“Are You a True Trekker? The Shocking Revelation That Divided Our Trivia Team!”
It is only because Geoff happened to remember details of “Forget Me Not”—and that was only because Andrew never shuts up about that episode—that we even squeaked into third place, meaning that not only the Man-DeLoreans surpassed us, but we even came in behind the Non-Fungible Tolkiens, a team of dilettantes who don’t even have a particularly strong Babylon 5 expert.
This humiliating evening left us holding a mere $10 Dunkin’ gift card for a full night’s work. Not exactly a crate of gold-pressed latinum!
We are a reasonable trivia team, Rich. We do not demand you bring us a positronic brain with 800 quadrillion bits of storage. No one expected you to have memorized the registry numbers of the USS Kimura. Nor do we punish the occasional mental hiccup. I myself, back when I was Scrivener and Star Wars expert on the Memory Asswipes, kept my team out of the finals by momentarily forgetting the 1970s animated Trek series, for I am human. But we cannot be bamboozled into believing you have broad and deep knowledge of contemporary Star Trek just because you’ve watched the occasional Lower Decks episode—what manner of Pakleds do you take us for?
Perhaps I share the blame, here: I should have sensed trouble after you blinked uncomprehendingly when I invited you to my Bell Riots party in September. Or when, in a discussion of the film series at that party, you referred to Into Darkness as “the Benedict Cumberbatch one.” Hardly the words of someone who’s internalized the Star Trek universe as if it were their own life.