Monday, May 6, 2013

Star Trek Bootcamp: How to Introduce Your Kids to the 24th Century



The only two things in this world I take seriously: (1) movies and (2) my kids. With this Star Trek Into Darkness thing coming out, I'm planning to take Zev, but needed to get him up to speed on the Federation and the whole history of the 24th century.

Introducing Star Wars, on the other hand, was easy. I've had that one worked out for decades (feel free to disagree, but know that you're wrong):
  1. Watch Episode IV first.
  2. Watch it again.
  3. Then Empire and Jedi.
  4. Take a long break.
  5. Introduce the prequels.
  6. Pretend The Clones Wars never happened.
  7. Rewatch only Empire and Jedi.

Easy.

Star Trek is trickier. There's the original series, 7 seasons each of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and however much Enterprise, the original movie series, and on and on. There's no clear or easy way in.

Advice I got from two nerd-dad friends: Watch some episodes with Shatner, then maybe some TNG and perhaps Wrath of Khan. A greatest hits approach.


I ignored them and went this way, given that we're dealing with a 21st century kid with things to do and places to be:
  1. We talked about why I love Star Trek, the vision for a spacefaring peaceful Earth where exploration, goodwill and curiosity drive galactic progress.  
  2. Watched the first JJ Abrams' reboot. It's a good entry and set-up, to both the new stuff and the old.
  3. Watched some of the best episodes of Next Generation, starting with "Q Who" and a few of the other Borg episodes. Going to move on to some Data-centric ones. The pacing of the shows is dated and slow, to be honest, but the sci-fi and characters are solid. I could watch it all day and all night.
  4. Whatever's next. 

How did you do it? 

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