If you can't hear Spock singing this gem in your head, too bad. If you can, let's take a minute to mourn the sad year just past for Star Trek.

"Take care, young ladies, and value your wine
Be watchful of young men in their velvet prime
Deeply they'll swallow from your finest kegs
Then swiftly be gone leaving bitter dregs
Ahh-ah-ah-ah … bitter dregs

"With smiling words and tender touch
Man offers little and asks for so much
He loves in the breathless excitement of night
Then leaves with your treasure in cold morning light
Ahh ahh … in cold morning light"

The fortieth anniversary of the greatest show on television approaches ineluctably yet arrives with deafening silence. This silence reminds us of what happens when the crucial feedback between producers and consumers is broken. Not to mince words, but that's what happens when ignorance assigns tasks to those incognizant of their responsibility.

"The terrific thing about this for longtime fans is that they'll get to see the development of all the technological gadgetry and capabilities that have become part of the Trek mythos. They'll see them in their infant, trial-and-error stages, before they end up being what we know them to be."

So at the beginning sayeth one with the power to have actually made that so. Yeah, and what happened? (Blame the partner I guess.) Our poor dead show. The rumors are flying that they'll even kill the startrek.com website. Maybe it's happier now, that it's dead. (God I miss Jimmy Doohan.) Left alone at the Threshold of professional failure, the responsibility for protecting the Trek falls last to those who love it.

So much for the hopes for a long-lasting addition to the mythos. That's where we have been left, bereft in the cold morning's light of any official concern for the eager golden goose. It's like a bubble has been popped, extra special painful in light of how unnecessary that popping was. All the claims about "tired Trek" and "take some time off" misrepresent the problem to the extent that any who give credence to them obviously is not atop the details of the situation.

Thanks (NOT) for the satisfying return on all the megadollars we fans pumped into Trek. Thanks (NOT) for the stains left behind on the treasures of the earlier series. Did we really need aggressive, emotional crackheads for Vulcans? How about a ship structured no better than the Jupiter 2? So many sour tastes left behind. Am I bitter? You betcha.


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