Transcript - Episode 4: Bockley Pancake
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 4
Hosts: Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker
Transcript by: Leigh Sugar
Transcripts formatted after those from Disability Visibility Project
Please note: transcripts are transcribed directly from recordings of live conversations; as a result, quotes and statements may be approximate and there may be unintended memory errors.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Hey, it's me. So I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about, and this is something that I mentioned to you before. But I want to talk about Star Trek. Specifically what I want to talk about is the new Star Treks and why they don't feel like Star Trek to me, even though I like them, like I, I love what Discovery has become. I mean, I wasn't a huge fan of the first season, but it is one of my favorite shows now. I love Lower Decks. I'm very sad to see that it's, you know, on the way out. I even liked Picard, although, you know, maybe that was mostly for nostalgia reasons.
The one possible exception to Star Trek not feeling like Star Trek might be Strange New Worlds, and there because it's a throwback. But there is something about the new Star Treks that just doesn't seem to fit with the tone of the Star Trek that I grew up with. So, I wanted to talk about that and related to that, I'm gonna send you a meme that I saw recently that was about video games. That was about what the big hit video games of the past, you know, of each decade of the past 40 years or so has been. And I think that there is a little bit of overlap there. So yeah. What do you think about that?
[Music]
RACHEL ZUCKER: We are gonna talk about Star Trek today. I have a question to start out with that I hope that can be in the recording. So can we start?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yes [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. Great. I want to tell you this question up front, but I don't want to hijack the conversation about a real topic. Real being in this case. Star Trek.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay.
RACHEL ZUCKER: But I am curious, and maybe we can talk about this at the end, or in another episode: you had mentioned in one of your messages that I think is in one of the episodes, that when you leave the message for me, that becomes the cold open for the show, that it's both kind of natural, but also has artifice involved in it.
And so I was actually curious about whether you did preparation for this conversation about Star Trek? And if so, what kind of preparation? If you didn't, that's also interesting and fine to me. And then of course, I was thinking about whether I did preparation for this conversation. And what it was and how it might be the same or different than yours. So that's a topic that I'm interested in, but I don't want to go down the meta meta path just yet.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: [Laughs]. So I would say that everything that I have brought to you for some kind of a discussion, whether it's for the show or not for the show, has been something that I've been thinking about anyway. You know, so when I brought those videos for us to talk about, those were videos that I had collected because I was thinking about them. I had seen them all in rapid succession, and I was thinking about how I would want to talk about them. And originally, I was thinking about talking about them in a TikTok video for the public, such as it is, but it was something where the discussion and my thoughts on the matter were already on my mind.
And similarly, with this, this is a topic that is already sort of on my mind as well. I think that, I mean, I actually know, that the idea that I've had for this conversation is one that I mentioned to you already, before I left you that message. So I don't know that that's necessarily conscious preparation, but this is actually just sort of how I approach writing in general, is that it tends to be kind of difficult for me to write on purpose. But what ends up happening for me is that I have a bunch of stuff that's just always sort of turning over in my mind. And when it's ready to come out, it kind of just all comes out in one go. And it's not that I never edit. It's just that a lot of the stuff that people do in their, you know, first or second round of drafting happens in my head instead of on paper.
[5:06]
Aside from that, I would say, you know, and this is actually something that I wanted to ask, is, because Star Trek is something that has been part of my life for a very long time. And it's something, you know, like when I was in high school, I won two or three Star Trek trivia contests [laughs]. So it was, it's something that at least at one point in my life, I knew very deeply.
And I know that you also watch Star Trek. So it was something that I, I had an assumption that you would have a certain baseline familiarity with the topic as well. So does that answer your question?
RACHEL ZUCKER: No, but we can come back to it [laughs].
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. So I wanted to, I wanted to start off just by asking you what your history with Star Trek is?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, I started watching The Next Generation in high school and I guess when it was, yeah, when it was first airing, and loved it. And I would watch it every week, and I loved the characters, I loved the show. I hadn't watched the original series and I watched it a little bit the way some people read their horoscope. So I felt very strongly that every week there was a question in my life that the show was answering. And I felt very identified at different points in time with different characters, definitely Deanna Troi, but, you know, then they would have different, interactions with alien races or different conflicts. And it always felt to me like I was finding personal meaning in the episode that happened to be playing at that time.
So then I went to college and I graduated high school in 1990. So I was in college 1990 to ‘94, was watching The Next Generation, you know, religiously. And then I think that Josh, I think we got together around, you know, we became friends, we got to know each other our junior year, and he had a long, deep love of sci fi and fantasy as a reader, for sure, as a younger reader and even currently, and liked Star Trek as well.
And he was courting me, and I had a boyfriend at the time, but he would try to come over to my apartment to watch Star Trek with me. Eventually, I'll sort of fast forward. We got together, we moved to Iowa and we lived in Iowa together for two years. We moved, during which point we were avidly watching Star Trek as well. Then we moved back to New York so Josh could go to Columbia. And we had these friends, we have these friends, Mark and Sarah, who were in the… Sarah was in the PhD program with Josh at Columbia, and at that time, if you missed a television show, you had to record it [laughs].
