I think I finally felt as if I were on holiday, yesterday, after nearly three weeks. I was walking the Moray Coastal Trail but took shelter under one of the disused railway arches. I was pretty well concealed and I had a bonny view of the Firth. I also read this:
That sailboat went by at a fair clip.
At the beginning of the week. I walked the Speyside Way from Fochabers ( near the Baxters Vistitors Centre) to the Dolphin Centre at Spey Bay, in about an hour and a half, on a hot day. Still haven't seen any dolphins, though.
Amazingly, the BBC Genome proves that my first exposure to Star Trek was fifty years ago yesterday. The episode was The Naked Time and the BBC was showing it as a replacement for Doctor Who ( Patrick Troughton having spun off into oblivion at the end of The War Games).
Did I miss that first UK episode, the week before, because we were on holiday? Maybe. When disparaging the nostalgia filter of Whovians, producer John Nathan-Turner said "the memory cheats". I think I remember seeing the Moon landing in my godmother's house in Girvan, as a six-year-old. It would've been Glasgow Fair so my dad might've been on holiday. And yet, I picture Star Trek in my Dad's house, the day before "one small step"...It's a sequence of events I'll probably never clarify.
We didn't stay with my Aunt Isobel the following year but had digs in a b& b along the street. I think that's the year I read the Action Comics/LSH story "Kill a Friend to Save a World", which ends with a shot of a Trek-style Legion Cruiser. Star Trek's influence was all over late-60s Legion and that continued into the mid-70s, with costumes and hardware.
Keith Albarn's psychedelic fun palace, The Fifth Dimension, was still on site in Girvan in September of 1970, so I probably had my second freak-out happening there that summer.
In my mind, Trek and the LSH are both linked to summer. This last week, back in 1982, I had my first visit to London, where I saw Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan at the pictures. I also paid my first visit to Forbidden Planet and got the first part of The Great Darkness Saga, having previously bought the second and third installments in Glasgow.
I was devoted to NextGen in the early 90s but DS9 irritates me ( aside from the equality fable, Far Beyond the Stars). I followed Voyager pretty faithfully and even enjoyed Enterprise on the Horror Channel last time it was aired. But it's The Original Series that means most to me.
In 2012, Chris Roberson and Jeffrey Moy created a comics crossover for TOS and the LSH for IDW. Some months ago, I read the collected hardback and today seems like a good day to finally review it.
The TOS crew and a group of Legionnaires ( including two of the most exotic, Shadow Lass and Chameleon Boy) are time-wrecked in a dystopian world where Tommy Tomorrow commands a battalion of Space Rangers, The Imperial Planets are ruled by an immortal dictator. Kirk knows him as Flint and the Legionnaires as Vandal Savage.
Savage, of course, was the antagonist for the first season of Legends of Tomorrow and I have been interested in this Golden Age villain since first seeing him in the Tuska/Pasko World's Greatest Superheroes strip weekly in the East Kilbride News circa 1978-79.
Savage's Imperial Elite is a Fatal Five mashed up with Trek monsters like the Persuader-Gorn from Arena; Tharok-Ruk from What Are Little Girls Made Of and a Validus-Mugato from A Private Little War.
This is not the Trek Mirror Universe but rather a timeline created when Savage-Flint seized power through a transcendent alien being: not a Metron or an Organian, although the latter is referenced, alongside the Legion's Controllers.
The Legionnaires depicted here seem to come from around the summer of 1983 in our time-frame and are some of the most visible from that period ( excluding Dream Girl, Element Lad, Timber Wolf and Shrinking Violet, probably).
At the climax of the story, the time travellers ensure the super-being- TNG's Q- is released and the timelines resume their original patterns. In the epilogue, Flint is visited by Q, dressed like the Squire of Gothos. I can't believe I never made the connection between Trelane and the Q Continuum before!
This is a delightful miniseries, celebrating both classic Trek and the Legion in its imperial phase. My favourite Easter Egg was a double-page spread of time travel devices from pop fiction: The Tardis and the Master's Ionic Column- Tardis; Bill & Ted's phonebox; the Cosmic Treadmill; the Time Tunnel; George Pal's Time Machine; the De Lorean from Back to the Future; Rip Hunter's Time Sphere and others...but not the Guardian of Forever, unfortunately. I mistakenly identified Lazarus's ship from The Alternative Factor as the timeship from The Flipside of Dominck Hyde- you can see why:
I haven't seen any of the new Trek Discovery series but I have read about Tarantino's Trek plans. Just as the LSH were rebooted in the 90s with Zero Hour, so JJ Abrams rebooted Trek ten years ago (already!). I'm very intrigued by Brian Bendis's plans for the Legion in the coming months.
In future posts: the Legacy of Time and the Lost World of Time
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