Who is Darius Tanz?

Darius Tanz is the protagonist of the short-lived Salvation, yet another sci fi show that deserved a longer run, or at the very least, cult-hit status. An asteroid is coming that will cause an extinction-level event on Earth. Simple premise, briskly paced, loads of suspense, cliffhangers that keep you watching. Well written and acted, with good production values and timely themes, even if the plot shovels it on a bit thick at times. Bonus: Santiago Cabrera.

Also, as it turns out, Darius Tanz is the anti-John Galt.

SPOILERS. Read on at your own risk.

Darius Tanz, handsome, brilliant radical individualist, learns that nothing matters without human connection, a lesson more EM Forster than Ayn Rand. His plan to save humanity by selecting supermen for his ark turns out to be the way of the bad guys. (Why exactly was Jillian going along with that again?) The real John Galt, Darius’ uncle, motivated by self-interest and greed, has been manipulating him all along. In fact, the great Darius turns out to have been wrong about everything. In the end, nothing he’s done over two seasons has actually changed the outcome in any way, with the possible exception of his final act, stopping Harris from launching the nukes – and one suspects that, even had they launched, the mighty Samson would still have arrived. 

Also, I may be the only person to have watched this series who likes where it ended: Our heroes confronting the universe’s next great puzzle.
Extra bonus for fans of common romantic fanfic tropes. Again, read on at your own risk.

Not only do the writers straight up use fanfic’s favorite trope to get the protagonists into bed (captured, fed disinhibiting drugs, locked in a room together), but they do it after using another favorite trope as a warm-up (sharing a hotel room with one bed), and then for good measure another one (posing undercover as a married couple, have to kiss to make it convincing), and I for one applaud every one of these bold choices.

On Picard, fan-shaming, and Aramis in Space

The premiere of Star Trek: Picard is around the corner. While most fans are going gaga about the return of Riker, Data, Seven of Nine, et al, I’m not. TNG is my least favorite Star Trek, and, while I have a healthy respect for the character of Picard, I’ve lived through enough Star Trek sequels, prequels, and reboots not to have a Pavlovian drooling response to each and every one of them.

And yet I am counting down the days to this premiere with a level of fannish excitement I haven’t felt in years. It’s a pleasant feeling, yes. But it’s a guilty pleasure, because it also triggers my fannish shame. You know what I mean: that little voice in your head that prevents you from mentioning your fandom hobby on job interviews or blind dates. Granted, culturally, this is less of a thing than it used to be. I’m old enough to remember the pre-Star Wars era, when the word Trekkie was never spoken affectionately by anyone who wasn’t one.  When I reached high school, I made a conscious vow to myself never to mention Star Trek to anyone unless they brought it up first. That little shame-voice has been with me for a long, long time.

It’s the voice that’s telling me it’s dumb to squee about…

ARAMIS IN SPACE.

That’s right. Santiago Cabrera, who played Aramis in the BBC’s The Musketeers, of which I am rather a fan, is playing Chris Rios in the latest iteration of Star Trek, a franchise of which I am a huge dork of a fan. In my head, it’s not called Picard. It’s called ARAMIS IN SPACE. (Always rendered in all caps, because that’s how you have to say it. Like Don LaFontaine.)

So now seems like a good time to interrogate that little voice. What’s with the shame? Why does this feel extra exciting, but also extra dumb?

Because conflating a character with the actor who plays them feels so…childish. Who hasn’t felt fremdschämen (an excellent German word meaning the feeling of shame for someone else who has done something embarrassing) when a fan comes to the mic at a con and asks an actor, “In season 2, episode 13, why didn’t you just reverse the polarity?” When a kid does that, it’s cute, but when an adult does it, we cringe, as though the shame of this person’s weak grasp on reality is going to rub off on us. Juvenile behavior is a big embarrassment trigger for most people, I think. We spend a lot of time and effort building adult levels of self control, and shame is the biggest weapon in that arsenal. If it weren’t, we’d all be eating candy for breakfast and playing video games in our underwear all day.

