Julia Houston On The Captain Deathwish

Julia Houston, official guide at About.com's Star Trek Fans, has returned from her holiday and updated the site with a new article, entitled 'The Captain Deatwish':

Of all the love/hate relationships out there, actors and death scenes might well be the most compelling of them all.

On the one hand, it means you're out of a job.

On the other, dying means being center stage. The other characters rally around you and cry and gnash their teeth. The music swells. It's close-ups galore! With luck, you get a funeral, where everyone stands around and talks about how wonderful you are.

It's little wonder the ultimate "Mary Sue" cliché concludes in just such a fashion (after, of course, she has saved the ship and become the general object of adoration).

And so it's also little wonder that Star Trek captains can't seem to resist the appeal of plotting their own demise. We had to hear about Kirk's death for years while Shatner went on talk shows and talked about the end of legends. Stewart requested that Picard die in Star Trek X: Let's Make Some Serious Money This Time, and was flatly turned down. Brooks was quite happy with his sort-of death at the end of DS9. And a recent report tells us that when asked about Voyager's last season, Kate "Mulgrew hinted broadly that she would like the character of Janeway to end with the show, stopping short of revealing whether Janeway would die. She did express a fondness for the last scene to dramatically focus and fade out upon Janeway's face."

Also new is a top-10 list, entitled 'First Starfleet Personnel Tasks After Vacation', including items such as "Check subspace mail.", "Make a vow never to wear those go-go boots on a hike across the Vulcan fire pit ever again!" and "Check holotapes to make sure the machine caught the final episode of Survivor #689."

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