I trekked up to Seattle this weekend with the
Best of
Landlords for a nice crash with my parents and a foray into the Emerald City Comicon. While the dinner with my parents and snarking around with
Terri Nelson and showing Jenn the aortic conference room level of the library and getting to breathe appreciatively all over
Dave Kellett was all enjoyable, the con itself was of the "oh god more Stormtroopers" variety; excellent if you're drawing strong people in tights, not so good if you're selling hand-drawn jewelry and minicomics.
Strangely, the best part of the con was going to see Jamie Bamber (that's Lee "Apollo" Adama on Battlestar Galactica) give a Q&A talk. Normally I shy away from gawking at actors who have been dragged, poor souls, to soi-disant comics conventions - both because I don't want to be disillusioned if they turn out to be twits, and because the questions posed by audience members can sometimes be skin-strippingly awkward or cliched. ("How much of your own personality do you put into your portrayal of Evil Alien Overlord Gornax?")
That said, I figured I might as well give Mr. Bamber a gentle ogle across the comparative safety of 30 feet of convention attendees in uncomfortable chairs. After all, the man comes with a British accent and was endearingly pathetic as Horatio's epileptic
boyfriend shipmate Archie in
Horatio Hornblower and has one of the most frustrating roles on Battlestar Galactica, and I've drawn him as a Simpsons character wearing a leash, so out of sheer apologetic impulse I
had to go. I took a leave from my table and went to stand in the immense snaking line to get a seat.
While standing there admiring the material of Viper pilot jumpsuit on the guy ten feet over from me, I was randomly recognized by the lady behind me in line, a ex-pat Portlander engineer named Eva who had just, in my absence, purchased a Battlestar Galactisimpsons print from me. We hit it off immediately and spent five minutes reassuring each other that, unlike all these other goofballs, we were very cynical and sophisticated and really were only going to gawk at a Battlestar Galactica cast member as a sort of social experiment.
We made it into the hall and grabbed some seats. Mr. Bamber, looking a little shaggy, was back by the podium chatting on his cellphone and wearing a leather jacket and a khaki driver's cap that made for a weirdly Justin Timberlake-ish presentation. There was no moderator, so Eva and I steeled ourselves for whatever tortures might visit themselves upon us in the following forty minutes.
But then he wandered out and sat down and it turned out he was utterly hilarious and articulate, smoothing over even the dorkiest questions (posed by a middle-aged woman in a Jedi suit...) with something suspiciously resembling both grace, insight, and humor.
He painted an amusing picture of the sheer unmitigated hell of being stuck in a tiny pretend spaceship inside of what amounts to a Saran wrap suit, all of which package large burly men are shaking around violently in front of a green screen, and how he sometimes suspects that the crew goes off to lunch while he's sitting in there with little blue lights blazing up under his eyeballs.
He also had a lot of lovely and poignant things to say about the show, including some of its flaws and challenges. There's no other way to describe those 40 minutes of Q&A, other than to call it strangely heartening. This was an intelligent young man who clearly cared deeply for the show and who was encouraged and empowered to engage with the writers and producers to make it better, and who had real gratitude and affection for its audience.
"I'll probably still be doing these cons in 20 years, and you'll all be bloody sick of me," he noted with an apologetic grin.
Somebody asked him what he thought we were supposed to "take away" from the show.
"Well, if you don't like soapboxes, you might want to plug your ears," he warned, before issuing a preamble that there was, of course, no ONE take-away point. Then, after a brief pause to think and scribble, he explained what he thought was one of its strongest themes.
"If you take a petri dish and drop in some bacteria, that bacteria will do everything it can to make its life wonderful," he said, scribbling shyly on the notepad in front of him. "It will grow and grow and grow and fill the petri dish until it's totally devoured the environment and doomed itself. Then it will collapse in on itself, and some new bacteria will emerge from the rubble and start the process all over again. And I think that's a pretty good metaphor for the show, for the humans and the Cylons.
"Ultimately it's sort a love story between the two - will we get together and merge and live happily ever after after all the pratfalls, like a screwball romantic comedy, or will we go our separate ways and ignore each other, like some art film, or will we completely destroy each other, like a tragedy?"
Then he paused, looked off into the distance for a second, and yanked the mike closer.
"And by the way, I thoroughly believe that we should kill them all."
Laughter and claps erupted. He continued to be equivalently funny and self-deprecating for the whole rest of the time.
At any rate, it was a surprisingly lovely little panel, winsome and wistful. I'll give an honest shot to anything he shows up in in the future out of respect for a really thoughtful and charming professional who's clearly put his heart and soul into an offbeat, morbid sci-fi soap opera that always swings for the fences. How very nice to see that the revolution in narrative television really does have some good folks working for it.
Tags: bsg, cons, geek
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