Note: the below review was written for the Morning Star newspaper. I’m not sure they’re using it, so it can live here instead.
Before the internet turned into the dystopia of corporations mining human rage for money, it was 98% Star Trek fans talking about Star Trek.
Or so it felt, in the far-off days of 1996.
Ah, younger readers. Imagine a time when the web was for meeting people with shared interests from around the world, rather than buying something you don’t need off a bald billionaire.
Where one was transported from a dull suburban existence to a place where others also wondered who would win in a fight between an Imperial Star Destroyer and The Enterprise-D (the Enterprise, obviously).
SF culture has long-since devoured the mainstream, but podcasts like The Greatest Generation have the same energy as those 90s internet communities, or the fanzines that came before them.
We’re all here at the London Podcast Festival to watch a live recording of this long-standing Star Trek podcast, hosted by Adam Pranica and Benjamin Harrison, two Americans who were embarrassed to be doing a podcast about Star Trek but kept going anyway.
Podcasting is now a huge industry, but these guys, like Star Trek itself, are on the right side of history: there are donations being made here to the striking actors in Hollywood.
Everyone listening, and who had made the effort to be in King’s Cross for the recording, exulted in a shared language, filled with in-jokes, canonical shibboleths, and the understanding that all this stuff is extremely important and utterly inconsequential all at the same time.
Meeting fellow fans before and after the recording, reading the dizzyingly niche T-shirts (props to the wag who came along in a Star Wars one), and sharing mock-terrible opinions (“the Vulcan baseball team in DS9 are the best characters in all of Trek”) was an experience of comradely love.
We’re all here to hear a review Star Trek V, or “the one where they kill God”.
If you haven’t seen it, this is a film notorious among Star Trek fans for being the worst of the original cast movies – it was directed by William Shatner, after all.
We learn that this was part of a contract deal Nimoy and Shatner had with Paramount: Spock had directed a Star Trek movie, so Kirk had to also. The eighties were a different time.
The hosts go scene by scene, mixing wild sexual suggestiveness with sincere, heartfelt and insightful criticism. As they say, we learn all we need to know in the opening scenes: McCoy values human life, Kirk likes rock climbing, and Spock owns a pair of rocket boots.
Whenever there’s a lull, they pull out an embarrassing Star Trek story from a fan, but even these tend to the amusing rather than brutal.
Everything gets a cheer, or even a whooop – there are Americans among us, some having even flown in specifically for this show. The atmosphere is more earnest and less cynical than the average London turnout.
Despite the occasional cultural difference (no, we don’t have guns for salt in Britain), the material is universal enough to work. Pranica and Harrison gently mock the bad effects and the clunky direction, but what the movie gets right, it gets very right, and the pair are generous and erudite in their praise.
Because it’s Star Trek we get big themes, even in a dumb movie. There’s euthanasia, religious fundamentalism, and the importance of truth, science, and pain amid the corny space bars and three-breasted cat strippers.
The show, and the gathering with like-minded humans before and after it, reaffirmed faith in online humanity.
And if you want to play catch-up, the 400-odd episodes they’ve done so far are all on the internet waiting for you.
Listen long and prosper.
jamesofwalsh 