Star Trek: Tuvix

Episode: "Tuvix"

Series: Star Trek: Voyager

Season 2, Episode 24

Original Air Date: May 6, 1996

via Memory Alpha

Tuvok and Neelix are merged into a single being through a transporter malfunction.  What follows is one of the most interesting moral quandaries in all of Star Trek.  That's saying something.  "Tuvix" may be the most polarizing episode in the franchise.  It's the make-or-break story determining how many fans, including my own child, feel about Captain Janeway as a character.

The merged being is his own man.  Tuvix is the best of both, the worst of both.  He shares the memories of each but the experiences from the point of merger are all his own.  He deserves to live.  There's really no question of that, is there?  His existence also means the end of the independent lives of two others.  There's no denying that either.  Thus the dilemma.

Spock: Logic clearly dictates that the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few.

Kirk: Or the one.

If there's one exchange that defines - and haunts - Trek, it's that one from the climactic scene of The Wrath of Khan.  By this argument, the needs of two outweigh the needs of one.  Tuvok's and Neelix's separate rights to exist trump Tuvix's.  

But real life is more complicated than that, isn't it?  Those we might cast as "the few" suffer needlessly all the time.  The benefits to "the many" from such suffering are often nebulous to non-existent.  There's a term for it: the tyranny of the majority.  It's not theoretical.  It's largely how the world works.

Tuvix's pleas for his own survival are both chilling and heartbreaking.  Plenty of viewers hate Janeway for the choice she makes.  Would any of those critics have chosen differently in her place?  I think it's too easy to say yes.  Either way, she's choosing death.  Either path means pain and regret.

It certainly makes for good television.  However one feels about the choice made - and a deep, emotional reaction is absolutely understandable - the question itself is exactly the sort of dilemma that has made Star Trek so compelling to watch for nearly 60 years.  If the answers were always obvious, who would care?

Acting Notes

via Criminal Minds Wiki

Tom Wright (Tuvix) was born in Englewood, New Jersey, November 29, 1952.  This episode is his first of two Trek appearances.  Films include The Brother from Another Planet, Barbershop and Barbershop 2: Back in Business.  In television, he had principal roles on Extreme, Martial Law and Granite Flats.  His other high-profile guest role was the recurring character Mr. Morgan, a Yankees front office colleague of George's on Seinfeld.

Squid Flicks: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Title: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Director: John Cameron Mitchell

Original Release Date: January 2001

My Overall Rating: 5 stars out of 5

via Wikipedia

John Cameron wrote, directed and starred in what I consider to be one of the most under-appreciated films around.  In my mind, I maintain a list of movies I wish more people would see.  Hedwig resides comfortably on that list.

Hedwig Robinson grew up in East Berlin, assigned male at birth.  She fell in love with Luther, an American soldier, who convinced her to get a sex change and marry him as part of a scheme to leave the country.  The operation was botched, leaving Hedwig with... unsatisfactory genitalia, thus the title of the film.

We first join the story as Hedwig, now living in Kansas, is trying to make a living as a rock musician.  Luther is long gone.  Tommy, a more recent lover, has become a star, propped up by songs we all know Hedwig co-wrote with him.  

Those are the basics of a whirlwind story.

We saw the movie at the Vermont International Film Festival's screening room.  I would be remiss if I did not point out what our child helped clarify for me: Hedwig is not a drag queen movie.  While it shares thematic material with Priscilla (last week's movie) and To Wong Foo, it is not of the same genre because Hedwig is not a drag queen.  Botched operation or not, Hedwig is a trans woman and living as such.  The wigs and the boas add to her performance. They are camp but they are not drag.

It's also better than either of those more commercially successful films.  Hedwig is adapted from Mitchell's off-Broadway musical of the same name, music by Stephen Trask.  Mitchell's on-screen performance is fearless and relentless.  The vast majority of the material - the lines, the songs, the camera shots - focuses on the one leading character, far more so than one typically sees in a movie.  The music is wonderful.  I've written about the showstopper, "Wig in a Box," before.  Hedwig was a huge hit at Sundance but disappointed in its mainstream run.  

Hedwig can be difficult to watch.  It's funny, visually dazzling and musically charming.  It's also continually heart wrenching.  What's more, Hedwig is not always a likable person, guilty of mistreating others as she has been mistreated.  Parts of the story can be uncomfortable for a cis man, that healthy kind of uncomfortable we've talked about before (here, for instance).  Lean into that discomfort and it will broaden your world concept.  

