Geek Mentality

Finally Finished The First Season of Star Trek

All the way back in early 2011 I made a geek goal for myself to watch every episode of every series and all the movies of Star Trek. Even though I’ve seen all the movies, I barely watched any of the television shows (I stayed with Enterprise for a season and watched on episode of Voyager in college). Now in the days of DVD and Netflix streaming it would be easier than ever.

Except that I actually had to DO it.

Well, it’s going to take me a whole hell of a lot longer than I would have thought because as of yesterday I only JUST finished the first season of the original series. I calculated that the total number of movies and episodes was equal to 737 (that’s including the animated series) though I may not have added the un-aired pilot into that list – so even though I did watch it for historical purposes, I am not including it in the number, 29, of episodes I’ve watched so far.

That means if you’re reading this fairly recently – the number on the right side countdown box is at 708. If I watch 2 episodes a day, I’ll be done in a little under a year.

Yeah, probably not going to happen considering my track record. However, I did watch the final few episodes more recently so I think I am back into the swing of watching a few a week at the very least.

As I finished this first season of Star Trek, I did pick up on a few things. First, even though most of the original cast as we know it were on the show in the first season (no Chekov yet) only three of them played major rolls. Kirk and Spock of course were the two biggest players in this season – and McCoy was right there behind them as the 3rd man in.

Sulu, Uhura, and Scotty all had their moments – more so than most of the various crew that came and went each week – but I hope to hear/see more of them in this next season.

Second thing I noticed, and this may be how things were back then, there wasn’t really an overarching storyline that our characters lived through. Each episode was pretty much stand alone. The topics they covered and some of the more “sciency” topics had to be completely groundbreaking for the time (were there any other shows at that time covering time travel and alternate dimensions?), but it really was geared for people to discover it any week and get sucked in without having to know what happened in the previous episodes.

Lastly, even though the original series only lasted 3 seasons, these were longer than today’s average season of television. While today, most broadcast shows go 22 episodes per season, and most cable shows air somewhere between 10-13 episodes a season, Star Trek’s original series started off with a 29 episode season, followed by 26 and 24 episode seasons – all seasons longer than most television today.

That means I still have 50 episodes of this original series to watch before moving on to a few of the movies and then “The Next Generation.”

I better get back to it as soon as possible!

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