Spock When You're Spoken To

On Sunday afternoon, I went along to the Moray Playhouse to catch Star Trek Into Darkness. This is of course the second instalment in the re-imagining or reboot of Gene Roddenberry's "Wagon Train to the Stars". I'll try not to spoil the plot but it is essentially a mash-up of an original series episode with elements from one of the 80s movies.

This time, I didn't find the lensflare gimmick half as distracting as the picture definition. I have no desire to examine every pore and follicle on "Captain Kid"s impossibly young face. It is very strange to live in a world where Jim Kirk is markedly my junior.
Of course, my earliest memories of Trek are of a regular fixture on BBC1: at first, a replacement for Dr. Who on Saturdays while he changed into Jon Pertwee. Then as a perennial of weeknight telly, pretty much in constant re-runs for most of the 70s.

My first comic book encounters with Trek were the hardback annuals which reprinted Gold Key comics of the late 60s. "The Planet of No Return" and its gruesome man-eating plants is still scorched on to my memory.
The iconography of the show was a huge influence on Dave Cockrum on both Legion of Super-Heroes ( cancelled yet again this summer) and of course on the All-New, All-Different X-Men.

In paperback, however, I became hooked by the crisp prose and adult themes of James Blish and, latterly,  his ghost- writer wife. The very first Trek novel I read (above) was bought for me in Safeway in East Kilbride Town Centre, circa 1974. I devoured the series, especially those episodes which had not been screened by the BBC on the grounds of unsuitable content.

As I've said before, in the mid-to-late 70s, a chance discovery in Rothesay of Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the animated series  (UK covers rich in head-shop alien imagery) eventually led me to Roddenberry's trippy movie adaptation. I preferred the "hurt/comfort" melodramas of Vonda McIntyre in the early 80s however.

During that decade, my experience of Marvel and DC's comic adaptations were limited to b/w reprints in the short-lived Future Tense/Valour weekly and the premiere issue of the Next Generation series.

Latterly, I've dipped into Peter David's New Frontier series but, like the many tv spinoffs, I've never found them nearly as compelling as the psychedlic morality plays of Shatner's original era. Into Darkness is a loud, flashy thing, driven by the charm and vigour of the young cast but in terms of social comment or psychological tension, as insubstantial as interstellar gas.

Coming soon: The Name of The Doctor ( Is it actually Keith?)

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