Theme
11:49pm July 26, 2015

Okay so… sometimes when I’m watching a TV show, I’ll get incredibly interested in some detail of the show that’s really supposed to be in the background and not very noticed.  In this case, the detail is a person – Lieutenant Charlene Masters.  She shows up in a lot of scenes in this episode and even has somewhat of a speaking part, but this episode is the only episode where we see her at all.  She’s wearing a science uniform, and she was working in Engineering at one point.  And she doesn’t like the coffee, and supposedly has a talent for understatement, according to Kirk  And she’s dedicated enough to her duties that she had to be dragged away from an exploding control panel.  And that’s all I know about her.

But I want to know more, and I wish she wasn’t just there for one episode, especially given she’s a woman of color in a sixties television show who isn’t Uhura and is in a position of responsibility and power.  And that’s hard to come by even in Star Trek.  But it’s not just that, it’s also that I’m insatiably curious about what is around the corner, what we don’t see.

Like… when I was a kid there were these toys called Colorforms, where there’d be a scene and then you’d stick these pieces of plastic onto the scene that were almost like stickers, except they’d like.. stick to the scene, but not to anything else.  They weren’t sticky.  So they could be reused indefinitely.  Anyway, sometimes the scene would have, for instance, a door, and a corner behind the door that you couldn’t see.  I always got really curious what was around that corner that I couldn’t see.

And that’s how I feel when I come across a character who seems interesting and is only in one episode of the entire series and is barely there enough that most people watching the episode won’t notice or remember her.  But I did, and I wanted to know more about her than I wanted to know anything about the actual plot of the episode.  And that might be weird but that’s how I am. 

So here are a bunch of screenshots of Lt. Charlene Masters, and I wish I was the sort of person who wrote fanfic to flesh out minor characters because that sort of thing is one of my favorite uses of fanfic.  But I suck at that kind of thing.  Like I am good at coming up with characters – original characters or fleshings-out of non-original characters.  But I’m no good at writing them into stories.  it’s really hard for me to insert them into stories even when I know how the story should go.  There’s just something difficult about that.  I’m going to try again this NaNoWriMo with characters I created myself who I badly badly badly want to put in a story.  Maybe without my dad dying this year, I’ll be able to handle NaNoWriMo. 

(My dad died in the middle of NaNoWriMo IIRC, so I was too stressed out to write well.  And he died while never finishing the novel he was writing. He wasn’t writing it for NaNoWriMo but he felt a kinship towards me that we were both writing novels.  And that has made me very much want to finish mine as soon as I can.  So I’m going to start over from scratch this NaNoWriMo and see if I can do it this time.)

Anyway… as I said, I wish I knew more about her.  I’m impressed that a Star Trek wiki actually has any information about her at all.  That tels me other people care about random details too.  But it still isn’t enough.  I want her to hae been there more often, been fleshed out as a character, etc.  And that didn’t happen.  They just showed her and then dhe disappeared forever.  I hate when that happens with characters who seem interesting.  I hate not being able to see around corners.  Even though I know that there’s nothing there, she’s not a real person, there’s no continuity beyond what’s on the screen because she was an actress reading off a script, the same way there’s nothing around the corner in a Colorforms background because it’s just a drawing and there’s no “rest of the house” to look for.

But meh.  I can still wish.

And I still love the original Star Trek over and above any other Star Trek that has ever existed.  I can’t explain it, other than that when Star Trek got a budget and a consistent ideology it lost a lot of important things that can’t be named, even though I like some of the spinoffs too.  And its ability to descend into utter shameless ridiculousness without taking itself too seriously is part of what it lost to some degree or another, but it’s far from all of it.