The Truth (Might) Be in Here

In my continuing quest to figure out what geek means, why geeks are “in” right now, and and how to make any of this useful in an academic sense, I was thinking the other day about Patton Oswalt’s Wired article, “Wake Up Geek Culture, it’s Time to Die.”  Long story short, Oswalt basically argues that its too easy to be a geek now, that the Internet makes obsessing with things too easy, since you can just go read the Wikipedia entry instead of tracking down every back issue of a comic book.

I think the Internet does make answering the question of “How is geek culture created and performed?” a lot easier, but I’m not sure it entirely answers why geeks are “in” right now.  I think I have an idea that might help to answer that, although it certainly doesn’t answer it by itself.

It’s Chris Carter’s fault.

Now, when I say “fault” I don’t mean that Carter is to be blamed for a bad thing.  What I mean is that The X-Files changed the world.  Or it might be less dramatic.  It’s like this:

Geeks are, and I would agree that this is not wrong, commonly associated with science fiction, fantasy, super heroes, and horror.  I will shorten this list to “speculative fiction” for  now since I don’t want to type all that out over and over.  There has always been a place in book sales, film, and television for speculative fiction, and there have been some very popular and successful examples of all these genres in all these mediums.  I’ll take two shows as example, Star Trek, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, because I’m a born again Trekker, and they make my point pretty well.

Star Trek ran from 1966 to 1969, canceled before it’s natural demise for reasons I’m not getting into here (like so much speculative fiction on TV).  It launched an entire sub-culture, and so when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, it had a built in fan base, which then expanded beyond just the Trekkers, spawning three more TV shows and some movies.

Let me return to speculative fiction for a bit.  These shows, such as Star Trek, usually involve a significant amount of setting information, the show’s mythology, which can be daunting for first time viewers.  Star Trek is pretty episodic, and the characters can be figured out pretty easily with only an episode or two under your belt, but the perceived investment can really throw people off.  More casual TV watchers, especially people who aren’t into speculative fiction in the first place, might be put off by the implied legwork of understanding the mythology and world in which Star Trek exists.  The same goes for Star Trek: The Next Generation, possibly even more so.

So fast forward to 1993, and the debut of The X-Files.  The X-Files has a complex mythology, by the end of the 9 seasons (the longest running science fiction show until Stargate SG-1 eclipsed it), there was a ton of complicated backstory and arcs and sub-plots and etc.  But, like Star Trek, the generally episodic nature of the show meant that you could jump in and understand the characters and the world they inhabited with ease.

Let’s focus on that world for a minute.  Star Trek is set in the 23rd century, it has Vulcans and Romulans and the United Federation of Planets, and it has technobabble (which becomes even worse in later shows).  The X-Files is set in the real world.  If you were alive at the time the show was on, it automatically made sense to you, especially in the early 1990s when conspiracy theories and alien abductions were still very much a part of popular culture.  The learning curve for that setting and mythology was really low, it was like chess: minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master.

The X-Files was incredibly popular, and rightfully so, and I think that was in no small part because it was immediately accessible in a way that Star Trek: The Next Generation wasn’t.  So a speculative fiction show was popular, so what?  Those things are all over TV now!  Yeah, now.  We might not have Once Upon a Time, or Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, or Smallville without The X-Files.  There is no way Lost would have worked before Carter changed the world.

The reason The X-Files changed the world is because it was so accessible, and people got hooked.  The show gained popularity, and brought in more and more fans who might not have considered themselves speculative fiction types.  Now, sure, these people aren’t the die hard, spend hours on forums discussing minutiae of the show fans, but those fans (the ones who are more readily deemed geeks) aren’t the focus of this essay.  It’s the casual fans.

