A month ago I announced to an un-expectant world my intention to watch every moment from the Star Trek canon in chronological order of story before J. J. Abrams new Star Trek XI prequel comes out at Christmas. One commenter pointed out that this would involve a great deal of television watching, arguably more than I had allowed for, but that it was a cool idea.
Four weeks in to the project I can announce that I have ticked off First Contact (and the invention of the warp drive) and all four seasons of “Enterprise”. I have a soft spot for “Enterprise” and I grew to appreciate the wooden performances (Dominic Keating as Lt. Malcolm Reed may well be the worst actor ever to wear Starfleet uniform) and the regular sprinkling of terrible pseudo-technical guff about plasma conduits and EPS relays and the like, not to mention the too-frequent reliance on time travel and parallel universes to get around plot problems.
A couple of genuinely great episodes per season seems to be as much as one can hope for (Similitude in Season 3 is as good anything in the canon) but it was fun watching the writers of Season 4 try and prepare the ground for The Original Series which was about 100 years away in chronology: the lack of cranial ridges on Klingons due to a human DNA cure for a Klingon virus was a particularly big stretch.
With three seasons of TOS, two of the Animated Series, seven each of of TNG, DS9 and Voyager plus all the films I was not expecting to be able to pull this off, until Paramount announced last week that the release of Star Trek XI was being pushed back to May 2009 which gives me a whole five extra months to complete the Marathon.
So, onwards to The Original Series we go. I’m sure that I have already seen all of these during the nearly 36 years since I saw my first but you never know.
In anticipation of the release at Christmas this year of J.J. Abrams’ 
