My wife and I have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, currently on Season 2, Disc 2. Especially taken as a whole, the series takes on a weight, filling its own history and backstory, providing stories that live beyond the confines of a mere pop-television show and add up to be something deeper and more meaningful. Who’s to discount this as a work of importance beyond entertainment? Or any television show with a complex plot and history for that matter?

Of course, as compared with the written word, this content of a much more commercial nature, but that’s in no way a platform on which to judge its content. After all, although early fables were formulated through an oral tradition as a teaching device, people like the Brothers Grimm were nothing more than creative types looking to sell and collect sets of stories [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Grimm].

There’s mutability to modern storytelling and mythology that goes beyond the static nature of the page and returns again to the oral storytelling tradition. Creators like Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly) and JJ Abrams (Alias, Lost) have expanded their mythology to include various mediums. Comics, web, movies, fan fiction. The mythology is no longer tied to the page, and now, even the screen, out of the hands of the creators and into the hands of the fans.

Star Trek, long the bastion of fan interaction, hasn’t held this crown for the last decade. Its advantage has been eroded by lack of leadership for the brand, a single visionary to guide the mythology through various permutations.

It’s ironic, and somehow fitting then, that JJ Abrams is one directing the new version of the Star Trek movie.

Maybe it’s he that can expand the mythology to the places where it best deserves to be.