Category Archives: Television

i find it hard to tell you, because i find it hard to take

Le_barre
L
ast night I watched an amazing episode of TNG called Family.

It is a truly wonderful episode that focuses on the human element of Star Trek. It is very dark and very heavy. It deals with the consequences of some very serious events from earlier in the series: Picard’s assimilation by the Borg and subsequent stint as Locutus, Worf facing his parents for the first time since his discommendation in Sins of the Father, and Wesley’s first face-to-face meeting with his father, Jack Crusher, via a holographic message which Jack made for him when Wesley was born.

It is a fantastic opportunity for the Patrick, Michael and me to take a brilliant script, filled with wonderful dialogue and complex relationships, and show the world what we can do as actors.

Partick and Michael are brilliant. They make the very most of every single scene, especially when Michael deals with the conflict between Worf’s need to
suffer for his discommendation with his obvious love for his parents,
and when Patrick finally lets Picard’s fall completely
apart as he acknowledges how helpless he felt at Wolf-359 and deals with its aftermath. It is a Ron Moore script that previews the depth and pathos that I have come to love on Battlestar Galactica, and they are absolutely outstanding in it.

And me? Ron gave me a chance to really shine, to explore some complex emotion and take Wesley beyond the two-dimensional caricature I often complained he’d become. I finally had a chance to explore and perform a human side of Wesley as he sees the face of his father and hears his voice for the first time in his life. I finally had a chance to really do something after years of saying "Aye, sir, warp six, sir" . . . and I fucking phoned it in. I sat there and I made all my stupid little faces and acted like I cared, but It’s painfully clear that I was halfway out the door. I totally and completely blew it. I was ashamed as I watched my eighteen year-old self last night, and rather disgusted by the time my scenes were over.

I looked extremely tanned, so the episode was probably shot in summer, and I’m sure I would have rather been at the beach with my friends instead of wearing a spacesuit on stage nine, but it’s no excuse. I was expected to be professional and do my job, and instead I was a bullshit hack who didn’t show up for work. I suppose the director could have knocked me into shape, but who knows what was going on at the time for him? And who knows if I would have even listened to him? After all, I was eighteen and I knew everything. I had the whole world figured out.

There were so many opportunities in that scene: opportunities to look at him and try to see myself in his eyes or hear myself in his voice; opportunities to make a rare emotional connection with a scene that didn’t involve a lot of techno babble and opportunities to just be simple and honest and truthful. As an actor, I should have thought about all the things we never got to do together, I should have done everything I could to stretch the moment out as long as possible, so the audience is left thinking that Wesley is going to sit in that holodeck and sob and miss his dad and watch that thing over and over for the next several hours. At the very least, I certainly should have allowed myself to feel the resulting sense of loss, but as a fucking douchebag teenager I didn’t feel anything. I’m pretty sure I walked into stage nine completely full of myself, and didn’t stop checking my watch until I was done with the scene.

Jesus, what a pathetic waste. What a complete and total fucking waste. On that day, I didn’t deserve to wear that uniform, and I certainly didn’t earn the right to call myself an actor.

It is such a great episode, and I’m so ashamed and disappointed that I didn’t realize it at the time. 

Ron, if you happen to read this: I am so sorry. When I saw you at Grand Slam, I thanked you for all the gifts you gave
me over the years; I’d forgotten about this one (probably because I
didn’t appreciate it at the time, in all my teenage arrogance and I am so sorry that I disrespected your work and didn’t honor the gift you gave me. Your work deserved better, and I was too much of an idiot to live up to the material. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to create something so wonderful, only to watch it destroyed by an arrogant and entitled teenager. I am so, so sorry.

I have learned much since I was eighteen. In fact, I became aware of what a douche I was about a year after I filmed this episode, and realized that I need to get the hell out of Hollywood and find out who I really was and who I wanted to be. I spent the next three years working all that shit out, looking at myself in the mirror every day until I could truly say that I liked the person I saw reflected back.

These days, I don’t take anything for granted, and I always do my very best to rise to the challenge of the material I’m lucky enough to be given. I wouldn’t change anything about my life, because the person I am today grew out of the person I once was . . . but I’d sure like a chance to take that wonderful material and do it justice.

Hopefully, I’ll get to watch an episode tonight that I can feel proud of.

(image from Memory Apha)

Afterthought – I put a version of this in comments, but here it is for the rest of all y’all (or is it all y’alls? all of y’alls?): It is important to me to examine and reflect on my life, whether it’s something I’m fiercely proud of, like my performance in Best of Both Worlds I & II, or something I’m not proud of, like the things I’ve written about here.

