I’m sorry, we’re bad at this.

When we started this whole idea, blog included, the world wasn’t quite the dystopian hellscape we’ve been living. Sometimes maintaining is all we can really do and well, we haven’t really been great at that, either.

But look! We tried! And we haven’t failed at doing the actual podcast and that really feels like something to celebrate. When this pandemic thing subsides, we’ll have these episodes to stand as THE THING WE DID. This is it. Here it is. Even if we kind of blew it on the blog portion.

I was considering removing the blog altogether, but the hope is that some day things won’t be so hard and the gossamer veil of constant depression that we’re all slogging through right now maybe won’t make things so difficult! And maybe it won’t, but I think it’s not the worst idea to just keep it up and see what happens with it. Maybe inspiration will hit and maybe we’ll feel like with spring right around the corner that we can breathe again. Who knows?! Either way, I can’t just get rid of Oh Captain my Captain Kevin Thomas Riley. That would be wrong.

~ Carrie

Oh Captain, my Captain Kevin Thomas Riley: A Sonnet

He fancied himself a descendant of kings

But he was problematic at best

Everyone gets double portions of ice cream

But that's too much to ingest

He'd prefer women work

But not in too much make up

Which makes him kind of a jerk

It's really quite fucked up

The next comment he makes obtusely

I swear I'll make him wish he was never born

Then he says around our shoulders loosely

Is how he'd prefer our hair worn

But then he changes everything with one call to rally

Saying we're to have a formal dance in the bowling alley

-Sarah

Where No Man Has Gone Before

I’m not even entirely sure what to say about this episode. It was a lot of talking and it was a lot of meh. Maybe if we had watched it a different week it wouldn’t have been so flat: it’s possible I just lacked the emotional energy to muster up a fuck about what was going on in the episode.

The past few weeks have been heavy. It’s impossible to fully grasp at one time the ways the world is hurting right now; the pain is too much, too crushing. Star Trek has often been a mental break from real life, a small pocket of idealism that things can get better and the past few weeks have been no exception. Gene Roddenberry once said, “Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.” He modeled this entire universe off of the idea that we as humans could do better. We could be better. We could evolve beyond what we are to become more and united.

Maybe that’s the part to remember about this episode. At one point the doctor brings up that Gary could be a new evolution of humanity, a giant leap that could take millions of years to occur. And that brings up a couple of different points to think about.

1. Gene Roddenberry believed that humanity in his reality was already way better than it was in real time, but that it was going to also keep evolving and growing and changing. That although they were mature enough for space travel, there was still so much to learn and integrate.

2. Change can seem small and insignificant, each tiny step forward so grueling. But it’s only by moving forward, inching ahead, that you can look back at where you’ve come from. To take stock of the mistakes that have been made, learn from them, and continue forward. We can look at the mistakes that were made in the 60s and choose to not follow the same paths, just as Star Trek reboots chose to not make the same cultural mistakes.

So let’s all be a little more like Gene Roddenberry. “I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature. We’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence, now. When we grow up - man, we’re going to be something.”

Let’s go where no man has gone before. Let’s be something. Let’s be better.

- Carrie

PS. At the time of this posting, things have already changed wildly in terms of the best places to donate for the BLM movement and protests. So I figured rather than try to point out something that might no longer need donations or be defunct, I’d just point you towards the source. They know far better than I who and what resources they need. Black Lives Matter.

Charlie X: More Than We Bargained For

I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that this episode made Sarah and I both very uncomfortable. It’s likely a sign of the evolution of our society that in 1966 a really creepy dude doing really creepy dude things was brushed off as an angry adolescent rather than what we would label it now: incel toxicity. This mindset surely existed in the 60’s, but it wasn’t until the internet managed to connect so many with these malignant and visceral feelings that it became it’s own sub community in our culture, with a name, web pages, and studies devoted to it. The internet provided connection and lent a sort of power to a voice that had no other void to scream it’s frustrations in to. Those resentments were mirrored back from others who shared them and amplified with the validation that they were not alone. They weren’t doing anything wrong, everyone else was to blame. It shifted the focus from internal “What is wrong with me?” to an external “What is wrong with them?”.

To read a little more about incel culture, Vox has a great article you can find here. It’s pretty horrifying when you look into it. The rage, the entitlement, the view that women are subhuman. It’s a lot to digest that a sort of lonely hearts club has become so toxic that there are calls to hunt, rape, and kill women simply for existing.