And if we ever had to miss Star Trek, we had a deal with Mark and Sarah where they would record it with us. And then in return, we would take them out to all you can eat sushi, which was a thing at that time on the Upper West Side near Columbia, because we lived right near them in Columbia housing. And, uh, so, I mean, I was really committed and then we got married and Star Trek was like deeply important to both Josh and I, and we both were participating in this, you know, kind of like, we are finding meaning. We weren't dressing up. We weren't going to conferences. We weren't doing that. But we were like really finding meaning about our lives and our relationship in the show.
I started teaching at NYU in the General Studies program, which was a two year, uh, Associate's Degree program. And I was teaching prose composition. And I wanted to teach my students how to do research. And so I remember that Voyager was out at that point. And I was, I loved Voyager. I loved Captain Janeway. I loved the storyline and really interested in Seven of Nine. And I did a deep dive into researching Gene Roddenberry, the origins of Star Trek, Star Trek, and particularly women in Star Trek in, like, the Star Trek universe, and feminism and, you know, the intersection between the two.
And I, I had to like, again, like the technology at that point was like me going through, we had hundreds of DVDs of old episodes of recordings of Star Trek.
[10:07]
And so I had to like, go find them. I had all these like compendium volumes of like each episode and, you know, in text. And then I would go find the examples that I wanted to use so that I could do this presentation for my students on women in Star Trek. And I read a bunch of books. There was a book, I think it was called S/T, uh, like S slash T. And it was about the history of Star Trek fan fiction, particularly, uh, like homoerotic, kind of examples of homoeroticism, especially between Kirk and Spock. And so at that, that point I had gone back and watched the original series and it just, I mean, I could, one of the questions I was interested in asking you was similarly about like, your personal history with Star Trek and I'll, I'll just sort of fast forward to, I've watched all the series at this point, including yesterday, I watched the most recent episode of Discovery, which have you watched it?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I have, yes.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay, good. Okay, good. So we're on an even, an equal playing field. Although I haven't won any contests for my Star Trek knowledge yet [laughs]. Yet.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It was easier to win a trivia contest in the early nineties when there were only two series.
RACHEL ZUCKER: It’s true. It's true. But I have, I think I've watched every single episode of every single series. And I, in the shower this morning, I was preparing for this conversation by just thinking through my history of Star Trek. And I had a very vivid memory of watching… I didn't want to watch, I believe that we, that Josh and I started watching Discovery, for sure we started watching together before we split up. And then I stopped, I was like, when Josh and I separated, I was like, I don't want to watch this show anymore. Like, there was a big lag. And I believe that I waited for two series, two seasons of Discovery and I didn't watch it.
And at some point Josh was like, you know, you should watch it. I think you really would like it. And I remember watching the episode. It's the beginning of one of the seasons, I can't remember which one, of Discovery, where Michael Burnham gets, you know, shot into the future, and she sort of crash lands on this planet and she's not sure at first that she's alive and then she's not sure where she is and more importantly she's not sure when she is. And this is of great importance, like, is she on an M-class planet where she has a breathable atmosphere? Is she, you know, hundreds, thousands of years separated from her crew? You know, and is there any other life?
And I mean, I feel emotional even describing this to you, but I remember very clearly that I was about to be or having just recently been officially divorced from Josh. And I was alone in Maine with none of my kids. And I was watching this episode where she crash lands on this planet and in the moments before she realizes how alone she is, like, is this a little bit alone? Or is this like galactically cosmically forever for her whole human lifespan alone? And I just started bawling, like, just like full on bawling. I remember this, you know, so well.
And there are other moments, even, even the episode last night really hit me, really hit me hard. And we can talk about that or not, but yeah, I have this like really tender spot about it. We also rewatched the original series with our older sons. My, youngest, Judah, when he was a little kid, we had all these Star Trek action figures and, he had never watched the series, but he could identify which show they were from. So he would like, pick one of the action figures up and be like, you know, “CC Nine,” which was how he said, “Deep Space Nine.” He'd say “CC Nine,” and throw it in a pile. And then he'd be like, you know, “Bockley pancake,” which was, you know, what was his name? Barclay… I can't even remember his name. He was afraid to go in the transporter. Anyway, and he'd like throw that in a different pile.
[14:54]
And at different periods of time, you know, in my older boys who are now almost 25 and 23, you know, there would be moments where one of them would be like, holy shit, you know, like, we'd just be like living our lives. And one of them would be like, holy shit, this is like the two Rikers episode. I do not like this. This is not okay. And I would know what that meant. You know, being able to refer to the storylines, the characters, the, the, the world-building, the values of the show has been like a common text, certainly in my marriage and in my, and with mysons, although my youngest, not so much.
So, yeah, it's always been interesting to me that you and I have never really talked explicitly about it, but I've known that you also have this, like, deep, long history with it.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. So The Next Generation started airing in ‘87, which is the year that I turned, uh, 8. And I think that it, that I was actually still 7 when it started. But that was not my first experience with Star Trek because my mom was, and her mom actually, were big Star Trek fans from when she was a kid in the ‘60s. So, I grew up watching old Star Trek reruns on like PBS or whatever.
