Tom’s Triumphs – Exploring the Final Frontier

Being a new dad for a second time is an experience full of mystery and delight. With the first child, we were mostly paralyzed with fear because every experience – from going grocery shopping to trying to sleep at night – was new and novel. With the second child most of the fear is gone but it’s a whole new set of challenges, like bedtime for two. 

With our first child, we started doing an evening bedtime routine at around two months old. When my wife went back to work, we started alternating nights putting her down. Over three years, we refined the system until it worked really well for us. When our new baby came along, we started alternating nights with the girls. Prior to the baby, the off night was a chance to work on projects around the house, do research or edit for the show. Now it is cranky baby time. 

Generally speaking, our baby is an  easy-going kid. For some reason, she is usually cranky from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Between feeding, changing and bouncing her in turns to ride out the fussiness, I can’t spend that time doing anything that requires too much focus or two hands. 

It has led to a surprising amount of TV time for me.  While my first choice is to see what Hobby Box Burns is streaming, he’s not always online. I don’t follow a lot of TV shows closely, but what I do I usually watch with my wife. I started watching Schitt’s Creek, thought it was too funny and started watching it with the wife. I decided to try to find something older that I had missed out on, that she had probably already seen. After discussing the show on Tom and Joey Unfiltered (an exclusive podcast for $10 supporters on Patreon), I decided to try Star Trek: The Next Generation.  

I had never seen an episode and I was hooked by the end of the pilot. So far I’ve made it through the first half of the first season. I’ve heard that the first season was a low point for the show – if that’s true I am extremely excited to see what comes next. 

I had long heard that people were enamored with Captain Picard, and now I get it. He plays a strong captain with a touch of whimsy and a slight vulnerability. I really enjoy him as well. I am fond of nearly the entire cast. I was spellbound by Q in the first episode and found myself thinking about how humanity might have evolved with a strict death penalty in the garden of Eden. 

This show has been tremendously surprising for me. I watched some reruns of the original series and thought they were fine, but I was always a Star Wars guy. I never really gave Star Trek a chance until the reboot movies came out. I thought Trekkies were nerds, especially in my teenage years. 

Looking back at the entirety of Star Trek, it’s amazing how long it’s held its place in pop culture. A list of Star Trek series, courtesy of Wikipedia:

• The Original Series – 1966–1969
• The Animated Series – 1973–1974 
• The Next Generation – 1987–1994
• Deep Space Nine – 1993–1999
• Voyager – 1995–2001
• Enterprise – 2001–2005
• Discovery – 2017–present
• Short Treks – 2018–2020
• Picard – 2020–present

Outside of the original series, I had seen a combined two to three episodes of all the other shows prior to watching the first seasons of Discovery and Lower Decks last year. Starting with Next Gen, there were 18 consecutive years with at least one Star Trek show on the air.  

My wife’s favorite is Voyageur, it was one of the few shows she would tune in to weekly in her late teens. She loved the rich characters and their backstories, particularly Flyboy Tom. I’m not sure who my favorite character in Next Gen will end up being, but so far it’s Data and I’m interested to see how Counselor Troi evolves. 

Eventually, our baby life will evolve with a new bedtime routine and I expect my evenings will once again turn to gaming, editing the podcast and writing this column. Assuming I do make it to the far edges of this final frontier someday, which series should I jump to next? 

Until next month, stay inside!

• Tom 

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