To go where exactly? I'm not sure about that answer now but I'm sure that the new movie coming out next year will shed some light on that.

I've been quite a 'Trekker' for as long as I can remember watching programming other than cartoons, which was over 20 years ago. How time flies when you've been beamed up onto the Starship Enterprise! But which one? As much as I like most of the Star Trek series, I'll have to admit that the original tends to be more addictive for me than the others, followed closely by Deep Space Nine. This is just a personal preference and by no means a judgment of series quality.

Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry and went through a great many ordeals during its production. 2 pilot episodes were created to the series: the first one received a largely negative response and nearly killed the sci-fi series before it had a chance to take off. The 2nd pilot luckily managed to salvage the heart of Star Trek, but at the expense of nearly all of the major characters who had appeared in the first one.

Thankfully for me, Spock was one of the only two characters to survive the chopping process that prepared Star Trek for its second try with audiences. Alas, depending on where your loyalties lie, Captain Christopher Pike was replaced with Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Personally, I prefer Kirk but that's just me.

Star Trek was aired from 1966-1969 and stirred up a healthy amount of controversy over its characters, plotlines, and suggestive themes. It was on Star Trek that Kirk participated in the first interracial kiss with Communications Officer Uhura. There were a lot of subplots referring to racism, hate, war, sexism etc. that were dealt with in a manner that was at least a decade ahead of its time. The characters alone were an unusual bunch, multicultural and alien in appearance.

I thought that I'd concentrate on the 3 main characters, as noted in the intro to Star Trek. Writing about all of them at once would take ages, dragging me down memory lane and going off into little rampages.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk - The middle name seemed to have been added on as an afterthought sometime in the 2nd series, if I'm not mistaken, but was only referred to by initial. Kirk was a very young, brash captain who did things his way, or gave people hell for trying it another. He could be very calm and diplomatic one minute, and the next be slugging it out with one of the natives on some foreign planet. As far as his command went, he tried his best to follow the Prime Directive (the law of uninterference in undeveloped worlds) and obey Starfleet's orders, but he would disobey in a second if it meant defending the honor or life of one of his crewmates.

Commander Spock - A fascinating character in that Gene Roddenberry didn't just make him an alien, but a half-human, half-Vulcan. This spawned a lot of angst in the series over where Spock's loyalties lay and also sparked a lot of bigotry. Spock was a very analytical person, trying his best to behave as a logical, unemotional Vulcan was expected to. However, he was prone to showing his human side off when necessary to uphold his morals or release some pent up frustrations during Pon Farr. Spock was the first Vulcan to enter Starfleet and came prepared with the Vulcan nerve pinch and mind meld.

Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy - Kirk rarely, if ever, called McCoy by his real name. He was fond of calling him "Bones, which was a private joke between them basing itself on the term "Sawbones" (slang for physician or surgeon) McCoy was a stubborn, highly emotional doctor from Georgia that would just as soon bite his patient's head off as treat him. As skilled a doctor as he was, he still managed to enjoy some good hard liquor with Kirk after-hours and get to work sober the next day.

Thank goodness for DVDs restoring movies and TV shows to their original lustre and crip audio (or in some cases enhancing it). I've got to admit that when I watched the series on TV, the quality was pretty shoddy. Now that I have the entire series + all the movies in DVD format, I can enjoy a nostalgic hour or two with flawless audio and video. I'm a little bit confused over the remastered episodes though. I've seen a few scenes from the remastered DVDs and felt that the enhanced special effects didn't blend in very well with the original footage. The Enterprise itself looks really fake (in my opinion) but maybe that's just because I have't seen it full-screen.

I'm contemplating over getting the remastered DVDs but with their current price tag, it would take a lot of freebies and cut scenes to make me invest such a large sum of money. Still, anything new from Star Trek would be great indeed! Even the new movie, although I'm not sure how willingly I'll part with my image of the original actors being replaced with newcomers to the world of Trek.