O Captain! My Captain!

I'm not the sort of person who typically forms deep connections with celebrities, and is then floored by their deaths. But I have to say (and this is probably no surprise to anyone who knows me), there's something different about the loss of Patrick Stewart. I've had a few days to sort through my feelings (though it will surely take many more), and I think I'm beginning to unlock the "why" of it.

At the most obvious level, he was my generation's "captain." For Star Trek fans around my age, "Kirk vs. Picard" was never a serious question. It was Picard all the way!

Star Trek: The Next Generation ran directly to syndication, meaning it was on at different nights and times in different markets. In the Denver area, it was Saturday nights. The premiere episode happened to run on the day my family moved into a new house. I spent my whole day watching the clock, hoping that the move would be done in time for me to watch the start of this brand new Star Trek series! And it was. All that was set up in my new bedroom was a mattress (on the floor), and a tiny television with a rabbit ear antenna. But I laid on my stomach, propped my head on my hands, and I watched that two-hour episode from maybe 12 inches away. Quite literally, the course of my life changed. I've made a career of games because of one particular game about Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Of course, I was a socially awkward pre-teen, and so of course, my favorite character was Data. But Picard had an effect on me whether I knew it at the time or not. He exuded not only leadership, but a certain fatherly quality (despite a stated dislike of children) that meant he was always going to remain "my favorite captain" even as other Star Trek shows and captains came along.

But that's basically the surface level of "why losing Patrick Stewart hurts." After all, much of that is about a character he played. Yes, an indelible character who wouldn't be what he is without the talents of the actor portraying him... but still, a character. The inspirational, aspirational qualities of Patrick Stewart would become more clear to me years later.

I'll quickly compress three stories about Patrick Stewart, that I think together paint the picture.

First, he was famously a real stick in the mud when Star Trek: The Next Generation began. His co-stars were warned: this is a serious, Shakespearean-trained actor. You must be on your best behavior around him. Marina Sirtis, who played Counselor Troi, once said she'd even internalized this message as "you can't be yourself around him."

At one point when a take had been flubbed during filming, the cast couldn't help but laugh and joke about the mistake. And Patrick Stewart was said to have thundered, "we are not here to have fun!" Stewart later told that story himself. He also talked about how his cast mates impressed upon him just how much time they'd be spending with each other, day in, day out, for who knew how many years. If they didn't have fun with all that time, they were all going to be truly miserable.

And Patrick Stewart took that to heart. Second story. Just months later, near the end of that first season, the cast arrived on the set where they were to film the funeral for Tasha Yar. It couldn't be a more serious scene; the only other death of a main character in the history of Star Trek had been Spock -- and they'd undone that in the next movie. The setting for the scene: a somber hill with lush green grass, against a pure blue sky.

Apparently, Patrick Stewart stood atop that hill, twirled in a circle, and sang, "the hillllllllls are aliiiiiive....!"

Third story: a bit over a decade ago, Patrick Stewart took to social media to post a video of himself eating an authentic slice of New York pizza -- for the first time, in his 70s. And he was willing to have a big laugh at himself about never having done so before.

What do these three stories add up to? To me, they're a picture of someone still willing to grow, learn, and have new experiences all throughout his life. Patrick Stewart was actually younger than I am today in the first two of those stories, but I know how "set in my ways" I already feel. Consciously or not, I brush up against that on an almost daily basis. I am who I am.

But I don't want to be closed to change. I don't want to stop learning. I want to have new experiences. And I certainly don't want to stop having fun. I think Patrick Stewart modeled that. Because of that, there's a lot of "sweetness" in the bittersweet feeling of losing him. I'm left with the feeling that, despite the illnesses that took him, he surely made the most of life until the very end.

And, of course, we have all the moral lessons we learned from Captain Picard over the years too.

Fame and Misfortune

Day three in Tennessee was the final day of our trip, and we had quite a schedule planned. We began the day at Belle Meade Historic Site -- a former plantation. On at least one previous trip (to New Orleans), the possibility of visiting a plantation was available, and I hadn't been particular keen on the idea. Visiting a sprawling house built by slave labor, to read placards claiming a history of nothing but cotillions and "states' rights?" No thanks. But in my pre-travel research, Belle Meade came up as a place that didn't live down to those expectations. Yes, they offer a guided tour of the mansion. They also offer a separate tour of the grounds, which was said to be a more honest look at the history of the era in general and this estate in particular.

