When I was a sophomore in boarding school, I was labeled ‘That Trekkie Loving’ Girl’ by my classmates. I joined the Star Trek Club, watched episodes at a teacher’s house, and generally made friends with the seniors and juniors in said clubs.
By the time I was a senior, I was the only person in the club.
In many ways, I’m a late comer to a lot of the geek mysteries. Or maybe it’s better said that I was born too late to enjoy them with my peers. I’ve never had a whole lot of friends my age. I’ve always been the youngest kid in the crowd, the baby to the older folk. I was the Lesbian Intern when I started in computers, the fair haired infant when I started at the bank, and even now, 6 years into Banking, I’m still the youngest in the department. That ought to hint at how young I started.
Maybe I’m just old for my age. I’ll keep saying that, since it sounds better than to say that I don’t identify with anyone in Gen X, and I’m too old for Gen Y. I don’t like the same things most people my age seem to like. I’d say ‘I have an old soul’ but then I’d have to kill myself because TV has beat that term with so many anvils of younger dude/older girl that it’s dead embarrassing.
I like TV like any self-respecting 80s child. But I was still in diapers when the 80s started, and I have little claim as one of that lot. I listen to NPR, I watch the news, I like a few dramas and fewer comedies. I enjoy reality programing, but mostly in the form of ‘This Old House’ and lately wedding stories (thanks, Massachusetts).
Am I a Sci-Fi geek, though? I’m Old School enough to call the crap Sci-Fi and not ‘SF’ for Speculative Fiction, which I suspect annoyed the crap out of a friend of mine a few years back. She kept telling me not to read trash Magic/Romance novels (Mercedes Lackey) and suggested China Mountain Zhang, which I liked, but not enough to recommend it to people. The only Sci-Fi I read right now is the Vorkosigan Saga by Bujold, and there are parts of that saga I skip over.
I don’t have any Star Trek books in my home, though I have a crap-load of manuals etc in storage with my Dad’s stuff in San Diego. I need to pick it up one day…
Still, the whole reason I began this introspective trip was because I watched, and liked, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, and I was very happy to hear it was picked up for 13 episodes.
Thing is, I hated the original series, never watched it more than three times, and other than giggling at Lorne Greene, I can’t stand it.
I currently have the same problem with Star Trek (in all it’s incarnations). I love Patrick Stewart, I saw him on stage and then in Jeffery. “To see the apartment!” Bless his heart. He cares with flair. All the best lines were his, and he delivered them with such grace than I wanted to run up and hug him for being that fucking cool. When I was 11, in the height of ST:TNG, I broke my arm and typed a letter to him while I was home all summer. He wrote back the standard form letter, with a picture, and added by hand at the bottom of the letter ‘PS, I hope your arm gets better soon.’
How can you not love a guy like that?
I often tell people that give me three seconds on any Star Trek episode, Original or TNG, and I’ll tell you what the episode is by title or by plot. Three days ago, I channel surfed to Spike TV and saw an episode. there was Q, there was Picard, and there was Troi in a skirt. “Encounter at Farpoint, part two,” I said to Ipstenit. She blinked, “Wow, I didn’t know you were serious when you said that.”
Oh yes, I can. It’s sad, I know. I also know that 36 hours from the onset of rigor mortis, a body becomes bendable again. My brain’s a repository for the weird.
Battlestar Galactica is on, though. The short-series. 13 episodes to start filming next month.
In my best Frau Farbissina voice (she from the Austin Powers movies), “Bring out the Fembuck!”
The reinventing of the series is interesting. Fembuck (aka Female Starbuck) and the Ambiguously Gay Apollo are no longer the Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, simple black/white heroes of the 13 Colonies. Apollo’s a whiny pest with Daddy issues and Fembuck’s a kick ass fighter who seems to have a few million self-control issues. Someone said the show was feminist (I think it was Dirk Benedict, the original Starbuck) and that it was about how women are better than men. I’m not sure where he was going with that, really.
I see it as a change in the times. Much like in WWII, we had stories of Captain America, who kicked Hitler’s ass and fought the Red Skull. The stories were black and white. Here was good, here was evil. Here was right, here was wrong. Today’s youth understand that the world is grey.
I think the progression of Sci-Fi from the clearly defined land of good and evil found in Star Trek began in earnest with Babylon 5. It wasn’t the first, certainly, but I think it was one of the best. JMS crafted a complete world, one where the lines were fuzzy and often crossed. Where people made the human mistakes and suffered for them. In short, the future we saw for ourselves. The machinery didn’t always work, the ships weren’t always pretty, and the people fucked up. They had problems that couldn’t be resolved in an hour, if ever, and you felt for them. Often, the characters accepted this grey, and those who were Rangers said ‘we stand between the candle and the flame.’
While the new Battlestar Galactica isn’t there, and I don’t think it’ll ever be as amazingly complete as B5, it has a chance to go back to the stories that it’s original never told. The human stories. The Cylon stories. The reflection of our own lives in the future, where we fight a war we don’t really understand and yet have no choice but to keep fighting.
It goes without saying that I will always pick Batman over Superman.
I love the dark, the stories of the night, the ones that are real with their depth and don’t candy-coat the world.
The humans.