Life seems to always surprise me.
I just watched a documentary that was recommended to me years ago but never watched. I'm not sure why I never took time to watch it. Maybe because I was too busy with my kids, or my job was taking a lot of my time... I don't know.
But this documentary was on a topic that I thought I knew everything about. And I do mean EVERYTHING. It was about a show that I watched as four year old... again as a teenager, again in my twenties as a married man, and then again in my thirties as a father. From what I just said, it probably sounds like I would know all there is to know about this topic... But, I am pleasantly surprised to be wrong.
The documentary portrayed and was narrated by a man about my age that was trying to discover who his father was. He was trying to discover, Gene Roddenberry, through the people he worked with and the people who watched his show. What made this man's journey special to me was that he was nothing like me. He did not watch Star Trek as a four year old, or a teenager, or claimed that he know all there is to know about Star Trek. He was the complete opposite of me and got to see Star Trek though his eyes.
Eugene Wesley "Rod" Roddenberry Jr described his relationship is his father as less than ideal... I couldn't help but think about my own faulted relationship with my father. He described himself as a rebellious teenager. Rod was often distant and “doing his own thing”. He picked distant schools for collage in majors that was opposite of his father profession. At one point, he took a major in astrophysics, but after failing calculus at least twice, he realized that “it was not in the cards”. I can only assume he did these things because wanted to be his own man by keeping clear away from his father's shadow.
If you know me, you know that I love math, I chose a science related profession as my career, and I was nowhere close to being a rebellious teenager. I sure as hell watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid. I'm sure if I knew Rod personally, I probably wouldn't even like him.
Then why am I writing about him?
When Rod was interviewing Trekkies and his father's former co-workers, he mentioned that there are two kinds of people in this world, the ones who “get” Star Trek, and the ones that don't. And he acceptingly admitted that he was one of the people who did NOT “get it”. I on the other hand, I always felt, I “got it”.
Now I'm not so sure that I always “got it”. At least not fully.
Rod interviewed quite a few people. JJ Abrams, George Lucas, to name a few. But Nichelle Nicols's interview stuck me the most. She played Lieutenant Uhura in the original series. She talked about the end of the first season (around 1966) when she decided that she is going to leave the show and go back to musical theater. She called it her “first love” and apparently, her mind was set. But one weekend, little did she know that one fan was going to change her mind. Nichelle was told that a huge fan wanted to meet her and she was more than happy to turn around and meet this person. When she turned around, in her face was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He described that he was a “Trekker” and Star Trek was the only show he would allow his children to stay up late for. Nichelle described him as happy and star struck in a way. She thanked him for his loyalty to the show, and mentioned that this is her last season and she will be returning to theater. At that point his expression on his face went blank and he said, “You can't do that...” He asked if she understood what her role on the show meant to young black children and young women across the country. “You don't have a black role, you have an equal role...” She went to work on Monday and walked into Gene Roddenberry's office and told him what happened that weekend. Gene replied, “Welcome home, we have a lot of work to do.”
I think at that point, I completely realized that Gene Roddenberry's vision was not just any old science fiction story, but his way of saying that he has hope for us as humans. I took a step back and examined what kind of world Gene lived in. What I saw was a world where people still can be judged by the color of their skin or the accent in their speech. We live in a world where “vision-less” leaders run our governments while the common person is ready to live in the 23rd century. Gene mentioned that we are infants in our evolutionary journey to whatever it is we are going to become. He thought we as humans are only going to get better.
Gene Roddenberry believed in us and so many people in the world “get” that. These people who “get it” share my feelings when I say Gene's world is the direction I want to go in.
