sometimes there’s videos that make me happy to exist on this planet
i’d reblog this even if it was a still image
I know it’s a sesame street clip but seriously, who is the target audience for this?
Parents watching it with their kids, I guess?
kids are perfectly aware that shakespeare is a thing, and “to be or not to be” is one of the few things they know about shakespeare. my nephew used to giggle like a fiend when my mom would talk all elizabethan to him. “what sayest, child, hast thou no cake? o injustice, sharper than a pokey stick! whither have the fairies whisked thy cake?”
[image description: geordi la forge and data from star trek: the next generation. they both stand in front of a painting they are doing, geordi stopping to chat. he lists his visor and jokes, “I’m starting to think mine looks better with the VISOR off,” to which data responds, “I think it is beautiful”. the painting in front of geordi is pale, abstract, and swirly, but a wonky profile of data could just about be made out. data’s painting is straightforwardly of geordi, but not yet finished. end id]
One of my favorite weird parallels between Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 is that in both cases, the leader of the powerful alien empire aligned with the primary antagonist force, is featured in super low-budget sets. Like, it’s kind of necessary; DS9 already had more important sets that required attention (since Damar’s room appears only very briefly and is not thematically important) and Babylon 5 never had any money.
However, what’s canon is canon, my dudes. Emperor Cartagia is surrounded by sheer drapes and Pier 1 castoffs (what’s great is when he appears on Narn it’s the same set and he lampshades it like “Wow you guys did a great job making it look like my palace on Centari Prime!”) And Damar, leader of the Cardassian Union, is sleeping in a dorm room with like one shitty mirror he got on clearance at Home Goods.
In my mind, the implications are fun to think about (that Cardassians expect austerity of their leaders, as they value prestige and reputation over wealth; Centauri servants grift the shit out of their leaders by accepting large decorating contracts and then delivering garbage, but their leaders don’t realize because they have no taste). However, you just have to know that, if these were produced in modern times with some of the absurd TV budgets of today, Damar would probably have enjoyed, like, windows or something. The interpretation would be entirely different!
Also Weyoun’s all casting shade on Damar having ladies over but apparently no one was like “hey maybe Damar shouldn’t have his clothes on if he’s in bed” so like what was he doing with those ladies with all his clothes on?? Like at least G’kar had his I’ve-Been-Fuckin’ robe.
tags by @orlofsky laugh rule but also damn, on-point
The cooking one is interesting, too, because on B5 the person who liked to cook was Garibaldi and he definitely had a dedicated kitchen-kitchen even given the comparatively limited size of crew quarters on that show. I also liked his giant Daffy Duck poster, because sci-fi tends to assume that it’s the highbrow culture that will endure into the future, but why would we necessarily remember Vivaldi and forget Daffy Duck?
(I’ve actually been meaning to make a post comparing how they handled crew quarters; I don’t like to get into a competitive space between B5/DS9 but compare-and-contrast is always interesting to me because we get to see what was effective, in what way, and ask ourselves why)
I really hope most people are aware of why Amok Time was made in the first place
I should start off by saying that Star Trek was made with a female audience in mind. It’s why Captain Kirk’s shirt rips and why he’s shirtless a lot, since the makers of the show were expecting to draw in a female audience with the good looks of William Shatner. Star Trek was even considered fake sci fi for girls by most male sci fi fans.
I have to mention that first because the show was banking on the female audience to fawn over Captain Kirk, and many of the women watching did, but they soon realized that even more women were fawning over Spock. When the show got renewed for a second season, they wanted to make sure they could retain the same female audience, most importantly the Spock fangirls, so they decided to treat their female audience with Amok Time.
Every single decision involved in the plot of the episode was made with “how do we give these ladies what they want without hurting his likability?”. Pon Farr was made up so Spock would have a reason to act super horny while still being the same alien everyone knew and love, T’Pring leaving Spock while Spock was planning on being loyal to her to show off how loyal he is to romantic partners, and his Pon Farr being cured without actually having sex was to keep him single.
TL;DR Amok Time was made for straight girl wank bank but instead they created the K/S community
I don’t think it was inadvertent at all – Theodore Sturgeon, the writer of Amok Time, was openly gay and was known for constantly trying to slip gay shit past the censors. He also wrote the backrub scene and lots of other k/s moments. Lgbt people in the 60s wanted to see themselves represented in media just as much as we do, but because of censorship laws it all had to be subtextual.
I’d like to look at this from another angle, because I think there’s more to it than Sturgeon was gay, therefore the gay subtext.
At the time Trek was airing, CBS thought of it as a kids’ show and boys were assumed to be the primary audience of Sci-Fi. In 1967 – 1969 girls were not thought of as being interested in Sci-Fi for its own sake (no matter how wrong media producers were about that). Girls were the half of the demographic that had to be brought in by “girl things”, e.g., fashion and romance and cute (non-threateningly good looking) male characters. An example would be the inclusion of Chekov with his Monkees haircut during the second season.
