Voyaging

It can be schlocky and its central star all too often offers up enough ham to scare Jimmy Dean. Papier-maché rocks and alien monsters with visible costume seams. Spinoff series that don't always age well. A show creator who started to think every story needed to be about his vision rather than about the people saying the lines. A kid driving a starship. Time-travel plots that worked on the narrative engine like sugar in a gas tank. An android whose quest to become human succeeded only in the area of annoyance. And a hundred other things that any real fan can count off at the drop of a red-shirted extra.

But then the little light notes sound and the fanfare and William Shatner starts in with "Space: The final frontier..." as he did fifty years ago tonight, and imagination sets sail for the stars on board a ship named Enterprise and we all boldly go where no one has gone before...