How One Episode Of Star Trek Granted Me TV Privileges in Our House

THINGS GET MYTHOLOGICAL WHEN MAX GLADSTONE TELLS US ABOUT HIS FAVORITE EPISODE.

We didn’t watch television when I was a kid. We had a television, yes, for Olympics and election nights, but most of the time it sat on my folks’ dresser, a boxy gray-black paperweight.

(This article originally appeared on The Back of the Box, the blog of Serial Box Publishing. Serial Box is the premier publisher of serialized fiction. Learn more at SerialBox.com)

My TV-suspicious parents are high school teachers, World History and World Literature, starting with Sumer and Gilgamesh and working to the modern era. When I was a kid, we read books, we played games, we told stories and went to concerts, but we didn’t watch.

But I watched sometimes, at friends’ houses after school or on sleepover Saturday mornings — and that was how I first saw Star Trek. I was young, and the Druhots showed my sister and me a Borg episode (I think it was I, Hugh), and I was hooked.

I spent the next week convincing my parents to watch with me. “Star Trek is really cool! It’s not like other television! Try an episode, you’ll see!”

They agreed, which probably should have unnerved me more at the time. The fate of my televised future hung on a randomly chosen episode of The Next Generation. But what did I know? At the time, I thought they were all good.

So, when the Chosen Night arrived, I turned on the TV and showed them — “Darmok”.

For those of you who aren’t Star Trek fans, which, why not?, Darmok is the episode where Captain Picard is stuck on a planet with an alien whose language, at first, appears untranslatable — until Picard realizes he’s communicating in mythological references.

And so, at a critical moment, Jean-Luc Picard must connect with his alien comrade by telling tales. And out of all the stories in the world, he chooses the tale of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

We watched Star Trek every week after that.

Check it out:

“Darmok” Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 5, episode 2

Max Gladstone is the Lead Writer on Bookburners, and a team writer on The Witch Who Came In From The Cold, both from Serial Box. He was thrown from a horse in Mongolia, drank almond milk with monks on Wudang Shan, and wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. Max is also the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards — Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow. Max fools everyone by actually writing novels in the coffee shops of Davis Square in Somerville, MA. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect. He tweets as @maxgladstone and can be found online at MaxGladstone.com.

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Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on October 19, 2015.