Those casual fans, sucked into a show about government conspiracies that had freaking monsters in it (Eugene Toombs is terrifying, still, and I haven’t watched The X-Files since the late 1990s), found themselves more likely to watch other speculative shows.  Like Smallville, or Buffy: The Vampire Slayer or, eventually, Lost.  The X-Files mainstreamed speculative fiction by making is easy to jump into the mythology.  Getting into Star Wars is easy, it’s two hours of your life and you can walk away, but Star Trek takes work.  The X-Files removed that work, and made people realize that they not only like speculative fiction, but that they might be willing to give other, less immediately accessible shows a try, because the pay off might be worth it.

So Chris Carter is, at least partially, to blame for mainstreaming geek culture.  More specifically, for mainstreaming a part of geek culture, which for many of us is what defines something as a part of geek culture.  Is the popularity of The X-Files the only reason?  No, of course not, but I think it’s a contributing factor.

Performing and Policing Identity: The Example of “Casual Gamers”

For those of you that don’t know, Felicia Day has a show on Youtube called The Flog, where she (typically) talks about five things she thinks are cool, then does something creative or silly (like learning to sculpt ice, or playing old video games with her brother), then answers a viewer question.  This week (the episode for June 11), she teamed up with Jason Charles Miller (who has a pretty eclectically awesome resume) to record a county song called “Gamer Girl, Country Boy.”  I’m not here to talk about the song (it’s awesome) or country music (which I have a complex relationship with).  What I want to talk about are some of the issues that came up in the comments on the video.

Ms. Day has a blog about her own reaction to the comments, which I’m linking here for you to read, but to summarize, they come down to two main themes: “gamer girls” are bad, and casual gamers are bad.  The concept of the “gamer girl” is too complex to get into here, and I’ve already discussed the portrayal of women in geek culture in an earlier post (although I only grazed that subject), so I’m going to focus on the latter.

People who don’t identify as gamers probably don’t know what “casual gamers” are, and there’s a good reason for this: casual gamers aren’t a thing.  It works something like this.  Gamer is an identity, and gaming is a subculture, and like all subcultures, people move in an out of it in different ways and at different times.  People who take gaming, table top or video gaming, very seriously, or for whom it occupies a significant amount of their time, tend to identify themselves as gamers.

What makes something a subculture is that it can be identified as something unique, but part of what prevents it from being a counterculture, is that it isn’t totally separable from the mainstream culture.*  To provide two quick examples: The US and Japan both have strong gaming cultures, and while these cultures share things in common, lending credence to the idea of a gamer subculture that does not follow specific national lines, they have aspects that are inherently national; American and Japanese gamers enjoy different kinds of games for different, culturally determined reasons (not that Americans don’t enjoy Japanese games and vice versa); both are subcultures of their larger national cultures.  So this gaming subculture has its own language, its own traditions, myths, a shared history, assumptions about correct and incorrect activities, etc.  Belonging to the gaming subculture, allows people to use the identity gamer.

The tricky part is who gets to apply that identity.  There are a lot of people who identify themselves as gamers, and far more that do not.  As video games (and this is mostly about video games), become ever more common and easily accessible, they become more acceptable within the mainstream.  It used to be that if you played video games and followed the industry news and maybe participated in conversations (online or in person) about those things, you were a gamer.  I firmly believe that this is still the prevailing definition.  Playing video games used to be more expensive, time consuming, and difficult (this can all still be very true).

The recent profusion of games on cell phones, as well as social networking websites, and various flash based games scattered around the internet, has led to the creation of a subgenera known as casual games.  These are games that require little effort, are often free or very cheap, and are accessible to just about anybody.  I don’t think my mom has played a console game since probably Atari (if even then), but she’s played Peggle and Bejeweled.  Does this make her a gamer?  No, because she doesn’t identify as such.  I play video games almost daily, and play a variety of table-top games, like Dungeons and Dragons and Warmachine, very often, does this make me a gamer?  No, but the fact that I do these things and identify as a gamer does.