When I was a kid, we didn't have, we couldn't afford cable, and the houses that we lived in for a long time, starting from when I was probably three, up until all the way through, well, until after I graduated from college, the houses we lived in were all in these deep canyons where there was no aerial reception. So, we couldn't watch TV. So what would happen is my grandmother, my mom's mom, would tape stuff off of TV for us, and every, about every, you know, three or four weeks, she would send us a tape or two. And sometimes it would be movies that she taped off TV, you know, like the TV recorded version of the movie Aliens was very much a staple in my and my little brother's life, with all the swears dubbed over and commercials in the middle.
You know, she'd record old musicals and stuff, but she would also record Star Trek for us. And originally it was the original series, of which I believe I have still not seen every single episode, but I've seen a lot of them. And then, once The Next Generation started, that was our way of seeing it, was every six weeks, she would send us a new VHS tape, one of the extended play ones that could hold six episodes. And funny thing too, there was one episode, I think it's in the second season, it's the one where Troi has a baby. She's, she forgot that episode. She missed it. So I didn't actually see that until probably 15 years after the show ended. And it's not a good episode, but -
RACHEL ZUCKER: It is if you're waiting for someone to find, have a baby on the show that you love! [Laughs]. Okay. Sorry. Keep going.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, so I watched, every episode of The Next Generation, as soon as I got my hands on it, except for that one. And we started watching Deep Space Nine when I was in high school, but then, so I graduated high school and went to college in ‘97, which was a little more than halfway through the Deep Space Nine run. And Voyager started a little bit after that, I think. I think Voyager started in ‘98? Maybe 99? It started while I was in college, I'm pretty sure.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So I, I had missed the end of Deep Space Nine because my friends in high school were, I mean, not in high school, my friends in college were, for going to such a nerdy school, were like kind of weirdly anti nerd, and I just kind of fell off of it until, until Enterprise came on and I didn't really like that show that much. I watched the whole first season and then I kind of fell off of it and I watched the end of it. And that was that for a long time.
I've since gone back and finished watching Deep Space Nine. That was within the last couple of years. I still haven't finished watching Voyager. I still haven't finished watching all of Enterprise. But I've watched all of the new ones. I should also say, I never watched, I don't think I've seen a single episode of the animated series [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Me neither. And I don't know that I actually have seen all of Enterprise. I might not have. But sorry, keep going.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But I've been watching all of the new ones as they come out. And It's been an interesting experience. One of the things that you are, that you referenced here is this sort of shared communication that you have via Star Trek. And I think that for a lot of people, for basically, I think any Star Trek fans who are, you know, at least 30 or so, that the show very much, for all of us, has a certain comfort factor to it. It has a certain association with times past.
Because, I mean, the things that you've been talking about, you know, like where you were when you started, the relationship that you were in when you were, you know, really into it, the way that it has inflected your communication with your kids - I think these are very similar to the kinds of things for me, like for me it's not with my kids because they've always steadfastly refused to engage with anything Star Trek-related [laughs].
[20:16]
But certainly with my brother and with my mom and her sisters, Star Trek is just sort of part of the lexicon, and because I was, you know, a pretty young kid when The Next Generation started, it was really a formative, a formative piece of media, like a formative piece of my media history. And there is something about watching those old episodes that does very much take me back to that time.
And so this idea of Star Trek being comforting is, I think, very much at the heart of what I'm talking about when I say that current Trek doesn't feel like Trek to me. I like it a lot. I would go so far as to say, I love what most of the new Trek shows have been doing. I even kind of liked Picard even though objectively I think it was bad. But there is just a different feel to the current shows.
Now I should say, I know that I wouldn't say that all of the quote unquote classic Trek shows have the same feel to them I don't think that's true. Deep Space Nine was very explicitly, like Ron Moore was trying very hard to, to get away from the sort of polished, shiny aesthetic of Star Trek, where just everything is constantly working out. And that's why he wanted to set it on a space station where things are constantly breaking and where there's political tensions and stuff like that. So I get that there hasn't necessarily been one tone throughout all of Star Trek. But at its root, I feel like Star Trek is an inherently optimistic franchise, or that it has been an optimistic franchise. The original series began during the height of the Cold War. I know that, and this is even something that my mom has talked about to me, that there was just a lot of sort of existential anxiety at the time around the idea that maybe we're all going to die in a nuclear war.
And the idea of having a vision of the future, not only where we, as a species, survive that long, but that we thrive, and that we reach a state where we can live out our highest ideals, was just, you know, it was a type of optimism that was not super present in the media at the time. I mean, I'm not an expert on ‘60s television, but you know, a lot of the other popular shows at that time were all like cowboy shows, very much looking backwards and sort of dealing with this idea of like American machismo kind of thing. And there is some of that present in the original Star Trek, but it's not the same. I think The Next Generation had that similar quality. And when I look at, and even Deep Space Nine and Voyager, there is still this quality.
