I’ve spent almost the last nine months reading The Fifty Year Mission – The First 25 Years. That alone should tell you how I feel about the book. Granted, I read plenty of other books during that time, but if I loved this or even enjoyed it, I would have plowed through to the exclusion of others. I didn’t.
Now before you get on my case, claiming I’m not a true fan or a fan at all, know I watched TOS each night on WPIX growing up. Yes, I’m actually too young to have seen the show in it’s original evening time slot, but I watched regularly, over and over again.
When TNG started, I suffered through the first season but grew to love it possibly more than the original. I made the leap to Deep Space Nine too when it started (though, I must admit I never made it through the entire series). I never could get into the Enterprise prequel, but Voyager got me through the Trump years. Lastly, I subscribe to Paramount streaming purely for the Star Trek content. So I think I’ve got enough cred to be able to criticize this book.
That said, it’s not the content of the book with which I take umberidge. It’s the editing. Reading it felt like having sex with someone who refuses to let you come. At some point, it’s just a pile of frustration and you want to just cut bait and run. But as I said, I still wanted to the behind the scenes stories so I struggled through.
For starters, this isn’t a narration. This is a series of quotes from all involved parties covering the series, conventions, the animated series (oh, yeah, I watched that too on Saturday mornings), and the six TOS movies. The authors sprinkled some exposition throughout but I felt as if I was reading the script for a huge unmade documentary.
Before you get into the content though with the quotes there are twenty pages of names and brief bios for each. The names you know, you know. The others you’re not going to remember 300 pages later when reading their quote. I think the book would have been better served to give a brief bio within each chapter at the point the commentator has their first comment when in a chapter and skip this section.
Next issue I had was with the organization of the first half of the book. It felt non-existent. With conception and three seasons to cover, you would think a chapter for each? Or something? But the stories lept around within a season and from season to season without any real cohesiveness. Things picked up when we got to the post series, convention era but that was almost halfway through the book!
Another issue was the repetiviness. As I said, you’re just reading quotes from the interested parties. Well, either they repeated themselves in the interviews or when assembling them, the same quotes and thoughts were repeated over and over. We get it, Shatner blew his wad on the effects at the beginning of V and didn’t have enough for the finale. How many times and how many different people do you need to tell us that?
Lastly, there were quotes that were either transcibed poorly or punctuated poorly. For example, “Something I’ve noticed in all sequels, and it’s true of the Bond films certainly.” That’s an actual quote. Is there a sentence in there somewhere?
All that said, I kept reading because I wanted the back story. I wanted the dirt. For example, I heard rumors about Gene Rodenberry but really what an asshole! And I was pleased to hear that Shatner actually had some humility when directing V. Too bad it was so bad. So I’m going to read the next one, The Fifty Year Mission – The Next 25 Years, and pray the editing gets better. For this one, I’d give it 1.75 to 2 stars.