Call me codependent (you wouldn’t be the first) but I got nervous whenever Ms. Fremantle had too much time on her hands. One didn’t need to go to Death Valley to find the devil’s playground. Her current Starwatch persona, the polymorphously perverse grease monkey from Albion-12, hadn’t made an appearance in the last few shows and I was concerned the writers were phasing her out. So it was with a mixture of relief and misgivings when, over ritual Sunday morning scrambled eggs and tofu at Hugo’s, she told me the mechanic’s role had been cut, in the service of a greater good — she would soon debut as Ambassador Trothex, the formidable Vorbalidian diplomat featured in none other than “Prodigal Son (Episode 21-417A),” Thad’s upcoming two-part extravaganza. It was a meaty role but one I thought exclusive to that particular story; I had trouble seeing how it would recur. Anyhow, we didn’t get into that. The new makeup, she said, was different enough that audiences wouldn’t recognize her from her previous incarnation. (I wondered how they were going to deal with the complete change of character from a PR standpoint; but again, not my “wheel house.”) I was genuinely happy for her. I saw the hand of Thad Michelet — perhaps even my father’s divine intervention — in her promotion, and was intrigued the three of us would be working together on a more level playing field than I’d anticipated.
~ ~ ~
COMMANDER WILL KARP HAILED FROM KANSAS City, Missouri (according to the writers, who themselves hailed from Harvard and Yale). A highly decorated gunner, he was a veteran of the Nardian Wars. Ladies man and marginal wit, he retained the chauvinistic whiff and wink of old Star Legion glory days.
Some “bible” backstory: Karp — uh, that would be me — was the son of a legendary warrior who, after a disfiguring battle wound, became the academy professor and beloved mentor of Frederick Ulysses Laughton, current fifty-something African-American captain of the distinctively ellipsoid, overmerchandized Starwatch mothership USS Demeter. Along with Laughton, I joined Lieutenant Commander Iltriko Shazuki (relatively new to the show, she’d been a minor player on Will and Grace and recently staged a satirical one-woman show at a theater on Cahuenga, playing nearly twenty characters); Major Glaston Cabott 7, the captain’s all-purpose android-de-camp (a storied second-generation player in Chicago’s Steppenwolf group, and of H-P mascot fame); and Dr. Phineas Chaldorer a.k.a. X-Ray, the Demeter’s handlebar-mustachioed Sultan of Sickbay (having made a fortune as the Prius pitchman, he was rumored to own a microbrewery and a vineyard in the Malibu Hills). I was already friendly with our congenial ensemble — most were in AA — but will maintain character names throughout, to avoid confusion.
The morning we did our usual preshoot read through, sitting around a table while the writers fine-tuned dialogue, Mr. Michelet was in subdued, if friendly, spirits. Not wishing to broadcast their relationship, Thad and Clea were careful about hanging out. They fraternized in a cordially standoffish way, as if to throw us off the scent. I found it silly because I didn’t think anyone gave a shit but since I’d concealed my own affair with Miriam, I tried withholding judgment. I was that big a person.
Michelet was a hit with cast and crew. Getting him on the show was considered a coup that raised everyone’s stock. The fact that he was a Renaissance man with a long, prestigious résumé was a balm to the large part of our troupe who felt they’d sold out, or at least lost sight of one-time lofty goals and aspirations. The gang lit up whenever he walked in the room. Even if, deep down, they knew life on the bridge was as good as it would ever get, all were warmed by his fire and its inherent promise of escape from the golden wormhole of artistically stagnant sci-fi syndication. Besides, the man had made real money out there. The actors were well versed in Black Jack’s harsh legend and recent passing, and when comfortable enough to give voice (it only took a few days), the complicatedly bereaved son found himself touched by their concise, carefully chosen words of sympathy. It was a gift of Thad’s that he could relate to the most pretentious of cast and roughest of Teamsters, snaking his way into hearts with the ease of, well, the microbial parasite that took the genial shape of a traveling circus clown in “The Ringmaster Cometh (Episode 14-321D).” Our close-knit soundstage family was ready to kill for him before filming even began.
On the first day of the shoot, I hovered at the bridge near my marks while actors took places for camera rehearsal. Clea coyly whispered to the A.D. something about Thad being “delayed” in the makeup trailer — a detail the man no doubt was aware of. (With all her caginess, I thought it oddly reckless.) The grapevine had it that our beloved guest star was of a mind he looked asinine in his facial prosthetic, and the makeup department, Emmyless for fourteen seasons running, was in an agitated funk. A couple of coproducers were dispatched to mollify Mr. M; after an hour or so, the director called “Action!” anyway.
We got as far as Thad’s entrance and were about to block the rest of the scene with a camera double when he finally appeared, stepping from the shadows in a drab ensign’s uniform, his countenance a macabre yet somehow tender dodecahedron of glinting latex planes — grand variation of Clea’s lower-caste Vorbalid mug. The utilitarian outfit, deliberately duller than those of the workaday crew (a brilliant stroke, I thought) made the physiognomy fabulously theatrical; like a peacock in a Pep Boys jumpsuit, we saw only the clipped tragedy of aborted phosphorescence. A hush fell over the stage.
“Ecce Vorbalid,” Thad proclaimed, with Lear-like abandon, beaming gregariously through the geometry of applied flesh. Not many knew what those words meant but everyone sensed that at last he was pleased. The ice was broken, and the majesty of his creation acknowledged with a burst of applause. The makeup folks, pardoned by the king, lifted their collective heads from the guillotine.
We were surrounded by windows. Not windows, really, but their facsimiles — cutouts from which one peered at “star curtains,” the crude, perennial backdrops that provided the illusion of deep space.
For those who aren’t fans of the genre,1 let me shorten and summarize: I was poised behind Lieutenant Commander Shazuki, peering over her shoulder while the harried communicator tried to make sense of a hash of data on the plasma screen. Waiting for camera to roll, I focused on the sexy, cyclonic hair swirls on the actor’s neck and my mind went off on a jag — youngish people in the news who of late were dying of sudden, unexplained aneurysms; the catching up I had to do with TiVo (Venom ER and SeaLab 2021 were auto-deleting right and left); the spam calls I was getting on my cell phone from “pharmacies” wanting to sell me Oxycodone — when suddenly Shazuki began talking about some weird “energy ingot” which had appeared out of nowhere. She was referring to a photon probe (I couldn’t believe the writers were still using that one) that gauged the so-called ingot to be just a meter wide, “an impossibility according to all known laws of physics.” Reflexively, I told Shazuki to keep an eye on it — it was probably just expansion gas. (I always got expansion gas after a good photon probe.) At this point, Android Cabott 7, the butt, if I may, of most of my heavy-metal humor, whooshed through the central door of the bridge.2