To boldly go where someone has gone before

There's talk of revisiting the original characters in the Star Trek universe. Problem: The aging process.

No one can play Dr. McCoy like DeForest Kelley did. No one can play Montgomery Scott like James Doohan. Problem: Kelley and Doohan are dead.No one can play James T. Kirk like William Shatner. No one can play Spock like Leonard Nimoy. Problem: Shatner and Nimoy are 75 years old.

Look at it a different way. No one can play Bruce Wayne and Batman like Adam West. No one can play Bruce Wayne and Batman like Michael Keaton. No one can play Bruce Wayne and Batman like Christian Bale. Odd - Each of those Batmen was better than his predecessor.

Granted, for each Keaton there's a Val Kilmer. For each Bale there's a George Clooney. Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman are fine actors, but Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg are the quintessential Steed and Mrs. Peel.

But we are talking about fictional characters. Sherlock Holmes will live forever; A. Conan Doyle and Basil Rathbone did not. James T. Kirk, Spock, Bones McCoy and Scotty will live forever. If more stories about them are written for actors to portray, other actors will be needed.

It's a sad fact of life. The creation of film made it someone less sad - now Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet can live forever, and so can the Shatner-Nimoy-Kelley chemistry in Star Trek. If Kirk and friends live on, the new actors will be compared to the originals; we cannot compare Olivier's performance to the hundreds and thousands of actors who portrayed the Dane for 300 years prior.

It's not a question of whether new actors can or should be found to play the Trek characters; if new stories are to be told, or if the old stories are to be retold, new actors must be found.

The more interesting question is whether these characters should be revived. They are a military crew on an ostensibly peaceful mission who nonetheless constantly use force to spread their philosophy through the galaxy; their prime directive supposedly is not to interfere with other cultures but they frequently impose their own values on those cultures anyway; some sort of sum-sufficient spending on credit has replaced money; the belief in a higher power is sneered at as a quaint tribal custom of primitive, inferior and/or oppressive cultures.

As the series progressed to the next generation, crew members were required to wear radio badges that enabled computers to track their locations at any given moment. Going somewhere without the electronic ID badge was portrayed as insubordinate and usually was a downright dangerous risk to take.

Come to think of it, the Trek universe might be a perfect fit for contemporary America.