One of the shows that Alan and Isabelle and I all enjoyed was Futurama. It had just the right mix of Simpsons style and wit, and Family Guy edge.
When Mom and Dad lived in DeForest, we spent a lot of time in the basement watching episodes of Futurama and Star Trek. We watched weird movies. We discussed the weird little trivia about these shows, like the episode of Enterprise that seems to be ripped off from a Voyager episode. Concerning Futurama, two big things came up: that the theme song was from an old French piece from the early days of electronic music.
The other was that Leela's name was from the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Messiaen. It seems there were a lot of links to weird modern French music. When I looked more into this particular piece of music, I decided that it was one of my life goals to own an ondes Martenot.
This was a time of transition for Alan. He had really face-planted after dropping out of school at Beloit, but after a couple months of moping, he started to pull himself together. He was more goal-oriented than he had been in a long time academically. We only got little tastes of his struggles -- the injuries from jumping a fence impulsively one night, the occasional pulling away from our inquiries. We really had hope that things were going to continue to get better.
One of the things we talked about often over the years was Star Trek. I had started to watch The Next Generation when it was still on air, and watched straight through to the end. In residency, I watched the entirety of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise on Netflix again. One of the hot Trekkie debates is about Enterprise, not just whether it was good or not, not whether it should ever have existed, but why they chose such a horrible theme song.
Here are the theme songs:
Listen to the themes in The Original Series. At 0:48, you have TNG, and you will hear (reduplicated) the same thematic material in the beginning leading up to a retooled main theme. At 4:08, the DS9 theme song clearly echoes the opening with a changed up rhythm. At 7:45, VOY, the opening twists the melody a bit, and then brings it back to the original series theme with the upward phrase at 8:44.
They are all thematically linked. They are all classically instrumented.
Then, in Enterprise, they went with non-classical and vocal. Even worse, there's a double negative at 9:50, much worse than the split infinitive in the first two (to boldly go). At 10:10, there's "strenth." Strenth. What the heck is strenth?
My favorite episode changes from time to time, but currently is from sixth season of DS9, entitled,"Far Beyond the Stars." In it, the actors play science fiction writers in the 1950s, in a time before the civil rights movement. There's a Taoist "who is the dreamer" theme suggestive of the butterfly story in Zhuangzi/Chuang-tzu (which both Alan and I read for school). Here's a clip from the beginning.
Alan's favorite episode of all the shows was from the sixth season of DS9 as well, entitled, "In the Pale Moonlight." In it, Sisko, the main protagonist of the series, compromises his morals for the greater good.
I strongly (or stronly) suggest you go and watch this entire episode on Netflix, but if you are 100% sure you won't, or if you've already seen it, here's the extremely powerful end monologue.
This episode briefly came up in our last conversation on Saturday night. He couldn't think of the name of the episode, but we had discussed it before, and I knew.
Maybe the first event that truly shook Alan's sense of whether he was a good person or not happened in Madison when he was working and taking community college courses. He was at a party, and a kid came out the shadows next to the house he was standing in front of. The kid started to yell, "You looking at me?" and tried to pick a fight with Alan. Alan couldn't remember what happened next, and could only patch together the details in bits and pieces. He described it as being "redded out" in anger. Alan ended up leaving the house with blood on him, and the kid had hit his head hard, ending up in the ICU. The police determined that the kid instigated it (captured on security camera), and that there was no evidence that Alan did anything wrong. They may have fallen down the stairs together while Alan was trying to get away. No charges were filed, but Alan wondered what exactly happened. He wondered what evil might be within him. What exactly did he do?
Until that point, I think his thoughts about good and evil were abstract and disconnected from reality. After that event, good and evil were real, and he didn't know which he was. That uncertainty, that ambiguity, fascinated him, drew him to things like that episode of Star Trek, but it also tortured him.
How do you convince a 21 or 22 year old deep thinker that everyone has good and bad in them, that there were more pragmatic things that he needed to focus on to get through daily life? How do you convince someone who had already started to question whether life was worth living that he shone a light into the lives of so many others -- his family, his friends, the homeless guy he befriended, the people who had nobody else?
The night he told me about his demons, we talked in an alley between two parts of Isabelle's condo building next to the air conditioners. He sat on a window ledge and smoked a cigarette. I find myself going there now, sitting in the moonlight, staring up at a flickering streetlamp, wondering how it could have gone differently. And how I will ever move on without him. I come up empty-handed.