When Family was over last night, I had a visceral feeling of shame and regret as strong as the feeling of terror I had writing about my first day of high school yesterday. It’s lived in me all day, so I finally decided to write about it tonight.

I don’t intend for this to become some sort of big pity party for me or
anything, and by writing this, I don’t feel that I’m sitting in a funk,
dwelling on the past, wasting he present (I’ve done lots of that in the last few years, and I think I’ve hung on that cross enough, thank you.)

I absolutely love who I am today, both as a creative writer/actor and as a person. When everything is stripped away and I am left with nothing but my naked soul, I am very comfortable with what I have. I wouldn’t have that if I didn’t reflect on all the peaks and valleys of my life, including moments like these.

Now that I think of it, if I didn’t have such respect for Ron Moore, and if I hadn’t just seen him two weeks ago, I may not have had such a profoundly powerful reaction to my performance (or lack thereof) in his episode.

Anyway, if I didn’t tear down the wall from time to time, I’d just sit here and wait for the worms to come, and nobody wants that. Trust me.

state of the exile

The day I got the WWdN database fixed, and had all the old WWdN entries rescued and readable was the day I found the path out of Exile.

Now that I know there are two ways out of this prison (in a pine box, or through that large opening over there that we all like to think of as "off limits, as a favor to me,") it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to stay here.

Which brings me back to the Typepad vs. MT w/plugins issue. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I like about Typepad, that MT 3.2 doesn’t have out of the box, and I came up with three things: Typepad has a great WYSIWYG editor, it easily and seamlessly handles uploading images and enclosures, like the RFB files, and all those little things on the right side are so easy to add and remove and update, I can’t believe I ever did any hand-coding of tables and filled them with php includes (which I also had to create and edit by hand.)

But I miss WWdN, and all its lameness and non-W3C-compliance. I miss its out of date FAQ and musical suggestions. I miss its clunky archives and the sense that, even though it’s a shitty house, it’s my house, goddammit.

Redesigning issues aside, can I move back to WWdN and still have as much control as I have right now? And most important: will it be easy?

I’ve been playing around with three different editors that all have WYSIWYG editing, and various other features:

  • Flock, which is a browser that is built on top of Firefox with integrated blogging tools.
  • Performancing, which is a Firefox extension that puts a WYSISYG editor into your browser.
  • ecto, which is an editor and publishing tool that lets you compose and edit entries outside of your browser.

Flock is pretty cool. It’s got a nice editor, and I especially like how it seamlessly integrates Flickr images and del.icio.us bookmarks into your blogging experience. It integrates lots of tools and appears geared toward blogging and anything which involves a tag. If I was all about that sort of thing, I’d be really into flock, but since I’m not, I can’t see myself using it.

Performancing is also really nice. I love that it easily inserts technorati tags and adds del.icio.us bookmarks whenever you update one of your blogs, (if you want it to), and I love that it lets you see a ton of information on the page you’re viewing. It’s a free Firefox extension, and free is good.

But I think ecto is the way to go for me. It does all of the things that the other two do, and adds in too many features for me to list here. I was introduced to ecto when Xeni told me she uses it to update boingboing, and even though I have to buy a license for it, if it’s good enough for boingboing, it’s totally good enough for me.

Last night, while I was goofing off with ecto, I ended up quasi-live-blogging part of an episode of TNG:

I’m watching one of my favorite (and most heartbreaking) episodes of TNG, The Offspring. It’s one of the best episodes we ever did, and it nearly reaches  —

UGH!
There I am in the ugly grey space suit on Stage 9. I’m not acting very
well right here, even though the scene is really about the Admiral.
Nice package on Wesley, though. Eww. Gross.

Gods. Data
has to say good bye to Lal now. This always makes me cry a little bit.
Lal says, "I love you, father," and Data just looks at her and says, "I
wish I could feel it, too."

It’s such a testament to the writing
in this episode (and the actors in the scene) that Data didn’t end up
doing a cheesy "I love you too," thing. It’s so true to his character
that he remains emotionally unattached, because Data doesn’t have
emotions. (I always thought it was an insanely stupid fucking move to
give Data his emotion chip, like giving Geordi sight. Weak.)

Heh.
I just said, "Course is set, sir." See? That’s why I hated working on
TNG in those days. Even though the episode is great, just saying those
stupid lines bored me to. fucking. death.

Now G4 is running an
ad for Star Trek 2.0, which I think is going to be the dumbest thing to
happen to the original series in 40 years. And now, it’s time for
Futurama on [adult swim].

