I’m late with this. Again. It’s not a habit I’ll get into, but a pretty brutal work week has put me in a bit of a daze. I needed to employ the dreaded all-nighter, my first of the year, to finish a script that was vexing me and had become a time pit. You know the ones - where the time you set out for it just isn’t sufficient and you find yourself looking over the same scene hours after you’re meant to have moved past that section.

As a result, I didn’t really see the sun for about 36 hours and Friday’s Bank Holiday (lol what are those) proto-Summer was too much to resist. I took a long walk, had a couple of non-alcoholic stouts (lad) and caught up with an old friend. So yeah, the TLDR is that I sacked it off cause it was nice outside. You wouldn’t have read it yesterday for the same reason so I reckon we’re square.

There's a famous, often paraphrased, Faulkner quotation: "The past is never dead. It's not even past.” A variant of it was at one point in the front material of An Adventure but it's an idea that's uncannily flowed through a lot of my experiences and thinking this week.

What to begin with? The Star Trek: Discovery finale, Red Dead Redemption 2 or some musings about my cats? I’m sitting in the park as I write this. I’ve got a beer cap next to me. Flat bit = cats, spiky bit = Trek, lands on the floor = RDR2.

*Vinay flips the beer cap*

Cats it is.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story of how I came to own three cats (now two, alas), basically they belonged to my neighbour and when she passed away I adopted them. They were nearly ten when they came to me which, as the vet and the lovely people/extorters at the pet insurance company tell me ,is quite old. They’ve lived most of their natural lives beyond my gaze, so my co-habiting with them is a little like solving a series of mysteries as to how they came to be the animals that they are.

For example: One day I was whistling the Star Wars theme tune and one of the cats came sprinting over, meowing incessantly. That had never happened before. I ended up moving to another room and whistling the theme again - much slower this time - and found the note that the cat was responding to. How weird. Funny ol’ creature. But then I got in touch with the previous owner’s stepmother and told her about it - it turns out that was the whistle pitch that they used to get called in with. The old owner would stand on the doorstep and bring them home with it. My heart.

Similarly, one cat gets particularly freaked out by badminton rackets (don’t want to ask too many questions about that) whereas the other gets particularly concerned and affectionate when I’m ill. Perhaps living for so long with someone with a terminal condition is a part of that instinct?*

I’m reminded of the first season of Westworld which gave a lot of its running time exploring this idea - how the layering of memories shape our personalities and make us who we are. Watching the robots go through this process was just the right amount of mind bending. Thinking back on that, I wonder if it’s the lack of new formative memories that stop us from changing, from becoming the people we want to be. Like, to a degree, this is incredibly obvious but I think it points to what the psychological difference is between active learning and seemingly passive experience. You can learn Spanish and move to Madrid but you won’t begin to shift until you’ve spent some time soaking in unsavoury bars.

Though I don’t intend to leave the country and become a lush, I’ve been wrestling with an instinct that wants me to change my life up significantly. I reckon this has partially developed out of a concern that I think too much about my relatively eventful past and also a niggling concern that by settling too much into my healthy routine I’ve also set myself in aspic.

Oh balls. I’ve mentioned Westworld already so I should probably run with the Western connection and talk about RDR2. Apologies for this haphazard structure.

I’d been avoiding buying this game because I knew it would destroy my productivity but I finally gave in and - surprise, surprise, it’s already a mistake because I shot way past midnight yesterday even though I’d promised myself I’d only play for half an hour. There’s no satisfactory way to play a Rockstar game for half an hour. 

Anyway, it’s already brilliant and, as much as I loved the first game, I’m glad it’s not just a continuation of that. As an experience it feels different from the off. Slower. More considered. It’s also a prequel that connects with the first game so is very much concerned with the past, how it shapes us and - most intriguingly - how we narrativise it. This is a bit of a running motif with the RDR series - evoking the feel of the old West whilst seeking to remind you how much of our common cultural understanding of it is a romanticised lie. The past is shaped and reshaped and weaponised (no, you said Brexit) and re-conceived in a way that is thrilling and also terrifying. It’s like the thing about humans not having any real continuity of self. No matter what unit of humanity you’re working from - individuals, groups, nations - all we really have to bind us is our stories. 

Ok, now we’ll do Star Trek. I’m already at my self-imposed word limit and I also don’t want to make a habit of continuously blowing past it so I’ll try and be snappy and as vague as possible to try and not spoil. (Did I have to use up words typing that sentence?) 

After fourteen weeks of watching the show oscillate between exhilarating and exasperating, it’s only right that it should end with a megaf*ckton of both of those experiences. The finale was a bit like one of the supernovas that Discovery is fond off - appreciate the dazzle, don’t look too closely and it’ll work out for everyone. SO many explosions. SO many things that you’re pretty sure that don’t make sense but WAIT ANOTHER EXPLOSION and then some GRADE-A FEELS. 

The dramatist in me screams. I know what rushed feels like and so much of it feels rushed. The kind of work you know is begging for another draft to tighten up a relationship here, to deepen/better calibrate a thematic exploration there. That movement feels a bit cheap. That moment is ridiculous. The staging of the gorgeously rendered space fights feel loose and choppy.

And yet? 

I? Had? A? Great? Time??

It ain’t your daddy’s Star Trek but how on earth could it be and not look ludicrous in this day and age. For better or worse, we don’t live in an era where science fiction is 90% hanging out in generic looking rooms and having a chat - though there is still a fair chunk of that. When in doubt, I check in with my inner kid and I reckon he would’ve paused that episode, run around the living room a few times, and then sat back down to watch it again from the start.

So an enjoyable end to a show that I think has found a different gear in its second outing though it is weird that in the final moments you’re left torn. Do you want to hang out with Pike and the cool kids of Enterprise or the wonderful dorks of Discovery? Tough question. Always a tough question. 

Life for versions of what you love or unknown futures?
 

Anything else that’s important before I wrap up? Oh yes! I came off a TV show I’ve been working on for a couple of years which means I’ve, a little ahead of schedule, reached the point I set myself of not writing episodes for other people. Not because I don’t like them (and there will probably be a couple of exceptions) but more that I feel that I’m ready to put my own nonsense and my own nonsense only out into the world. I’m excited and quite scared about what this’ll mean for me as an artist. However, I know this is a huge moment to unpack and I can already feel my fingers running away with it so I’ll stow that for another week.

We began with a the past so let's end with the future, whilst continuing last week's Vonnegut love-in: