Luke Skywalker Can't Read (20 page)

*
Most people assume
Dark Shadows
was always about the vampire Barnabas. But it's not true. He wasn't introduced until Episode 211, when Dan Curtis asked Caldwell and others to cook up the vampire story. The character was supposed to be part of a temporary story arc. If you want, you can call this the “Urkel effect,” since '90s sitcom
Family Matters
has a similar issue; supposedly, reoccurring uber-nerd Steve Urkel (Jaleel White) was so popular snapping his suspenders that he was made a regular.

*
Roughly translates from Italian as “wishing you all the beautiful things.”

*
See more in “Baker Streets on Infinite Earths.”

*
I've never seen this movie, but I guess Willy gets de-rescued somewhere in between
Free Willy
1 and 2. I also love the fact that a guy who did the music for a great Star Trek film later had to work with preexisting music composed by Michael Jackson.

*
Jerry Goldsmith also wrote the theme song for the fourth Star Trek TV show,
Star Trek: Voyager
, and it's my secret favorite Star Trek song.

*
There's also a chance it's like five million other girls and guys who live in Brooklyn (or Portland) and who own that same hoodie for the exact same reason.

*
There's also something about “Anakin's Theme,” from the Star Wars prequels, that reminds me of Elliott, too, but maybe that's just because the
E.T
. aliens are randomly in that big Senate scene in
The Phantom Menace
, which technically makes
E.T
. and Star Wars exist in the same fictional universe. I know people have complained about this before, but what the fuck, everybody! If E.T. can live in Star Wars, then what's to stop the reverse from happening: a Star Wars movie rolling up on contemporary Earth?

*
I did have to end up with two lines or so as Time Fucker's boss, a character with an eyepatch named “Conrad,” whom I'm pretty sure I lifted directly from the old Birdman cartoons.

*
Supergirl
, as opposed to
Barbarella,
is a movie that people think sucks, and they're totally right.

*
This is exactly like learning about the Beatles by listening to Oasis.

*
The cartoon
The Real Ghostbusters
, which aired between 1986 and 1991, has its bizarre “real” prefix title for two reasons. First, there was a totally unrelated Filmation cartoon called
The Ghost Busters
(airing in various forms in 1975 and 1986) that needed to be retroactively made “fake” by asserting the one spun off from the film to be the real thing. More bizarrely, though,
The Real Ghostbusters
cartoon actually constructs a metafictional reality around the 1984
Ghostbusters
film with the episode “Take Two,” where it's revealed that the movie starring Bill Murray and company is actually just a film “based” on these “real” Ghostbusters in the cartoon. Coincidentally or not, this “reality gap” between two kinds of fiction is very similar to the fact that Watson publishes stories about Sherlock Holmes in the “reality” of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Now that I think about all of this, every single Sherlock Holmes pastiche can now be called “The Real Sherlock Holmes.”

*
Famously, Nick Meyer received no screenwriting credit for
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, and that's because he offered to rewrite the messed-up screenplay from scratch in an amount of time that made it impossible to negotiate union rights. Meyer didn't care about getting the credit; he just wanted a script he could direct. Make no mistake, this excellent movie is his baby, 100 percent.

*
Irene Alder is a blackmailer in the Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” She's frequently the love interest in Holmes adaptations. She was portrayed by Charlotte Rampling in 1976's
Sherlock Holmes in New York
and by Gayle Hunnicutt in 1984's “A Scandal in Bohemia.” More recently, we've seen Rachel McAdams as Adler in both of the Sherlock films starring Robert Downey Jr. Lara Pulver played her on
Sherlock
, and Natalie Dormer on
Elementary
, where Irene Adler also has ANOTHER secret identity. Imagine whichever Irene Adler actress you like as Spock's maternal ancestor.

*
This is a little like Harry Potter. It is my belief that J. K. Rowling will be forced to write another Harry Potter novel by the universe or the same god that is keeping Holmes alive. You heard it here first. She'll do it before the decade is out.

*
Who am I kidding. I cry as an adult, too. I also cried when I saw Christopher Lloyd speak at New York Comic Con in 2012.

*
Other than drinking. Marty never really drinks.

*
I happen to love both Coldplay and Huey Lewis. Just to be clear.

*
Which is also fake, in a way, since a lot of people who liked
Star Trek
2009 still don't care about 1960s
Star Trek
.

*
What if Crispin Glover had done
Back to the Future Part II
and played Marty Jr.? How much weirder of a movie would that have been? Tom Wilson got to play his own grandson, so why not? Next, imagine Crispin Glover with a crazy Irish accent playing Seamus McFly in
Back to the Future Part III
.

*
Weirdly, Sisko's dead wife was also named “Jennifer,” and she was featured in at least one time-travelish episode. Luckily, Felecia M. Bell was always able to play her, even when she was an evil Jennifer from an alternate universe.

*
There were two more revised
Hobbit
s, published in 1958 and 1966, respectively. Broadly, they're similar enough to the first revision, at least for our purposes here.

*
I know “The Battle of the Five Armies” is in the book, but using it as the subtitle of the movie, when they had a perfectly good subtitle—“There and Back Again,” which is the actual subtitle of the book—is just baffling. For now, I'll only call this movie
Misty Mountain Hop
, because I hate the “real” title so much. For comparison of just how annoying I am, I also irrationally call the American version of
The Office
“The Fake Office.”

*
My alma mater, Tor.com, and
Gawker
's geek empire,
io9
, were both launched in 2008.

*
Unrelated, but I love reminding people that the other big novel that Pierre Boulle wrote other than
The Bridge over the River Kwai
was
Planet of the Apes
. Seriously, I will never shut up about this when people mention
Kwai
,
Apes
, David Lean, or, occasionally, Alec Guinness.

