So THAT'S why...

Growing up, I can't say that I was really a fan of Star Trek. Maybe it was because it was before my time, or because kids on the playground made fun of my big pointy ears and called me “Spock”, but I didn't really get in to it. I remember seeing one of the movies in the theater with my dad, the one with time travel and the whales, and eventually I caught most of the other ones on television. I've seen one or two others in the theater, and caught quite a few of the old episodes and Voyager. I've seen enough of The Next Generation to know all the characters and the actors(many of whom supplied voices on the show I wrote about yesterday), but there's probably quite a few I haven't seen. Somehow I only managed to watch the first and last episodes of Deep Space Nine, which is strange because I did like it in the beginning and always heard good things about it. I think it may have aired at odd times or moved around a lot in syndication.

I gave Enterprise a chance and I liked it at first. I liked Scott Bakula, though here he was surprisingly wooden in his acting and his emotions seemed less genuine than on Quantum Leap. The rest of the cast had potential. Trip and Malcolm were both pretty cool characters, and Jolene Blalock was just HOT. I liked the opening credits with the soft ballad and the montage of our space program, showing real footage of astronauts and making the connection that we could someday get from where we are to where these fictional characters were. As a prequel to every other show, I thought that was fitting.

There was some promise in a storyline about some mysterious figure from the future manipulating things, and I stuck around to see that play out. I'm not sure if it ever did. I dropped the show in favor of other shows early in the third season and never looked back. I tried to start watching again in the fourth season but again quickly lost interest. I watched the finale tonight, curious from internet rumors whether the entire series would turn out to be a hologram replay on The Next Generation. By the end of the hour it seemed like these characters HAD existed, which was good, but they killed one of my favorites in a really lame manner, and after build-up to some great speech by the captain, the two characters from the Next Generation watching the historical replay just TURN IT OFF and walk out of the room. So. Incredibly Stupid. I sat there letting what I just watched sink in, thinking about the temporal plotline and wondering if that was resolved, and ultimately thought, “So that's why I stopped watching this crap.”

The decline of good shows just means more time for movies as far as I'm concerned, but here's what's still on the air that I still watch, and how I rate them on a scale of 1-5 stars:

* * * *The Simpsons
* * * *Family Guy
* * * *Everybody Loves Raymond
* * * * *24
* * * * *Scrubs
* * * *Blind Justice
* * *Smallville
* * * * *Lost
* * * * *Alias
* * *Joey
* * *Teen Titans
* * * *The Batman
* * * * *TMNT