[Nate the Great]

I was just going with round numbers to mark off the five-year increments. It's not like I'm ambitious enough to go over to startrek.com for research or anything.

Re: Flashback. Any thoughts on whether a Star Trek: Excelsior show would've really worked? I don't think it would've worked as a 2290s-era show, the actors really had aged almost ten years, remember. However, if we put Sulu in 2310 or something, had cameos by Demora and remarks on the Klingon and Romulan situations, maybe younger versions of Garrett and Castille, etc. I'm still dying to know more about that incident with the Romulans (second battle of Tomed?) that led to forty years of closed borders.

Re: Trials and Tribbleations. Truly a classic DS9 episode. Seriously, you can't have too many tribbles, and finally getting an answer on how tribbles can leak out of an access door after the deluge is over is always a good thing.

Now another Trek memory. When I was a kid I actually kind of hated any TOS episode other than Trouble with Tribbles because they seemed a little lame. You know, the way any kid would looking at the cheesy special effects and KIRK ... style ... over-ACTING. In later years I've matured a bit (but not much, look at what I do for a hobby, but then again, as the wise man said "maturity is overrated") and now I can appreciate the genius of the original Roddenberry and see the characters behind the absurd accents and speech patterns. Think about it, Trek has endured because of what's underneath, the vision if you will. It's lasted because it's not another Flash Gordon or (in later years) Star Wars knockoff. Trek isn't about tech, it's not about meaningless action and violence, it's about people. I've often heard that one reason for the popularity of McCoy is that he's just an "old-fashioned country boy from Georgia." There are many more examples of that sort of thing: different people look at the same situation and see different things. We can see how Seven would think that Janeway is trying to impose her will on the former drone, and yet we can also see how Janeway has a wider viewpoint and firmly believes in what she'd doing. Shades of grey have always been a major tenant of the Trek philosophy. Trek bad guys are always understandable. We don't condone Cardassian or Romulan philosophies, but we can see how such a society survived. The same with Ferengi, Kazon, on and on.

I suppose that's a reason for the popularity of Stargate in more recent years. The characters are also three-dimensional (with the exception of the snake-heads of course, but that's part of the fun), their relationships evolve, the issues that they confront are compelling, and so on.