Site Columns

Hello World!

It feels like a lot longer than a week since I last wrote this column. Halloween week is always busy when one has children: I worked in my son's classroom before and after the costume parade, setting up for the party and helping with costumes, and the evening before that I went to a Samhain ritual at the home of the friend who introduced me to the joys of Highlander, so there was DVD-watching after the spiritual gathering. Annoyingly, the clocks always go back to Eastern Standard Time from Daylight Savings Time the weekend before Halloween, so the kids are always out late in the dark, and now we have a house full of chocolate!

I remember when Gene Roddenberry died, I thought it was a shame, but it felt pretty distant to me. I knew very little about the man personally, I wasn't much involved in the fan community at the time, and I was in graduate school, focused on other things. 70 didn't seem very ancient but it was the same age my grandmother had been when she died and my grandfather had been even younger. At 57, Michael Piller seems absurdly young to have died, and somehow it feels much more personal. I interviewed him a couple of times and found him to be much as people who knew him much better have described him: smart, friendly, insightful, extremely articulate, optimistic about what could be accomplished on television and never condescending about viewer intelligence. I also interviewed his son Shawn, and I know several people who worked with him on Star Trek and The Dead Zone, so his loss feels much closer to home and has made me very sad this week. I suppose I always harbored a fantasy that he would be involved with the franchise when it reinvigorated, since he was involved with much of my favorite Trek.

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

-How did you feel when you heard about Michael Piller's death?

-Which were Piller's best episodes?

-Is TNG way overrated?

More topics can be found at the Trek BBS!

Trek Two Years Ago

These were some of the major news items from late October 2003:

• Bakula Bothered By Negativity
  "I learned a long time ago that you have to focus on the work and let the other elements go because they’re out of your hands," Star Trek: Enterprise's Scott Bakula (Archer) said, admitting that all the negative press attention focused on Star Trek: Enterprise takes its toll on the cast. "What I’ve done in the past is desperately try not to read the reviews...it’s hard not to take them personally."

• Trek Stars In Reading To Support Free Speech
  Ethan Phillips (Neelix), Robert Picardo (The Doctor), Armin Shimerman (Quark), James Cromwell (Zefram Cochrane) and original series writer Harlan Ellison took part in a performance of The Waldorf Conference in Los Angeles, a staged reading of a play about the Hollywood blacklist to benefit the Writers Guild Foundation and the ACLU of Hollywood.

• No Sunset on 'Twilight' Viewership
  Final Nielsen ratings for Enterprise's "Twilight" showed an increase of nearly half a million viewers over the week before, as 4.07 million viewers watched the show, compared to 3.7 million for "The Shipment."

More news can be found in the archives.

Poll Results

Below are the results of the most recent TrekToday poll:

Does it bother you when Trek actors criticise their shows? It's great when the actors care enough to complain, like many of the 'Enterprise' stars have done about the finale. 41.7% - (594 Votes) They're entitled to their opinions. 30% - (428 Votes) Some of them need to quit griping about the series that made them rich and famous. 16% - (228 Votes) Enough with the negativity already! It would be nice if they focused on what could be done to improve the franchise. 10.2% - (146 Votes) I never read what the actors say anyway! 1.8% - (26 Votes) Total Votes: 1422

Please vote in our new poll on the DVD release of the final installments of Enterprise and the Star Wars saga!

Happy Birthday!

Tomorrow, November 5th, is the birthday of both Armin Shimerman, Deep Space Nine's Quark, and Eric Menyuk, The Next Generation's Traveler. Next Tuesday, the 8th, is the birthday of Alfre Woodard, First Contact's Lily Sloane; the next day, Wednesday the 9th, is the birthday of Robert Duncan McNeill, Voyager's Tom Paris.

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