As kids, we don’t have a strong understanding of how the world works, including how movies and TV are made. (For those of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era, all the more so. At my first Star Trek convention, age 12, mid-1970s, I learned that scenes are shot out of order, retakes are common, stunt doubles do fights, and the doors on the Enterprise set don’t open by themselves or make a “whoosh” sound.) To a kid, the face a character wears IS the character. The actor wears the same face; ergo, they are the same person. Simple. Twelve-year-old me would never have imagined that, decades later, I’d embrace anyone who is not Leonard Nimoy as Spock.

 But here I am, a fan of both Zachary Quinto’s and Ethan Peck’s versions, evidence, I suppose, of a more mature understanding. As we grow up, we come to understand, intellectually, at least, that the characters we love are not entirely, or even mostly, the creations of actors, but of writers. The actor’s job is to embody someone else’s invention. We realize that good acting is vital to bringing the story to life, but that, while characterization is a collaborative effort, the essence of a character already exists on the page.

And yet…

At a con, or a red carpet, or anywhere popular entertainment is celebrated, it’s the actors who get the most exuberant reception, not the writers, directors, or even show runners. We respond viscerally to the faces of the characters we love (or love to hate). Deep down inside, each of us has a wide-eyed child who believes the person standing before us is a true hero, a foul traitor, a hilarious clown, a great lover, a tragic martyr – whatever. That’s why we whoop and holler for them, while the off-screen people who are, objectively, more responsible for the shape of our beloved stories get a more restrained reception.

Which explains why this impulse is a little embarrassing. We know these actors and their lives are nothing like the characters with whom we’re mildly obsessed. We know that the process of making the stories we love, of shooting a movie or a TV show, is nothing like living out the story. We know this person standing before us can’t fly, punch through walls, do magic, solve mysteries, destroy worlds, time travel, or for that matter, even pull off an exciting car chase. But inside each of us, there’s this little place of pure imagination where they absolutely can. It’s the place where the characters actually exist and the fiction has reality. Within that place, the real-world rule – that the one wearing a person’s face IS that person – applies. It’s not that we don’t see the boundary between reality and fantasy; it’s that we choose to immerse ourselves unreservedly in the fantasy. We allow ourselves to cross that boundary and experience the fantasy so viscerally that, when we cross back, it feels like an actual memory rather than a purely mental exercise.

Fan-shaming is largely about the perception that fandom is an indicator of arrested development – an immature understanding of, and even withdrawal from, the real world. (There are whole dissertations to be written about the gendering of that disdain, and its long history. Not for nothing were novels once seen as intellectually inferior literature that appealed mostly to women. But I digress.)  Growing up is supposed to be about leaving childish things behind, right?

Except, not really. Sure, we do have to learn to compartmentalize a bit. But what would human beings be without the power to vividly imagine things they haven’t directly experienced? How would we communicate, invent, create, empathize? And what would imagination be if we didn’t allow it the full emotional impact of real, lived events?

The Gradgrinds of this world, people of a sterile, impoverished mentality, lacking imagination, or more likely, afraid of giving voice to whatever shriveled, hardened stump of imagination they have left after a lifetime of neglect, will always be with us.

But fuck it.

I can’t wait for ARAMIS IN SPACE.

(PS -- This wonderful Rolling Stone interview with Michael Chabon, in which he talks a bit about his own experience with fan-shaming, was published a couple of days after I wrote this. I feel so validated.)

Why I like Enterprise's much-maligned Xindi story

The Xindi story line of Enterprise is a surprisingly nuanced response to 9/11 and subsequent events, tackling such questions as, is it okay to respond out of vengeance, or only self defense? Are there some moral absolutes that can’t be broken, even to save millions of lives? In war, how do we weigh the lives of the enemy against our own? How good does intelligence have to be to justify killing, or even starting a war? Is killing to prevent possible, even probable future killing defensible? Who decides, the military, the politicians, the citizens? How do people who have seen and done terrible things in the line of duty move on with their lives? And it’s not preachy or facile – it really digs into the grey areas.

