help me im a worm

It’s difficult to fully articulate the hold that Patrick Stewart had on audiences when TNG was airing. Between the hundreds of magazine covers, the talk show circuits, and the paparazzi nonsense, the amount of baldness puns editors were compelled to create was astounding.

It was like the media fixated on this man because he had catastrophic levels of charisma and audiences were losing their minds over him (TNG was regularly beating network shows in ratings), yet he was so far removed from the narrow Hollywood standards of beauty that it vexed and haunted these people for years.

Baldness was a joke in Hollywood. 75% of George Costanza's identity revolved around bald jokes. If you were a bald actor, you were cast as a villain or a buffoon, never the hero. And if you were losing your hair, you had to slap a wig on or risk losing your career. Yul Brynner was somewhat of an exception but he was from a much different generation of Hollywood and even Bruce Willis didn't fully shave his head until 1994 (post TNG success incidentally).

In Patrick Stewart's case, there was often an undercurrent of snide putdowns with many interviewers, drawing focus to his baldness over and over and over again with low hanging jokes. It was like you could see their vanity-based paradigms cracking in real time and it was strange to witness. Imagine how bizarre it would be if talk show hosts today could only ask The Rock, Vin Diesel, or Jason Statham about their bald heads.

But karma swooped in to the rescue. In 1992 Stewart was voted TV Guide's "Sexiest Man on Television" with a whopping 54% of votes. He beat out the likes of Luke Perry, John Corbett, A. Martinez, and even Burt Reynolds (with a total of 20 contenders).

The middle-aged bald guy in the syndicated sci-fi show beat out the hottest of the Hot Guys™️ and it wasn't even remotely close.

^ Bald joke

Level 2: We shouldn't treat mental health facilities as objects of horror because it stigmatises mental illness.

Red: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Orange: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Yellow: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Lime: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Green: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Teal: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Blue: Sexy

Purple: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Black: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Brown: Nonbinary, Pansexual, They/Them

Deep Space Nine 4x3, “The Visitor”

I adore how Benjamin Sisko encourages and nurtures his son’s fledgling writing career, while also ensuring that Jake doesn’t let life pass him by. That’s a tough balance to strike, but you can tell that Benjamin does it and does it well by Jake’s response at the close of this conversation: Ben promises to read and discuss what Jake’s written so far if Jake will just come watch the wormhole with him; Jake says “Deal.” Jake lets Ben read his drafts, and values his father’s insight! Let me tell you, when I was Jake’s age I was secretive af about my writing; I didn’t like my parents to know it existed and I certainly never let them read a word of it. Jake trusts his father, respects his father, because Benjamin does the work to ensure that Jake knows how loved and respected he is.

This exchange is even more poignant when you know which episode of DS9 this is – it’s the one where, just minutes after this conversation, Benjamin is zapped by the warpcore and eventually discovered to be not dead, but lost in subspace. Jake is devastated by the loss of his father, his greatest supporter; and for all the long decades of his life, he is unable to gain closure for his grief because Ben is not dead, but truly, simply, “lost.” Not unlike his father, Jake drifts through the years – unable to make marriage work, scarcely able to write, because the need to help his father who had so often helped him eats at him so intensely.

“It’s life, Jake! You can miss it if you don’t open your eyes” – or if you are too overcome by grief without closure to pursue your own joy. But, spoiler alert for the episode, the love between father and son wins out – at the close of his long life adrift, Jake saves his father and gives them both a second chance to live life together.

Executive producer Ira Steven Behr wrote: “A love stronger than death. Usually that’s romantic love, but for this show, this series, we chose the love between a father and son” (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, p. 270.

In her article on DS9′s revolutionary depiction of Black fatherhood, Angelica Jade Bastién writes:

“No series before or since has a portrayed a black father with such complexity, crafting him as a widow, a powerful authority figure, a religious icon, a man whose morals are formed in shades of gray and whose love of his son remained his guiding principle.