When I think about how people talked about Discovery, when it first started, a lot, there was a lot of discourse online, people saying “it doesn't feel like Star Trek.” And there were a lot of reasons for that. One of the big ones was, of course, racism, because people couldn't, well, like a combination of racism and misogyny, the idea of like someone people couldn't handle Michael Burnham as the main character, which is, I mean, it's interesting because at, by that point we'd already had a woman captain and a Black captain, but somehow both together in this particular moment in time was just too much for a lot of people. On top of which just, the way that they light the show, like, Star Trek previously has always had a very bright lighting and color palette, and in the new series, in all of the new series, it's a lot more muted color palettes, a lot less futuristic looking, and, particularly in Picard, like you see the way people dress in Picard, where, like, in their off time in The Next Generation, people were basically wearing space pajamas all the time [laughs] and now you see people wearing jeans again. And the show is just physically darker to look at in most scenes.
But I think for me there is something that comes up particularly in Picard, and in the later seasons of Discovery that has to do with this sort of inevitability of decay that just was not something that was present in the current moment of Star Trek. Star Trek has always referenced that, you know, human society had to go through a lot of turmoil in order to get to where it was. So there was always this post apocalyptic aspect to it, but it was never really part of the text. It was always part of the background of the text.
[25:06]
And I feel like Star Trek now is just not as optimistic as it used to be. And I feel in a lot of ways, like, what Star Trek is doing now is trying to take the values of classic Star Trek and project them into a world like, what does it mean to be optimistic? If in some sense there isn't necessarily a hope of saving the world? And I find that really interesting.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, okay. So, so let's go back for a second because I was, uh, I was going to interrupt you. I'm glad I didn't, to say, I agree entirely that it is this kind of optimistic franchise, you know, that it was, and my understanding is that that largely came from Gene Roddenberry's experiences in the U.S. Army, and this kind of sense of the terribleness of war, but the camaraderie of male veterans. And the experiences that he had of being in a unit with men from many different backgrounds, many different geographical locations, and the way in which that became a kind of survival, family, intimacy among men, intimacy of individuals who are under this extreme duress of war.
But yes, like the, the optimism was always projected into the future beyond this, you know, near extinction event in which, you know, which was never really fully like pre-warp capacity, you know, there's so many references to it, but it's basically like capitalism itself implodes, you know, there's some kind of World War Three that almost extinguishes human life on the planet, and then we get the capacity to visit other places and a perspective, and then we, you know, The Next Generation, we're all like looking back, you know, they're all looking back and like, “Remember when there was money. Remember when people cared about money?”
And so, you know, we're having this, this view, and I think it's a very neoliberal view, of a kind of post race, post racism world. And there's kind of, I'm not sure optimism is exactly the right word, because there's this inevitability of a near extinction event that precedes this era of pacifism or, you know, almost pacifism and this real switch from “We're not a warship, we're a science vessel of exploration,” of, you know, meeting new cultures and, and stuff like that. So, I mean, I remember that as very clearly as being kind of the zeitgeist amongst neoliberal people in the nineties and, you know, yeah, in the nineties, and maybe the early 2000s.
And so I feel like one of the things that's changed is, either we're getting closer to that near extinction event [laughs], that The Next Generation sort of, it's an important or, you know, part of the timeline, but it's, it's taking us into, you know, it's jumping us over. And so now what's happening is that even though we're not in the timeline of The Next Generation in terms of that near extinction event, we're in our timeline, really approaching that extinction event, you know, in terms of the environment, in terms of all of these wars, in terms of capitalism, and we don't have, at least I would say, the liberal people that I know, including myself, don't have the same kind of hope, don't have the same kind of optimism. What we have is, I guess, you know, my students introduced me to the term “hope punk.” Do you know that term?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I've heard it, yeah.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. I mean, it is hopefulness, but it's also kind of like hopefulness with a kind of understanding. Maybe it's the difference between hopefulness and optimism, which I don't really know semantically what the difference is, but like, it's like the kick ass hardcore, like insane punk willingness to maintain hope as these wars and mistreatment of sentient life and the planet continue in what becomes more and more clear is either a cycle or a decline, and not like, “Wow, remember World War II where everyone lost their shit and did crazy things? Well, we'll never do that again because if we do, we have nuclear weapons. And we'll all annihilate ourselves. So it's the end of war.”
[30:31]
Turns out it wasn't the end of war. Turns out it's just one fucking war after another. And so I think that the newer series are trying to reflect, which is interesting, because are they aspirational or do they reflect the culture, you know, where we are, of course, they do both, but yeah, they're very, very dark. And you didn't even mention, like, the, the prime world is so dark, but in Voyager, sorry, in Discovery, there's the mirror universe, and the Terran Empire and like all, and those are even darker. So it's like, it's like dark and darker. And, and then this, I, what I love about Star Trek is that, you know, now there's this storyline about the end of The Federation and the problems with the Federation and corruption in the Federation. And, you know, what is the world like when there isn't and, you know, like in The Next Generation, I'm sorry, I'm talking on and on and on. But like, in The Next Generation, it's like, they meet people they don't understand, aliens they don't understand, but they like overcome it, until they meet the Borg. And that is such a deep threat to, you know, human survival that they have to like, you know, that's, that's like the, they can't figure out how to stick to their moral code in the face of the Borg. And then that becomes like, you know, this incredibly important, you know, plot line storyline.