All this brings me back to Felicia Day.  Although she certainly self identifies as a gamer, Ms. Day has always made it a point not to attack people that play casual games, the so-called “casual gamers.”  There are a lot of people who do not share this idea with her; they decry “casuals” as infecting the culture, as not real gamers, and their games as destroying the industry.

Anyone who knows anything about the industry knows that A) casual gaming is helping, if anything, and B) the industry’s problems are much deeper and more intricate than peoples’ mom’s playing that fish tank game on Facebook.  And I don’t have the room or the knowledge to really address that, but you can find lots of intelligent people who do, and will, all over the internet.

Like I’ve said, people who play casual games, but do not play “hardcore” games (basically anything that you have to drop $60 on and requires a powerful computer or a gaming console) by and large do not consider themselves gamers, and do not consider themselves part of the culture.  So why do gamers care?  Why have they manufactured an enemy to attack?  A perfect scape-goat that will never fight back because they don’t exist?

Because they are performing the identity of gamer.  Performing an identity is like playing a part on stage, you do and say the things that your character (your identity) would do.  Playing games lets you identify as a gamer, but talking about that is what allows you to show other people that you’re a gamer.  Because saying “I’m a gamer” will result in other gamers asking you about the games you play; if you can’t answer, if you can’t perform that identity, then you aren’t actually a gamer.

Another part of performing an identity is policing it, ensuring that the boundaries of that identity don’t mesh with other identities or become so fluid that people can slip in and out of it.  Every actor on stage has to help make sure every other actor is playing their part correctly, else the play is a mess.  So gamers test other self-professed gamers, challenging them to perform their identity.  Both the challenge and the response are aspects of the performance.  In this way, people with a given identity make sure that others with that identity are actually performing it, and vice versa.

The problem at the core of this particular issue is that many gamers don’t consider casual games to be worthy of inclusion in the subculture, and so people who play these games exclusively are not considered members of the culture.  Lest the identity and performance of “gamer” become diluted, they must be held at bay, kept out, and derided.  If they are let in?  Than the identity becomes muddied, and if everyone with a game installed on their iPhone or Facebook is a gamer, than membership in the subculture stops meaning anything, it stops being special.

There are deeper aspects to this, such as the guy who owns an Xbox but only plays sports games or the occasional overwhelmingly popular shooter or driving game not being “real gamers” (an opinion that I once held but have since given up), or the horror of a “girl gamer” who only plays games with her partner.  Or the absurdity of bikini clad models that may or may not game in real life playing games in ads because scantily clad women get attention (especially in an industry primarily marketed for and at presumably heterosexual men).  This post has gone on long enough so I won’t go into any of this except to say that this post only grazes the surface of something.

The long and short of it is that gamer, like any identity, is performed and policed by the people who claim it, and sometimes that entails attacking people who are not perceived as performing that identity, or not performing it correctly.  The “casual gamer” example is one that has probably not cost many people a lot of sleep, but it’s a good example of how this works.

 

* To clarify, ”the distinguishing feature of counterculturism is its programmatic quality, the presence of an ideology that defends deviant behavior in the name of some progressive ideal.” (Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present, page 262)  I like Kett’s definition but it could use a bit of translation: basically a counterculture provides an alternate way of living life that is directly at odds with one or more aspects of the mainstream culture, good examples would be the hippies and the punks.  What makes gaming a subculture is that it doesn’t reject the mainstream in any strong or programmatic way, it in fact is completely reliant on post-World War II consumer culture, and would utterly die without it.  Gamers, in short, make terrible punks.

A Brief Exploration of Misogyny and Homophobia in Geekdom

My very smart friend Matt has a blog about bodybuilding and academia.  Reading it has inspired me to post more on my own blog, and the specific post that I linked above, coupled with the image you see below, has inspired me to write this post in particular.

Now, for the sake of full disclosure, I think this lady is attractive, I also think steampunk is generally pretty cool.  People at cons do cosplay, and get their pictures taken, and by itself, I would think “Oh, a picture of an attractive lady doing steampunk cosplay, that’s nice,” and continue on with my life.  Let me tell you why seeing this pop up on my Facebook feed infuriated me.

