THEY went boldly where few cinema goers had gone before, those 200 or so addicts who attended Saturday's 14 hour marathon screening in Dublin to mark the 30th anniversary of Star Trek's first televised voyage.
They were there at 10.30 a.m. to see the 1979 epic Star Trek: the motion picture. And six motion pictures later, they reassembled at midnight to see a champagne bottle hurtling in slow motion through space to launch the new Enterprise and Star Trek 7: Generations.
Trekkies are not given much credit for humour. But even after 12 hours staring at the Virgin cinema screen, they were still splitting their tunics on Saturday night, especially at the knock about stuff in the last movie when the humanoid robot Data overloads his system with an emotion chip.
While two and four seem to be the favourites, there is near unanimity among Trekkies that the worst of the seven is the fifth - The Final Frontier, directed by William Shatner with the same wooden touch he brought to his acting role as Captain Kirk.
"He dies in the next one. That's why I'm going," said Cliodhna Lyons from Thurles, as she trooped in for the last screening.
She and her friend Caroline Delaney from Kilkenny, were up at 5.30 a.m. on Saturday to get to the screening.
Declan McGregor, the host of the Virgin marathon, is not in fact a Trekkie. He organises special cinema events and his next project will probably be a horror marathon at Halloween. But, Captain Kirk like, he was there to greet his other worldly customers as they emerged blinking from the final movie at 2.03 a.m. They each earned a certificate for their attendance and went off into the night, their emotion chips overloaded.
