Life Lessons

Plus pinball wizardry, the Monkees, and - gasp! - Star Wars

This is the free, weekly version of Star Trekking, my attempt to share points of interest and random intersections in the final frontier. If you like it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Simply click this button for immediate access to bonus content.

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Not too long ago I subscribed to a newsletter called Moviewise that aims to catalog the “life lessons” found in films.

Well, I bet you can already guess where I’m going with this.

What Life Lessons can we glean from Trek episodes?

• Arena. Captain Kirk is forced to fight an alien being to determine which species deserves to survive.

  Life Lesson: Make sure you pay attention in chemistry class.

• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Our gallant crew steals the Enterprise in order to retrieve Spock’s body from the Genesis planet.

  Life Lesson: You only need a chimpanzee and two trainees to run an entire starship.

• The Inner Light. Picard lives a lifetime on an alien world.

  Life Lesson: It really only takes 25 minutes to learn to play the flute.

• The 37’s. Janeway and crew find a truck in space, leading them to Amelia Earhart.

  Life Lesson: It’s okay to skip certain episodes of Voyager.

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The ongoing thesis of this newsletter is that, whether you’re actively looking for it or not, Star Trek is everywhere.

This week it arrived from a galaxy far, far away.

(You can buy this shirt)

I clicked on an Esquire article, An Oral History of Star Wars Merchandising. It’s an excerpt from the new book by Trekspert Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Secrets of the Force, the latest in their series of “Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized” oral histories. Other volumes include two must-reads for Trek fans - The Fifty Year Mission volumes 1 and 2.

But this new book, and article, are about Star Wars, so I wasn’t expecting to come across a rather excellent reference to Star Trek.

Timothy Zahn: When I was developing Thrawn, I wanted someone the reader could understand, someone who would be interesting and someone I could enjoy writing about for three books. In the back of my mind was the original Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror,” the first one with the Romulans, and the Romulan commander’s last line to Kirk was, “In another reality, we might have been friends.” I wanted to put some of that into Thrawn—that in another reality this guy could have really kicked butt for the Rebellion. He understands his people. He understands how to be a leader.

I read Heir to the Empire when it came out and honestly don’t remember anything about it - except that I never read any more Star Wars novels after that. But maybe in another reality those books and I could be friends.

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Later that same day I was researching Monkees albums, as one does, and came across this.

Debuting in the fall of 1966, the Monkees launched with a TV show about a rock 'n' roll band that crashed the party set in motion by the Beatles just a couple of years earlier. Soon, that television group became a real band – "it's like Leonard Nimoy actually becoming a Vulcan," singer and drummer Micky Dolenz famously noted – which led to one of the era's largest pop phenomenons.

Hey hey.

By the way, the full article correctly ranks this album as the greatest Monkees record. I believe I shall spin my copy right now. I’m sure Micky would agree that it is the logical thing to do.

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Next, I was minding my own business, reading Judge John Hodgman’s weekly column in the NYT magazine when, lo and behold, he handed down this ruling.

Stay in your room and be grateful. But if you do buy a pinball machine, I order it to be a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” machine. You’re welcome.

Well obviously I had to find a picture of this machine. I guess this came out after my prime game playing years, so I was sadly unaware of its existence, let alone its reputation as one of the all-time great pinball machines.

Don’t have the machine at your local arcade? You can download a video game version for your mobile device.

Better that than this.

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MEANWHILE…

From Trekbbs, h/t Neil S. Bulk.

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This is up for preorder.

TNG med kit.

Not sure I can justify shelling out four hundred bucks for this. Then again, my kids aren’t in college yet…

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This week I sent my first paid-subscriber-only bonus issue. It featured the first chapter of a novel. Here’s the first chunk, as a preview.

Finally, my life’s purpose came to me. Finally, the scattershot realities of my past would coalesce into meaning. No longer would my petty obsessions and juvenile hangings-on just serve as clutter to stand in the way of real progress, of real reIationships. Finally, everything, my entire life until this point, made some kind of sense.

I would write the Great American Star Trek Novel.

You can subscribe today for just five bucks a month and get immediate access to the rest of that chapter. Just click this button:

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Thanks for reading. And please let me know if you played TNG pinball. I’d love to hear your experience.

Until next time,

LOVE long…and prosper.

Neil

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Star Trekking is written and edited by Neil Shurley, except where noted.

Star Trekking logo art by James H. Dargie.

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