But now it's like, we're meeting Borg-like species over and over and over again. And so I guess I feel like, I respect the makers of this show for the way in which they're willing, like, I don't think that original comfort and optimism would hold now for me. I just don't think it would ring true. And I don't know if that's because of my age or because of the current moment of history, but there's a way in which the abandonment of that original optimism is the only way that I can continue to, like, engage with this show and have a kind of hope, and still continue to find meaning and nonviolent solutions, you know, with these characters who are… a lot of the storylines are so psychological now, as opposed to external. And I don't know. I feel like that's, that's why the show continues to hold power for me, whereas if it had maintained, even though I've, I find it comforting in theory, I actually don't really like going back to The Next Generation or to those earlier shows. I, they feel sort of saccharine to me. They feel, they feel too simple. And I can't, I can't locate myself in them. Or if I do, I feel ashamed of the kind of like, colorblind neoliberalism of that era.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So it's interesting. It's a pretty common refrain among science fiction writers. I don't remember the first person who said it, or maybe it was Vonnegut, I don't know who, it could have been anybody, Asimov, but there is this common refrain among science fiction writers that science fiction is never prescient, it's always about what's happening now.
And so in, in that way, what Star Trek is doing right now, I mean, of course it's coming out of the sort of zeitgeist, sort of like, what aspiration even means in the context of right now? Of course, that's what it's going to be coming out of. But what's really interesting just now, this is a perfect segue, what you just said to that meme that I sent you.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So this is a a meme. And I've seen actually a few different versions of this thing over the past year or so, but this just happened to be one that popped up in the past couple of weeks is this person on blue sky whose, uh, handle is, uh, Cate with a C. Catespice.bsky.social says:
80s video game: here is a fantasy that you are an astronaut blasting asteroids
90s: no you’re a badass marine blasting demons 2000s: time to blast some aliens
2010s: chop up these zombies
2020s: here is a fantasy that you have a cosy house, friends, relationships and food
[35:05]
So, I know you're very familiar with Star Trek. I don't know how familiar you are with video games, but I know that you have spent a fair amount of time online. So I would bet that you have at least some awareness of how during the lockdowns, everybody was playing Animal Crossing? This cozy game about, you know, managing a little island and building houses and farming together and stuff like that. And there is a whole segment of video games right now that is very popular, that people refer to it as “cozy gaming.”
Prior than that, there are a lot of, within speculative fiction, the cozy moniker is in both fantasy and science fiction, cozy fantasy and cozy sci fi are subgenres that over the past five years or so have gotten a lot more popularity. There are a lot of books that I've been reading more recently where, you know, for example, I read one that's by Travis Baldree that's called Legends and Lattes, and it's about this adventurer, you know, super badass orc-woman who was a, you know, soldier-for-hire kind of thing who, after she's done adventuring, she decides she just wants to open up a coffee shop. And it's all about her opening up a coffee shop somewhere after she's retired from being an adventurer. And it's not that the story is without conflict, it does have conflict within it. But the story is, rather than it being about an adventure, it's about trying to build a peaceful life, trying to, you know, it's about found family, about community, which is really quite different from the sort of stories that fantasy was telling in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and, you know, even going back to the, the ‘60s with like, The Lord of the Rings and stuff like that.
I think that it's really interesting how many people are looking for a certain kind of comfort from their media and literature these days. And whether that is something that, you know, is something that people ought to be criticized for or whether it's just like, you know, do what you got to do to get through the day, I think that's sort of like not a very interesting question to me. Whether it rings true is also, I think of it being like, like reading a romance novel.
I think a lot of people, romance is a genre that I've been exploring over the past couple of years. And not just in my reading, but also in listening to what the discourse around romance is. And taking that, that word fantasy and saying, you know, rather than the fantasy genre that, that I was talking about, but rather, one of the appeals of romance is that it is a fantasy, and that it is not really meant to be representative of a real relationship or of real life, that there is something to lose yourself in and to escape in that way.
I find that really interesting. And I feel like this ties back to Star Trek, particularly Discovery, but even, even something like, like Lower Decks, which I think also has a very contemporary sensibility in that it is a very funny show, but it is one that very much skewers the idea that Starfleet, that the defining trait about Starfleet is their competence. Everybody's good at their jobs in Starfleet, and the people on Lower Decks by and large are not. I mean, they kind of are, but they're, you know, they have the same sort of workplace hijinks that you would see on a show like The Office or Parks and Rec.
RACHEL ZUCKER: So wait, okay. Hold on. I'm going to interrupt if that's okay.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Because you're saying so many different things that are all incredibly interesting to me, but I feel like there's, I kind of want to just for a moment separate the cozy, or coziness, and comfort, versus like war, anxiety, shoot the aliens, you know, that stuff.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: The point here is that I don't think that what Star Trek is doing now is cozy. I think it's really doing quite the opposite, but at the same time, we have this growing fandom for things that are cozy and these are happening simultaneously.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. I haven't done enough research and preparation to really back up this idea, but I want to throw out the idea that one of the things that's happened is very much about, so when Josh was growing up, he was reading the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, right?