It was this second option we went for. And there weren't many takers, on this day at least. There were just four on the tour: the two of us and another couple. But that meant the four of us got a very personal tour, as a guide took us around the property for an hour-and-a-half. We learned about how it passed through five generations -- from the first who established it to the fifth that burned nearly all their papers as they went bankrupt, destroying most of the records of what their family did over the decades.

Much of the tour focused on Belle Meade's history as a stud farm for horses, centered mainly on formerly enslaved Bob Green. His time breeding horses was so successful, we were told, nearly every Kentucky Derby winner of the past several decades can trace their lineage back to his time at Belle Meade. While this triumph was a highlight of the tour, our guide did not shy away from frank discussion of darker parts of the plantation's history.

After that heavier start to the morning, we wanted something to lighten the mood a bit. Interestingly, Belle Meade offered that as well. They have established a winery and distillery on the property. (In fact, they put some of the proceeds from that toward their historical research efforts.) So in a nice loft above the carriage house, we went for a paired food tasting with samples of their wine and bourbon -- along with a refreshing peach cocktail for which they shared the recipe.

Next, it was time for the thing many people actually travel to Nashville for: the Country Music Hall of Fame. Many people say you don't have to be a country music fan to enjoy it, and we were hoping those people were right. But just to be safe, we booked a special tour that isn't automatically part of the museum visit, a trip to RCA Studio B.

A short bus ride away, Studio B is where many hit artists including Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton recorded large portions of their famous catalogs. It's a rather small building, so in very short order, the guided tour takes you straight into the recording space where all the magic happened. The look has largely been restored to how it was in its prime, though much of what's inside the studio isn't a re-creation. All around are the actual instruments used in many of the recordings.

Our very chipper guide played pieces of several famous Studio B recordings as she shared fun stories: Dolly Parton crashing her car into the side of the building when she first came to record (and not telling anyone at the time); Elvis Presley's recording of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" in pitch blackness (with a barely perceptible split between takes near the very end of the track). Studio B is actually still an operating studio, so we even got a sample of a more modern artist to use the space. And of course, every song played there sounded pristine.

I must say, Studio B was actually the highlight of the museum visit. Because once the bus took us back to the Country Music Hall of Fame? Well... that was pretty much what I expected. There are some fun novelties to see, from one of Elvis' over-the-top cars to countless rhinestoned and fringed costumes worn by different performers on stage. I had a few memorable moments at other visitors' expense -- watching someone pluck the strings of a giant guitar on the wall right beneath the sign saying not to touch it; hearing a guy mutter that the display dedicated to The Chicks ought to say "Dixie" and "not this woke crap" (as though the band didn't choose for themselves to change the name). But in all, it took less than an hour for we two non-country music fans to breeze through the highlights of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

As evening came, it was time for the reason why we'd chosen this particular weekend to visit Nashville. The Colorado Avalanche were in town to play the Nashville Predators, so we were going to see our hometown NHL team in person on the road for the first time. Unfortunately, we showed up. The Avalanche? Not so much. Their 6-2 loss featured basically their worst play so far this season. Still, the seats were incredible -- just one row behind the tunnel where the Avalanche emerged to their bench. We were really able to see how badly they played!

When the game was over, we decided not to head straight back to our car. There had also been a Tennessee Titans game earlier in the day, and we'd seen firsthand what a traffic jam that had caused. So we decided to close out the trip with a short walk down to Broadway. We didn't have a particular destination on the Honky Tonk Highway in mind, but we wound up making one of the more "when in Rome" choices with Garth Brooks' bar, Friends in Low Places. (Him, I could support. You wouldn't catch me anywhere near, say, Kid Rock's bar.)

We arrived just as one band was finishing, so we got to enjoy half an hour of relative quiet. When other people who'd been at the game ordered their "free hamburgers" from the bartender (you get a "Fors-berger" if Filip Forsberg scores on the power play at a game you attended), we decided we might as well get one too. Then we listened for a bit to the next act to come on stage before calling it a night.

