Visit EMP’s Star Trek Exhibit: The (not so) final frontier
Captain’s Log, Stardate -306547.5
At dawn, we set our course for Seattle, a three and a half-hour drive if we got lucky navigating the traffic-belt just outside the city. Our destination: EMP Museum’s Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds exhibit. We arrived just before the museum opened at 10 am.
Excitement levels were high as my eighteen-year-old Trekkie and I (Trekkie by association) climbed the stairs to Paul Allen’s extensive collection of Star Trek costumes, sets, weapons, props and other memorabilia. Okay, fine. It’s not all Paul Allen’s, but most of it was.
We tried to take our time and start at the beginning, reading about how Lucille Ball’s production company took a chance on Gene Roddenbury’s fledgling sci-fi show. But after a minute or two, we couldn’t hold back and flew to the gem of the exhibit, Captain Kirk’s command chair and the navigation console from the original series.
Seeing this wooden, electrical-taped, scratched, dented and low-tech set initially dispelled some of the magic the series. (That was it?) But only for a moment. Quickly, I was impressed at the way viewers, like myself, were willing to suspend their disbelief despite the low-tech sets. We all bought in.
On mannequins, the costumes are just fabric and rickrack; the weapons just props; and the ships themselves, small models. Yet all of these things made us believe in a different time and place where our modern day issues of war, racism, and politics played out with a different set of rules, and different outcomes.
One minute my son was regenerating in a Borg thing, the next we were both beaming down to an embattled planet and saving the day before beaming back up. We crawled through a Jeffries Tube and recorded ourselves acting out Kirk’s, “Kaaaaaahn,” scene.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek series, and the exhibit shows how it’s impacted art, culture, design, science, and literature. More than that, it’s a great way to celebrate a series that has had such an impact on our culture.
There’s special exhibit pricing for Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds, but the fee also gives access to the rest of museum, including the permanent sci-fi collection. You’ll see Greedo’s mask, the actual hoverboards from the Back to the Future movies, a six-foot tall Dalek and so much more. So set your phasers to geek-out, grab your favorite Trekkie and make the land-voyage to Seattle.
Exhibit runs through February 2018. Tickets $27 online or $30 at the door.