[40:00]
So Tarzan, all of the Tarzan books, you know, and not even not just the Tarzan series, like, you know, all of these different sci fi and fantasy series, which are very male. And if we look at this, this is changing. This is what I'm getting to. But it used to be that YA, once it even became called YA, was so split, right, between the male YA and the female YA.
And so, for example, I had read all of Madeline L'Engle as a young reader, who is a sci fi, you know, and fantasy writer, but a woman, and a lot of the stories have a domestic family component to them. That's really important as opposed to the sort of like various stereotypical like Arthurian legend, Tarzan version of like, you know, the mother's dead and the kid is like raised in the wilderness and it's always a boy and he's a hero and it's a hero's, it's a hero's quest, right? A la Joseph Campbell. Okay.
And I remember when I found out that my third kid was going to be a boy, I was really pissed for a lot of reasons, including that I had read all of these very male boy books to my older boys. And Josh had read a lot of them, Lord of the Rings, you know, the Narnia books. And I was like, wait, I'm never going to get a chance to read the girl books.
And so while I was pregnant with Judah I read Anne of Green Gables, I read to my older two boys, I read, you know, all of the Little House on the Prairie books. I was really interested in the way that, you know, these quote unquote girl books had a lot of character development but very little plot. And these boy books, which I read them before the girl books, and then afterwards, again, had a ton of, you know, they were so plot driven, and so little character development.
Okay, so, I'm getting somewhere with this, because I think that between the original series with Kirk and Spock, who, and this is why looking at the homoeroticism between them is so interesting, because it is about men's intimacy with one another. But, you know, the show is incredibly sexist in so many ways, right? The role of women on the original series is, you can feel the, the show is not being written by women, for women, about women.
But in The Next Generation, they, there are families on the Enterprise. And that really starts to change things. And so part of what I think you're describing is about the increasing fluidity, increasing participation of women in the writing room with these books and these movies and these video games and an awareness of women's bodies and issues, you know, in these series, and a greater fluidity of gender, gendered issues, you know, around this stuff, and a greater kind of like, interplay between the male or the masculine, and the female and the feminine in these plots and in these plot lines.
So it's not just like, wow, I can't believe we have like a, a female captain. You know, like, I won't go into this right now, but I love the plot line of Saru and the Vahar’ai that he goes through. And I think this is a whole, this is about menopause in my opinion. So the fact that like, he is a, you know, male-presenting Kelpien doesn't change my feeling that the show is, is talking about menopause when they're talking about this life process that he goes through that he thinks is going to kill him but actually, just when he goes through it, he's super powerful because he loses his fear. So in any case, this is a very long winded way of saying that I think that one of the things that's happening when we have this desire for the comfort or the cozy, in some ways is like a kind of nostalgic desire for the time when the masculine and the feminine were more separate in our media.
[44:45]
And this kind of like idealized, like, you know, Leave it to Beaver… I don't think it actually ever really was that way, but this, this kind of like, you know, the domestic, you know, like the comfort of like the domestic as opposed to the masculine, because most of the male stories were all about war and all about killing. And that's kind of what we were fed. So I think that's part of what's happening right now. I don't know. Do you have anything to say about that before I go on to the second part?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, I do think that it's interesting and it's something I hadn't really considered. I think that, you know, to me, when I think about people reaching for something cozy, whether that's old Star Trek or a cozy fantasy or cozy video games, I don't know if I would have thought of it in terms of people reaching back towards defined gender roles so much as reaching back to a perception of a past that was safe.
But I think that of course that's something that can't be divorced from the concepts of femininity and motherhood because for, you know, sort of archetypally the mother is, you know, our conception, our cultural conception of the mother is of the parent that's safe. So I guess there, I mean, it's an interesting thing that I hadn't really considered. Also just that I do find, something that I deeply love about Discovery is the way that it, I think more than more, more than any other previous Star Trek show, I think, in The Next Generation, a little bit, and in, in Deep Space Nine and, and Voyager more, there is more of a push to, to create women characters who are not merely nurturing.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But what I think Discovery is doing to extend that is to create men who are nurturing.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And, For me, like, my favorite characters on Discovery thus far have really been, like, the soft-voiced, gentle male characters, for example, Saru and Dr. Culber.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: There is just something about soft-spoken, male, like gentle male voices that is, it's like catnip for me [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, even Book, I mean, he's, he's hot and he's kick-ass, but he's an empath and, you know, incredibly gentle.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. But you said you had more that you wanted to -
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, I was just gonna also say… well, it's interesting. I have not been a big gamer. When I have played video games it was Myst, Riven, what do you call those games? You know, they're, they're like, they're narrative games that have, that you end, you have, you get to the end.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Those two games in particular are examples of what people call point-and-click adventures, but yeah.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay So, and I always -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Narrative gaming in general, I would say.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. So I never have played those alone. Those were like things I did with Josh, like almost instead of going on a vacation, we would like get that game together and we would be one, you know, we, we'd play it together as one character. I've never played multiplayer games, video games. I really sound like a very old person right now, but -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: We are old [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: [Laughs]. I know. But your video gaming keeps you young, Mike, and mine, just my absence of it has pushed me into old age.
