by Mark Richards

Created on: February 24, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

For me the minute that the music would come up, and I would hear William Shatner intone "Space, the Final Frontier..." I would be drawn into a world I had never been to before.

I would stop what I was doing sit down, and watch with baited breath as the episode unfolded.

It did not matter how many times I had seen the episode, the impact was always there and each time I would see something new or learn something new.

From a weekly science fiction series that first aired 41 years ago, you must be kidding?

Actually no, here in Colorado we have been without classic STAR TREK since the original series was bought out by Sci Fi in the late 1990s, we still had The next degeneration, deep space nine vger and Enterprise; but missing was the flagship the original and real STAR TREK.

Why does it still draw me to it while Next Generation and Deep Space 9 I don't watch as frequently?

The timeless quality of the storytelling, consider the fact that these episodes were written between 1965 and 1970 and were dealing with the War in Vietnam, Civil rights, the holocaust war crimes, and occasionally spiritual issues and yet the stories for the most part are still current.

In some cases the episodes have improved with age, with what we have developed in technology and how we are perhaps developing genetically superior people now episodes like Space Seed and The Changeling become more and more relevant.

Unlike all the variations of TREK that followed with the exception of the first two seasons of Enterprise most of the spin offs wrote too closely to the time they were produced in.

Also because of changes in culture many episodes in the follow up Treks were more PC than what had been written in 1965.

The acting was stiff, the characters not fleshed out, of course if you read the writers guide it becomes obvious as to how this happened, after all you have just skeletons with no real history you will have incomplete characters.

However with that small problem the series episodes still hold up superbly 41 years later. In all reality there was only one STAR TREK and it starred William Shatner Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley.

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