So I have three things left to do before I can return to WWdN (in this order):

  1. Find an editor that I like, that’s easy to use and reliable. I’m pretty sure I’ve done that.
  2. Figure out a way to easily update modular content for the non-blog areas of the site. This feels like it should be fairly easy, but I haven’t put all that much time into reading the MT forums or digging through the plug-ins. I suspect the answer is to use MT-Includes that are files linked to various MT Templates. Alternatively, I can figure out some sort of web-based php backend that will let me update all that information without having to go into an html editor offline, and ftp the damn thing whenever I want to make a chance. And don’t even talk to me about ssh-ing into the server and using vi from a shell prompt. Those days are long behind me. This is, I think, the stickiest widget.
  3. Complete the re-design. We’re working on this, and once we figure out a couple more things, it will go live very quickly.

 

there are many copies

Cylon
I
have an audition this afternoon to host a Sci-Fi show, and one of the things they’re asking us to do is conduct a mock interview with Edward James Olmos.

If I book this show, I’ll solicit questions from WWdN readers for the interesting guests whenever I can, so, without revealing any spoilers (I’m only on episode 5 of season 2.0),
if you could ask him anything about Battlestar Galactica, what would it be?

To be clear: I’m not actually going to talk with him. It will probably be a casting assistant, but they will want to see that I understand my subject, know how to move an interview along and react to the subject’s natural ebb and flow, and make with the occasional funny. I’m also pretty sure that I’m in a very unique position, with the ability to connect with WWdN readers and take a consensus question (does that make sense?) back to the interviews.

I think I’ll ask him the most controversial question I can come up with: Is Deckard a Replicant?

He won’t answer, but then again, who does?

Update: Thanks for your questions and discussion. For me, personally, I want to know about the father aspects of Adama and find out if it’s intentional that that thread of nurturing and inspiration runs through all of the great characters he’s played over the years (I suspect it is.) I also want to know how he’s dealing with being the new Picard/Kirk/Sisko/Malcolm character, and if he would speak at conventions, and get involved in all that fandom stuff that we all love so much.

I think I’ll present the WWdN consensus as: "Do you feel vindicated that your BSG is widely seen as the best SF series ever, especially since you advised original series fans (who were highly critical before the miniseries even aired) not to watch? Does it feel as cool to be a part of this as we all think it is?" I’ll mix in some comments about how there are TNG parallels, and then I’ll ask him if he’d like to grab a Flaming Moe after he show.

Well, I’m off now, so wish me broken legs!

jon stewart pwns larry king

Kingstewart
In case you missed Jon Stewart on Larry King the other night, Crooks & Liars has video and a partial transcript (but you really need to see or hear it, because a lot of the way Jon Stewart talks is lost in the literal written tranlsation.) Larry King made several feeble attempts to create controversy, and Jon Stewart kicked him square in the nuts each time. Witness this exchange:

KING: You don’t want Medicare to fail?

STEWART: Are you insane?

KING: No.

STEWART: You’re literally asking me if I would prefer
— yes, Larry, what I’m saying to you as a comedian I want old people
to suffer, old and poor people to suffer. That is — that is — what we
want is — what seems absurd to me is the length that Washington just
seems out of touch with the desires of Americans to be spoken to as
though they are adults.

Nice try, Larry; too bad Jon didn’t go for it. Maybe you can team up with Nancy Grace for a two hour Aruba Special to get back on familiar, more comfortable ground.

That question was just one of several "gotcha" attempts which failed
spectacularly when Jon refused to take the bait, and instead turned the
ludicrous question back on Larry King, who of course had no response other than this painful frozen half-smile that was equal parts fear and lothing. When Larry King wasn’t completely controlling the tone and content of the show, you could feel how uncomfortable he was. Jon Stewart was so funny, and so quick-witted, and so smart and so insightful, if Larry King wasn’t trying so hard to create controversy where there was none, you’d almost feel bad that he wasn’t able to keep up.

Walter!

Walter

While channel surfing, I just discovered that my episode of CSI, Compulsion, is about to start on the West Coast.

So if you’d like to see me and my sweater, put on your local CBS station, and enjoy!

Afterthought: I’m having a really shitty day, which included an absolutely terrible audition (my fault, not theirs), and accidentally discovering that this is on has brightened my spirits just a little bit. I’m real proud of the work I did on CSI, and it’s nice to remember how good it felt to earn the part, work on the show, and watch the episode when it first aired.

"Finders keepers!"