They also don't carry on with humans. I think we can all agree that T'Pol is *not* your average Vulcan.
But you're all right, of course. Star Trek is just so
deliciously audacious in my opinion. And there's so MUCH of it. MASSES of Trek. MASSES of different media. The fact that there are a only a couple of handfuls of well-known stinker episodes/movies/books that we like to hold up as crappy and non-canon is also testament to the fact that there are hundreds of eps/books/chars/storylines that DO keep us addicted to a bulletin board about two cancelled characters and a cancelled show.
There's SOMEthing indefinable that is somehow more magical than any other TV phenomenon out there. The fact that we actually DO have to TRY and (impossibly) reconcile our today-filmed 22nd-C tech with GUMDROP stuff from the SIXTIES really speaks to our show's abiding mysterious timeless quality. It speaks to our insistence on it all somehow hanging together over 40 years of television.
We Trekkies are perfectionists. We're above average intelligence, and above-average geekiness, and I think, if a study was done, above-average stubbornness (from being shoved in all those lockers as adolescents). We're like Seven of Nine with the obsessive perfectionism. We try to stick to canon for forty years and beyond. There are whole sites and books and legions of people keeping track of "Trek" history. Trek tries to iron out technical "mistakes" like Klingon foreheads through creative scripts, instead of just "rebooting". Don't always succeed, but the whole circuitous explanation is always dead interesting and sassy.
And, since we're always looking at a show/movie/book produced by massive committee collaboration spanning literally decades, some of it is crazy and zany. Committee collaboration is always a bit watery and strange.
And we FANS monitor the zaniness and discuss and analyze canon like no other genre. We mostly stole the term from the
crazy Sherlock Holmes perfectionists. Canon is mostly a Trek term. We demand a lot as Trekkies. And
sometimes they listen. They "fixed" the finale with TGTMD, clearly, not to be nice (when have TPTB cared about the little fans?) but to re-rally all the completely pissed Trek nuts they upset... so that the entire legion of said nutty fans wouldn't ignore the movie in 2008. It was crafty of them. It was crafty of us.
I dunno, Trek perfection would have nixed that whole Nitpicking book I mentioned. To me, Trek will always be just the right mix of Picard and B4, what happened to the Klingon forehead and female Pon Farr, "Observer Effect" and "A Night in Sickbay", "Terra Prime" and "*the_abomination*", heroic, believable Trip Tucker and silly pretty-boy Mayweather. Worf joining Enterprise for every movie. The Wrath of Khan and Nemesis. The Gorn and the Borg. The good stuff and the weird stuff. And the bad stuff. The awesome stuff wouldn't have as much impact if there wasn't warp ten and Tom's prosthetic tongue and evolved lizards to balance it all out. The Beebs serve a purpose. Like dung beetles in a garden.
I dunno! I think *the_abomination* and then the zany book-fix is SO much more insanely interesting than just a passable series finale and no more discussion. WE certainly wouldn't still be here years later, joyfully banging away at pagelong posts regarding the specific, specific insanities of our kooky show.
So, we kind of owe our community to the kookiness, and so in a
big, Sixties, Gumdrop Way, the kookiness is part of Trek.
Would we all REALLY be happier if it all fit together and you could just watch and just forget and never think about it again?
Holy long post Batman.