Post 5 - Familiar Faces and the Value of Easter Eggs

It has been a while since my last post, and for that I apologize. My new goal is to try to put a new post up every Friday, starting today. With that, let's get started!

During the time between my last post and this one, I watched 5 episodes of Enterprise. Those include Shuttlepod 1, Fusion, Rogue Planet, Acquisition, and Oasis. As with most of Enterprise, the Easter Eggs kept coming, but within these episodes I began to see something new - Star Trek actors from other series were making cameos on the Enterprise. Ethan Phillips (Neelix on Voyager) played a Ferangi captain in Acquisition and Rene Auberjonois (Odo on Deep Space Nine) played a stranded engineer on Oasis. Finally, while not a direct cameo, there is a joke made on Oasis about how crazy it would be to have a holographic doctor, clearly a reference to the role Robert Picardo played as a holographic doctor on Voyager.

Seeing that, I thought back to some of the opening credits that I've seen in this series in previous episodes. Particularly, I thought about the familiar names (to me anyway) that I saw listed. The series was created by (and many episodes written by) Rick Berman and Brannon Braga - names I saw in the same roles with Star Trek Voyager when I was a child. Occasionally the listed director was also a name I had seen before. LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge on The Next Generation) directed Terra Nova and Fortunate Son. Roxann Dawson (B'Elanna Torres on Voyager) directed The Andorian Incident. Robert Duncan McNeil (Tom Parris on Voyager) directed Cold Front. In addition, many of the other directors and writers were seasoned Star Trek directors from Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation, and Voyager.

It got me thinking about the value of Easter eggs in media. Why do we care so much about brief references to other stories (and potentially even other universes) contained within the main story? Easter eggs exist in almost all media. We saw ET in the Galactic Senate in the Star Wars prequel. Mickey Mouse and Goofy were in attendance at the bottom of the ocean during a party in The Little Mermaid. In Man of Steel, one of the army people had the name Ferris on her uniform (implying that she is Carol Ferris [a friend of the Green Lantern and ultimately a Star Sapphire lantern herself]). Entertainment companies know that we love these, buy why?

(Fun fact, it is widely assumed that the term Easter egg in reference to finding something cool in a movie or TV show goes back to the Rocky Horror Picture Show [the one with Tim Curry]. Apparently, the cast and crew had a literal Easter egg hunt on set and didn't end up finding them all. An eagle-eyed viewer can still find a couple that made it to the final print of the film. https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/6kh0jf/there_are_literal_easter_eggs_that_can_be_see_in/)

My personal opinion is that Easter eggs in movies and TV help us form connections with the story being told. It creates and solidifies the idea of something being "in universe" or "canon". And while life isn't a movie, we use the same concept every day to form connections and to help us understand the world every day.

The concept of connecting two seemingly unrelated bits of information is one of the superpowers of being a human. It is a core component to creativity, problem solving, and critical thinking. With movies and TV, we have writers, directors, actors, and (occasionally) accidents that lead to Easter eggs. However, in real life we have to create them ourselves. This is especially true in the weird world of social distancing. Easter eggs in life help us to form and maintain connections with people, things, ideas, and memories - just like they do in Star Trek.