Star Trek: The Muse

Episode: "The Muse"

Series: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Season 4, Episode 21

Original Air Date: April 29, 1996

via Memory Alpha

Onaya, a beautiful and mysterious woman, arrives at the station.  She and Jake are drawn to one another instantly.  Evidently, Onaya has a thing for creative men.  She inspires them in their work, then draws on their energy like a vampire.  Meanwhile, Lwaxana Troi turns up, too, and she's pregnant.  She enlists Odo to help her escape from her current husband.  Our dear compassionate constable even goes so far as to marry his friend in order to help her out of her predicament.

This is a much-maligned episode by critics and internal creative staff alike.  I don't hate it.  Admittedly, the Onaya story is weak - though everyone praises Meg Foster for her performance in the titular role.  On the other hand, I like the Lwaxana/Odo tale.  As I have written before (here), Lwaxana is more likable with a bit of vulnerability - most people are, fictional or otherwise.  It also helps to have one in-story character who genuinely appreciates her.  We all know - Lwaxana included - that Odo's affection for her does not extend beyond platonic.  That said, his speech in her praise at the wedding is both earnest and touching.  She made his world a larger, less lonely place.  Truly, what more can any of us ask of a friend?

And even the Onaya story has its merits.  As I have for this entire run, I watched the episode with our child.  In the midst of a tender scene between Ben and Jake, they declared Ben Sisko "the best fictional dad."

"Better than Atticus Finch?" I asked.  

"Yes, in my opinion."

I'm not quite ready to make that claim myself yet but I acknowledge the strong claim.  As I've written in previous posts (such as this one), the affection between the Sisko men is unusual for men of color on American television.  I'll take it a step beyond that.  A man lovingly and reflexively kissing his adult son on the forehead is something you just don't see on screen, no matter the race of the characters involved.  In the 2020s, Ted Lasso has gotten a lot of credit for promoting healthy, non-toxic masculinity (see this article).  DS9 was setting its own fine example 30 years earlier.

In one scene, Jake is reading a Horatio Hornblower novel.  Once again, Star Trek piques my curiosity about nautical literature.

Oyana can't help but remind me of Alma Mahler.  Here's a musical tribute by the inimitable Tom Lehrer who just passed away this summer:

Acting Notes

via The Vampire Diaries Wiki

Meg Foster was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, May 10, 1948.  She trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York.  

Her big break came when she won the role of Christine Cagney in the TV series Cagney & Lacey.  Unfortunately for Foster, the part was re-cast for the second season.  Evidently, it was a crushing blow for the actress and her career prospects.  She was still able to find guest appearances, including turns on The Cosby Show, Quantum Leap and ER.  She had a recurring role as Hera in both Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Princess Warrior.  Earlier in her career, she played Hester Prynne in a miniseries adaptation of The Scarlett Letter.  Films include Ticket to Heaven, The Osterman Weekend and They Live.

The light blue eyes one sees in "The Muse" are, in fact, natural.  Mademoiselle magazine once called Meg Foster's "the eyes of 1979."  Many producers made her wear colored contacts.  Fortunately, they were perfect for Star Trek.  

Squid Flicks: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Title: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Director: Stephan Elliott

Original Release Date: May 15, 1994

My Overall Rating: 4 stars out of 5

via Wikipedia

Not long ago, our child watched To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a 1995 Hollywood hit film about drag queens starring Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo. They loved it. I told them yes, that one's good but the movie you really need to see is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, an Australian smash released the year before.

I'd watched both decades earlier, I think even before my wife and I were married.  I saw Priscilla first and was absolutely blown away.  Thanks largely to RuPaul, social acceptance of drag queens was on the rise in the mid-'90s but a major film production like Priscilla was still daring.  While it's technically a comedy, it hit the sensitive spots just hard enough to bring poignancy.  The queens' dresses were plenty fabulous.  The queens' actual lives?  Not so much.

Tick (Hugo Weaving in his international breakout role), a drag queen in Sydney, is offered a job in far away Alice Springs.  He invites transgender Bernadette (Terence Stamp, RIP) and the beautiful but obnoxious Adam (Guy Pearce).  They buy a converted bus, which Adam names Priscilla, and they hit the road.  They face hardships - mechanical difficulties, hostility, abuse and even assault (thankfully averted just in time) - but also joys.  An friendly indigenous tribe takes them under wing for an evening.  They meet their savior, the amazing Bob (Bill Hunter, who was in the midst of a string of Australian international hits).  They find love.  

And running throughout is an undercurrent love letter to the Australian Outback.  Costumes and makeup are amazing, as one would hope.  But just as stunning is the scenery.  Acting is wonderful and the writing pitch-perfect.  The soundtrack is stellar.  The ABBA show is definitely worth the wait.