The story would end there, except for a coda the next morning as we boarded our flight home. There getting onto our plane and settling in the first row of first class? Joe Sakic, former Avalanche player and current general manager. Why he wasn't traveling with the team I couldn't say. (Maybe he was too embarrassed of their play the night before to be seen with them.) But there he was.

It would have been nice if that last night could have ended on more of a high. But as they say in sports (just usually not this sport), any given Sunday...

Either way, Nashville made for a fun weekend getaway.

Wining and Dining

On day two of our Nashville trip, we spent hardly any time in Nashville -- instead heading out to see other parts of Tennessee. We drove south to Lynchburg: home of Jack Daniel's Distillery, where we'd heard the tour was a fun experience.

Indeed it was. The tour kicks off with a Jack and Coke slushie. They take you around their sprawling grounds, showing you everything from the place they burn their own charcoal for filtering to their giant stills, vats, and bottling lines. You see the water source they use for every drop they make, where a statue of Jack Daniel himself stands nearby: "Jack on the Rocks."

There's a bit of quirky theater to it all. You're not allowed to take pictures of any of the indoor spaces -- even though they aren't doing much that any other distillery isn't also doing. Then there's the fact that Lynchburg itself is in a dry county that bans alcohol sales -- a fact you're constantly reminded of even as they tell you with a wide smile all the ways they get around that. The tastings you get on the tour are officially for "educational purposes." The bottles you can buy at the gift shop are souvenir collectable bottles that happen not to be empty. Moore County is more of a "damp" county.

You could almost (but no, not really) appreciate how the charade of it all might piss some people off. By the time we were leaving, a pair of protesters had taken up across the street, screaming into a microphone about the evils of alcohol (with heaping sides of sexism and homophobia). Needless to say, no hearts and minds were won that day. I'll bet they'll be back next Saturday to try again.

After the tour it was time for lunch, which we had at Miss Mary Bobo's Restaurant. We'd chosen the place ahead of time because it was close to the distillery and it served the sort of "home cooking" that seemed like something you should have at least once while vacationing in Tennessee. We didn't realize the atypical dining experience we'd opted into with this choice.

The restaurant was in a large two-story home that, going back many decades, was previously a boarding house. Meals in the boarding house were included, and so every day, total strangers that happened to be there would all gather around one large table to eat together. Today, every bedroom has been converted into its own dining hall, and every two hours, a new dining experience kicks off for around 100 people -- each taken to their own grand table for 10 where dishes are already set out with chicken, meat loaf, side dishes, and pitchers of sweet tea. A guide fills you in on the history of the house and its tradition, as you're able to order as much as you want of any food at the table. But save room for the brownie pie dessert!

We are certainly too introverted to have opted into a "dining with strangers" meal, had we known that was the format. Still, the experience wasn't bad at all. The food was terrific, the history interesting, and the forced social interaction not nearly as intense as we might have feared. Above all, it was a novel experience -- not like any other meal we'd ever had.

Since we were outside of Nashville already, we looked for something outdoorsy to do. We found our way to Short Springs State Natural Area, and specifically a short hike to Machine Falls. After half a mile strolling through flat woods, we began to wonder how there could really be a waterfall just a quarter mile ahead. But then the terrain quickly dipped, and we came upon a ravine where water trickled down perhaps a 20-foot high, mossy rock wall -- so picturesque it was almost like someone had installed it there. The hike back and uphill was a little more challenging, but in all it was a nice little diversion for some exercise and a pretty view.

We had a bit of time yet before a dinner reservation back in Nashville, so we made another stop in the nearby town of Arrington at Arrington Vineyards. Tennessee isn't exactly known for wine, and what this place had was, as expected, "fine." But the real draw was its broad hillside, where every Saturday through the warm months, performers take to the stage for the afternoon. People bring picnics (hmm... we could have done that if we hadn't made the dinner reservation). They grab some wine, then settle down to listen and enjoy. This particular band was playing some light instrumental jazz, a nice accompaniment to the sample flight we tried.

Finally, it was back to Nashville -- and dinner at Giovanni's Ristorante. That turned out to be a fancier dinner than perhaps we should have gone in for. But the appetizer of prosciutto and canteloupe was a delightful taste combination that we may now put into the rotation at home. And the crushed walnuts sprinkled over my ravioli dinner was another nice touch I might have to do on occasion for myself.

