They’re both in their eighties now: John wears red cap with a blue Vulcan salute on the front, Bjo has a streak of brilliant pink hair floating in her cloud of white. “Not bragging.” Special guests at Star Trek Las Vegas (and a host of other 50th anniversary events), Bjo (pronounced “Bee-joe”) and her husband John are Star Trek’s ur-fans, the determined couple who saved the franchise. “We're pretty sure that the Trek community you see today would not have existed but for us,” Bjo Trimble says. For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen.”) Star Trek touched a cultural and critical chord-Leonard Nimoy was nominated for an Emmy three years in a row his ears, instant icons-but the show didn’t get the ratings it needed. You are reflecting what we are fighting for. (“We don’t need you to march,” she says he told her, “You are marching. When Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, considered leaving TOS after the first season, Martin Luther King, Jr., who watched the show with his family, urged her to stay on. While that vision wasn’t a perfect microcosm of the world at large, now or in 1966, it was still a radical one. “I was told to say, ‘Kirk to Enterprise, please beam up three of us.’” He laughs. The officiant takes out an Original Series communicator and at the bride’s arrival flips it open-a familiar motion to anyone who owned a cell phone in the mid-aughts. When it’s time, the sound system plays an orchestral version of “The Inner Light,” a melody Picard performs on his flute in a Next Generation episode of the same name. For a moment it looks like the real thing: the crew of the starship Enterprise has landed on a strange new world, which also happens to be the emptied pool area of the Rio Hotel and Casino. By the makeshift altar, the groom stands in the dress uniform Picard wore to Riker and Troi’s wedding in Nemesis, flanked by two rosy-cheeked boys in gray suit-vests pinned with Next Generation-era combadges. Rows of seats are full of people in costume: there’s Ambassador Soval from Enterprise, Lore from The Next Generation, a Trill wearing an Original Series uniform, a member of the Borg. It’s the end of day three of the five-day Star Trek Las Vegas 50th Anniversary Convention, and I am outside, at a Star Trek wedding. In the desert in early August, the temperature nudges 100 degrees, even as the sun dips below the horizon.
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