it sure smells tasty © Lilly Schwartz 2011

Sometimes it’s just not possible to keep up a daily blogging schedule. I was just too tired to write last night after not having slept very well the night before. I have been struggling with insomnia for ages, so it’s not quite surprising that every now and then I have restless nights. This was also the case after Ezequiel left on Tuesday. I brought him to Tegel airport which is only 10 minutes from here on a bus. It is only a small city airport and not a very pretty one either. Still, I spent some time walking around, climbing up stairs to see what’s around. It was raining, so I tried to keep my camera dry by taking pictures from under overhanging roofs and through windows. It definitely changes your perspective a little.

Apart from that my day was rather uneventful. I went to a shop to pick up some groceries and then spent the evening watching episodes of Star Trek Enterprise from a few years back. It’s quite different from other Star Trek series, because there is not the usual moral high ground involved. There is no big organisation that dictates directives or what to do in outer space and the universe is not just a big friendly space on the territory of the good guys. There is crime, slavery, a bit of frontier spirit and so on. For one or two seasons they managed to keep the story lines quite well together, but I think they were struggling with low viewer numbers and tried to spice things up a bit. The third season is therefore far away from the usual Star Trek spirit and goes way too far in questions of morality. I was not impressed at the time. No wonder that they got cancelled after that. It’s a shame though since the fourth season is really quite something. It for example explains why Klingons look so different in the original series.

And yes, I’m re-watching the series after I’ve already seen it twice. I’ve actually seen every Star Trek episode ever produced at least twice apart from some of the original series episodes which I only vaguely remember from my childhood. All of the series have something special about them, something that distinguishes them from the others while still maintaining a similar spirit. That’s what made the entire franchise so successful: There is something in it for everyone. And every now and then there are very special stories in them too like the TNG episode ‘Inner light’ or the Enterprise episode ‘Carbon Creek’ that don’t happen on star ships. There is just this incredible range of topics that can be explored in Science Fiction which I have always found fascinating. It has the whole range of “what if” to play with which makes me wonder whether they will even come up with a new series at some point although the franchise seems a bit dead at the moment. It would definitely make me happy!