Understanding why this bothers me requires you to know that much of geek culture bears a patina of sexism and homophobia.  Now, these things, coupled with racism, tend to manifest far more often (or at least with less subtlety) in anonymous spaces on the internet, like forums and chat in online multiplayer games, or screamed by teenagers playing Halo on XboxLive, than they do in any kind of official capacity.

The problem is primarily the text, and what it represents.  ”Nerds have this,” the poster exclaims, which is the first problem.  Now, the author is perhaps speaking in the abstract, but there’s a certain implied ownership of the female form.  Geeks are predominantly men, the numbers grow ever closer to equality, but its true, whether I like it or not.  With that comes a certain sense of patriarchy, a sense of geekdom as male space, in which women are either outsiders or objects.  You can see it everywhere you look within the mediums we embrace, be they video games, comic books, animation, live action films or tabletop games: women are objectified more often than they are presented as actual characters with depth.

When I brought up the idea of looking at gender in geek culture and community, a friend of mine mentioned how the two most common responses by fellow World of Warcraft players finding out she’s a woman are “girls can’t game,” and “boobs.”  Now she’s was speaking figuratively, few of them probably just typed BOOBS into chat, but don’t discount that possibility.  The fact is that the response tends towards one of dismissal, because she’s a woman she’s reduced to an inconvenience or an ornament, perhaps both.

“Sports Fans have homo-erotic displays of manliness,”  reads the punchline of the poster, which brings me to my next point: homophobia.  Play Halo or Gears of War online long enough (or, well, just about any game really) and you will eventually be called a fag, either because you aren’t good at the game, or because you’re too good at the game.  Homophobia is another dismissive tactic used in the community; by calling someone a fag, you’re implying that they’re less of a man than you are, making you the winner in the unspoken (and nonexistent) pissing contest.  Imply that sports fans are gay because they watch “homo-erotic displays?”  Well then that makes you better than those fags doesn’t it?

The result can be seen in this image.  Not only does it objectify women, but it dismisses a huge portion of the population that enjoys sports.  Now, I’m not really a sports fan, the only sport I can really pay attention too is hockey and even that has a hard time holding my interest, but I have seen a lot of sports.  What I have never seen is a single “homo-erotic display.”  I will say that John Barrowman and James Marsters having a violent make out in season two of Torchwood was incredibly homo-erotic.  It was also awesome but that’s beside the point.

Where does this patriarchy and homophobia come from?  Well in part from the same place it comes from in all cultures: male privilege.  But there is another aspect of geekdom, which is much thicker than a patina, it is perhaps a glaze, and that is elitism.  Geeks like their culture, and well they should, but it is a culture largely born out of the struggle and strife of adolescence and the cruel mocking of more popular or attractive kids in high school and college or, conversely, none of that because nobody cares about people they don’t actively associate with anymore (but that is a very different post).  The result is a tendency to think that geekdom, and its associated trappings, are the best, and that we enjoy these things because we are smarter or better than people who don’t, who can’t, because they don’t get it.

It becomes a defense, something that all subcultures have to adopt from time to time, to protect themselves from the culture at large, and as anyone can tell you, the best defense is a good offense.  So when the mainstream culture thinks you’re not manly because you like Star Trek or My Little Pony or play D&D, the reaction is to prove your own manliness, as it always is.  And, like it often does, that manifests in homophobia.  Calling another man gay implies that they are submissive during sex, and allow themselves to be penetrated.  Like a woman.  Its two for one oppression!

So here you have this image, which implies that nerds (which is not the correct term, I would maintain) are or at least have it better than sports fans, because we get to look at attractive women, and they watch men play games together, which is somehow gay.  What it actually implies nay, states, is that geeks are no better than the mainstream: both cultures contain members who are misogynistic and homophobic.  And both cultures need to reeducate those members.

