Drink Like a Geek. Jeff Cioletti
practice of forging diplomatic relations over booze is as old as booze itself. It’s also about as cross-cultural as traditions come. In China, for instance, dignitaries have been known to toast with baijiu, the country’s traditional spirit distilled from grain—mostly sorghum, combined with wheat, rice, barley, and whatever other cereals are available. It’s known for its rather…shall we say, assertive flavor.
When President Barack Obama hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe at a state dinner in 2015, the President toasted the visiting leader with sake (Dassai 23 Junmai Daiginjo, to be precise). And Russians look for any excuse to say “na zdorovie” with a shot of vodka. Diplomatic meetings are just one of those many occasions.
If Star Trek is any guide, then the custom of bridging cultures (and even galaxies) by sharing a glass or two of adult beverages will survive at least a few hundred more years. After all, it did correctly predict in the ’60s that we would be commanding our computers verbally, among other developments.
Tranya may have become a liquid symbol of finding common ground, but, in the real world, it’s been the source of ongoing debate for more than five decades.
There’s a bit of controversy over what the props team actually put in the bowl and the glassware. Clint Howard has claimed that it was grapefruit juice, which he actually hated; he had to work really hard not to betray that fact on screen. William Shatner, in his memoir, Star Trek Memories, remembers it being warm apricot juice with food coloring. To the naked eye, it resembled unfiltered apple juice, so there might be some truth to that.
While Anthony Call’s Bailey character would never again appear on Trek—the Enterprise leaves him with Balok as an ambassador—tranya would pop up again decades later. Jadzia Dax can’t get enough of it at Quark’s Bar on Deep Space Nine.
The 2015 edition of Tiki Oasis—an annual gathering of Polynesia-philes in San Diego, (see Chapter 12) featured a symposium titled “The Interstellar Tranya: Drinking the Good Life and Beyond” hosted by Rod Roddenberry, TV producer and son of Gene Roddenberry, along with tiki expert Jonathan Knowles and others. They presented an encore of the symposium at the Fiftieth Anniversary Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas a year later in an area deemed, what else, Quark’s Bar.
Dueling recipes emerged from that event in a nod to the conflicting reports of the five-decades-old original drink. One was grapefruit-forward and the other, apricot-forward. Both had rum. Lots of rum. These are tiki drinks, after all.
A Sense of Normalcy
The history of exploration is soaked in alcohol, and it’s reassuring to find that the Federation appears to have learned from the past. Long journeys have, for centuries, involved some kind of booze. There’s a popular story about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock instead of their original destination, the Jamestown colony in Virginia, because they needed to stop to make more beer. There’s likely little truth to that tale which the craft beer industry likes to tell, but it is rooted, at least to some extent, in custom.
And then there are also rum and the Navy, which have been closely intertwined since about the dawn of sugarcane cultivation and distillation in the New World. They don’t call higher-proof rums “navy strength” for nothing.
Whenever there is new mode of transportation, you can bet that there will be booze on board. You think folks would have been willing to get into a metal tube that would hurl them through the air at thirty-five thousand feet and speeds of more than five hundred miles per hour if the flight attendants didn’t ply them with booze to help calm their nerves?
So, it’s perfectly logical that the Enterprise and other vessels in the Star Trek universe have bars. You can’t expect people to sign on for a five-year or continuing interstellar mission without a place to unwind, socialize and, yes, tie one on from time to time.
On the original series, we rarely got to see much of the Enterprise’s broader population outside of the bridge, save for a few extras walking down a corridor every now and again and the requisite Red Shirt about to meet an untimely end at some point before the closing credits rolled. The ’60s version of the Enterprise just seemed so…lonely. You can probably thank the modest budget of a series that its network never truly believed in. It frequently got the highest ratings of its Thursday night slot (okay, there were only three networks at the time), but that didn’t stop NBC from exiling it to the Friday night death slot (where it still managed to hold its own).
But, by the time The Next Generation was ready to embark, Star Trek was a bona fide phenomenon. Devoted fans kept the fire burning during the wilderness years, the decade between the airing of final original series episode “Turnabout Intruder” and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And the cult continued to grow during that period, thanks to nightly reruns on local TV stations. Attendance at Trek conventions, which began in earnest in 1972—nearly three years after the show’s cancelation—grew steadily through the ’70s. Star Trek Lives! gets much of the credit for being a pioneer in the convention space, but the New York City fan celebration—which ran for five consecutive years—was not the first. That honor belongs to a much smaller gathering, Star Trek Con in Newark, New Jersey in 1969.
The relatively brief run of Star Trek: The Animated Series from the fall of 1973 until the fall of 1974 also helped stoke the Trek revival movement.
When “Encounter at Farpoint,” The Next Generation pilot, aired, the franchise already had four original-crew movies under its belt. The last of these, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, had been the most commercially successful of the franchise and nearly tied with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as the most critically acclaimed of the classic crew movies; Khan scored 88 percent and Voyage Home registered 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, these scores were retroactive since neither Rotten Tomatoes nor the internet existed in those days. Needless to say, Paramount believed in the franchise and was willing to put some money and production value behind its new syndicated sequel series. The effects are laughable by today’s standards, but they were nothing short of cutting-edge in the ’80s. The production team wanted its world to be as believable as its budget and technology would allow, and that meant populating the Enterprise. It also meant that sometimes that population wanted to go where everybody knew their names. That watering hole had its own Sam Malone, in the form of Guinan. The fact that a very familiar face, Whoopi Goldberg, embodied the role, meant the audience would instantly bond with the barkeep, just as the crew of the Enterprise-D would.
Guinan’s familiarity was already baked in to the series. We didn’t get an episode that spent any significant amount of time introducing this new character. There was no fanfare. Her first scene didn’t even have any lines (those would come later in the episode). She just was. Only Whoopi Goldberg could pull that off.
When it came time to launch another spinoff series—Deep Space Nine, (DS9) which debuted midway through The Next Generation’s sixth season—you could be damned sure there’d be a drinking establishment on the titular remote space station at the edge of a wormhole. It was such a volatile location, with peace always hanging by a thread. Booze played no small role in keeping a wide range of galactic species’ worst instincts in check. And Quark, the resident publican—well, casino owner, really—was just the Ferengi for the job. Ferengi were the wheeler-dealers of the galaxy. They could be a bit sleazy, but they also knew how to defuse a heated situation. When the Cardassians withdrew from nearby Bajor, Captain Benjamin Sisko was intent on keeping Quark around as a community leader—a role played by many a bar owner throughout history and today—for a sense of continuity, of familiarity.
DS9 is the closest thing to a Western that’s existed in the Trek franchise. There’s the obvious frontier aspect to it. If Sisko was the mayor of this one-horse town on the edge of eternity, then Odo was its sheriff. Quark is very obviously its Al Swearengen (without all of the “cocksuckers”). Folks might argue that Enterprise was more Wild West than DS9 because everything was so new and uncharted versus “lived-in.” But I would argue that Enterprise was more like the age of explorers and conquistadors that predated the young America’s westward migration.
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