One blemish costs Priscilla a star in my rating.  The character Cynthia, Bob's Filipina wife, plays on ugly Asian stereotypes.

Apart from that misstep, it's a wonderful movie, and definitely better than To Wong Foo.  Perhaps I'll cover that one another time.

State of the Blog 2025

Blogging Year 17, here we go!  

I don't have any big changes planned for the coming blogging year.  The schedule will be the same...

Tuesdays: Family Adventures

Fridays: Star Trek

Occasional book posts

For Star Trek, it's onward with both Deep Space Nine and Voyager.  I should be well into Season 5 for the former and Season 3 for the latter by this time next year.  We have a movie coming up before long, too.

Family adventures will likely continue with the same themes: travel, food, film and games, more or less in that order of priority.  No big travel plans for this year but Spain/Morocco was far from a certainty twelve months ago so who knows?  I can virtually guarantee trips to Massachusetts, DC and Pennsylvania.  Beyond that, we'll see.

I am eternally grateful to those of you who stop by to read and engage.  As always, if any of you enjoys reading The Squid half as much as I enjoy writing it, we're all doing fine.  

Squiddies 2025

The Armchair Squid turns sixteen years old today.  It's time to hand out some hardware.  The Squiddy goes to...

Biggest Surprise: Casablanca

Morocco wasn't even the point of our late-February/early-March trip.  Royal Air Maroc had the best airfares for getting to Andalusia.  Why not extend what was already a long layover in Casablanca?  We could add another country - indeed, another continent - to our life lists.  Is Casablanca even that exciting a city?  According to the guidebooks and the websites, not really.  But if we're going to go at all, let's not spend half the time trying to get somewhere else.  Let's make the most of where the plane lands.

Well, wouldn't you know it.  Casablanca knocked our socks off.  No, it's not a tourist trap and that was perfectly fine after our more conventional adventures in Spain.  It's just a city where people go about their daily lives - people who let us walk in their midst for a while, mostly ignoring us, to be honest.  My friends, it was grand.  That's what real traveling is - not gawking but simply being.  Fly on the wall rather than sightseer.  No long lines.  No tour guides.  Just life.

I'd live there for years given the chance.  It's been a long time since I've felt that way about a place.

Biggest Disappointment: Trump's Second Term

Is disappointment even the right word?  Donald Trump's narcissistic lust for tyranny is not exactly a secret.  And yet, my country voted him back into the Presidency.  I guess that is my disappointment.  I'm still amazed and deeply discouraged that so many people aren't horrified by him.  They want this.  All of the bigotry, misogyny, contempt, incompetence, recklessness, dishonesty, crassness, arrogance, pettiness, the near-daily betrayals - they aren't dealbreakers.  Folks, that says a lot more about us than it does about him.  

And the feeble response of the Democrats in Congress has been appalling.

I fear for the present and the future.  Even if we can turn this around, the mess to clean up will be huge.  Plenty of the damage can never be entirely undone.

And that is what they want.

Best Read: Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

We're living in interesting times.  It can be difficult to know what to say to people.  The Right is so... programmed.  They all watch the same news shows, visit the same websites, watch the same TikTok videos, stick to the same talking points as if they are gospel.  Even imagine they are gospel.  Even when they're in clear defiance of gospel.  

I'm veering off point.

If you're looking to make solid progressive arguments, Reni Eddo-Lodge's book is a great reference.  More importantly, it's an essential read for white people to better understand the racially-framed experiences of people of color.  Systemic racism is real whether you believe in it or not.  So is privilege.  The question is what you do with truth once it's presented to you.  

Thanks to my ex-pat time in Japan, I still have several British friends.  A few of them believe racial injustice is an American problem and not a British one.  I really want them to read this book.

You should, too.

Best Comics Find: Love and Rockets by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez

via Wikipedia

I've been aggressively exploring the comic book medium for over a decade now and practically the instant my curiosity took me beyond Marvel and DC, I started hearing about Love and Rockets.  First launched in the early '80s, L&R is considered by many to be the most important and influential indy comic in the American industry.  I'd never read it until this summer.  Now I'm hooked.

Why is L&R so good?  The characters are so real you can practically smell them.  You experience their love, their pain, their shame, their thrills, their lusts, their losses because you are sitting next to them on the couch, feeling awkward as Maggie and Hopey start making out right in front of you, forgetting you're there.  It's the same reason Scorcese films are amazing.  These aren't strangers.  They're the young squatters in the house next door with sketchy friends stopping by all the time.  They occasionally ask you to buy beer for them because they're not old enough yet.  They're the rowdy group of young men talking too loudly in the street late at night outside your front door.  Or it's even closer.  You're in the street with them, annoyed by the stuffy old geezer who keeps telling you to shut up and go home.  