 

 

What’s In A Name?

I haven’t posted anything here in far too long, so I decided to get back into the swing of things with a post about the blog itself.  Namely, why is it called owenstreetpress?

For those of you who don’t know (or may have forgotten) I have long been interested in game design, I’ve actually published some things in the d20 pdf market in the past, but all of my unique mechanics or settings have rotted on the vine, so to speak.  For a long time this hasn’t been a part of my life, although occasionally I’ll think back to the heyday of my pre-university life where I actually took game design more or less seriously.  Some may remember when I planned on making game design a full time career and thought college wasn’t for me.  It’s ironic that it was only after I realized that academia was my calling that I actually published something in the d20 world.

Well, for a while the idea of Owen Street Press being my own imprint for games and basically anything else I want to self publish, has been kicking around in the back of my head.  It’s only been relatively recently that I decided to start blogging again, and take that as an opportunity to force myself into at least making some aspect of Owen Street Press a reality.  Actually I guess it started with my twitter account, but still.

So far though, Owen Street Press has simply been my blog, or my tumblr before this, and most of my content has been about Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I’m fine with that, if I only posted about game design I would have posted… nothing, at least until now.

I currently have two games in the works, one has a complete set of rules and a [very slowly] growing list of cards, and the other has a rough idea for a mechanic and a gimmick.

The first, which is something I’ve been thinking about off and on for about a year now, is called Ruritania, a name that might mean something to historians of nationality or political scientists.  Ruritania is a card game in which players vie for political control of an imaginary state in inter-war Eastern Europe.  It’s very much intended for history nerds, but the game play (which hasn’t been tested yet) is complex enough to hopefully interest people who don’t know who Ernest Gellner is.  I have very serious plans to see this through to fruition, although I don’t have an actual time table for that.  I’d really like to begin play testing it soon, but I still have a lot of cards to come up with.

The other is called Heavy Metal Card Game, but that is only a terrible working title.  I came up with the idea while driving to Clinton Township and listening to Ronnie James Dio, appropriately enough.  In HMCG players represent metal bands trying to make it big, but not too big.  You play cards to generate a fan base.  Get enough fans and you win; but there’s a narrow window of victory, because too many fans makes you a sell out, and that makes you a loser.  It’s a lot simpler than Ruritania (but then heavy metal is a lot simpler than interwar Europe), but it does have a gimmick: every single card will be named either for a song title, or a lyric from a song, and will also contain a line of fluff text containing the opposite.  So if a card is called, for example, “Monsters Always Know,” the fluff text might read “…it’s Better in the Dark.”  That one works especially well, since the fluff text is both lyric and title!

Some Preemptive Thoughts on the Mass Effect 3 Demo

I downloaded the Mass Effect 3 demo the other day as soon as I found out that it was available.  But then I read Tycho’s post about it and now I’m wondering if I actually want to play the demo.

Let me be clear: Tycho had very good things to say about the demo, specifically the multiplayer part.  Now, I’ve never really cared much about online multiplayer, although I do love co-op and as far as I’m concerned that’s the only way to play a game like Gears of War.  From Tycho’s description, the ME3 multiplayer is not unlink Horde more for Gears of War 3, which is my favorite online multiplayer format ever.  So the ME3 multiplayer actually sounds kind of interesting, now I might actually give it a shot.

When I downloaded the demo for Kingdoms and Amalur (which I’m playing the full version of and absolutely loving it) it was because I heard good things about it.  What got me to actually play it was the promise of bonus materials (which I’m actually kind of ambivalent about) for ME3.  Usually I download demos but don’t end up playing them.  I think that might happen with ME3.

