Because it had to pop up at some point. 32 hours of de Lancie loveliness; something for trekkers, bronies and general geeks. I spent about five hours setting this up. Hoovering is a waste of time, anyway.

Labels: john de lancie, star trek

Funny, isn't it, how the last post I published on here happened to be about Star Trek: The Next Generation, and half a year later I get this urge to post about that show again. Why? Just my latest obsession. Q, of course. I believe I mentioned him last time. I finished ST: TNG last week and I found the ending to be a good wrap-up (at least it got a proper ending, as opposed to so many US shows). What I found the most surprising about the whole series was that the writing was very good throughout, and the series improved a lot once the second series was under way and the characters had been established. Imagine if it hadn't been in first-run syndication; the network would probably have cancelled the series halfway through the first series.

The show was made even better by the inclusion of Q, though.

I enjoy the notion of John de Lancie doing what he can with the material given to him by the writers (without feeling the wrath of the censors/producers), and 3-4 days into production being told by the producers that they would like to have him back later in the series. Q appeared in no fewer than eight ST: TNG episodes, then moved on to both ST: Deep Space Nine and ST: Voyager, plus the ST: Borg "game". Good going by someone who was only ever supposed to appear in one episode. Remind me* to cast John de Lancie in my next stage production (if he's not too busy being a Brony on a sail boat somewhere).

Slightly misleading photo no. 1

The problem with getting so obsessed with a series which ended almost 20 years ago, is that my enthusiastic tweets are met with exactly no responses from fans (they've kind of been there, done that a while ago), and if I look for articles, most of them are from the mid-90s at the latest. However, the cast have been popping up at conventions for a few decades now and there are plenty of videos from Q&A sessions etc. Phew! I was getting a bit disorientated by reading articles in the .txt format posted on alt.scifi.q forums and Compuserve and AOL and whatnot. At one point I actually had to look up and check the date. It was still Stardate -310355.02.

And then there's the fan fiction... I sincerely hope no actors or writers EVER read ANY fan fiction. It'll screw up their minds, easily. But for a show in the Star Trek universe you basically have to go the route of fanfic if you want to read the real stories. The producers frequently put their collective foot down, but the writers and certainly the cast managed to wrangle their own sub-text into the scenes and dialogues. And then the fanfic writers saw, took and ran away with it, to do with it as they (and we) pleased. I didn't exactly need to read fanfic to discover the HoYay between Picard and Q, and I was very happy to hear both actors and at least one writer were totally on board with that. Not entirely sure they would have appreciated the two fanfic novels His Beloved Pet and Love Reign Over Me, but I spent a whole day reading those two. Minding One's P's and Q's is also a very interesting interpretation of the interactions in that vast universe (actually the whole Genders OnLine site has fascinating and though-provoking papers).

Slightly misleading photo no. 2

I was kind of thinking "imagine if the series had been produced only ten years later; we would have seen The Puppy Episode in Ellen and had the world of television changed for the better overnight (give or take a decade or so...)", but considering the Star Trek series following The Next Generation (perhaps with the exception of Enterprise), it wouldn't have made the slightest difference. Oh well, thankfully there are actors daring to do something about it (notice how they often have theatre backgrounds? Hmm...)

*) I don't really need reminding.

Labels: john de lancie, star trek, TV