This intimacy is achieved so elegantly you don't notice until after you've been absorbed.  Every storytelling experience should be like this, yet it rarely is.  Without question, L&R is a masterpiece.

Athlete of the Year: Ichiro Suzuki

via Wikipedia

The Armchair Squid began life as a sports blog but I rarely return to the subject anymore.  Of the athletes I did mention over the past twelve months, no one had a better year than Ichiro Suzuki.

In late July, Ichiro became the first Japanese-born player to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.  Ichiro was simultaneously the greatest contact hitter, the greatest leadoff man, the greatest outfield arm and the most internationally beloved player of his generation.  Just one unbelievable stat of many: for ten consecutive seasons, Ichiro had at least 206 hits.  Ty Cobb can't claim that, nor Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, Rod Carew nor any of the other great contact hitters.  In fact, no one else has even come close.  Pete Rose also had ten seasons with 200+ but never more than three in a row.  Sports fans are forever talking about "records that will never be broken," then Alex Ovechkin surpasses Gretzky's once-unassailable career goals total.  I feel 100% safe saying that Ichiro's ten consecutive years with 206 hits or more is untouchable. 

During his career, there was discussion of whether Ichiro could truly be considered one of the all-time greats, having spent so much of his early career in Japan.  In the end, the Major League numbers alone were plenty: 3,089 hits, .311 lifetime batting average, 509 stolen bases, 10 All-Star Games, 10 Gold Gloves.  The years in Japan only pad the already sterling resume.  Without a doubt, he was one of the greatest athletes in American sports for nearly two decades.

Best Family Adventure: The Alhambra

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain was the main target for our aforementioned February/March trip.  The Alhambra, a UNESCO heritage site considered by many to be the most beautiful man-made structure in the world, has been at or near the top of my travel wish list for as long as I have known it existed, over 30 years.  With such high expectations, a let down is practically inevitable.  Even while we were there, I worried I wasn't doing enough to appreciate what I was seeing.

I needn't have worried.  The Alhambra is an experience that invades your soul.  Now, just a few months later, it feels like a dream.  Were we really there?  I remember our last day in Granada, already wistful over the fact that we had to leave.  Already thinking of how to make the most of the next visit, knowing full well it might never happen because life is like that.  

So, yeah.  I read all of that and it sure looks like I had a great year.

Apart from Trump.

Fuck Trump!

Star Trek: The Thaw

Episode: "The Thaw"

Series: Star Trek: Voyager

Season 2, Episode 23

Original Air Date: April 29, 1996

via Memory Alpha

Voyager happens upon what is initially presumed to be an abandoned planet.  Neelix identifies it as a former important trading colony and scans reveal evidence of an advanced civilization, but no life forms.  And then, they receive a hail.  Miraculously, a very small group survived 2.3 km below the surface in artificial hibernation.  The hail was an automated response (we've seen those before) as they are still asleep.  Our friends beam the hibernation pods to the ship in hopes of reviving the occupants.  Then the real fun begins.

In order to learn more, Kim and Torres enter the same hibernation state where the survivors have generated a shared dream scape to keep their minds active.  Unfortunately, the dream has turned to nightmare.  A tyrannical clown (Michael McKean) embodies all of the inhabitants' anxieties and he uses them to manipulate, terrorize and even kill.  Obviously, all must be rescued.

The set up is complicated for what evolves into a fairly straightforward hostage narrative.  Of course, it's Star Trek so the philosophical exploration behind it all makes the basic a lot more interesting.  Plus, Michael McKean is predictably outstanding.  It's difficult to imagine anyone else playing an evil clown so expertly.  With the zany characters, simple set and melange of striking colors, "The Thaw" has the look and feel of an original series installment.  Overall, it's strong, one of Season 2's best.

Acting Notes

via Disney Wiki

Michael McKean was born in New York City, October 17, 1947.  He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA from NYU.  

McKean is one of the most recognizable television actors of his generation.  Never exactly an A-lister, he built his career as a top-notch comic character actor.  In 1976, he and his comedy partner David Lander were cast together in the Happy Days spin-off series Laverne & Shirley.  In fact, McKean and Lander had created their characters of Lenny and Squiggy while they were still in college.  Later, McKean was a company regular in several of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries, including This Is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind (for which he won a Grammy for the song of the same name) and For Your Consideration.  Over the years, he's made numerous appearances in highly regarded shows, including Better Call Saul, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep and The Good Place.  

McKean is the last surviving member of the Laverne & Shirley original principal cast.

via Wikipedia (McKean/Lenny bottom left)