So yes, when it was discovered that there was actually a female demographic gravitating to the show on its own, for its own reasons (e.g., Spock, the dynamic between Spock & Kirk), then Roddenberry, a very clever man, decided to exploit these things for all they were worth.
One of the best and most time-honored ways of doing this is through the “Are They Or Aren’t They (Lovers)?” question (aka the Bromance), primarily of interest (so it is assumed) to the female audience. What makes the question work is that it’s always hinted at but never, ever answered. If you answer the question, you resolve the undercurrent of sexual tension and you kill the show (or it must become another kind of show).
It is also something that Theodore Sturgeon, a well-established science fiction writer at the time “Amok Time” was written, would have known. He would also have known where to look for a story idea that would really grab the audience, not with fistfights, rubber monsters or planet-devouring robots, but with the question: What do I (and the rest of the audience) most want to see? The answer is always the forbidden, the thing held back, kept under wraps.
“Amok Time” and Pon Farr is one of the best examples of “Are They Or Aren’t They?” because the engine that drives the story is that strong undercurrent of unresolved sexual tension (aka gay subtext). At the time the show aired, few in the audience would have spotted that subtext, which was how they got away with it, but the female and gay contingent would certainly have felt its effects. When a show brushes close to your half-conscious fantasies, it is absolutely electrifying, though you may not be able to explain exactly why.
Sturgeon headed straight for the forbidden: to strip Spock emotionally naked. Pon Farr was the vehicle with which to do it. Show after show (and Nimoy himself, as he developed the character) gave the female audience teasing little hints at the inner Spock, the smouldering interior landscape, the potentially barbaric sexual and emotional inner being he was keeping hold of with an iron fist. “Amok Time” is an emotional striptease that pays off by symbolically answering Are They Or Aren’t They?
In writing, and this includes television writing, when you have written a fight scene, particularly one that is cathartic, you should examine it with the same critical eye as you would a sex scene. This is because in terms of character development, fight scenes and sex scenes do the same thing: they strip the character bare by showing you their “inner animal”, their deepest needs, desires and fears. This is something else Sturgeon would have known. It is the reason Pon Farr is structured to only have two possible resolutions: sex or a fight (or denied either, death). So when Spock finally does explode, how does it happen? A fight to the death not with Stonn, his actual rival for T’Pring, but with Kirk (with the acknowledgment that Spock didn’t choose Kirk for this purpose, but Sturgeon, the writer did).
On an emotional and symbolic level, the answer to Are They Or Aren’t They is a resounding YES, THEY ARE. On a conscious, visual level, the answer remains ambiguous, a hint, subtext, thus keeping the unresolved sexual tension intact. However physical the fight, the consummation remains emotional only, and thus the show, and the chemistry between Kirk & Spock, goes on. It’s an elegant solution to a big problem: How can you give the audience what it wants, without really giving them what they want and destroying the show (as it would have been at that time)?
So IMO, Pon Farr was not quite so deliberately created to give Trek a hefty dose of gay subtext, nor is that subtext just an accidental byproduct. It’s a great writer weaving all of that together to make a very compelling story.
damn….
Just one last thing, Sturgeon won a “Gaylactic Spectrum Award” (given to LGBT+ science fiction/fantasy novels and short stories) for a piece he wrote called The World Well Lost. It’s about humans who discover a pair of male aliens who are deeply, intrinsically in love, kinda like Spock and Jim ☺️
(Also, I don’t believe Sturgeon was gay, I believe he was actually bisexual or sexually fluid, but I’ll have to check because I don’t know for sure.)
Reblogging for the excellent commentary AND this line which I want to be engraved on my headstone:
“…
Show after show (and Nimoy himself, as he developed the character) gave the female audience teasing little hints at the inner Spock,
the smouldering interior landscape, the potentially barbaric sexual and emotional inner being he was keeping hold of with an iron fist. “Amok Time” is an emotional striptease that pays off by symbolically answering Are They Or Aren’t They?”
Spock’s the kind of Vulcan dude who has the next thirty years of his life planned out in a color coded Excel spreadsheet and then. Jim comes into his life. And Spock calls Amanda and Sarek like “esteemed parents…. you won’t believe this but…he just DOES things…he doesn’t even think about them before he does them, this morning Jim saw a dog half a mile up the street and we were twenty minutes late to a meeting with the admiralty because he kept insisting that I give the ‘good boy’ a pat on the head. And also his smile is like sunlight and I can’t say no to him. Why is he like this”
Sarek’s just like “my son….now you understand how I feel when your mother insists that we wake up at dawn to view the sunrise together…it is completely illogical and yet….every second I spend in her presence is a gift”
And Amanda’s just sitting there laughing like “holy shit, they think I’M the emotional one?”
when you and your husband hate saavik’s new girlfriend but youve had a mental bond for two decades so you dont even need to say anything to know youre on the same page
Plot Designing 