See, as I’ve expressed in the past, the Mass Effect games are some of my favorite games of all time.  I don’t need a demo to sell me on ME3, the existence of the game sold me on it.  As Tycho pointed out the single player part of the demo was just stuff he would have to do over again when he played the full game.  I don’t know if I want to do that, mainly because I hate hate hate spoilers, but especially because playing even a snippet of ME3 without the rest of the game is going to kill me.  Plus I’ve been too busy to even play Amalur the last few days, and I would like to finish that before starting ME3, because everything will take a backseat to ME3.  In fact, playing that game over Spring Break, which is when it comes out, is probably a pretty good idea.

So I’m thinking about deleting the demo, since I probably won’t play it, but especially because doing so should clear up room on my hard drive (I only have 20 gigs) for Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, which comes out on the 22nd and is purely downloadable.  Have I mentioned Alan Wake on here?  Because Alan Wake is one of my favorite games of all time too!  If I had to pick my top 5, and the two Mass Effects and the two Portals had to be separate choices each, the list would consist of the Mass Effects, the Portals, and Alan Wake.  It’s amazing, and while American Nightmare isn’t a true sequel, in that it’s not Alan Wake 2 (it’s confusing, you’ll have to play the game, and the DLC, and then American Nightmare), it’s more Alan Wake, and Remedy so blew my mind with the first game that I can’t wait for more from them.

Academic: A note on the D&D controversy

So for those of you not in the know, I’m working on a research paper about the controversy over Dungeons and Dragons during the 1980s.  It’s resulted so far in a lot of reading about moral panics and Satanism scares, as well as lots of really misinformed articles about the game.  All in all, it has ranged from infuriating to hilarious, because people made up all kinds of silly shit about D&D in the past.  Sad part is that there are still people who believe that D&D is of teh debil, and will destroy your soul.

The point of this post however is that today I discovered two really great sources, a thread over at rpg.net where someone posted a bunch of articles from a town near where he grew up in Canada that his mom (who is awesome) collected in a scrap book for him.  After I revived that thread (which was about three years old) another guy posted an Escapist article he wrote which contains a nice timeline of the whole depressing controversy.  I would suggest checking out both as they’re pretty interesting.

Star Trek: Half a Drumhead

In a continuing “alternate a new post with an old one” kind of theme, here’s another reposted Star Trek blog from my old tumblr.  I recently read the Fashion it So (I can’t find the actual entry so you’ll just have to rad through the archives, you’re welcome) post about Half a Life, which reminded me that I also blogged about that episode.

Half a Drumhead

I’m going to talk about two really good episodes (in a row no less!) of TNG, The Drumhead and Half a Life.  The former is a trial heavy episode, which are rarely my favorites, with the exception of The Measure of a Man, and the latter is a Lwaxana Troi episode, which usually are my favorites.  I’m going to do the funny bits first and then I’ll actually talk about the episodes.

There is nothing funny in The Drumhead.

However Half a Life opens with the obligitory Enterprise in Space shot, with Deanna doing the voice over in her personal log.  She just says that her mother is on the ship.  Then the first shot is this:

Look at how scared he is!  He knows that Lwaxana is out there, hunting him.

Then David Ogden Stiers shows up…

… and he looks like he’s waiting for Hawkeye and B.J. to pull some shit.  Just waiting for it.  Lwaxana bails on Picard super hard, and decides she’s going to show Timicin (Stiers) around the ship.  Then this happens:

Look at those faces!  Oh this Timicin guy does not know what he’s in for!  Did I mention O’Brien is in this one?  Cause he is, just barely, but he still gets more screen time and dialog than Bev.

So Lwaxana (who has really great short hair in this one) is herself and she’s funny and intrusive and Riker in one of like, three shots he’s in, does his special shit eating grin for when Lwaxana is a pain in everyone’s ass.

So Timicin is there because he needs to test this sun restarting process he has developed to save his planet, which has about 40 years left till it’s sun craps out.  Long story short, it doesn’t work, actually it works too well and the sun flips it’s shit and theEnterprise books it out of there.  Mind you, this is a test sun, nowhere near anything alive.  Timicin is really depressed but he thanks Picard and friends and then he is sad.  Turns out, he’s almost 60, and at 60, people on his planet kill themselves so they don’t get old and fall apart.  Lwaxana is pissed, because she really, honestly fancies the guy, and he fancies her back.

