Not So Boldly Going

He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.

Like, look at this stuff????

It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!

Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.

And then there's this one:

The Fantasy

For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.

The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.

But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.

Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.

This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.

"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.

"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.

This is his art.

You can't forget this, the first art made in space.

and data said well as i am an android i posess no such sense as well. however i do have excellent ballance. and kept painting. and then data said many art theorists would argue that aesthetics as a concept are actually counterproductive to art, as the pursuit of art should include expressing emotions and evoking sensations in the viewer, and the traditional sense of beauty inhibits this.

and then he kept painting (some sort of surrealist disembodied head floating through a geometric maze of connected rooms) and the next thing he said his voice sounded a little different, quieter: as an android, i have no emotions to express. but before weyoun could reply he turned around and handed him a painbrush and said: perhaps you'd like to try, mr. weyoun?

and then there's a cut. cue A plot. next scene we see weyoun and data paint side by side quietly. close up on weyoun's canvas. it's a writhing dark mass of fuzzy shapes and distorted figures. inside of it you can make out thousand of little faces with their mouths twisted open in fear or screaming, eyes open, closed, some without arms or legs, clutching their injuries. dark fluid streaks down from them to the edge of the canvas, dripping to the floor, like tears or blood. in the background, a mountain of corpses. if you step away from it, the whole composition makes a sillhuete of a founder.

that is most illuminating, said data.

yes, I can. You are being Reginald Barclay rn, who no one liked, who was addicted to interacting with holo-people, who had ISSUES.

The first episode of Star Trek EVER, the Cage, follows the Talosians, a race of people who became so reliant on entertainment via the creation of illusion that they lost the ability to do ANYTHING for themselves in real life because the illusion was COMFORTING AND PREDICTABLE.

It’s odd to me as well, because so many fans and critics praise DS9 for its willingness to be critical of the Federation and of Starfleet, and yet I see relatively little acknowledgment of how much of that criticism is accomplished through the character of Bashir (alongside, of course, Sisko). His infamous “frontier medicine” line is the very first example - it completely upends the ethos on which Star Trek rests, and it’s placed in his mouth. That matters, given that that he is set up as a character who believes in the utopia in which he grew up, and whose altruism is well-intentioned but shown to be naïve. That’s why he’s paired with Sisko in Past Tense, in which he’s shocked by the injustices of the past; it’s why we have episodes like The Quickening, which demonstrates without a doubt that his heroic impulses are good and worthwhile, but need to be tempered by humility.

And two of the arcs that are the most sharply critical of the Federation - namely, the augment thread and the Section 31 subplot - both centre Bashir. That’s not an accident. Those arcs raise all manner of questions related to institutional corruption and self-protection, the narrow standards of normalcy in Federation society, disposability and unpersonhood, the degree to which moral standards can be stretched for the greater good (similar questions to those raised by In the Pale Moonlight), etc.

"Man I sure do love this show about people and exploring space, I wish i could do that! .......... I am gonna do that"

Re: blorbo from my research, here is my favorite ever case study. I'm obsessed with it.

Summary:

- Guy presents to neurology with muscle issues, very clearly has something going on but diagnostic tests are inconclusive

- History is mostly unremarkable. Key word, mostly. He drinks four liters of plain Earl Grey tea per day. For context this is nearly twice the recommended daily fluid intake. All fluids, to be clear, not just tea. He only drinks tea tho

- Bergamot is known to be phototoxic in high doses (reacts badly on your skin with sunlight)

- APPARENTLY nobody previously has consumed enough of it for it to be widely known that it is also, apparently, mildly toxic to ingest in high doses