A Star Trek Morality Primer

What are the lessons Star Trek teaches us? Does Star Trek have a clear moral compass? Is it consistent, or does it evolve over time? Did you really expect me to have the answers? Of course not.

Instead, I offer these series-by-series nuggets:

TOS:  Do the right thing. However, the right thing will change from week to week, depending on who wrote the script.

TAS: The universe is confusing. Just go with it. Nothing lasts longer than 24 minutes anyway.

TNG: If you do the right thing, all will be well, because those are the rules.

DS9: Out here on the frontier, the rules are fungible. Do the best you can. Mostly just try not to start a war or a religion. But if you do, you’d better prevail. At both.

VOY: One for all and all for getting home.

ENT: Doing the right thing will generally get you absolutely nowhere, but pay it lip service from time to time because your series has an inferiority complex.

DSC: Doing the right thing will seriously mess you up, because streaming TV is dark 'n gritty.

PIC (speculative): The rules are back, but in a more neutral color palette.

Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to recognize that, at times, Star Trek really does deliver some profound insights with intelligence and subtlety. And sometimes, it's more like this:

Slingshot around the sun: International Star Trek Convention 1975

Let's travel back in time to 1975, to the other NYC Star Trek con that happened that year. This one was at the Americana Hotel, not that you'd know from the program, the cover of which is pictured above. (You can see the program from the competing con here.) Apparently, there was a schism among the con runners that resulted in two separate events. Of course, I knew nothing about it at the time, being just 13 and all. I was just happy to have more Star Trek. But you can read about it here.

Anyway, this program is notable for a comic that was apparently trying to emulate the underground comics of the day by being vaguely psychedelic and pretty incoherent. The title, Star Truckin', was obviously a reference to Robert Crumb's Keep on Truckin'. Beyond that, I can't tell you what the fuck is going on.

There are also the usual publicity stills, plus the names of everyone involved (but weirdly, no dates or any other useful historical information). Guests included Shatner, Doohan, and Koenig, as well as Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison. You could certainly do a lot worse.

Mexican Jewelry Trek

While reading up on vintage Mexican jewelry, as one does, I encountered the work of Sigi Pineda and was struck by one particular form he uses again and again, which strongly suggests the iconic Starfleet insignia. Pineda’s work, dating to the mid-1950s, was designed first. These are some examples of his jewelry, which could easily adorn a Starfleet uniform, and wall hangings, which would look at home on any Starfleet admiral’s office wall.

It’s generally believed that William Ware Theiss, Star Trek’s original costume designer, derived the insignia from the red chevron of the NASA logo, designed in 1959, but it’s impossible to ignore the similarity to Pineda’s work. Was Theiss aware of these sleek, midcentury-modern designs? Maybe they had just entered the general gestalt, or perhaps it’s all just an uncanny coincidence. Theiss is gone, and we’ll never know.

Slingshot around the sun: Star Trek Convention 1975, New York

When I was a wee Trekkie, I was lucky enough to attend seven New York Star Trek conventions from 1974 to 1977. Sadly, I didn't save the program from the very first one, but I did save the rest. I've been meaning to digitize them for ages, but it never rose to the top of my to-do list -- until now. It just took a nudge from my orthopedic surgeon (i.e. I'm laid up after foot surgery).

This is the program from the con held Feb. 14-17 at New York's Commodore Hotel, called (drumroll please) ... Star Trek Convention. Yup. Just what it says on the tin. Guests included Gene Roddenberry, William Shatner, George Takei, Isaac Asimov, David Gerrold, and more.

This program (like all the others from back in the day) is packed with publicity stills and behind-the-scenes candids. Back in those prehistoric, pre-internet times, these were like gold and made the programs treasured souvenirs. Also of interest to fandom historians (if such exist): listings of zines and fan clubs. There's also a recap of the previous year's con from superfan Joan Winston. Enjoy!