When Star Tek gets it right...

SAREK: Kirk, I thank you. What you have done --

KIRK: What I have done, I had to do.

SAREK: But at what cost? Your ship...your son...

KIRK: If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul.

I was watching Star Trek III: The Search For Spock tonight with my parents, and my father said at one point that "These are morality plays." To which I replied "You're right, and the best ones are the ones where they don't forget that." Then we got to the bit of dialogue quoted above, and it really drove home how right he was. The second through fourth Trek movies were the best, bar none.

Wrath of Khan taught us that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, or the one. The Search For Spock then taught us that sometimes, you have to put the one ahead of everything, and damn the cost. The Voyage Home told us that if your goal is noble and good, you keep fighting, no matter what the odds are against you. Ain't a damn one of these three that doesn't make me tear up at least a little bit in its final moments, because they didn't forget that they had a lesson under the story that they had to tell, and they made it a lesson worth putting in (and The Undiscovered Country did this, too, with its message of cooperation with old enemies toward mutual survival.)

In the TV episodes, the same held true. City On the Edge of Forever, for all the cuts and changes, remains one of the top ten episodes of any Trek series. Any episode involving Sarek has power drawn from the conflicts between father and son that were explored. The Inner Light spoke of the cost that Picard played in choosing to devote his life so utterly to his career, and Duet with the cost of hatred and the desire for vengeance to one's soul. The Visitor returns to the question of father/son relationships, and asks what price you might pay to bring back a loved one lost before his time.

There are others, of course, but these are the ones I think of first when I think about how Trek can be, in the right hands, more than just entertainment. These are the ones that stay with you, that when you think back on them, brng back the burning in your chest you felt the first time you saw them. These are the ones that I think of when my thoughts turn to which installments achieved, in the words of a certain other series, "a moment of perfect beauty."

My father is a wise man. I hope that, in the end, I can say that I proved worthy of the example he set for me.