*
To be fair, this is confusing, and ironically arch in only a way that the British could be capable of. It's made even more confusing by the fact that there are weird remake movies in the '80s in which the character is played by Peter Cushing (Tarkin in Star Wars!) and is actually named “Dr. Who.” Obviously the Cushing “Dr. Who” films,
Dr. Who and the Daleks
and
Daleks—Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.
, don't count as part of the real
Doctor Who
canon, but their existence prior to the current popularity of the “real” show certainly helps excuse why the character's name—or lack thereof—is confusing for the uninitiated.

*
Read
Queers Dig Time Lords
(Mad Norwegian Press, 2013) for tons of excellent exploration of gender politics in
Doctor Who
and its spin-offs.

*
Donna Noble gets a good dig in about this fact in “Planet of the Ood,” when, seeing another, more traditional spaceship, she exclaims, “A real proper rocket! Now that's what I call a spaceship. You've got a box, he's got a Ferrari.”

*
This episode was part of a serial called
The Tenth Planet
, written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. The entire story is actually “missing,” meaning you can't watch the whole thing, which is tragically true of a lot of early
Doctor Who
recordings. Meanwhile,
Doctor Who
itself was created by Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman just prior to 1962. There's a lot of history to delve into here, but the fact that Verity Lambert was a woman in a male-dominated industry, partly responsible for creating an iconic and enduring and primarily
nonviolent
sci-fi TV show, is something everyone should remind everyone all the time. The 2013 TV movie
An Adventure in Time and Space
, though it takes some broad liberties with history, is a heartwarming, must-watch docudrama about the early days of the show. In fact, if you've never seen
Doctor Who
, it's not a bad place to start.

*
People freaked out about this—crying fits and everything—particularly when Tennant left. My friend Emily Asher-Perrin wrote an essay about this called “When Your Doctor Is No Longer the Doctor: How to Survive Regeneration” for Tor.com in December 2013, right before Matt Smith left. It's tops.

*
The contemporary version of the show has outright established that Time Lords can and do regenerate into other genders. The Master, the long-running male nemesis of the Doctor, returned in the eighth season, in 2014, as Michelle Gomez's “the Mistress,” or “Missy.” The old show used to call female Time Lords like Romana (Mary Tamm; post-regeneration, Lalla Ward) “Time Ladies.” Every day on the Internet, everyone (including myself) asks if the Doctor will ever become one. My personal vote for a future lady-Doctor is Michelle Dockery.

*
BUT, when we did get to “see” the Time War in various episodes, most notably “The Day of the Doctor,” it didn't do much for giving us feelings, mostly because the Time Lords seemed so generic and white. Still, it did do a better job than, say, showing us why Anakin Skywalker fell to the Dark Side of the Force during the Clone Wars. Some wars, whether they be Clone or Time, should stay offscreen.

*
Also known as Matthew Crawley's mother on
Downton Abbey
.

*
Prior to
Doctor Who
, Davies was most famous for creating the original version of
Queer as Folk
. Current showrunner Steven Moffat wrote and created the show
Coupling
before being placed in charge of
Doctor Who
, following Davies's departure, which coincided with Tennant's. Davies is still remembered fondly among fans for his twenty-first-century progressive politics, whereas Steven Moffat has rapidly become the George Lucas of
Doctor Who
, an embarrassing dad whom we love because, you know, we have to.

*
David Tennant did three full seasons (a season is called a “series” in England) of
Doctor Who
, which in the context of the relaunched show are seasons two through four. However, because he was playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he created a long swan song from
Doctor Who
by doing four stand-alone episodes from 2009 to 2010 that were a little longer and ended in his regeneration episode, “The End of Time, Part 2.” These are either considered “the specials” or part of season four. When Matt Smith became the Doctor in “The End of Time, Part 2,” Smith's subsequent season was referred to as season (or “series”) FIVE exclusively. Tennant of course came back in 2013 for the “Day of the Doctor” anniversary episode, which combined with his “half” season makes it seem like he was in the role for longer than he really was.

*
Though, after both left
Doctor Who
, Tennant and Tate played Benedick and Beatrice in a run of Shakespeare's rom-com
Much Ado About Nothing
on the West End in London.

*
This is a Star Trek episode with almost no science fiction in it at all, other than the fact that it's set on a spaceship. It's a murder mystery that features a company of Shakespearean players who are hanging out on the
Enterprise
.

*
This quote is a little bit different than it is in the novel. Kirk turns “rest” into “resting place.” Similarly when Picard quotes
Moby-Dick
in
First Contact
he says “if his chest were a
cannon
,” which is a change from the book's “if his chest were a
mortar
.” I guess we can excuse these guys because it's the twenty-third and twenty-fourth century respectively?

*
See the title essay of this book, “Luke Skywalker Can't Read.”

*
I do like the idea that we should all love bad novels and bad movies because they more accurately reflect the human experience than good ones, but I worry I already live in that world a little bit and don't want to make it worse.

*
We excuse Luke Skywalker for the mass murder of everyone who lives on the Death Star, for example.

*
In the 1991 Star Wars comic book series
Dark Empire
, that is exactly what happens. Luke's relationship with the Dark Side is treated way more like a drug addiction and the moody art by Cam Kennedy reinforces this perfectly. If we see the Dark Side as “addiction,” it's too bad
Trainspotting
's Ewan McGregor had to play a goodie-Obi-Wan-Shoes in the
Star Wars
prequels. After playing Renton, he would have actually made a killer Anakin Skywalker.

*
Star Trek had one real dad, Captain Sisko in
Deep Space Nine
. Sisko is such a good person and a good dad that I'll not disparage him here. You can read more about him in my “Back to the Future” essay, too (“All You McFlys”).