We had one more full day in Nashville ahead; in fact, our most jam-packed day of the trip. 

From Athens to Barad-dûr

This past weekend, my husband and I headed out on a long weekend to Nashville. Are we country music fans? No, not particularly. But neither of us had been to Tennessee before, and we thought heading out on a Friday for an extended weekend would be a nice way to cross that state of our list.

We hadn't even left airport property when one of the trip's running gags began to take shape. The turn signal in our rental car (a Chevy Equinox) sounded exactly like the Monty Python bit of using coconuts to imitate a horse's gait. I thought it would never fail to make me smile... until a few hours into the trip, when I discovered (at a rather long traffic light) that it wasn't a horse with an even gait. Every few steps, it would rush for a split second and "clomp clomp" just a touch too early. Maddening. At least the car helpfully reminded you to check the backseat at the end of every drive. "Don't forget our babies" became a mantra of the trip.

Anyway... we started things off on-theme with a lunch at Edley's Bar-B-Que, before heading to a location that you might see as rather "off-theme." Do you know where the "Athens of the South" is? If you're like me, you might well have guessed... well, Athens, in Georgia. But no, Nashville seized that moniker at some point, apparently with its multiple universities and support for higher education reaching back to the 1800s. Near the end of that century, the city cemented their reputation by bringing Greece to Tennessee in the form of a full-size replica of the Parthenon.

I don't have the most impressive picture of Nashville's Parthenon, because on this occasion it was flanked with catering trucks, setting up a banquet space on the steps for a wedding reception being held there the next day. What that cost, I can't even imagine -- but at least it didn't stop us from going inside. Because, you see, the Parthenon is also a small museum, cyclically dedicated to the construction of the building itself and its centerpiece, a recreation of the giant statue of Athena that once stood in the original Parthenon. Built throughout the 1980s, then painted and gilded in gold in 2002 to represent what ancient Greek statues actually looked like in their time (not how we think of them today), this Athena and the explanation of how it was built is pretty much the only thing to see in the museum. But it was still an impressive, if quirky, novelty to start off the trip.

Speaking of gold, our next stop was to pick up the "gold pin" for the trip. If you've followed my trip blogs before, you may recall that we have in our house a large map of every craft brewery in the United States. We mark one with a silver pin if we taste one of their beers, and a gold pin if we go to the place in person. Whenever we visit a new state, we aim to pick up a gold pin -- a task somewhat harder these days, since the map dates to 2016 and many small breweries have closed. But New Heights Brewing Company in Nashville was still there, with a rather large and varied menu that made for a nice tasting flight.

From there, we headed to the downtown area, where we had a little over an hour before a riverboat dinner cruise we'd booked ahead of time. We used that time to first walk onto the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge. It crosses the Cumberland River, giving both lovely views of the downtown area and access to the stadium across the river where the Tennessee Titans play.

Then? Well, we had to see "Honky Tonk Highway," the stretch of downtown Broadway where bar after bar features live music until well after midnight every day of the week. Like New Orleans, where bars like this didn't necessary feature jazz, not every bar in Nashville was blasting country music. With enough time, we could have found any number of places that would have been fine to settle at for a bit. Still, it would have been a kind of sensory overload we weren't up for just then. (If ever?) And we did have somewhere to be.

River cruises have somehow become a bit of thing for us when traveling -- a nice way to see the sights without doing too much walking right on day one. This cruise was a bit different; besides being on a setting-appropriate paddleboat, it was a dinner cruise. The food was pretty good, though we'd practically finished the meal by the time the boat pulled away from the dock (a bit behind schedule). So we soon wandered up to the top deck, where we spent the rest of the cruise sightseeing and listening to the live musician work her way through a set of tourist-friendly country hits.

We realized that a daytime cruise probably would have been better; once the sun went down, there wasn't much to see but the glittery skyline of downtown. (I'm not the first to notice that its prominent AT&T building may have been inspiration for Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Apparently, it's also known as the "Batman building.")

Still, it was a relaxing evening with a few really golden photo opportunities.

We had two full days in Tennessee ahead of us, and I think we made the most of it. You can be the judge as I share the memories in upcoming posts.

Enterprise Flashback: Bound

Hot on the heels of a really bad classic Star Trek episode, let me talk about a pretty bad episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, "Bound."

