Thirty Days of TV: Day Twenty-Eight

Day 28 - First TV show obsession

Leaving aside cartoon shows watched as a little kid and described on day thirteen, Star Trek, which entered my life when I was a somewhat older kid. I watched every episode. I bought the tie ins; those that were published in German, anyway; this was of course years before I spoke a single word of English, and btw, yes, like everything else imported, Star Trek was dubbed and known as Raumschiff Enterprise. (Which means I heard the voices of the original actors for the first time when I was in my mid-20s and discovered that the local video store also carried ST tapes in English. To this day, though, the dubbed German voices are those I associate first with the TOS crew, sorry, can't help it. Also Bones is Pille, not Bones.) Now Star Trek was actually shown in the late afternoon as part of the programms for kids, and this meant there was an infamous example of censorship to prevent the young 'uns asking questions about the Vulcan mating cycle. To wit: the dialogue for Amok Time was completely rewritten so that in the German version, Spock gets mysteriously sick, McCoy is racing against the clock to find a cure, Spock in his feverish delirium has a bizarre dream about going home to Vulcan to marry his fiancee which ends up with him killing Kirk, McCoy finds the cure, Spock wakes up, has a bit of trouble sorting out fever dream from reality and overreacts when meeting Kirk again. The end. You can imagine that when some of the media tie ins referred to the whole business with T'Pring, I was confused because hadn't that been a dream? Also, what was this Pon Farr everyone was talking about? Ah, the troubles of being a German first Generation fan.

(The other instance of censorship was that Patterns of Force didn't get dubbed at all until a few decades later. I first saw it, undubbed, at a convention and decided I hadn't missed much. It was exceedingly dumb and one of the worst examples of American tv using the ever popular Nazi trope.)


When the movies came, I was just the right age to see them in the cinema. This meant being unspoiled for Wrath of Khan, which no one will ever be again, but I think I already suspected Spock wouldn't remain dead despite sobbing as one does. And overidentified with Saavik who I decided was totally me in space. (Then I read the tie-in novel where Vonda McIntyre hooks her up with Kirk's newly discovered son, David, and went eeeeewwww, because Mr. Curly Blond Hair wasn't my type at all. However, the tie-ins later delivered the romance free Saavik backstory The Pandora Principle, which I read so often that my copy practically falls apart.) But I didn't make the ultimate fannish step of looking for fanfiction, going to conventions, debating with other fans, and being so impatient for new episodes that videos from England were imported until TNG times. Not only did I fall in love all over again (not at fist sight: as was said a lot by me in these reflections, the first TNG season was, err, not the falling in love type, but it had just enough to keep me watching), but this time I had this overwhelming wish to talk about what I'd seen and about the people, and how much for a convention ticket and train fare to Bonn again?

Space, I tell you. The final frontier. These were the voyages...

( The rest of the days )

oh, the non-surprise

And in other news: some very tentative looking at Once Upon A Time communities and at the fanfiction sent me back in a hurry with renewed resolution to only read reviews/comments from people I know. It's the phenomenon I first encountered during ye olde Highlander days with Methos and since then kept running into in fandom after fandom over the decades. You know, same old: canon delivers fascinating shades of grey or layered villain character. Hooray! Only... hang on. Why do so many people decide nothing is ever this character's fault and he's misunderstood and why are those MEEAAAAAN people not forgiving already, not that there is anything to forgive because he didn't seriously do anything wrong, and anyway, he's cool, and so forth, and so on. Only this time, said phenomanon comes two editions, one for Rumplestilskin and one for Regina, and for God's sake, did I really just read someone saying Snow & Charming ought to be ever so grateful to Rumpel because of everything he did for them and their family and how he "kept them safe"? SERIOUSLY?

(Also, one would think it to be self evident that blaming a seven years old child is evidence of a warped perspective, but apparantly not.)

*Deep breath* All of this has happened before. And all of this will happen again.

Incidentally, for all my renewed growling about Bill Adama, rewatching some BSG has reminded me that BSG generally atually was good about this. Both the canon and the fandom, by and large, at least to the extent that I recall (and I was admittedly never completely emersed, since the two main ships - Kara/Lee and Adama/Roslin - were ships I actively disliked). The show gave you the Cylon perspective from late s2 onwards in addition to the human one, but it never ignored or downplayed the genocide that started the saga. Most of the characters were enormously flawed, but (in varying degrees) understandable nonetheless, and there were moments of sympathy for everyone, but I never felt that if character X didn't want to forgive character Y, we were asked to see X ans Meaaaaan. There is this moment in Faith (season 4) where ( spoilery stuff involving Jean Barolay, a Six, Natalie and Sam Anders happens )

. BSG was a flawed and at times very bleak show, but it also kept having this presentation of humans (and Cylons, so maybe I should say "sentient beings") as complicated and trying, though not always succeeding, to cope with life; as people capable of doing both horrible and wonderful things to each other. I guess that's why for all my frustrations with individual storylines and some overall decisions, I keep coming back to it, and do get a lot of narrative satisfaction from it.