I think it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one at all that I have always been a Trekkie. I started watching it when The Next Generation began airing. My dad was a bit of a nerd and it was considered family entertainment so we watched it together. Of course, I got far more into the show than he did so I kept watching it even after he lost interest.
Now, I know what everyone’s thinking. No, I didn’t have a crush on Wesley Crusher. Ew. ST:TNG started airing when I was six or seven years old. I also didn’t have a crush on Data (though he was a favorite of mine) or Picard (though I thought he was awesome) or Q (though I thought he was hilarious if a little mean sometimes). It wasn’t La Forge, either (even though I liked Levar Burton because I was also a big fan of Reading Rainbow).
I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t anyone on the senior staff and it wasn’t anyone who was a regular guest or recurring character. At least, not on TNG. He also didn’t make an appearance until late in the series when I would have at least been aware of boys and mildly interested in them (albeit more in the academic sense because it took me a while to get into the whole “dating” thing and that was more the result of succumbing to peer pressure than any actual interest in the paradigm. Yeah, I did have interest in a couple of boys during my teenage years but it was always more a mental connection than physical or emotional. Kind of still is, now that I think about it).
And if that hasn’t given you all of the clues you need to figure it out, I don’t know what to do other than just tell you that the second major crush I had (the first being Haplo the Patryn from the Death Gate Cycle) was on Ensign Taurik from The Lower Decks (S7:E15) which aired when I was 13. The same actor who portrayed Taurik was cast as another Vulcan in Voyager — Vorik — who is also a character I really liked (though I didn’t have a crush on Vorik because, by then, I was way too busy with school and dealing with the soul-crushing grind of social norms that were alien to me to have much energy to spare developing a crush on a character from a TV show I was only half-watching while trying to wade through the mountains of homework I had. Yay for honors and AP courses that no colleges actually bothered to honor even when I aced the exams!)
Tell me he’s not at least a little bit cute. The actor is definitely not hard to look at. He’s probably married to some super model or something. That’s Alexander Enderberg, btw (and no, I don’t have that memorized. I just have amazing Google-fu).
So, there you go. For Throwback Thursday, one of my more embarrassing secrets revealed. I had a major nerdcrush on Taurik from ST:TNG when I was younger (kind of still do a lil’ bit). Nae worries, though. G’s Code is still in force (I will never go anywhere near anyone famous I like, admire, or respect unless I have legitimate business or financial reasons to do so which are beneficial for them because these people have enough fans who want a moment of their time and I refuse to be one of them). So help me Bob, we’ll never be in the same ZIP code and once I get my particle accelerator up and running, we won’t be in the same solar system so the chance of accidental interference will be less than negligible (I have done the math!)
— G.K.
