A Star Trek time of life

It's taken more than 105 weeks, watching five episodes every seven days, but I've just finished watching all of the Star Trek shows from the 90s.

That's 526 episodes of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. I'd seen 100 percent, 80 percent and 20 percent of each series respectively before this mammoth re-watch, and when one of the local channels started playing a TNG episode every weekday a couple of years ago, it seemed like a good way to really dig into the adventures of Picard and crew.

And when that finished, they then slipped straight into DS9, so it seemed rude not to watch all seven seasons of that, and when that followed with Voyager, I had to give that a go, didn't I? (They aren't going on with Enterprise, but I'm not too worried about that.)

There were some slogs, some nonsense and I never want to see another holodeck episode ever anywhere (the baseball episode of DS9 was the only one that worked), but there were some surprises in there.

The TNG team is always my crew, (my first paycheque went on a TV aerial so we could pick up season 3), but I somehow ended up liking Voyager more than DS9 - it had its share of duff episodes, but didn't have the endless war and Bajoran politics and all those fucking prophecies. There were just more unexpected thrills in the Delta quadrant. And sometimes it all got weirdly emotional, and even duff stories could have moments of real pathos, and when you watch the stories of the same people for months at a time, you do give a shit when they get married, or die, or just move on.

But the past two years of watching Star Trek have also coincided with the first two years of parenthood, and they're always going to be linked, always together. They're hard days, but I've watched the adventures of Starfleet with the kids sleeping on me, or while I've been changing their nappies, or while we eat some chips after Rhyme Time at the library. 

It must be obvious to anybody who has been reading this blog that I have a terrible habit of stapling my memories of real life onto the pop media I consume, and that's just the way I work - I'll always be more fond of the Voyager because of how many I watched at this particular time in my life.

A lot of it blurs together and there are only so many anomalies and warp core breaches you can really handle, but that Star Trek vibe, of all those crews and the way they deal with the final frontier, that's there. I bonded with the new lifeforms over them, and that bond isn't ever going away.