Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon

Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices.  I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal.  (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable.  I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog.  But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.)  Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.

Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one.  But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons.  The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.

The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember.  Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes.  There’s a lot of bad.  But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.

The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series.  It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica.  (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)

All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus.  In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.

But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits.  Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy?  Tolerance?  Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking.  We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”

One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.

I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room.  As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.