Star Trek

Though I have tried to resist it over the years, without a doubt I have been raised to be a good Trekkie. My family members have always been big fans of all the Star Trek series and movies, and I do have fond memories of watching original Star Trek and Next Generation at home. One of my favorite exhibitions at the science museum in Tampa, MOSI, was a traveling Star Trek exhibition, which I am pretty sure we went to on multiple occasions. I even vaguely recall a Trekkie convention or two, especially one where I got to see an appearance by the original actor who played Scotty. But I digress.

I was really excited to go see the Star Trek movie this week, especially because the original Star Trek series was by far my favorite from the franchise; I loved the back-and-forth between Spock and Dr. McCoy. Seeing the movie in Istanbul was an unusual experience. Ceylan and I were clearly the only people in the room who had a clue about the Star Trek franchise. I got the impression that most of the other people in the audience had just come to check out the new space movie from America. If they had seen any of the tv series, they probably had seen it dubbed or subbed in Turkish. What made this really funny and awkward was that the new movie is riddled with the young characters uttering classic lines, and Ceylan and I would usually emit audible shrieks or laughs when that happened, causing the people around us to get very frightened. I was the only one laughing when Scotty screamed, "I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!" or when the Guy in the Red Shirt died incredibly quickly when dropped to Vulcan's surface. I think Ceylan and I really scared everyone at the end when we recited the "Space, the final frontier..." speech along with Leonard Nimoy's voice. The whole time I just thought to myself, "whatever, you can stare all you want, but this is MY cultural heritage. Respect!"