There is some really good Lwaxana development, the episode stops being funny at all, and it focuses on her dealing with the forthcoming death of this guy she legit loves, which she’s already had to do once with Troi’s father, who died some years ago.  There are some really touching scenes and she tries to convince Timicin to fight this tradition.  He stumbles upon a possible way to fix the sun restarting problem, and asks Picard for asylum so he can continue working.  The planet is not happy, and send warships to prevent the Enterprise from leaving the system with him, which is fucking stupid on their part.  Mother fuckers will wake the goddamn dragon that way, but it doesn’t come to blows, because Picard is not Kirk and can control himself.  Timicin’s daughter shows and up and shames him into coming home and he does so, with Lwaxana at his side to go to his gonna-kill-myself party that everyone gets.

Getting to see character development for Lwaxana, getting to see her whole worldview threatened and see her break down in tears, is really powerful.  Majel Barrett-Roddenberry was a hell of an actress.

The Drumhead

Like I said, this is a trial heavy episode, and those tend to range from boring to absurd (see Devil’s Due).  This one is good, however.  It starts with a Klingon biologist who’s visiting the Enterprise apparently having stolen warp core schematics and sold them to the Romulans.  Seriously, WTF.  He, like some other Klingons apparently, think that the Romulans would be better allies than the Federation, who have turned the blood in all Klingon veins to water.  Shit yo.  I’ve talked about this before, how I love that the show actually addresses how difficult this alliance is for the Klingons.  But that’s not really what the episode is about.

This retired admiral comes to the ship because the warp core broke and a conspiracy is suspected, she brings a Betazoid, and then Troi vanishes and doesn’t interact with him, which is crap.  I should mention now that Picard and Worf are the only regular cast with any really scenes in this episode.  Worf is dead fucking set on unraveling the truth, because he is not a fan of Romulans or conspiracies or Klingon traitors.  He gets rather caught up in the ensuing investigations.  They talk to a med tech who administered some shots to the Klingon (he has some disease, it’s not important) who says he’s a quarter Vulcan and never interacted with the Klingon otherwise.  Betazoid says he’s lying.  Turns out he was, he’s a quarter Romulan, not Vulcan.

From here is gets out of control.  The retired admiral and her aid start accusing everyone of being traitors and hiding shit, they drag out Picard’s not having risked the Enterprise to retrieve a Romulan spy who had posed as a Vulcan (I remember the episode but not the name), accuse Worf of being a traitor like his biological father (who we know wasn’t) accuse Bev (BEV!) of hiding conspirators because she won’t list the people who were in Ten Forward one time, etc. etc.  It get’s into some serious character assassination, show trial bullshit.

What makes this episode good is that the acting is amazing, and it was directed by Jonathan Frakes, so I’m going to go ahead and give him some of the credit for that.  But it gets at just how afraid the Federation is of the Romulan Empire, if they’re willing to distrust and accuse an innocent man just because he’s a quarter Romulan, if they’re going to look for enemies everywhere, where there are none.  Picard waxes philosophical, and quotes the retired admiral’s father, who was a famous judge, and gets her to break.  At the point when she tells him she’s brought down bigger men than him, and that quoting her father (which Picard does 100% in context) sullies his good name, the other visiting [actually still an] admiral, who was there to observe the proceedings, gets up and leaves, and the whole thing is dropped.

The best part though, is the at the end, when Worf comes to Picard to tell him that everything is done and all the guest characters have left, and admits that he got caught up in the inquiry, and that he fell into the trap of character assassination and show trial bullshit that comes with paranoid, totalitarian governments and has no place in the kind of free democracy the Federation is supposed to be.  Worf is visibly shaken, you can see that he’s lost a little bit of faith in himself and regrets his actions.  It’s pretty powerful.