Museum space; the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Star Trek Exhibition.
Its never-ending mission: to explore strange new fanboys,
to seek out new wallets and new methods of payment,
to boldly go where no ripoff has gone before.

Despite the fact that less than two weeks are slated for the epic journey of the Star Trek Exhibition, I feel the need to warn loyal Trekkers out there that their $25 is better spent on a new pair of Spock ears. Fandom’s greatest ripoff is currently taking up residence at The Tech in San Jose, with only a few days remaining before it hopefully goes back into deep space storage so it can do no more harm. I’m not a diehard Trekkie but for twenty-five bucks I expect to have a good time. I didn’t. Why not? Let’s review the non-epic series of events:

Star Cheap: The Unoriginal Series. It was fun to see that the jokes about flimsy, cheap Star Trek costumes were true. But I wasn’t amused that the exhibit looked cruddy to match. In most places it was little more than rough particleboard hallways bearing plaques with blurbs about Star Trek stuff that even the most casual fan would already know. Then factor in that exhibit after exhibit read “replica of original set prop.” I get that a lot of things are lost or destroyed over time, but it’s not really a museum exhibit if it’s just a showcase of reproductions. On top of that, they were lousy reproductions. Go to Comic-Con and you’ll see much better gear, lovingly homemade by a Romulan who looks the business and will actually let you hold his D’Delak.

The Inanimate Series. The website claims that this is an interactive experience, but the exhibit is strictly hands off. You can walk around the bridge of the Enterprise, but you don’t feel comfortable really playing around because several security goons are staring at every move you make, waiting for the chance to yell at you for doing something verboten. I ended up feeling like a guilty intruder instead of a welcome visitor.

The Next Extortion. This review probably would have been positive had they not done most onerous thing possible for an event targeted at geeks: no photography. At all. If so much as a cell phone came out security jumped you. Museum junkies may say, well, perhaps multiple flashes would have damaged the light-sensitive goods on display. Oh no! If you wanted your picture in Captain Kirk’s famous chair, you had to pay them so an untrained photographer of the theme park variety could do it for you. Once you got through you could fork out extra for such delights as a frightening-looking Romulan Ale energy drink, and a motion simulator ride that looked like a low-budget ripoff of Star Tours. Barf.

Deep Space Not-So-Much. I did my best to stretch this out, but this exhibit was even smaller than my digs in my mother’s basement.

Don’t Touch, Voyager. The atmosphere was hostile to fun: Don’t touch. No pictures. Move along. I found it odd that an exhibit that encouraged Trekkies to dress up for the show didn’t want them to have any fun. The blasé exhibit could have been revolutionized into an epic geek playground by allowing people to take photos and play around on the sets. The money they were making from charging visitors for photos had to have been gobbled up by the staff they had to hire to prevent the use of personal cameras; cancel that out, let the nerds have their fun, and they’ll leave your show singing its praises.

A Lousy Enterprise. I’ll say it unequivocally: this exhibit is pretty weak and definitely not worth the sum they charge. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to see for free in the lobby of a more interesting event. It was cool to see some of the costumes, especially the ones from Deep Space Nine, which seemed to put the most effort into interesting fabrics and good needlework. But I found it sad that the area where people lingered the most was around a screen where they were playing old episodes of the Original Series. And you can get those for free online.