Character Insight No. 200: An Ode to Anniversaries

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we celebrate This Week in Trek's 250th episode, this segments' 200th installment, and Star Trek's 50th anniversary with a look at anniversary celebrations in and around Trek.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp200

Although Star Trek did not become a huge franchise phenomenon until well after the Original Series, which aired from 1966 to 1969, the owners of the franchise and the creators of the new content have always taken the opportunity to celebrate big milestones of time from that original stardate. That has meant great presents for fans of the franchise on these occasions.

For the 25th Anniversary in 1991, we received a fitting sendoff for the original crew in the movie The Undiscovered Country, while also revisiting the best recurring antagonist of that crew, the Klingons.  A commemorative video game also came out on all platforms that year.

The 30th Anniversary was perhaps even better, with another iconic recurring character The Borg featured in what was the best TNG movie, First Contact. The current TV shows at the time also joined the celebration with DS9 airing Trials and Tribblelations, and Voyager airing Flashback with George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney.

Now, in year 50, we had the movies deliver another great one with Star Trek Beyond, which many believe to be the best of the Abrams cast reboots thus far. But perhaps in the biggest gift of all, a new television show Star Trek Discovery will finally air after over 11 years of no new TV Star Trek. That gap was approaching the only other significant content gap in the TV franchise history, that being the 13 year gap between the end of The Animated Series in 1974 and the pilot of TNG in 1987.

Regardless of how the new show turns out, at least new content is being tried. If nothing else, Trek knows how to celebrate its anniversaries.  This is also true within the show itself, where anniversaries are brought up on a few occasions.

We see happy individual anniversaries like Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres on their second anniversary of a first date in the episode Warhead, and sad individual anniversaries like when Ben Sisko struggles with the fourth anniversary of his wife's death in the episode Second Sight. If you think 50 years is a big deal, you should check out the celebrations for a couple's 300th wedding anniversary on Risa in the Enterprise episode Two Days and Two Nights, or the 315th anniversary celebration of First Contact Day on one of the final Voyager episodes, Homestead.

Neelix: In honor of the 315th Anniversary of his ancestor's arrival on Earth, I've asked Mr. Tuvok to recite the first words spoken to humans by a Vulcan.
Tuvok: Very well...Live long and prosper.

Even in the 24th Century, anniversaries are a vitally important way to honor history and milestones of time. Congrats to Mike and Darrell on episode 250, and in the immortal words of Leonard Nimoy, may all of us and our Star Trek content: "live long and prosper."