If God Said Boris Had To Turn Gay

Boris O'Dan is a good friend all of the time but he's at his entertaining best on no sleep and too much Little Debbie and cold caffeine:

"Now, I'm a straight guy," he said Thursday. "But if God came down and said, 'Boris, I've decided you've got to have a homosexual relationship,' I'd have to choose Hugh Jackman for that."

"Don't blame you," I said.

"Or maybe Patrick Stewart" - already I was starting recoil - "But that would be just to hear him talk dirty in that English accent" - His next words were done in a dead on impression of the Next Generation captain: "Who's a dirty boy? Who's going to make it so?"

It took me until lunch to recover from both the horror and the giggle factor on that one. What made it extra funny is that Boris is usually a very polite, slightly introverted fanboy type. But he was up all night on Wednesday working to meet a deadline for a freelance writing gig, and he kept himself fueled with Little Debbie Swiss Rolls and Mountain Dew to stay awake. Then he had to go to work Thursday morning, and when I saw him during break, he was still at it with the Swiss Rolls and Dew. I said I'd read that critics are ripping up the new Wolverine movie. He concurred, but said he still wants to see it anyway, adding that he's excited about positive reviews for the new Trek film. I said I'd heard good things about Trek too, but that I'll probably wind up going to see Wolverine because it's got Hugh Jackman in it. Imagine hearts floating around that last clause in the previous sentence.

That's when the conversation took the weird ass turn it did. It made me wonder, what would Boris be like on Jaegermeister and Red Bull?

A cultural analysis of Doctor Who and Star Trek

From a cultural standpoint, it makes no sense to me why Star Trek is an American science fiction fantasy and Doctor Who is a British one. You’d think it would be the other way around.

Let’s look at the British, who are said to be more class-conscious than Americans. They have a monarchy, the House of Lords, and a history of limited social mobility. At first glance, they seem to be all about adhering to hierarchy. You’d think they would be the ones to dream in terms of rank and duty when it comes to escapist TV. That they would be the ones to create the fantasy of living on the Enterprise, a spaceship that looks an awful lot like the setting many people work in.

But they didn’t. They came up with Doctor Who, an unemployed individualist who roams aimlessly throughout space and time wearing whatever he wants. Excuse me, but there’s been a mistake here. That should be our fantasy. We’re the ones who are supposed to be all about informality and living outside stuffy social conventions.

With its short-napped carpet and drab colors, all the Enterprise needs is cubicles and Styrofoam coffee cups to pretty much recreate the office settings in which many of us toil and suffer. Those uniforms, the ones on the TV shows at least, appear to be made of the same material as the ones worn by fast food employees. This does not look to me like fiction created by yahoos who left the Old World to roll like a lawless wave over the continent, stealing land from the natives and answering to no one. We’ve produced cowboys and carpetbaggers, been a nation of fortune seekers and nonconformists. But now you can’t ride west on a Conestoga to stake a claim anymore. We’ve tamed ourselves, or been tamed by those who managed to find themselves in charge of things. So how come when we get home from our dumbass Secret Santa parties and performance reviews we want to sit down and watch other people at work?

To me, being a member of the Enterprise crew would be almost as bad as being Borg. No wonder Seven of Nine switched loyalties so easily. The crew lives at work. They have to follow orders and file reports. And for the vast majority of crew members, the ones with lower rank who never make it to the bridge, their lives must be incredibly boring. Sure, maybe they can look out the window and see enemy ships firing away and know things aren’t good, but they probably don’t know the finer details of what’s going on, and they’re supposed to just go about their jobs like it’s none of their business. They’re stoic in their devotion to duty. Everybody on Star Trek seems to be preoccupied with upholding professional roles with the utmost decorum. Rarely does anyone kid around, swear, flirt with any real enthusiasm, say anything off color, etc. And there’s always a plan on Star Trek. They’re always leaving one place and trying to get to another on time.

What a fucking nightmare.

They seem to derive all their satisfaction in life from the fact that they are proud to be members of Star Fleet. They are such elitists that all they need from life is to belong to this Ivy League-like alumni group of Starfleet Academy graduates. Or they believe so much in the Star Fleet mission, they just love being a part of it. They don’t always agree, but they remain staunchly loyal to each other.

That’s the kind of horseshit thinking that we Americans fought the Revolution to overthrow.

I like the Doctor Who character because he chooses to run around with people he enjoys, and eventually he parts ways with those folks (his assistants) before the relationship wears too thin. Mostly he chooses females, and the question of whether or not he’s dating them adds a fun ambiguity to the show. If I remember correctly, Janeway’s rank prevented her from dating anyone on the Enterprise, and she had to seek romantic solace on the Holodeck. In my mind, that’s just high-tech masturbation, which is not very glamorous. It’s mean to the character, too, and possibly evidence of sex discrimination. You can’t tell me Captain Kirk abided by the Don’t Fuck Beneath Your Rank rule. And as for the sexual tension between Captain Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher, that was next to no fun because they were both such bastions of good Star Fleet character they didn’t flirt much.

Once you join Starfleet, you put on that uniform and leave much of your individuality behind. Doctor Who might go from having a reporter assistant in camo pants to a jungle/cavewoman assistant in a suede bathing suit. Most recently he traded up a shop girl for medical student. The diversity of these characters and the fact that they don’t have to conform to any organizational standards or codes of conduct keeps the show refreshing.

It’s not like Doctor Who is a hedonist with no responsibilities at all. He feels obligated to save the earth or whatever planet he’s on if the need arises, but it’s not such a pain in the ass when you know nobody expects you to do it. And if you don’t know when you get out of bed in the morning that you’re going to have to save the world, you don’t waste all morning dreading it.

The doctor is more entertaining because he has no rank. In fact, his credentials as an actual doctor are in question. He carries no gun and mostly just bullshits his way through confrontations. Wouldn’t that be great if we didn’t have to get degrees, practice at the shooting range to stay sharp, or move up the ranks?

Rarely do characters in the Who universe follow orders. In fact, if they’re given an order you can almost go ahead and assume they’re not going to do it. He might get pissed off, but the Doctor does not regretfully tell them he’ll have to put disciplinary letters in their permanent files. I think Picard’s underlings would have told him to cram the disciplinary file up his ass sideways if they weren’t trapped on the same ship with him and his security officer.

Perhaps these examples of Science Fiction dreams are compensatory. I’ve read somewhere – forgive me but I don’t remember where – that people tend to dream of what they don’t have because the unconscious needs a sense of balance. So in the land of individualism, we dream dreams of characters giving themselves to a collective, to Star Fleet. And the more socially striated English unconscious dreams in a much less structured fashion.

Or maybe over here we’ve become so obsessed with guns and military whoopass we can’t even dream without them.