When Captain Archer inadvertently purchases a trio of Orion slave women, he tries to impress upon them that they are free to do as they wish. But they're exactly where they want to be, and what they wish is to take over the Enterprise. The only chance at stopping them may be Trip and T'Pol, whose intense, unreconciled feelings for each other render them immune to the powerful Orion pheromones.

The fourth and final season of Enterprise dumped out the Star Trek toy box to play. Anything from the original series that might be worth re-visiting and expanding in a prequel was fair game. Here, the target was the "Orion slave women" of the original Star Trek pilot. And you can see what the idea was: to recontextualize the blatant sexism of the 1960s by showing us that Orion women are actually running the show, not the men. But this version of Star Trek "feminism" has aged only marginally better than the original. "Bound" is an episode full of men stopping just short of cartoonishly yelling "aa-oooooooga!" at beautiful women. That the women are "making" the men do it doesn't really make it any better.

Part of the problem is that the episode is so clearly trying to have its cake and eat it too. It wants credit for saying Orions are a female-dominated society, but it also wants to tantalize the viewing audience with a lengthy, sexualized dance. It makes the women smart by making the men exceptionally dumb, from Kelby's macho conflict with Trip, to Phlox abandoning his enlightened sense of sexuality to be bamboozled, to Mayweather and Reed working out together to get women off their mind. You have to wonder what a gay male character would have done for this story. It can't help but feel like it would boost the attempt to be feminist if the whole episode weren't so aggressively heteronormative.

For once, the Trip/T'Pol romantic subplot of this episode feels like the likable diversion in the episode, rather than the stretching of the melodramatic "will they / won't they" taffy. For one thing, the answer finally seems to be "they will"; the two actually reconcile in this episode, with Trip revealing he's transferred back to Enterprise permanently. And the subplot suits the story well too, with the mutual attraction between the two rendering them immune to the influence of the Orion women. 

Other observations:

• The viewscreen has dramatic sensibilities in this episode. Within the same communication, it switches between closeups and wide shots of the Orion bridge.

• It probably shouldn't even merit a mention anymore, but boy does Reed look stupid in this episode. Even allowing for "Orion pheromones" as an excuse, he easily gives up a bunch of sensitive information. 

• This "classic Trek"-inspired episode has a very "classic Trek"-inspired ending. T'Pol notes of the Orions that even the most disagreeable species have positive attributes -- their matriarchal society. All that's missing is the classic Star Trek playful music just before the end credits roll.

Because "Trip and T'Pol" really works here, I can't judge the entire episode too harshly. But for sure, that subplot is the only thing I found watchable here. I give "Bound" a C.

Star Trek Flashback: The Alternative Factor

With Strange New Worlds again between seasons, it's time to pick back up where I left off with other Star Trek. Unfortunately, the next classic episode in the queue is a rough one, "The Alternative Factor."

Enterprise is hit with a powerful "non-existence" distortion. It seems to have emanated from a strange spacecraft alone on a barren planet... but the ship's lone occupant, Lazarus, is oddly evasive about what he knows. And is he the ship's lone occupant? It seems a twin Lazarus from an anti-matter universe is periodically trading places with his double, while at other times the two become locked in personal combat. Will their conflict destroy the galaxy?

If you can somehow put yourself in a 60-year-old mindset, remembering that this was Star Trek's first "alternate universe" episode, you can perhaps appreciate the fact that a science fiction show from the 1960s was taking on such a bold, complicated story. But that's pretty much where my appreciation for this episode ends.

The story's ambitions far exceed the production's grasp. The alternate universe is represented in overly literal fashion, in "photo negative" footage shot on an empty, smoky sound stage. The location filming is back at the Vasquez Rocks yet again, and making no effort to hide the familiar formations that were already featured in earlier episodes. Lazarus' spaceship is a Jetsons-style flying saucer, and his beard looks too fake even for a Spirit Halloween costume.

The pacing is glacially slow. Characters stop by the mess hall for a coffee break in the middle of a red alert. They make dumb decisions to prolong the "mystery": again and again, no guards are put on Lazarus or his ship, even though our heroes say they don't trust him. And yet it's clear that even as slow as things are, some scenes have been trimmed for run time. (People know Lazarus' name before he tells anyone.)

