Star Trek TOS - WRAP UP

After watching all three seasons of Star Trek TOS, I have come to the conclusion that this is still my favorite Trek series. It has timeless characters, solid acting, creative story lines and surprisingly decent visuals. The two biggest knocks on TOS have been the poor production and Shatner's overacting. But, honestly this is very inaccurate. In fact, for the most part I was happy with the quality and come on now ... Shatner is the coolest Starship Captain ever. I also leanrd a few things along the way, such as Lt. Leslie and Nurse Chapel appear in nearly every episode...far more than Sulu, Chekov and Scotty.

Another reason why I love TOS is purely for nostalgia. Although I did watch it as a youngster, it wasn't until 8th grade that I started to watch it obsessively. At this time TOS was broadcast on channel 56 here on Neural Planet. In 9th grade I started my quest to tape every TOS episode on VHS ... pausing on the commercials of course. Sadly for me, the show didn't start until Midnight. I kept up this schedule for nearly the entire school year and boy did my grades suck, but hey I taped every single episode. Little did I know that some years later a thing called a DVD would render my quest obsolete ... and then Netflix would seal it's fate for good.

Even while in class I still could not get enough Trek. The Star Trek Encyclopedia had just been released and I recently had stolen it from my "friend's" house (in my defense, this was after an argument on which was better TOS or TNG ... ok that's not really a good defense). Anyway, I would typically be reading that Encyclopedia during my classes. You know in 80's movies when they show a student reading a porn mag under his text book? Yeah, I actually did that with the ST Encyclopedia!

At this time, I basically lived in Bizzaro World. In the small Neural town that I lived in, the geeks and the punks were one in the same. My friends were a group of alcoholic, druggy, obnoxious, criminal, tough-guy bullies .... that also watched Star Trek, made Star Trek models, collected comic books, programmed computers and played D&D (or Rifts). In this crazy place the geeks were actually the troublemakers. One of the few exceptions to this had been Capt. Naps who has always been a straight up geek and I'm sure very proud of it. Even though I also associated with these other kids, I really did not partake in the bad behaviors but I was certainly around for nearly all of it.

This charming anecdote pretty much sums up the entire situation: After many physical assaults one of my friends finally went to prison (the first of many). I went to visit him with our other friend (now dead). Anyway, when we got there the prison official told us that we could not see him because he had just been locked up in solitary. He was in a fight over control of the rec room TV. The official commented that this was the first time he had ever seen a person fighting in a prison because he wanted to watch Star Trek. This is what happens when you combine a dead end town with one great TV show. Shenanigans ensue. Welcome Neural Planet.