#031 - The spirit is willing, but the flesh is kind of a lazy jerk
Jesus, Picard, you’re being lazy in a fictive context. That’s some serious labor avoidance.
I’ve always wondered if a little bit of the script for the Sisko/monks/Opaka stuff in the pilot ended up on the cutting room floor somewhere, because it really is a weird pair of scenes in the show as it aired:
1 - Random monk is all “hey, c’mere”, Sisko goes “nope”, monk says “okie doke!”, and that’s the end of that. Whole thing plays out like a Hare Krishna encounter on the sidewalk.
2 - Monk shows up again a little bit later and says “hey, c’mere!” and Sisko just hops on transport to Bajor with no further comment.
Like, something must’ve happened in between there? The text of the episode as aired gives us nothing; basically the only discussion of anything related to Bajoran spirituality is the super brief mention of spiritual leader Kai Opaka in the 30 seconds of conversation that Sisko has with Kira right before the monk reappears. Did they cut a scene where Sisko read the wikipedia entry on Bajoran Religion or got a memo that the weird monk was some government heavy’s nephew and to be polite so feathers don’t get ruffled?
Picard’s motivations here, however dubious, make more sense to me than that actual scene in the show, is what I’m saying.
But at least Data is displaying some rudimentary eye for sartorial details. So that’s a thing.
tk
I think this is the strip where I finally locked in on the coloring scheme I went with for most of the comic -- grey for out-of-character comments by Geordi and the players, colored panels for in-character descriptions and dialogue. Was this important to the readability of the comic? Probably not, the text and context is doing the work. But it felt consonant in a way that supported the flow, and it had the added advantage of freeing up the cognitive load of trying to come up with some sort of coloring scheme for every single strip.
As someone with (at that point in my life undiagnosed and pretty unexamined) anxiety and ADHD-flavored brain stuff going on, getting out of my own way as much as possible when working on a creative project is pretty important for me to keep working on any given project. Small hurdles can feel like sheer cliffs, small setbacks or points of indecision can completely derail my creative momentum. So a detail like "I don't have to try and solve the color problem every strip" matters more than it might seem like it should. I'd say producing Larp Trek for as long as I did, especially with less self-awareness about my own bumpy cognitive landscape, was sort of a miracle of consecutive hurdle-navigation. I won a lot of coin flips in a row on that.