When it's finally time to unravel the mystery, the leaps in logic have even less foundation than the earlier lack of suspicion. If one Lazarus was "good" the whole time, why did he never share any information? We're told that the two Lazaruses meeting physically would annihilate both universes... despite the fact that we've seen the two of them physically grappling with each other again and again throughout the episode. And why does Kirk tell two security guards to just stand back, leaving them to stupidly watch Kirk try to physically restrain Lazarus?

The ultimate resolution is meant to be poignant: "good" Lazarus is making the ultimate sacrifice to be locked in conflict with his doppelganger for all eternity. But why is this the answer, as opposed to consigning each each version to his own reality? Why can neither kill the other while they're in this liminal corridor between realities?

Why do we get this engineer "Masters" in this episode instead of our beloved Scotty? And why does Masters get a first name when neither Sulu nor Uhura got one for the entire run of the original series?

I just don't find much to like here. I give "The Alternative Factor" a D-. It's clearly the worst episode of Star Trek's first season.

Strange New Worlds: Tomorrow's Enterprise

With my stories of vacationing in France all wrapped up, I can now also wrap up my recaps of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with the season 4 finale, "Tomorrow's Enterprise."

Enterprise is investigating a white hole when the ship is damaged by the intense distortions. Uhura is convinced she's overheard Scotty's death, but soon finds she's heard a snippet from the near future. She also begins communicating with a farther future one year from now, where the Enterprise is investigating a black hole that may somehow be connected to the present. Two Uhuras must work together across time to save Scotty's life and guide their ships from danger... all without risking the timeline by revealing their connection.

There have been dozens and dozens of time travel episodes across six decades of Star Trek. Credit must be given to the writers for coming up with one here that doesn't feel derivative of one made before. (Even if the episode title suggests a connection that isn't there.) A character working with their future self to avert disaster is an angle I simply don't recall before; either Star Trek hasn't done it, or this take was sufficiently novel to trick my memory.

Still, the strongest aspect of the episode isn't the story or script, but rather is the tour de force performance by Celia Rose Gooding. She plays two utterly distinct Uhuras and carries the entire episode on her shoulders. She has wonderful scenes with nearly every main cast member -- the standout scenes being with Scotty and with Pike. She even sells a payoff that starts to get a little hokey; donning a spacesuit to mime delivering a giant space baby.

Not every aspect of the episode works perfectly. I don't think that "future Uhura can lie" is the best basis for differentiating the two characters -- at least, not after the notable subplot of an episode earlier this season, about M'Benga teaching Uhura to lie. I'm not sure setting this only one year in the future feels right; I guess that's either the facts of the franchise timeline or necessitated by next season being this series' last, but it doesn't feel quite enough time for the sorts of changes we see. And again, that space baby delivery borders on cheesy.

I love the way the hair, makeup, and costuming departments all went so hard to make the future versions of the characters look consistent with their 1960s season one Star Trek counterparts. I also enjoy playing with the idea of Uhura and Scotty as a couple, building a sort of continuity out of the strange, one-off flirtation between the characters from Star Trek V. Basically, there was plenty of dessert here for the fans to enjoy.

Overall, I give "Tomorrow's Enterprise" a B+. Now that season four is complete, though, I'll join pretty much the entire fan base in saying: I don't understand what the deal was with all the genre episodes. I'm coming at it from the opposite side, though. When seasons four served up episode after episode, zigging and zagging between homages to other things, it felt like a purposeful decision, like a box of Cap'n Crunch's Oops All Berries. In the end, when 8 episodes were huge genre swings and 2 weren't? It feels like they lacked the imagination or courage to complete their thought.

But "finishing their thought" is indeed what we're in for some time next year. Sadly, there's just one more season left of the series -- and it's an abbreviated one with fewer episodes. Indeed, Strange New Worlds was reportedly cancelled after season four, but the producers argued to the studio that the agreement had always been to connect things directly to the original series in the end... so they were given a handful of episodes to do that.

I'd wager that even the Trekkers who weren't into season four the way I generally was still wouldn't choose to have no Star Trek on television. But that's exactly where we're going to be some time next year once season five airs. I'm both looking forward to the episodes and very much not looking forward to that state of things.