Nerd Lessons: Star Trek & The Dark Side

We love our fandoms. For those on the outside looking in, it may be their impulse to discount our devotion as superficial or childish. That’s because they don’t understand or see how nerdom has effected us. At BNP, we know that comics and movies and anime and cosplay does so much more than entertain us, it shapes us; we learn what kind of people we want to be—and who exactly we are fighting against becoming. We sent out that bat signal, we sent out notice for an open call for submissions on what nerd lessons you learned and y’all answered the call. The Author of This Piece and Teacher for This Nerd Lesson: Stephanee Killen, Facebook There was a lot of Star Trek playing at my house back when I was five, but I’m fairly certain at that age I didn’t internalize much interstellar wisdom. It wasn’t until I hit my late twenties that I saw what became one of my favorite original Star Trek episodes—one that stayed with me as a nerd life lesson about balancing the light and dark within us: Season 1, Episode 5. “The Enemy Within.” The Deepak Chopras of the world probably don’t start their spiritual journeys gathering specimens on Planet Alpha 177, but that just goes to show you never know what’s going to trigger a full-on spiritual breakthrough. For Captain Kirk, this was a return transporter malfunction splitting him into two people: “Positive” Kirk, with that classic soft focus filter making everything angelic-level dreamy; and “Negative” Kirk (K2), sporting heavy, lower-lid black eye…