Beam Him Up


If the death of James Doohan doesn�t get me back onto this blog, nothing will! It�s been harder than I anticipated to try to keep blogging under the strain of my slower-than-slow internet access, but I�m back and will be doing regular updates from now on.

As one of the millions of people who love Star Trek, the death of one of the key cast members of the original Enterprise is a sad day indeed. I hope that no one will argue, at this point, whether Star Trek is the most important show ever to appear on television. It quite simply has changed the world -- all for the better -- and certainly was the show that changed my own life. It was Star Trek that got me into a career in television, specifically by being the program that motivated me to call my local TV station and complain, inquire, and find out that there was indeed some kind of job where you might have to talk to people about TV, about Star Trek -- and I knew that it was in a department at the station called Programming. Well, that was it. I knew, even in high school, that I knew as much about TV as that guy on the phone, and that I had to do that for a living. And I did, and loved almost every single minute of it. All because of Star Trek. All because I cared so much about TV, and what should be on TV, and what people wanted to watch, that I could not fathom why that local channel had taken it off the air.

I hadn�t even been much of a fan of the show during its original network run; I fell in love with Trek through reruns, reruns that I still watch now everyday on Space, the very good science fiction-oriented channel up here in Canada. Star Trek is simply one of the most important things to ever happen to me, and I don�t know what my life would have been like without it.

So losing Scotty is a big deal. A sad deal. Not because you expect people to live forever, but because it�s always, always, such a cold, hard reality when they pass, and not any less so when it�s a performer you�ve spent more than half your lifetime knowing. I�ve loved reading the quotes where he said that he used to fret about being known as Scotty for the rest of his life, until his dentist, four years after the original series went off the air, said he ought to just go with the flow and enjoy it, which Doohan obviously did.

James Doohan�s continuing enthusiasm for the Scotty and for Star Trek, and the unquestioned iconic status that his character achieved is quite a legacy. Wouldn�t any of us love to be fondly recalled whenever that ultimate feets-do-your-stuff phrase pops out of somebody�s mouth. "Beam Me Up, Scotty" isn�t about the person who says it, it�s about that lovable, hard-working Starfleet officer we hope is working the transporter for us. He never let any of us who love Star Trek down, and we�ll never forget him.