A couple of years ago, the Biscuit became mildly obsessed with original Star Trek. A video store near his apartment carried the whole series, and I must say that, while I do miss a few things about the boy, shifting from foot to foot for forty-five minutes while he pored endlessly over the title boxes and tried to decide which ones he wanted to add to the “permanent collection” is not one of those things – and god forbid he got the Couch Baron started on the subject, because the Couch Baron has not only seen every episode of original Trek numerous times, but he has also seen the animated series, read a lot of the books, kept up with Voyager, and has a memory elephants speak of in awed tones to boot. Now, I don’t dislike Star Trek, but I usually fell asleep ten minutes into a given episode and thus had nothing to add to these conversations, so I’d wander off to play pinball at the first mention of anti-matter, only to come back to the table over an hour later and find them still discussing the minutia of special-effects continuity, and my attempts to snap them out of it by announcing oh-so-casually that I planned to go home and entertain a local sports team in my underwear met with only a distracted “uh-huh, I’ll call you later. Now, if Kirk didn’t have his tricorder, how did Spock know where he blah blah blah blah blah.” But neither Biscuit nor Baron considered himself a “Trekkie.”

I think the Couch Baron plays it off as general sci-fi fandom, but the Biscuit’s relationship with Trek had more to do with his greater love of so-bad-it’s-good pop culture, which included Russ Meyer, public-access television shows, musical selections by Wesley Willis, the entire James Caan oeuvre, and of course anything relating to His Highness, King Of Masticated Scenery himself, William Shatner. I spent inordinate amounts of time and money hunting down obscure Shatner-iana for Christmas and birthdays and Valentine’s Days, including one hard-to-find film called Impulse that features Shatner as a set-gnawing psycho-killer who sports a wide array of pimp-tastic outfits, and culminating in the piece de resistance, a book of lovingly cataloged trivia known as The Encyclopedia Shatnerica. The Biscuit unwrapped that last one in the presence of my extended family, and upon finding out the nature of the gift, my uncle observed in a carefully neutral tone, “Oh, so you’re a ‘Trekkie,’ then,” while shooting me an “I pity you” look, leaving the Biscuit scrambling to correct this impression of himself as an insufficiently socialized brainiac with substandard hygiene habits.

It’s an impression most of the world shares – not about the Biscuit, but about fans of Star Trek. The word “Trekkie” functions as shorthand for “pasty, pimply, overweight, dandruff-sporting, Klingon-dictionary-memorizing, never-the-opposite-sex-with-their-lips-touching, monomaniacal dweeb of the highest order,” a perception memorialized in the legendary Saturday Night Live skit in which Shatner himself exhorted a gathering of Trekkies to “get a life” and wondered sarcastically if any of the convention attendees had “ever kissed a girl.” The documentary Trekkies, which I rented over the weekend, does not initially do much to convince us otherwise – I mean, nobody would mistake me for a fashion plate, and I’ve gotten obsessed with various games and toys and shows myself from time to time, but would I drop $1400 in an auction for a cosmetic forehead the actor who plays Worf wore in one episode? No, I wouldn’t. Would I go grocery shopping attired in Spock costume, complete with pointy ears and prosthetic eyebrows, on any day other than Halloween? No, I don’t think I would. Would I tile my bathroom in – I kid you not – “Federation blue”? No, I most certainly would not. I don’t want to tell other people how to live their lives, but a lot of these people really, really need to dial it back. I understand that the fans dislike the negative connotations of the word “Trekkie,” but I don’t quite see how they can expect to make that point with any kind of authority while kitted out in full Cardassian make-up, right after admitting that they still live in their parents’ basement because they’d rather buy DS 9 trading cards than use the same money on rent.

Take a woman I’ll call “Commander” as an example. I’ve elected to call her that because she asked her co-workers to call her that. Commander, who looks frighteningly similar to Amy Sedaris’s character in Strangers With Candy, carries various Trek communications devices with her on a tool belt at all times. She wears a communicator pin – it makes a little bleepy noise when she puts it on – at all times. And I do mean “at all times”; she garnered quite a bit of publicity a few years ago when she got selected as a Whitewater juror and wore all her gear to court. Commander heads up her local fan club, or “ship,” and she wants to represent her ship in the community. Or something. In an interview, her bosses said that Commander works hard and does a good job, so they don’t mind her . . . Trekkiness . . . and I’d like to commend them on their restraint in not mentioning Commander’s obvious loss of touch with several significant elements of reality, and in not giggling every time they called her “Commander.”

