Reading the abruptly truncated article, it looks like he's going for the idea that Star Trek evokes a mythological reaction that causes people to be religiously

Reading the abruptly truncated article, it looks like he's going for the idea that Star Trek evokes a mythological reaction that causes people to be religiously obsessed with it. Personally, I think he's overstating things. Everything has a fanatical fanbase somewhere. I'm sure there's people who watch American Pie repeatedly, marveling at this amazing piece of cinematography and wondering why other people aren't doing the same. However, combine that with the following: 1. There is a certain mindset that seems to come out more in the geeks of the world. The obsessive, driving force that makes us dedicate days and hours of our time to a single project, instead of passively consuming, say, romantic comedies. There are people who watch Star Trek and say "Mmm, Star Trek.", and there are people who watch Star Trek, write out technical plans and compare the sizes of all the ships in the series, and recreate scale models of them. There are people who calculate how fast the ship is actually going, how hot a phaser would have to be based on the length of time it takes to burn through material X in episode 1, material Y in episode 2, and call out the writers when it burns through material Z in episode 3 too slowly. 2. In the 70s, there wasn't an internet. There was no real form of escapism for the bullied geeks, no way for them to gather together from across the country in forums based on shared interest. There was just the hope that someday, the brains would win out over the bullying brawn, and Sci-Fi in general, and Star Trek in particular, was the crowning jewel of that time. 3. To that end, the sense of awe you had when you first saw the Enterprise swoop out over the screen, the gasps when Kirk was about to get pummeled by the Gorn, the cheering when he turned the fight the other way-- those feelings are the reason Star Trek was popular back in the '70s. Too, possibly, The Next Generation in the 80s/90s. But after that...well, the honeymoon was over. And it's not really that surprising. As an adult, you can never completely recapture the feeling of nostalgia you had when watching the series for the first time. And instead of realizing that, fans lashed out at the followup series- DS9, Voyager, Enterprise...is it any surprise the franchise had a reboot? But it's too late. The future is literally more fantastic than they could have guessed when Star Trek first came out, and kids are too used to seeing personal communicators with more functionality than Star Trek's from the age of five. Anyways. The upshot of all of this is that Star Trek managed to hit a sweet spot of mindset, escapism, and time period (pretty much the same as Star Wars did), and that sweet spot is now taken up by other, more interactive media of varying types. It was more a matter of luck than any real sense of the "mythological", and the only reason anyone would think that would be because of their attempt to recapture the nostalgia of their youth, the first time they saw the series. Edit: I realize that anecdote is not the plural of data, but for me personally, I don't know a single person my age (22) that is a Star Trek geek. The only people I know that collect Star Trek memorabilia, watch and debate the shows, etc. are people who were teenagers when The Original Series came out.