Workin' on a Space Farm

Writing about Khan Noonien Singh is like writing about Coca-Cola. I could drop a long ton of truth on you about how Khan is representative of the id in conflict with the ego and superego as represented respectively by Kirk and the Federation, but aside from the fact I’d probably be about the millionth person to say so, I don’t think it would move the needle much on how Khan is perceived. Same if I said that Khan was really just a sensitive soul who had fashioned his strongman exterior as a defense against criticism of his musical preferences. Or that Khan is a symbol of the mass production of power.

Actually that last one wouldn’t be a bad thesis for a graduate-level term paper in a poly-sci seminar. Or a Youtube video. This is neither of those of course. Honestly I still struggle a bit as to what exactly belongs here—I find when I think about Khan the first thing that comes to mind is Corinthian leather. Khan is a great foil, and Ricardo Montalbán, though he does chew holes in all the scenery, played him with greater conviction and intensity than most Star Trek villains. But he’s Ricardo Montalbán, and he had a whole other career, some parts of which are imprinted deeply upon the Corinthian leather of my soul.

Everybody’s doin’ the Space Lindy…

Khan was an outlier. Montalbán was a workaholic—almost thirty years’ constant presence in film and television before “Space Seed.” But I grew up in the 1970s and to me Ricardo Montalbán was first and foremost the main character of the fantastically cheesy Fantasy Island. Mr. Roarke was the beginning and the end of Montalbán as far as I knew. I watched Fantasy Island occasionally, even though I found it absurd and corny even as a boy in 1978. For better or worse I forgot or didn’t know that Mr. Roarke was in fact supposed to be immortal and in one episode battled the Devil, played by Roddy McDowall. I know some folks love this kind of campy shit. I’m not one of them, but that’s beside the point; the point being that Ricardo Montalbán was a fixed point in the firmament, about which orbited Hervé Villechaize and a parade of guest stars. 

The quintessential Fantasy Island experience for me—and this might explain my ambivalence—took place on a Saturday night probably in 1978. My parents dropped me and my sister off at the Fort Bliss Army Base childcare facility, presumably so they could go on a date. I’m not dinging my parents here; they couldn’t know what a Lord of the Flies type situation reigned at the base childcare facility. Now, in my later years, with the benefit of much accumulated cynicism, I could easily tell you that any childcare facility located on a U.S. Army base would necessarily be suspect, but in 1978 the base was a perfectly normal place. We went for groceries at the commissary, did a little shopping at the PX, saluted the gate guard on the way out, as you do. So where else could they drop us, right?

The childcare facility was a large room in some olive drab building situated one must assume at a sufficient remove from the arsenal as to preclude the possibility of the kids there being targeted by a Soviet strike, though given what we’ve seen of Russians lately we probably would have been much safer at the arsenal than, say, at home. I reckon there were about two dozen kids there that night—mostly toddlers and lower elementary school kids sifting industriously through bins of sticky toys. At eight I was probably the oldest kid present; still too young to be on my own but too old for wheeled Fisher-Price telephones and just enough aware of my own cleanliness or distressing lack thereof to be prevent my unreserved engagement in the heavily perforated Stretch Armstrong figure still hemorrhaging gooey red liquid all over the toys, the floor, the other kids. 

So I spent most of the evening skirting the center of the room, where the most uncivilized behavior took place—kids bopping each other on the head with Weeble Wobbles and that sort of thing, concentrating instead on facilitating my sister’s play in that way older kids have where they think they’re adulting as they attempt to teach a younger kid, usually incorrectly, how to play Go Fish. 

At 9pm the staff dragged out a bunch of decrepit army cots and told us it was bedtime. This was a bad joke as far as I was concerned but without any real options for recourse I crawled onto the alarmingly unstable, creaking cot and pulled a smelly army blanket, stained by the various liquid expressions of generations of children before me, up to my neck. There I lay, surrounded by the sobbing and snorting and sniffling and the occasional farting of my platoon. Just as I was beginning to reconcile myself to my hard fate, the television came on. Ah! This wouldn’t be so bad after all. 

So for the next two hours the eldest among us lay in our cots watching Love Boat and Fantasy Island as our younger comrades drifted away one by one to join a chorus of snores and make personal contributions of drool and urine to the milieu.

That admixture of young children’s confusion, terror, and emanations—that’s what I think about when I think about Ricardo Montalbán.

I can’t say I actually recall watching “Space Seed,” though I’m sure it was one of the episodes featured in the 24-hour Star Trek marathon I watched in its entirety as a high school sophomore. It was a favorite of our local affiliate, though I suppose the success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had something to do with that. Wrath came out in 1982, which, as years go, was more or less a blur for me. My grandpa died in January, setting the tone for the tone for the eleven months to follow. We would have one more death in the family before the summer was over, and almost another one shortly after that. We moved twice, and I attended three different schools that year. 

So you’ll have to excuse me but I honestly have no recollection of having seen Wrath until years later. It’s iconic; I get that. Kirk shaking his fist at the sky and yelling “Khaaaaaaaan!” It’s a whole thing. 

This was a pre-Blockbuster, pre-VCR, and obviously pre-Netflix era, but surely I saw it somehow, somewhen. I do recall being pretty excited about Star Trek III. Not as excited as my friend Sean though. The morning that film opened I trekked for 30 minutes from our hilltop apartment to Bellevue, the cluster of shops and fast food restaurants that constituted our town within the town of Nashville. Sean, a tall, pale, flabby teenager with a pile of orange hair like a ginger tabby sitting on his head, was already at the theater, sitting in a lawn chair with a small stack of execrable sci-fi novels and a cooler full of sandwiches and a two-liter bottle of Coke. I stopped and talked to him for a little bit before heading on to Service Merchandise, where I spent a good hour or so memorizing the specifications printed on the sides of boxes containing Commodore 64s and Apple ][s. 

Tiring of this I left and stopped back by the theater. Sean was still there, alone. I really do think he expected to be at the front of a line stretching down the block. He probably had some pithy comments ready for the TV news crew. I paused and chatted with him again before walking over to McDonald’s, where I ate a leisurely lunch. When I returned a third time the box office was just about to open and Sean had packed his things in order to queue up. He was—of course—first. And I was second. There were probably four or five others who showed up to watch Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

It was ok. Not as good as the Sean story, but better than McDonalds. Maybe it would have been improved with a cameo from Montalbán, heralded by McCoy: “He’s not dead, Jim!” I don’t know—none of those films has aged particularly well in my opinion. 

In any event, perhaps I owe you an apology. It’s not like I’ve given a great effort to find some corner of the Khan story that hasn’t been reported yet. I don’t have any particular angle worth an article or heaven forbid, a book. That’s probably just fine though. Khan is a deadly foe—strong, intelligent, and driven. That’s plenty good enough for a villain. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be anything more. “Space Seed” is a decent enough episode aside from the usual grotesque sexism and the fact that Kirk, despite not being a genetically engineered superhuman like Khan, gets the drop on him the way he so often does—simply by virtue of being Kirk. His passion for his job defeats all comers. 

So be it. Jesus and Mr. Roarke had to face the Devil but Wyatt Earp only had to deal with the Clantons and McLaurys. We don’t all have to live supernatural lives after all. Some of us are stymied merely by the smell of toddler in the morning.