When We Invited You To Join Our Trivia Team, It Was With The Understanding That You Knew ‘Star Trek’
Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, Rich. Our team trusted you with the privilege of proving yourself on Trivia Hell Night. But after last night’s demeaning spectacle, I doubt we can ever go back to Sharlene’s Bar without recalling the deep humiliation you brought upon us all. After tanking a Star Trek round with a full four questions whiffed, I feel more shame than Spock in “The Naked Time.”
I want to speak plainly and clearly—not rage like a wild mugato—and I cannot say my piece any more plainly than this, Rich: When we extended our invitation, not a week ago, for you to fill the empty slot on the Knowblemen while Andrew was out of town for Comic Con, it was because we trusted your fervent assurances that you were well-versed in Star Trek lore, inside and out, with a special emphasis on 21st-century Trek.
What did we witness instead, Rich? A deeply disappointing display of Trek knowledge in the all-too-critical Week 8 of our 13-week trivia season. At this point, our longstanding nemeses the Man-DeLoreans will have to meet the business end of an ahn-woon for us to have a chance at winning it all.
I thought I was very clear with you that Trivia Hell was guaranteed to have a generous dose of Trek questions, and that the Quizmonster has a boner for NuTrek, often dipping into it for his hardest, most herd-culling questions. I was quite emphatic that Andrew is the only team member who is not too busy elsewhere to give Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Picard the deep scrutiny they deserve. And you? You swore up and down that you were—to use your exact words—“into all that.” Well, next time we’ll just have to prepare a written quiz before capriciously welcoming newcomers.
You certainly knew your stuff when it came to “The Lights Of Zetar,” the Rozhenko family, the Dominion War, and Delta Quadrant geography, making you both a vintage Trek fan in good standing and utterly redundant on our team.
Let us review just some of the subjects that gave you trouble, Rich: the name of Captain Archer’s dog, the actor who plays Keenser (No, Rich, it was not Verne Troyer. It was not Verne Troyer at all), and who made up the bridge crew of the USS Discovery. They were asking for the crew’s names, mind you—not, say, their blood types or their extracurricular activities at Starfleet Academy. Needless to say, once the match got serious in the second half, you fell apart completely on questions about Rok-Tahk’s backstory and the properties of horonium, turning what should have been a night of triumph and glory into a humiliating Kobayashi Maru scenario, as tortuous as a weekend with Gul Madred.
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.
Incidentally, I saw you flirting with the waitress nearly as much as you were considering the questions. Is that what this was about—worming your way onto our team to hit on a girl like a lowly Ferengi? Knowblemen are to pon farr on their own time, Rich. We are an elite bar-trivia team focused on no less than total, devastating victory and the supreme prize of a $25 discount on our bar tab.
Had this gone well, we were considering asking you to join us next month for Trivia Combat starring General Knowledge, where teams of up to six are allowed. You are, after all, very strong on Harry Potter trivia. If only we could Tuvix you and Andrew into one body, we’d be unbeatable. But now? The critical bonds of trust have been shattered like the Crystalline Entity. One day we may get past this—maybe we’ll even laugh like Kirk and Kang in “Day Of The Dove”—but the crude, Berlinghoff Rasmussen–level con you foisted on us last night is, for now, a grave offense.
But perhaps the worst wound of all is that you treated trivia as if it were unimportant.
Larry Groznic is a noted fan-community luminary and sought-after expert on the topics of British television, spy-fi memorabilia, cosplay, RPG adventuring, and limited-edition collectible maquettes. He lives in Cedar Rapids, IA, and is single.
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