(2 of 7)
And the Trek phenomenon is bursting again like a fresh supernova. A seventh feature film, Star Trek: Generations, which opened over the weekend, brings together for the first time the two Enterprise big shots: Shatner as the heroic, headstrong Captain Kirk of the original series and of every movie until now; and Patrick Stewart, the bald-pated Brit who succeeded him as the more cerebral Captain Picard in The Next Generation. The new film, a smashingly entertaining mix of outer-space adventure and spaced-out metaphysics, almost certainly marks the last movie appearance of the classic Trek crew (Kirk, in a secret no one seems able to keep, dies at the end of the film) and launches what promises to be a new string of movies featuring Stewart and his Next Generation gang. With Deep Space Nine continuing, and yet another TV series, Star Trek: Voyager, debuting in January, the pump is primed for more TV-to-movie transfers in the future. The mother ship of all TV cult hits seems poised to boldly go where none has gone before: into eternity.
For all that, Star Trek has never won much respect. In the realm of long- running entertainment phenoms, Sherlock Holmes has more history; James Bond, more class; Star Wars and Indiana Jones, more cinematic cachet. And while no one sneers at the Baker Street Irregulars, noninitiates consider Trekkies to be pretty odd: Trekkies like Pete Mohney, a computer programmer in Birmingham, Alabama, who leads a double life as captain of his local Starfleet "ship," the Hephaestus NC-2004, and publisher of a 40-page Trekkie newsletter; or Jerry Murphy, a Sugar Grove, Illinois, business manager and father of two, who is commander of a local Klingon club and frequently dresses up as one of the big-browed aliens for charity events. "Nobody messes with Klingons," he says. "We're the bikers of the Star Trek world."
After all, you have to wonder about people who would pore over The Star Trek Encyclopedia, with 5,000 entries on every character, planet, gadget or concept ever mentioned in the series, from gagh ("serpent worms, a Klingon culinary delicacy") to Pollux V ("planet in the Beta Geminorum system that registered with no intelligent life-forms when the Enterprise investigated that area of space on Stardate 3468"). Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's late creator and guiding spirit, once got a letter from a group of scientists who complained about a scene in which Captain Picard visited France and looked up at the night sky. By their calculations, they said, the stars could not have been in that position in France in the 24th century.
Yet Star Trek has legions of more temperate fans too. General Colin Powell is a watcher; so are Robin Williams, Mel Brooks and Stephen Hawking, the best- selling physicist (A Brief History of Time) who made a guest appearance in an episode of The Next Generation, playing poker with holographic re-creations of Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. Rachelle Chong, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, has decorated her office with Trek paraphernalia and dressed up as Captain Picard for Halloween. "I like the show because it shows me tomorrow," she says. And sometimes today: the cellular phone-like communicators used by the Trek crew back in the 1960s are almost exact precursors of the personal-communication systems the FCC has just begun issuing licenses for.