And Commander isn’t the most, uh, “committed” of the lot, not by a long shot. Dr. Bourguignon, DDS is much scarier than Commander. Dr. Bourguignon has based his entire Cape Canaveral dental practice around the Star Trek way of life, and instead of wearing normal dentist’s scrubs, he wears Trek scrubs; they look like Federation-uniform dresses. The entire office is decorated in the Trek theme, including a holodeck mural in the waiting room and an inflatable Enterprise suspended from the ceiling. Even his wife and children have gotten in on the act (although the kids didn’t look all that wild about it, actually), and the practice seems to do a booming business, notwithstanding the tepid attitude of Dr. B’s employees towards having to wear Trek shirts to work; he’s crossed the line with it, no question, but at the same time, I wouldn’t mind visiting a dentist who had a theme besides “pain and uncontrolled drooling.” At least he hasn’t turned his home into a shrine to Brent Spiner, the actor who portrayed Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The nervous shrine-building redhead, who refers to herself and others who find Brent Spiner fetching as “Spinerfemmes,” keeps all her Spinerabilia in a locked fireproof safe. She has a gigantic photo album filled with photos of Brent Spiner that she’s taken at conventions; I can’t imagine what the guys at the local Fotomat must think of this woman. When she gets stressed out, she goes out onto her balcony and looks across the valley at a hill, at the bottom of which Brent Spiner apparently lives, and doing so calms her down. This is a voting adult, folks. I like me some Noah Wyle, but I don’t go up to my roof with a pair of binoculars and look to the west every time I get a tension headache. And excuse me, but when you spend twenty minutes a day stuffing your poodle into a Federation uniform, you have probably taken it too far. When you barge up to James Doohan on the street and ask him for a blood sample, you have most definitely taken it too far. When you send several dozen letters to the “Celebrity Fantasy” section of Penthouse, all of them involving various geometrically implausible contortions starring you and Jeri Ryan (Seven Of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager), you might need the help of a professional, and no, alternating letters about Jeri Ryan with letters about Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar on Next Generation) does not alleviate this need. (And no, I’m not joking. I used to work at Penthouse, and if you think that’s scary, try to imagine the content of Kirk-Spock “slash” fan-fic. Done puking now? Okay, let’s move on.) If you had your name legally changed to James T. Kirk, or you shaved your Sisco action figure’s head to reflect the current season’s facial-hair configuration more accurately, or you dressed your cat up as Bones and entered him in the costume contest (okay, that’s kind of cute, but only if the cat wins), or you went to Klingon language camp – well, I hesitate to say “get a life,” but, you know, you should look into it, because the world does not need Leonard Nimoy and anal intercourse wedded to one another in prose, and your cat might not appear to mind wearing baby pajamas with a Federation badge on them, but I assure you that he minds very deeply.

But when I think about it, I don’t know that these people could get a life, and by that, I mean that our society tends to value “pretty” and “normal” and “fashionable” over “smart” and “not the best-looking” and “maybe a little weird.” Yeah, it’s easy to make fun of Trekkies, but they do have lives – the Trek franchise is a life, one where they can find acceptance and hang out with people who share their interests. Commander is a strange cookie, of course, but when she gets together with her “shipmates,” she’s a star (and Commander’s ship, like many Trek clubs, does lots of community service, going to hospitals in uniform and giving talks and visiting the children’s ward and so forth, which I didn’t know before and which I think is pretty cool). I have to admire anyone who has the stones to walk into court in all that Trek regalia and not flinch, even when the press shows up. She’s different, but she’s sticking with that, and I don’t get it, but I can respect it. I can respect a kid like Gabriel Köerner, a self-possessed and very well-spoken fourteen-year-old, even though his “quibbles” with his custom-made uniform – the stripe on the sleeve should have a half-inch more fabric? Who notices this stuff? – had me rolling my eyes. He’s obviously very smart, which probably doesn’t serve him too well in high-school-food-chain scheme of things, but he’s found a peer group, a circle of people who value him for knowing a lot. He’s written a Trek-related screenplay, he’s designed a whole new Trek ship on his computer, he’s even mocked up the uniforms. His dad even customized the family’s van by stenciling “Enterprise” on the side. Sure, it’s tempting to say that Gabriel needs to get a life, but he has more of a life than a lot of kids his age, and all that Trek-inspired creativity will probably wind up helping him get into a good college. Nobody would say Gabriel needed a life if he devoted the same amount of time and energy to sports.

Again, I don’t get the Trek thing. I’ll watch it if there’s nothing else on, but I can’t imagine getting so into it that I’d put Hobey into a Nurse Chapel outfit or anything. But I don’t see the harm, either, and frankly, if a Trekkie had to listen to me prattle on about baseball, he’d probably think I needed to get a life. And unless he’s the guy who rendered a sex scene between Yar and Data in needlepoint (still not kidding, people), he’s probably right.

Boldly go.
See for yourself.

Share!