Barely slept, it seems. It's Thursday again, which means noisy maids were here. In my brief sleep cycle, I dreamt of a wide exterior shot on Coruscant. Count Dooku was there, or rather Christopher Lee dressed in his Count Dooku costume. Lee voiced Dooku in the recent Clone Wars movie, which might disappoint us Christopher Lee fans if we didn't know that Christopher Lee's been in 8 billion bad movies simply because he constantly works. But he always gives a first class performance. In my dream, it was like he'd finally given up, and he read his Dooku lines in a tired and unenthusiastic tone. There was a glass of milk on a building ledge behind him, and behind the milk, slightly hidden by an alcove, was a glass of scotch.
In front of the building was a row of boxes holding a bunch of my possessions from childhood. I remember looking at a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy, a sort of turret gun that fired plastic pizza disks. "You didn't eat any of the pizzas, did you?" asked someone. "Er, no," I responded dryly. In the rest of the boxes, my things had changed into water in which swam goldfish, except for one box where large, colourful tropical fish had been swimming in place in a very small quantity of water for decades. I wondered if they would even know how to handle themselves in a proper aquarium.
When the noises outside my room woke me up, I at first had some idea of going back to sleep when they left, so I killed some time colouring and listening to music. "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid soundtrack came on, which I'd downloaded six or seven years ago because a girl I liked was a big Little Mermaid fan. I'm always trying to connect with people through art. It occurred to me to-day that my artwork is my best gesture towards connecting with other people.
I suppose because the upcoming movie put me in the mind, I've been watching the original Star Trek television series lately. I'm only two episodes in, and I'm amazed at how fresh they seem to me. It's really been a very long time since I watched them last.
The second episode, or the true first episode of the series, the first one with Kirk, is about a couple Enterprise crew members becoming omnipotent espers. Of course, they eventually become adversaries of their former crewmates. One of the two espers was a psychiatrist, and when she starts boasting of the pair's newfound godhood, Kirk says something to her I found impressive;
"Then let's talk about humans, about our frailties. As powerful as he gets he'll still have all that inside him . . . You were a psychiatrist once. You know the ugly, savage things we all keep buried, that none of us dare expose, but he'll dare. Who's to stop him? He doesn't need to care. Be a psychiatrist for one minute longer. What do you see happening to him? What's your prognosis, doctor?"
A couple things struck me about this. For one thing, as much as I like Star Trek: The Next Generation, you'll never find a speech like that acknowledging fundamental flaws in the human mind. It also seems a fitting sentiment to be expressed by a show associated with nerds; who can appreciate the lack of compassion in a powerful being better than people who've been forced to the sidelines of real society? This nicely lets these outcasts identify with a starship captain. It's kind of sweet that way.
It also has nice political resonance, too, as Kirk even mentions absolute power corrupting absolutely. The show was pretty thoroughly left wing.
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