I grew up with “Star Trek”. My sisters had crushes on various bridge crew members and I was playing Trek about as early as I can remember. When channel 39 out of Dallas was rerunning it every day at 6 p.m. for most of the late 70’s and early 80’s, I was eating my supper in the living room so as to see every episode.

I watched Next Generation, Voyager, Enterprise and the first couple seasons of Deep Space 9 faithfully*. As a child, I built models of all the ships and the phasers. I still have a cassette player shaped like a tricorder (doesn’t work, but it still looks cool). I am a Trekker and have even owned up to the perjorative “Trekkie”. I’ve been to every one of the movies. (Though, in all honesty, the projector broke halfway through “Nemesis” and I took the refund rather than wait for the next show. I eventually checked out the DVD and discovered the movie wasn’t improved by having an ending.)

So then I heard that they were going to make still another Star Trek movie. I was planning on going because, well, read all of the above. But then I read that they were going to cast new people as Kirk and Spock. I’ve got enough green blood in me to hate that idea and was only mildly pacified when I learned that they were going to use young actors and tell us how Spock and Kirk met.

Then, the rumors came out—and were confirmed—that J.J.J.J. (etc.) Abrams was going to “helm” this new movie. I really can’t think of any news that would have made me less interested in the new movie than that. In case you don’t remember, Abrams is the guy who gave us “Alias”. “Alias” was not a horrible show, it had it’s moments, but the relative value of almost every episode after the first one hinged on whether you had seen all the preceding episodes. And then it just went on and on until it got canceled because people got tired of watching to see if anything would ever be resolved (spoiler alert: nothing was).

Then, Abrams gave us “Mission Impossible III”, which was only good if you really liked the star (Tom Holmes), had seen the previous two movies, and had somehow completely missed the old TV show with a remarkably similar name. The best thing about III is that it hasn’t apparently spawned a IV.

J(squared) Abrams then went on to create a TV show whose name I can’t currently remember. I used to watch it faithfully. It was about this airline that got lost at sea, then all the passengers who hadn’t lost their lives were lost on this island and were trying not to be lost, except for this one guy who liked being lost on the island and wished those who wanted to be found would get lost. Dang! I wish I could remember the name of that show.

Anyway, I watched it faithfully for the first season. In the third episode of the second season, though, I got up to go to the restroom at the first commercial break and never went back. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t care what happened to those characters. It wasn’t that they weren’t interesting. The problem was that the show was like an artichoke except that instead of peeling back layers to get to the heart they just kept peeling back more and more layers—often ignoring previous layers the size of polar bears—until I no longer cared whether there were a heart to the artichoke or a point to the island. My wife lasted about another six months before abandoning the ship/island.

My fear is that Mister Abrams is now going to take a show I really like—add layers of complexity and depth—and completely destroy the whole deal because while he may have skills at telling stories he has no clue at how to end them. Hearing that he was helming the new Star Trek was like hearing that my favorite rock song was going to be covered by some country band. Hey, maybe country fans will like it, but I can almost guarantee it’ll be nails on a chalk board to me. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. Hey, I’m already imagining the worst so, “Mister Abrams, you have nowhere to go but up!”

*Instead of going where “no man had gone before” they just waited around a space station and hoped something interesting would come to them. Most weeks, nothing did.