Get McAvoy, Tom Hardy, and Ed Speleer together for The Picard Dynasty. It’ll write itself 😂

I genuinely think X-files and specifically Fox Mulder was a huge factor bringing a lot of that conspiracy mindset into the mainstream. It was already there as an undercurrent, but having a hit show on the air weekly for so many years — that was tinfoil hat normalisation spelled large.

So having people of colour in the leads and as a show runner? Yeah, I think/hope it will get some wingnut viewers’ panties in a knot 😄

Oh! Oh! It gets better!

[After failing at running comic shops as well,] Wilhite started attending Lamb of God Lutheran Church in Humble in 1989 and wrote a Christian memoir looking back over his involvement in comics and gaming. In it, he warns readers about the dangers of occult activities like playing Dungeons & Dragons or watching horror movies.

Apparently all his failures were not due to his own shortcomings, but signs from god to stay away from all of that occult scifi stuff or whatever.

There’s also a bit of info on this Houston Press article from 2014:

In 1982 there was supposed to be a con to end all cons here in Houston. And there was, but not in a good way. It was billed as the Ultimate Fantasy, a product paired with the respected name of Houstoncon, which had been providing a quality and successful con experience in the city since 1967.

Thereafter it would be known as the Con of Wrath, or the Ultimate Fiasco, and its failure is the stuff of geek song and legend.

[…]

Ultimate Fantasy was ambitious even by today’s standards. It was to be a huge stage show hosted in the Summit and featuring a rotating stage and a laser light display. The guests would be most of the stars of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, who would re-enact parts of the film. Nothing like it had ever been done before, and Wilhite was convinced he could pull it off.

So convinced, actually, that he got several investors to mortgage their houses. Billboards went up all over the city. Ads appeared in TV Guide and Starlog. Wilhite believed that Ultimate Fantasy and the associated Houstoncon at the Shamrock Hotel would draw 10,000 people, including Trekkies, from as far away as Japan and Europe.

Organizers needed 5,000 people just to break even. Two months before the event, barely 400 presale tickets had been sold.

[…]

When the stars of the convention appeared, they found out that their hotel rooms hadn’t been paid for. They were forced to pay out of their own pockets.

As the con progressed, it became apparent that the thousands of attendees needed would not appear. Vendors and venue realized that they were not going to be paid. Shamrock management contacted all the dealers in the hotel and told them that unless the remaining balance was collected by that evening, they would all be thrown out. They passed the hat to keep the doors open and hoped to sell enough to recoup their losses.

And Jerry Wilhite had disappeared. No one could find him. Or any of the money that was supposed to materialize. With him he took Houston’s reputation as a place for comics and science fiction pop-culture acceptance and celebration. Word went out from guests and dealers alike to avoid the city. The people in Houston didn’t know what they were doing.

True. And can she transform all of that to an arresting comics story? We don’t know.

Do comics do ghost writers?

I mean, there is the Marvel Method where Stan Lee would brainstorm with artists, let them go off and do the brunt of the work, and take a writing credit for filling in dialogue.

More to the point, I guess nobody has as much head canon about Dr Crusher as McFadden. She’s spent decades creating back story for character motivation where it may not have existed on the scripted page. As I understand it that’s pretty much par for the course.

I’m pretty sure IDW have “support writers” in staff to make those ideas conform to industrial narrative standards and formatting…

“Far future”? This was supposed to be for Discovery, which is initially set around 130 years from now. How much visible evolution do you imagine would take place in such a short timespan?

I sat down and rewatched “Affliction”/" Divergence" last night after this whole discussion. It is very much a not good storyline, and one that hadn’t needed two episodes if not for some poorly motivated character shifts with Trip and Malcolm.

Yeah, the racially charged complaint against the DSC design doesn’t entirely add up given the darkface makeup used in all previous versions of (white people playing) Klingons, including the TNG through ENT depictions.

I did like the DSC Klingons as aired, and if people had the patience required for things to play out, they could have waited for future writers to make up an elegant answer like the augment virus in ENT 🙂

Honestly? Also Gillian Anderson 🤣

Yeah, that was my thought as well. The jawline spikes are a bit much.

Whatever do you mean, this was only released 10 years after the fact (and 2 yrs after the show had run its course well beyond his involvement) 😄

You talk a lot about trust, and I think that’s an important factor. Sure, you can argue that the shows’ utopianism changed entirely because the powers-that-be warped the messaging. That’s probably true too, certainly now with the Ellisons at the top. But that’s pretty recent.

I think there’s also an aspect of how much viewers would be able to suspend their disbelief if they were served '60s or even '90s era scripts today. Especially TNG was very diplomacy focused and based in mutual respect. My guess is there has been an erosion of trust in Western society in the meantime. Again, ultimately because Capitalism, I’m sure — but in a broader sense than I interpret from your comment?

I dunno, I don’t have a neatly wrapped theory about this. Sorry if I go completely off on a tangent based on your comment.

I think the first season of Discovery tried to earnestly grapple with real world politics through the whole Klingon war/Mirror Universe arcs. All of Picard seemed to be about conspiracies and shadow governments, which certainly also speaks to its time of production… while dulling the shine on the utopian vision for the future.

And it’s not just badmirals and Section 31 that have been at issue. We’ve seen plenty of disgruntled pirates (read: regular-Joe capitalists) turned terrorists in the eyes of the Federation. Our main casts have visited enough dystopian “slum” planets in the past ten years, where criminals organise and prosper, that the idealism of Star Trek is depicted as precarious.

Way out in the 32nd century, as Osyraa bites into a Federation-produced apple, admiral Vance comments that “it’s made from our shit, you know”. Way to sell post-scarcity, buddy. Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. I think the past decade of Trek has done a good job of postulating soft values, standing up for minorities and diversity. It’s been pretty shit (to stay in the vocabulary) at representing the very foundation of that sort of tolerance, though.

Trek should be a means to imagining the end of Capitalism, even if only as a background note for all kinds of weekly weird encounters and philosophical twists. But that is not just hard to depict in the 21st century — it’s actively being played as downright unsexy in the shows.

That’s a pretty nice haul judging from the photo you posted. Especially at the grand price of paying nothing 🙂

And they’re still on a trek through the stars? Seems to do what it says on the tin.

Okay, that was rude and nitpicky. But I’ll bite:

Read the article. Her voice was heard on every episode, but recorded separately. So, for example, the cast of TNG never met her until she showed up for her first guest spot as Lwaxana. Sirtis relates their (or her) initial reservations:

I didn’t meet Majel until she was a guest star on our show in the episode ‘Haven,’ and we didn’t bond immediately because she was the boss’s wife, and we were all a bit nervous because as a cast; we were a little rowdy

Note the distinction I put in italics.

That was a good read, it’s nice to have both her acting peers’ as well as Rod Roddenberry’s perspectives on her. I’m not sure I’ve read more than the equivalent of her Wikipedia entry before. Polite secondhand info, that is.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Majel whenever she’s on Trek. The first Number One, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxanna… and all the while, also the voice of the Enterprise. Geez, Gene may have been the mind behind the show, but she probably embodied it more than anybody outside of the main cast(s) 🤩

abandon [conservative] crew members on the planet.

I think introducing conservatives to an alien ecosystem is against the Prime Directive. Better to yeet them into the nearest ion storm without a space suit.

So that’s what the de-con chamber in Enterprise was for. Silly me, I thought it meant decontamination.