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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...

Reaching the point in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) surrogates for Miles and Keiko O'Brien (Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao) got me thinking about the ways that actors' real-life pregnancies are met with creative responses in television shows to the extent that whole story arcs reshape the series. Sitcoms such as Frasier and Brooklyn Nine-Nine found ways to re-dress the pregnancies of Jane Leeves and Melisa Fumero through Daphne Moon's stress-induced weight gain and Amy Santiago's love of bulky folders, undercover work as a pregnant prison inmate, and then later a pregnancy for her and Jake (Andy Samberg). It is in science-fiction, though, where the creative explanations for or concealment of a bump really shine. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I spent much of my teens and twenties as a committed X-phile. In the show's lore, its whole structure and story arc underwent radical change when Gillian Anderson became pregn...