The struggle in terms of the strange

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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

2 Comments

  1. Adam Riggio
    July 10, 2015 @ 7:12 am

    You definitely hit on the problem of Alexander. He's just kind of a non-entity, rarely performing with any singularity to his character beyond simply being Worf's son. Granted, the storyline of his and Worf's relationship always moved me a little, at least on its best days. I never really had male role models in my immediate family, and although it didn't exactly do me any harm, I was quite attached to father-and-son stories when I was younger.

    Less so now, because my emotional and creative priorities have changed as I've gotten older and I've absorbed some of our current cultural contexts. While I like how their relationship develops Worf, it would be a lot more interesting if the relationship had developed Worf and Alexander at once. As it is, we don't really get a sense of Alexander as an individual until his last appearance as a teenager on DS9.

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  2. K. Jones
    July 13, 2015 @ 8:30 am

    The best part of this episode was that it manufactured an opportunity for Riker and Worf to bromance it up and selflessly save a kid who almost died by selflessly saving a zoological animal.

    The worst part is that, even with the excuse of a more rapid aging cycle for klingonese children, they still never stumbled onto the obvious choice of making Worf's kid into the Anti-Wesley.

    It's a holdout of my teen years that I still really, really tend to skip "kid-centric" episodes. But it's hardly universal – Disaster had great kid performances. Wicked nineties TV, with a dash of cheese, performances, but totally watchable. You can't not smile at "Engineer in charge of radishes" or the "number one" confusion.

    It was always kind of a strange permutation of the Worf-effect as well that Worf, the practically virginal member of the youthful Enterprise generation, knocked up his star-crossed one-night stand. I mean why couldn't Eternal Bachelor Riker, who has by now certainly fallen into the "traveling space sex tour" stereotype, had to deal with an actual awkward life scenario? Riker who disliked his dad for being distant, who might benefit a bit from dealing with comparative circumstances.

    But I don't want to fall down the "might've" rabbit hole too far.

    The kid totally shouldn't have been named Alexander, though. Should have been Warg or Varg or Klarg or something suitably klingony.

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