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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 2427752" data-attributes="member: 8447">I put this in my journal today.  I hope you don't mind my sharing.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------James Doohan died today.Scotty has been beamed up.When DeForest Kelly died, I wasn't hit so hard. In my mind he was "the old guy" on Trek. Not Scotty. He was one of the regular guys, one of the crew.Trek holds a very special place in my heart. I was born in '59 and saw Star Trek when it first aired, thanks to my mom allowing me to stay up past my usual bed time. I was a Kennedy Space Kid, a kid so in love with The Final Frontier that I watched every single launch from the Alan Sheppard going up in his Mercury to Apollo XIV. Subsequently I have become much less regular, but still I was there. "We will go to the moon, we will go to the moon, we will go to the moon!" Star Trek was the embodiment of much that was positive about the 1960s. Here was the crew of a spaceship where there were women as officers and people of every race and nationality on the crew, where everyone was working together for the common good, where all that mattered was the courage, the tenacity, the wisdom, and the hope that each crewman engendered. Every week a new voyage presented a new problem; some of these problems were solved by strength of arms, but many others were instead solved through the human spirit, the knowledge of right and wrong, and the wisdom to know the difference. In the end Trek was not about perfection, but about hope. The future might not be perfect, but this was not from want of trying. Little by little, the human race was perfectable and if the world of the 23rd century wasn't quite the thing yet, they were at least still giving it all they had. For a Kennedy Space Kid, that was what was needed.Star Trek was, for its time, quite forward looking, radical, and amazing; it was also constantly pummeled in the ratings by such pathetic formula shows as Lost in Space and Time Tunnel, just showing where most of the tastes of America were, as always. Nowadays the sets, the costumes, the special effects, even the dialogue looks and sounds cheesy, but you have to cast your mind back nearly 40 years, in the time prior to Watergate, to a time when people on the whole still had a general faith in both their government and in the concept of Progress. Trek was, for its time, far and away ahead. Like The Twilight Zone it took modern problems, repackaged them in a sci fi setting, and then dealt with the issues of the day -- race relations, prejudice, nuclear war and MAD, cultural imperialism, the inherent goodness/wickedness of the human race. Trek is a classic because it was gutsy.Scotty was an interesting character. There are essentially four tiers to the Trek crew. On top was Kirk. Next came Spock and McCoy. Then came Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura. Then there was everyone else. Scotty, however, bridged the second and third groups, sometimes nearly as important as Kirk's Yin and Yang, sometimes playing an important backup role. More importantly, he got his hands dirty -- he worked (literally) in the bowels of the ship, ekeing out just a touch more power, pulling off a mechanical miracle, and knowing every drone, every grind, every gear, bell and whistle of the other great character of the show, the Starship Enterprise. In fact, as has been shown more than once, Scotty had a greater respect and love for the ship than for any single member of its crew. or all that, Scotty was an intenesly passionate individual, not above getting drunk, engaging in a brawl, being chauvanistic (pro-scottish, pro-ship, pro-technology), simply grabbing life by the tail and holding on for all he was worth.Scotty had soul.Scotty had chutzpah.Jimmy Doohan was a man who did radio for years in Canada. If you needed an accent, he would do it. When the role of Scotty was first developed, he tried out for it; at that point they still knew nothing about the Chief Engineer other than that -- no name, no nationality, no nothing. By having Jimmy read through the script a number of ways, working through a number of accents, Scotty was born. This later led to science fiction books claiming that while not all Scotsmen were engineers, all engineers were Scotsmen. And all of this was due to Jimmy. He was a kind and friendly man, always happy to meet the fans, always willing to sign pretty much anything put before him, always happy to put on The Voice for people. In his waining days, Jimmy was succumbing to Alzheimer's, and yet he still appeared at one last fan con, simply for the fans. He didn't say anything, but he knew he wanted to be there, that he had to be there. Under Alzheimer's we are often stripped back to an earlier time and our core thoughts, as they rage through us over and over again, unable to connect to the new, the current.Jimmy knew that his fans cared for him and so he was there.Godspeed, Scotty. We'll miss you.</blockquote>

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