A Dispatch on Future Dispatches

Upcoming issues and exploding, bug-eating Starfleet officers

I’m still referring to this year as having just started, even though we’re close to wrapping up February. I reckon it’s time to get back into the groove. For a month or so it was me wrestling with the issue of Substack as a company taking the ol’ “Nazis are just the price of doing business” defense for the proliferation of, y’know, Nazi stuff on Substack. I’m still ambivilant about using Substack as a result, but I am also slow to make up my mind. Another part of the delay has been, as is always the case, me wondering what I’m doing here, how it vibes with things I’m doing elsewhere, and whether I should be concentrating on getting actual paying writing gigs instead of fooling around with my own sites. I started asking myself that question around 1998 and have yet to supply myself with a good answer, so I doubt it’ll come to me any time soon.

That means the nature of this newsletter, as well as the nature of any website I may be running or writing for, will continue to avoid having any sort of definite form or purpose, no matter how many times I write something proclaiming that I’ve finally cracked the riddle.

As of today, however, I have some thoughts.

It’s unlikely that Suburban Pagans the Substack newsletter will continue to feature full reviews. Those will be appearing elsewhere and will be linked to from here; or an occasional review will appear here, but it will be relatively short. There are many things I enjoy and want to promote but can’t work up a full review around. In place of a full review, Suburban Pagans will feature more personal musings and updates (sort of like this, this, and this for you eleven old timers who have been here since the beginning) that, more times than not, represent some undercurrent or experience that informs what I’m doing elswhere. For example, I’m working on a series of scripts for a television show. Nothing that has much hope of being finished or, even if it was finished, resulting in anything, but a project which I am nevertheless enjoying, learning from, and occassionally even a little proud of. I may pop in here from time to time to write about the process, how the exercise of writing a script has benefited my skills at writing about film, and maybe drop a teaser or two about what’s in the screenplays.

I also plan to include two regular spots in this newsletter. The first will be a short review/commentary about an episode of one of the TV programs I’m watching. Nothing recent, mind you. I’m talking Miami Vice, Jason King, Space: 1999, The Avengers, The Prisoner—programs of that vintage, plus maybe the occasional episode of Star Trek: Voyager. The second regular spot will be me paying homage to/ripping off Scarred for Life (the books and the podcast, both of which I highly recommend) by featuring a “Childhood Scar of the Week”—some program, movie, story, or experience that left an indelible mark on me. Please note that the weekly Scar of the Week feature may not appear weekly.

Subscription to this newsletter recently broke the 50 mark, which doesn’t fill a stadium but is very much appreciated. I find that, although there are more options than ever for “reaching an audience,” those options are junkier, less effective, and harder to navigate, as they are largely driven by algorithms that determine who/what can generate the most ad revenue or data that can be resold. When I started my first website, Teleport City, in 1998, there was no Google, no social media, and no effective way to search the web. Yet the site enjoyed tremendous global success thanks to online word of mouth, discussion groups, and “webrings” of like-minded writers who promoted one another. I suppose it also helped that there were a lot fewer choices for your cult cinema studies entertainment. Not to “these days” like an old man, but these days, even Google is inundated with system-gaming junk sites that half-assedly scrape data from the IMDB or generate garbled AI-produced nonsense onto a useless site that exists to serve revenue-generating ads. They exploit “search engine optimization” to clutter search results, and there’s no easy way to customize your searches to exclude the ever-growing number of them. That makes it difficult to find or have found what your actually looking for, which is a thoughtful human-authored review of Zombi 3.

On top of that, the trend overall has moved away from websites altogether and toward podcasts and videos for Youtube and TikTok. There’s a lot of great ones out there. I just don’t have th energy to try and be one of them. Those I know who are fighting in those mediums have to spend more time “building a personal brand” and trying to satisfy “the algorithm” than they do actually working on what they want to say. And yes, I have the oldster’s distaste for referring to it as “content creation,” though I know that’s largely a generational semantic thing, like insisting “I don’t make movies; I make films”—and I hate those people, though I will die on the hill of urging people not to refer to a series, characters, or anything else, no matter how big and commercial, as “IP.”

