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For a while now I've thought that our most impacting encounters with art and culture occur when we are most receptive to the ideas they present. I have often felt like a latecomer to a lot of things I or others feel I should know more about, but sometimes we're not ready or interested enough to engage with. As I've written on this blog a few times over the last year or so, coming to Star Trek after ignoring the franchise for 35 years keeps inspiring revelations in me and it has gone far beyond being just a set of television shows I enjoy. It strikes me that in exploring 'the final frontier' it is really confronting humans with the first frontier: understanding and knowing ourselves in all our complexity. I wrote before about feeling an affinity with Klingon anger, but with their relative absence in Enterprise - which I've been watching for the last few months - I have gradually felt even more of a connection with the Vulcans. More than ever before in Spock (L...

As I grapple with an inner tug-of-war about reasonable reactions to things, I have come to appreciate depictions of rage more and more, particularly when it comes to the deep wounds of trauma. Many of us who remain scarred by the harm incurred from the actions of others have to make tremendous, often invisible, efforts to mask anger so often triggered by any number of inconsiderate, rude, obnoxious, mean, nasty or thoughtless actions. It is all the worse when the behaviour comes from someone oblivious to their own effect on the people or environment around them. Then there's the self-doubt that you're being too sensitive or unreasonable. Minefield. One of the things I have apprecated from my late-in-life Trekdom (it was bound to come up again - we're on season 4 of Star Trek: Voyager now) is the unapologetic grumpiness and anger from loner characters including the marginalized Klingons Worf (Michael Dorn; raised by humans and traumatized by the tragedies wrought by his own ...