The Decline and Fall of the Space-Faring Nerd

"Captain" Daly (seated) and the bridge crew of the USS Callister

Two different social outcasts saunter into fake worlds of their own creation. In spring 1990, Lieutenant Reginald Barclay enters the holodeck of the USS Enterprise-D on Star Trek: TNG’s episode “Hollow Pursuits.” In the closing hours of 2017, Captain Robert Daly enters the bridge of the titular ship on Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “USS Callister.” The twist is, both characters enter fake worlds of their own creation. But they reflect two very different visions.

By now, dedicated fans already know about “USS Callister,” so I’ll be frank. Spoiler warnings ahead. Where Lieutenant Barclay has created a world of swashbuckling men and gentle women in diaphanous Roman robes, “Captain” Daly has created a retreat into Great Society-era science fiction, with high-minded declarations about human potential, but massive subsumed racism and sexism. Both retreat into the past. And both populate that past with people they know.

Barclay has created duplicates of the Enterprise bridge crew. He’s made Commander Riker a short, comical character, and turned Doctor Crusher into some strange nymph of fantasy. The bridge crew is justifiably horrified to discover how they’ve been shanghaied into a lesser crew member’s fantasy life. But as the story unfolds, Barclay proves himself a highly competent, but risk-averse, scientist, who’s created a fake world to shed his inhibitions. He’s essentially harmless.

“Captain” Daly, by contrast, is malevolent, power-hungry, and arrogant. Like Barclay, he’s an underappreciated genius in real life; he created the base code for America’s most popular online role-playing game. But others get fat off his creation. So he creates a parallel world to exact the revenge he cannot have “outside.” His genius masks an underlying rage. Daly wants recognition for his accomplishments, so he creates a pocket universe where he can demand, and receive, it.

Side-by-side comparisons of these episodes could yield interesting studies. Toxic masculinity versus social emasculation, for instance, or evolving attitudes about escape into space. (The “Callister” ends with gamers engaging in dick-swinging displays despite standing little to lose.) I care more about both episodes’ retreat from the present.

The Callister’s obvious debt to Star Trek doesn’t bear comment. But which franchise Daly pilfers does. Rather than TNG, which fans consider the gold standard for Trek, Daly recreates the bobbed bouffants and scenery-chewing acting of the original series, from the 1960s. Despite being a technological genius, with a finger on America’s game-playing pulse, he voluntarily retreats from the present. His game happens on a non-networked computer, away from humans and, y’know, reality.

Lieutenant Barclay asleep on Doctor Crusher's lap, on Star Trek

When Star Trek aired “Hollow Pursuits” in 1990, fan culture wasn’t boosted by the popularity of the Internet. Fans were mostly in-groups sharing mimeographed magazines with hand-drawn illustrations among their own members. Mass culture could easily pass over nerds, and nerd culture, as essentially harmless, because it was inward-turning and private. Mainstreamers mostly disliked nerds because they kept their own company, which makes natural joiners uncomfortable.

But the Internet’s linking ability emphasizes nerds’ ability to organize. No longer fringe elements yoked by geography, nerds have global reach. By its simple ubiquity, nerd culture has become mainstream, which has revealed a seam of malice as destructive as the “squares” who formerly tortured nerds. From Gamergate to the Great Szechuan Sauce Meltdown of 2017, the malice lingering under at least some of my beloved nerd culture has become visible.

It’s tough to avoid comparisons to people who claim amendments to their favorite franchises “ruined their childhood.” If women can be Ghostbusters, or James Bond could be Black, then the world we comprehend—because it’s oriented toward people who look like me, and reminds us we’re normal—isn’t static. Despite its language of the future, toxic nerd culture has a past orientation. Let’s retreat to when things used to be good.

Around the same time “USS Callister” distributed online, BBC aired the Doctor Who 2017 Christmas special. The 12th Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, had a face-to-face encounter with the First Doctor subbed in by David Bradley (original actor William Hartnell died over forty years prior). Confronted with his past, which included bluntly misogynistic attitudes and white arrogance, the Doctor had self-awareness enough to feel embarrassed about his prior principles.

That’s why Robert Daly is so scary. Not that he dominates others; hell, we’ve all seen that. Nor that he spouts bromides about humanity’s best impulses to justify his domination. Rather, like dictators and petroleum despots, he clings to power most furiously, and punishes opponents most brutally, when he realizes he’s most critically vulnerable. People like him matter less and less.