Homemade Trek

I'll admit it: I've always enjoyed Star Trek and it's various incarnations.

For my money, ST: Deep Space Nine was the best of them, with excellent writing and superior acting. Too many of the other Trek series seemed to fall into a formula that can most easily be summed up this way: The Enterprise/Voyager encounter an alien race that looks like us except for some plastic glued to their foreheads and we make them see that we can all get along. The End.

At least DS9 (and, to a certain extent, the fourth and final season of Enterprise) tried to shake things up.

I've never felt strongly enough about the franchise to consider myself a Trekkie or Trekker or whatever the derogatory term is today. And I've certainly never felt moved to make my own Trek episodes.

I have watched a few of them. You have admire the hard work and love for the subject that goes into these Mom and Pop productions. The recreation of the various sets is impressive and the special effects are actually better than the 60s incarnation of the show.

Yet all that hard work is ultimately brought down by acting that is so bad, even junior high school theater groups would say, "Dude, you stink." Some of these guys make Shatner look like Olivier. I suspect that's because the fans behind the scenes insist on getting in front of the camera. They must figure Shatner made it look easy. So enjoy the passion and ignore the thespians.