Yesterday, Allison and I took Georgia to see the new Star Trek flick. I'd seen it on Friday, as I believe I've mentioned, and couldn't imagine why it had been slapped with a PG-13 rating. It was, at most, a PG, no more challenging to young viewers than the original Star Wars had been, or any of the other movies all of us grew up watching. I prepped her a bit about some of the more "intense" scenes before hand, just so she'd have a context for what was going on, but as it happened I probably needn't have worried. Aside from a busted nose and bloody lip in a barroom fight, the only real visceral violence happens off-camera, as Abrams cuts away from the actual moment of violence in virtually every case. (When we got to the SPOILER "interrogation" scene, for example, Georgia wasn't quite sure what was happening as the camera panned away from Pike. I explained that the bad guy had just made the captain eat that bug, which is essentially what's happening, and she squealed, "Gross!")

Georgia sat riveted through the whole thing, and when it was over her favorite bits were the time when the captain had to eat a bug, and Scotty's little alien friend who keeps climbing on things. We stopped at Target on the way home, to get her a treat for being such a good moviegoer, and that's when we discovered the Star Trek toys that had arrived since the last time we went shopping.

Needless to say, as a dad who has seen all of Star Trek to date and a mom who has seen most of TNG and all of DS9 and Enterprise (and though she denies it now, at one point she seriously suggested, for all of a minute, that we have a Klingon wedding ceremony when we got married), we were pretty jazzed that our five year old was getting excited about Trek. And so we may have gone a little overboard in buying her Star Trek toys.


Here she is, phasers blasting. She's got them set on "Stun" (you can tell by the blue light), and is "freezing" me as I take her picture.


Then once she got done shooting me she busted out the tricoder and started scanning for signs of life.

That's the Enterprise Bridge playset she's got, augmented with a few editions. These toys are actually quite clever, with each of the small-scale action figures coming in a package with their chair and duty station from the bridge. The Bridge playset comes with Kirk, the conn (complete with helm and navigation), a few computer terminals, the forward viewscreen, and the matt itself, on which is printed the location of each of the other stations. As you get additional action figures (we got Simon Pegg... erm, I mean, "Mr. Scott.") you just plop them with their chair and station on the appropriate spot. Also included with the action figures is a little clip-on Starfleet emblem that can double as a figure stand.


Of course, we weren't going to get her all of them (well, not yet at least), so Georgia has had to pad out the crew of the Enterprise with stand-ins.


That's a couple of dollar-bin bendie aliens at the helm and navigation, and Kirk's pet cat beside the Captain's chair. What, you don't remember Jim Kirk's pet cat from the movie? Well, according to Georgia if he didn't have one, he should have...