Throughout portions of the episode, Charlie gave off some real hardcore incel vibes. No, Charlie wasn’t in his room trolling women on the internet that he hated because he couldn’t sleep with them. He wasn’t intentionally following a woman at night, knowing he was scaring her, and getting a thrill off of the power that made him feel. But when he began pursuing a woman who very politely expressed she wasn’t interested in him in “that way” he didn’t accept the gentle let down, respecting it, and moving along. He pursued her harder, convinced he could make her love him. When that didn’t happen, he internalized the rejection and let it fester. I LOVE JANICE SO SHE HAS TO LOVE ME BACK. And when she refused, bluntly this time as he wasn’t respecting her boundaries, he hurt her. He literally “disappeared her” for not loving him back. His baser impulses took over and he funneled his pain into hurting others. He was clearly out of control, but only seemed to target women. At one point there’s a pretty blonde girl that he is walking behind and he turns her into an old, wrinkled hag. He turns a girl into an iguana, then removes the face of another. (There were some men off screen that he froze as we can see by their shadows, but they were with the woman whose face he stole, so I’d argue they weren’t the target of his aggression.)

But that wasn’t the most disturbing part of this episode. Charlie was obviously confused and alone; a kid who had never belonged anywhere at all. He’d never been taught how to be a person, had no connections with other people, let alone have empathy for those around him. There’s actually a very small window for people to develop empathy, and it begins at three and lasts until about age six. Remember that he was three when he ended up alone on that planet when much more powerful beings gave him the power to survive, but also left him isolated? Without the early childhood intervention of healthy adult interaction he grew up with a power that didn’t belong to him and no guides to control or even understand the very human feelings he began to have.

So when Charlie, brand new to human interaction (and doing very poorly with it through no real fault of his own), is tracked down by the very species that “created” him what happens? The frightened, fragile, boy begins to beg. He’s begging to stay with his kind. Begging to get another chance. Raw humanity pours out of him (which may have resulted in some overacting, let’s just be honest) and Kirk, moved with compassion, tells the floating green head that Charlie can stay, that they can help him. But it’s too late for Charlie. The other species gave him a power he never asked for and instead of any of the many things they could have done, they took him back to the loneliness he was trying to claw his way out of, albeit ineptly. He just wanted to be loved. He wanted to get better, and that’s like, the first and most important step to a healthy recovery. The desire to be better is the spark the creates motion forward; it’s the only place you can start in therapy. The desire to be better is the driving force of therapy. But Charlie didn’t get that chance; was punished severely for not inherently knowing how to be a good human. This “superior species” didn’t strip him of his powers and allow him the chance to reintegrate with the human culture he wanted so desperately to be a part of. Instead they stripped him of any hope he could be better or have a better life. They threw Charlie away to die in isolation after they created him.

If there’s one takeaway from this episode, my first thought was that incels have always been around and also fuck them. But the reality is that it goes much deeper than that. I think we saw a show attempt, and fail spectacularly, at a really important lesson of connection, compassion, and recovery. Later series would have handled that situation with far more grace and sympathy. The outcome wouldn’t have been a scarred boy begging to stay with some shitty techno departure at his exit. Later series would have made sure he wasn’t thrown away. And while there’s no way to say if Charlie would have reformed his toxic behaviors or not, he at least deserved the chance to try. He was ready. It’s a shame that society at that point wasn’t.

-Carrie

The Man Trap or: How I Relate to the Salt Monster

Imagine it,

Everyone you know is gone,

You had a family once and they're gone,

You're the last of your kind, the buffalo.

This is not how I relate to the salt monster.

Imagine it,

Your hands are made of suckers

Perfectly evolved to remove salt from the bodies of your prey.

This is not how I relate to the salt monster.

Imagine it,

You don't have enough salt.

Whether it's on your perfectly baked potato wedges Or your supposedly salted caramel truffles.

This, this is how I relate to the salt monster.

Those last days of her life,

Craving salt and the happiness it brings to being alive

That's the real tragedy here.

This is how I relate to the salt monster.

- Sarah

The Pilot Always Sucks

I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a fan of sci-fi, you’re well aware of how painful the first few episodes can be. Whether the plot isn’t quite there, the characters aren’t formed, or the chemistry hasn’t appeared yet, you know it usually takes a while for the cohesion of a good show to appear.

We think this podcast will be similar. We’re trying things out, seeing what happens, but this is a whole new world we’re building and that can be rough. This is a thing we’re doing because we think it’s fun, and we’re not professionals at like. . . anything. I think that’ll be pretty evident on the first listen.

But eventually we’ll find our stride, things will have a pretty solid structure and we’ll be like that first season towards the end where things start to thicken up and then it’s like, “Hell yeah, this is good!” So just sit tight while we figure out what direction we’re heading and we’ll be on our way soon.

- Carrie