pauraque_bk | December meme: Star Trek favorites (Reply)

sineala asked me to post about my favorite Star Trek episodes, which is only fair since I asked her first (though I wrote this before reading her post).

I guess first I have to define my terms. If favorite means "best", then I suspect a lot of us fans would have similar lists, and I don't disagree with the usual suspects.

But if we're going to talk about episodes that are sentimental favorites, then that turns into a different list. And perhaps a more important list, because the lasting appeal of Star Trek is pretty obviously not about it being consistently "good" by any reasonably objective standard; it's about love, and love is an illogical human feeling. So I'm going to answer this by talking about a few eps that mean something to me even if they're not the ones you'd show to a non-fan to prove that Star Trek Is Quality Television.

Arena
Would you believe, watching this episode is one of my very earliest memories? I couldn't have been much more than a toddler, because I remember being able to read a couple of the words in the credits, but being baffled by most of them. (Yes, I have clear memories of the time before I could read fluently, and it's just as weird as you'd imagine.)

Anyway, my parents were both long-time Trekkies and TOS reruns were often left on in my house. Nobody seemed to care if I watched it, but really at that age I couldn't even understand the plots because the dialogue had too many words I didn't know and the stories were more sophisticated than The Runaway Bunny. But I got excited watching Arena because there was a monster and Kirk was going to fight it, and that, I could understand. So this episode sort of represents a moment, maybe the first in my life, when I felt a sense of accomplishment and power because I could connect to something in the grown-up world.

Rascals
Okay, you have to understand... Sorry, this is going to get heavy.

When this ep first aired I was 10, and by that age I already had a lot of shit going on in my life and I could relate to young!Ro and her trauma more than I should have been able to. One of the biggest reasons TNG is the Forever Fandom Of My Heart is that while it was on I was young and troubled and was not receiving adequate care or supervision, and TNG brought trustworthy adults into my home and my life.

So, watch the episode from the perspective of that 10 year old, and maybe you'll see why the kindness and understanding that Guinan shows to Ro in this episode resonated with me so hard and stays with me now.

The Infinite Vulcan
Because a friend and I used to watch TAS and give it the MST3K treatment and laugh until we could not breathe. I'm picking this episode as representative both because it's delicious crack and because I can still make myself start giggling just by thinking the words ARMY OF GIANT SPOCKS.

For me this is what fandom is all about. There's the canon, and the canon has to be there, but fandom isn't about the canon any more than life is about breathing air. It's about the people you meet. Those connections are worth more than any old Hugo award.

You can still give me questions/topics on LJ and DW.

This entry was originally posted at http://pauraque.dreamwidth.org/41223.html. Comment here or there.