But I think, those games were very much about a puzzle that I was figuring out. I mean, I, I went through a Tetris phase. I've played games like that, which are to me, they're like knitting or doing a puzzle, but like a physical puzzle, which I actually really can't stand. I feel like I might as well just die [laughs]. Like, I can't, I hate spending my time, even though I, I do it sometimes. You know, the idea that I just, just like spent, you know, an hour playing even the New York Times, you know, Wordle and all those games. Those are just like, those are just ways of spending time.
So for me, those are the kind of cozier, maybe comfort stuff, but they, but I don't actually, I don't really actually like doing it. And if I'm going to play a game, I want it to be with other people. So either, you know, I've played a bazillion board games and still do with my kids, you know, or something like Myst and Riven where you, you're done.
[50:00]
Like, doing it forever is my idea of hell [laughs]. I just, in part because I, you know, I watch a lot of TV, you know, I need the shows to end. I can't manage my own, you know, if it's just always there and I can do it forever and ever, and it's like this like lovely cozy feeling, like to me, that's like an addiction that's actually potentially very serious for me if I were to kind of get into that.
And I really don't like the kinds of video games where you're driving or shooting people, you know, where it's just like this flood of adrenaline. And I don't like, you know, Josh read me all of the Game of Thrones books out loud, and maybe the last one I read to myself, and I loved the television show, except I, I hated it, like, there was so much rape and torture in every fucking episode, so graphic.
That's how I feel when I play the other kind of video games, like I can feel my body like fill with cortisol, adrenaline, stress hormones, I can feel it's not good for me. So I don't like either the cozy throwback, you know, I would, for me, the healthy cozy throwback is like, turn off my phone, turn off my computer, lie in bed, you know, meditate, cook some food, go for a walk, like do something that that… technology isn't my access to the cozy throwback comfort feeling… technology isn't usually.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I mean, you know, we're not necessarily just talking about things that we conceive of as being technological. Books are a technology, but I don't think most people include them in that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, can I just briefly tell you what I'm reading?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Sure [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. Uh, I am reading The Woman Who Raised the Buddha, The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati by Wendy Garling. And this is, Moses gave me this book for Mother's Day, which is a lovely gift for Mother's Day. And it's the most wonderful combination of quite boring and absolutely thrilling and exciting and like revealing of all these things about early Buddhism, which I didn't know anything about.
But one of the things that's really interesting about this book is the Buddha's biological mother, Maya, died seven days after the Buddha was born, and the Buddha was raised by his aunt, Mahaprajapati. So in Buddhism, there are all of these stories that the Buddha tells and other people tell of their past lives. And so it's fascinating because a lot of these stories of past lives, or even stories of the Buddha's contemporary life, have magic in them, right? People are like flying through the air and, you know, putting their hand into rock. And, so it's in the past, but it has the feeling in a way of sci fi and fantasy. And then the past lives, which are able to be accessed, some of them are extraordinarily violent and wild. And people are like, you know, like, again, like levitating and doing magical feats and all this stuff.
And so I was thinking when you were, when you brought up this topic, it's really interesting for me to be reading about this kind of magic, for lack of a better word, in a religious spiritual tradition through a feminist and maternal lens. But I've also always viewed Star Trek through a feminist maternal lens, even before I had children.
So, I don't know where I'm going with that, except I'm thinking about how and why it helps me to live my life in the present by living in my imagination in the distant past, and in the distant future, and why this has always helped me on like a very immediate, personal, almost practical, logistical level to live my life. And I think, you know, there's something about, all books, right? Like, why would I want to read about made up people, even if they're, you know, from the ‘60s or, you know, from the present? There's something about this imaginative leap that certainly Star Trek has, has, like, it's been my, how many thousands or hundreds, I guess, of hours have I spent with the creators of these shows?
[55:17]
Nobody ever asks me that in an interview when they're, when I'm talking about my poems, they're not like, “I can clearly see how influenced by you were by Star Trek,” you know, and there are very few other poets or people in the literary world who have watched as much Star Trek as you and I have. Uh, but there's something like deeply, deeply foundationally important to me about this project that Gene Roddenberry kind of started and that now all of these other people have participated in, like, it is, it is a central myth that is as important to me or extremely important along with, you know, the Bible stories that I grew up with. And I don't know. I think that's incredible.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So we're, uh, we've been going for an hour [laughs] and I am, and I'm, what I'm thinking about now is, that in the first episode, we haven't really done this yet, but in the first episode, what we proposed as the format for the show was that we were going to have a discussion on a topic, and then at the end, we would circle back and discuss the discussion. I don't feel like we've reached a resolution or like a good stopping point in the discussion itself, but I also don't know that we will, but what I did want to say, to discuss the discussion, because in order to get meta, meta, meta is that I, I'm finding the dynamic here really, really interesting because I feel like the two of us are not just having, but trying to have, two completely different conversations here [laughs] and, and I think that that's really, really interesting.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Uh huh.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That my conception of the conversation we were going to have was that the ways in which the media that we consume reflect something about how we as a society respond to anxiety and stress. And that the conversation that you are having or trying to steer us towards is about Star Trek as, like taking a feminist lens to Star Trek and the role of motherhood or like cultural role of motherhood. And there's probably some other things that I'm not summarizing properly, you know, Star Trek as a, as a foundational text, you know, in, like, in an almost religious sense.