My fellow film writers, leave that degrading shit to the lawyers and accountants.

The need to cultivate a personal brand extends to writing for print, as many publishers become less and less willing to consider authors who don’t cultivate a wide-reaching, active social media presence. My social media presence is a few people on Threads talking about Formula 1, the WNBA (Go Libs!), and the NWSL (Go Bats!); and me on Instagram mostly looking at 1) places I want to go, 2) food I want to eat, 3) outfits I want to wear, and 4) bulldogs trying and failing to jump up onto things. Otherwise, social media is there for me to direct message a few friends scattered across the globe. While I enjoy these aspects of it, I don’t enjoy much else about social media and I have the typical Gen X aversions to self-promotion, personal brand building, and “selling out.”

Not to use any of that as an excuse. I admit that the collapse of my writing career has largely been the product of my own laziness in pursuing it (since, even before “personal brand building,” writing was a constant hustle). Still, it’s often frustrating and can feel like hollering (about Sun Ra records and Umberto Lenzi’s Ghost House) into the abyss. Writing is a personal excercise for me, sure, but it’s also nice to know that if you are writing for the public, there’s a public there to read it.

Anyway, so that this issue is something more than a litany of grievances and self-incrimination, here’s the the inaugural…

Childhood Scar of the Week

What the fuck, Star Trek: The Next Generation???

Most of the time, the Scar of the Week will be something from childhood, one of those classic slices of horrifying entertainment that 1970s/80s attitudes decided was fine for children, no matter how harrowing it may have been. And most of the time, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a reserved and polite show, the kindest and best-behaved series of the Star Trek franchise.

So I thought I’d kick off this series with an entry that violates both of those assumptions.

The TNG episode “Conspiracy” aired in 1988. I was a teenager with a driver’s license and a healthy love of bloody horror films. I was well outside of the range in which television shows should have been scarring me for life. I was a moderate TNG fan, at best. It wasn’t must-watch TV (that first season was, to say the least, uneven), but I watched it when I happened across it. Amidst its sort of dull characters in dull uniforms drinking tea and having conversations came “Conspiracy,” a dark, gory, paranoid episode featuring lizard-eating Starfleet officers, mouth bugs, and exploding human bodies lovingly depicted in janky old TV slow-mo.

On the Scarred for Life podcast, they frequently talk about how the most traumatizing entertainment shocks happen because of the ambush—something terrifying in a place that is not supposed to be terrifying. TNG was definitely not terrifying. And yet…this fucking episode!

Gene Roddenberry hated it and considered it the antithesis of everything he meant Star Trek to represent. It was bleak. It was upsetting and had a depressing ending. It depicted a future and a Starfleet that was corruptible and full of giggling weirdos. And above all, it was gross. Usually, getting phasered makes someone fall down or, at worst, soft of fade out in a blaze of swirling animation. But when Riker and Picard phaser a parasite-infected Starfleet officer in “Conspiracy,” he explodes like something out of a Lucio Fulci movie. The camera lingers on this meat-draped bloody torso with an exposed rib cage. Gore may be common on TV now, but in 1988? You could barely get away with an affect like that in an R-rated movie. How the hell did it slip onto prime-time broadcast TV??

And as if that wasn’t enough, it ends with the revelation that this was just one hive of the insidious infestation/takeover. Others are out there, manipulating Starfleet into an increasingly dark place. Granted, the episode was so controversial that TNG never picked up the thread, but still. The idea would be resurrected, sort of, in season 3 of Picard, although in that story it’s shapeshifters from the Gamma Quadrant that have infiltrated Starfleet Command (a direct continuation of the “Dominion War” arc from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).

So, “Conspiracy.” A shock that scars and delights me to this day.