And I think there's merit to both of these conversations. I think it's really interesting that we're both, that there's a pull that's happening where both of us are trying to yank the conversation in a certain, in a different direction [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: I, this is a related question, but In your engineering, mixing, and editing of the previous episodes, did you do the thing that you told me you sometimes do on Keep the Channel Open, which is measure how many minutes each person speaks?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I haven't done that yet. No.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. I'm curious. What's your sense of us? I feel like it's pretty even, but I also feel like from re-listening to the, you know, the first two episodes, I think that there's probably too much.... there's not enough back and forth quickly enough. Like we each talk for too long.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah, we're both pretty prone to monologuing.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. So it's interesting because we don't really interrupt each other very much. I mean, I interrupt you more [laughs], but we don't interrupt each other that much.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I have a hard time interrupting people.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Uh huh.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I remember one time, I had a telemarketer call and I, because I have such a hard time interrupting people, I just, and she just wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise, when she finally stopped to let me say, “I'm sorry, I'm not interested,” she got really mad at me because she was like, “Why did you let me talk for that long if you weren't actually, you must be interested if you let me talk this long?” And I said, “No, I'm sorry. I just really find it rude to interrupt people.” And then she hung up on me [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. So what are we going to do? We have to get off because I, I have to go to this memorial service for the teacher I mentioned, a few weeks ago.
[1:00:00]
I'm so interested in what you're in your observation about how we've been talking about this. Of course, I want to talk more about that. I also, you know, just hearing your description of how Star Trek came into your life, like, I have so many questions about, you know, why was your grandmother taping it? And, there's a lot of women in your story around this, right? Your mom, your grandmother, it's you and your brother, were watching it, but, you know, like, I'm so interested in why your mother and grandmother, you know, were interested in this. And I think you even said your mother's sister, or sisters. So I have all kinds of personal questions about that. There's a part of me that wants to ask you more about your favorite character and why, you know, you started talking about, you know, you're sort of the soft spoken male characters. I love catnip. And, you know, and then also I want to ask you like, just, you know, more stuff about like, favorite moments or important moments for you in the series.
These are all ways of steering the conversation back toward, like, your personal personal, psychological, internal, interpersonal, individual, relationship with these shows and characters, rather than a kind of more societal development [laughs], but I don't know,.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Isn't that just like exactly the dynamic here between the two of us for, for the whole show so far? It's such a, it's such a man-woman thing [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: I know, I know, and I, it's funny that I think we both try to resist it, you more than me. And I think because, I mean, I don't identify as kind of particularly feminine, although I'm certainly obsessed with, you know, what it means to be a woman and feminism and the history of feminism and women creators. But, you know, and I know you don't identify and in fact, do a lot of work to not be “that guy,” you know, the toxic man who's, you know, doing all the bad things. So, but it's funny, we do, we both try to avoid gender essentialism. And yet we're sort of enacting it constantly with each other [laughs].
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It's very funny to me. It's very funny. I don't know what to do about that other than what we're doing now, which is just calling it out when it happens [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, okay. So let me ask you a practical question. Do you, you can change your mind as soon as you, you know, whenever, of course. Men are allowed to change their minds too.
But do you want to have another episode on Star Trek, or related to Star Trek? Or do you feel like, what do you want? What do you think you want the next episode to be?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think the next episode is supposed to be your call.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right. I know.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So it can be whatever, whatever, and maybe this is me, uh, just being too uncomfortable with masculinity and dominance, but having me say what I want the next episode to be, other than to say that it's supposed to be your episode next time, makes me really uncomfortable [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay [laughs]. All right. Let's end there.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: All right.
RACHEL ZUCKER: This was fun.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: [Laughs] Insert tagline here.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You've been listening to Hey, It’s Me with Rachel Zucker and Mike Sakasegawa.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hey, It’s Me is a production of Rachel Zucker and Likewise Media
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Editing on this episode is by Mike Sakasegawa music is by Podington bear and transcription help is by Leigh Sugar.
RACHEL ZUCKER: You can find more information about the show, including contact information and transcripts at heyitsmepodcast.com.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: If you'd like to hear more from us, you can find Rachel's other show, Commonplace, at Commonplace.today.
RACHEL ZUCKER: And you can find Mike's other show, Keep the Channel Open, at KeeptheChannelOpen.com.
Thanks for spending this time with us. Take care.