Pop Culture - Photography of David Allan Barker

Strange New Worlds, the latest installment in the Star Trek franchise, explores pre-Kirk life in the Federation. In particular, we learn the back story of Captain Christopher Pike whom we first met in “The Menagerie” which aired in 1966. Anson Mount plays the current iteration of Pike, a character written according to a longstanding template that makes him indistinguishable from James T Kirk. When he’s not in the chair on the bridge, he’s riding a horse in Montana while sporting a rugged beard. Starfleet rules are really suggestions, but he only breaches them when higher values are at stake. And he carries himself with a good-humoured sex appeal that, sooner or later, will have some large-breasted alien swooning.

Why, you may ask, does a guy with a photo blog post a piece about Star Trek? Glad you asked. It turns out they’re filming Strange New Worlds in that strangest of strange new worlds, the city of Toronto. This became cringingly obvious in the first shots of episode 3, “Ghosts of Illyria.” The opening shots establish that the Enterprise is in orbit around an alien world, home to species called the Illyrians. The next shot takes us to the planet’s surface where an away team has landed only to find that the planet’s inhabitants are missing. We swoop across the surface of a large body of water and the camera rises to the horizon. A strange alien structure comes into view.

It’s Ontario Place. But in the future. And on another planet.

For more than 10 years now, Ontario Place has been a sad shell of its former self, serving no particular purpose other than to slowly rust away into the lapping waters of Lake Ontario. Doug Ford’s decision to make it a terminus for his new subway line strikes me as utterly pointless. Once built, the Ford line will be the subway ride to useless. But don’t worry. He’ll license a casino there to one of his mob cronies and all will be well.

The irony is that when it first opened in 1971, it reflected an optimistic vision of the future, or at least the future as its architect, Eb Zeidler, imagined it. At the same time as Zeidler was preparing his plans, Stanley Kubrick was giving us far out furniture on his 2001 space station and selling space travel as a glorified acid trip. The only thing missing from the original Ontario Place designs was a humongous lava lamp. It’s the kind of place you could go for a giant city-wide key party. The future was so much better back then.

In the Star Trek version of the future, Ontario Place is ground zero for a plague transmitted by photons. Once infected, victims crave light which of course produces photons and increases the likelihood of transmission. This futuristic plague’s version of masking is to turn out the lights. The only thing missing from this episode are the anti-darkness truckers who demand in the name of freedom the right to turn on the lights and infect their Enterprise crewmates. But I guess that would make it more like Toronto today than the Federation in stardate 2548.3.

Black and white photograph of Ontario Place buildings rising from the ice covered waters of a thawing Lake Ontario. — Ontario Place

Maple syrup doesn’t have a lot of pop culture exposure, probably because most maple syrup production and distribution happens far away from Hollywood. Even so, there are exceptions. I can’t say that the following examples elevate the industry, but any exposure is better than nothing. So here we go:

1) Star Trek: Voyager, s.7 ep.16 “Workforce”

An alien civilization with a labour shortage has kidnapped members of the Voyager’s crew and, to keep them docile, erases their memories and implants new ones. When the crew rescues B’elanna Torres, Neelix uses pleasant food associations to help the half Klingon Torres recover her memory. He presents her with a plate of pancakes drenched in maple syrup and tells her that it’s her favourite breakfast. There you have it: Klingons love maple syrup.

2) Elf, starring Will Ferrell

Raised as an oversized elf, the human named Buddy travels from the North Pole to NYC in search of his biological father. During a dinner, he pulls a bottle of maple syrup out of his sleeve and douses his plate of spaghetti. He informs his hosts that elves thrive on the four major food groups: candy, candy canes, candy corns, and syrup.

3) Sweet as Maple Syrup

Sweet as Maple Syrup is a made-for-TV movie, as yet unreleased, and so I have no idea whether it’s any good. However, reading the blurb on IMDb, I suspect it’s awful:

Rachelle is in a race against time when her family’s maple orchard starts to decline, just ahead of the upcoming Maple Syrup Festival. With the help of Derek, a professor of arboriculture, they combine her hands-on experience and his scientific knowledge to heal the orchard, along the way discovering their newfound friendship may have a sweet ending of its own.

A maple syrup orchard? Really? It sounds sappy.

4) Pulp Fiction

At the end of Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, we come full circle with the robbery in the diner. Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are eating breakfast after a stressful time cleaning bits of brain out of the back seat of their car. Vincent has a plate of pancakes and, after buttering each pancake, slathers the pile with syrup. When Vincent excuses himself to go to the toilet, Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) pull out their guns and rob the diner. When Pumpkin gets to Jules, he notices that Jules has a briefcase on the seat beside him, and while Jules refuses to surrender the briefcase, he lets Pumpkin look inside. Pumpkin opens it up and although we never see what’s inside, we see how it bathes Pumpkin’s face in a golden glow. The internet is rife with theories about what’s inside that briefcase but anyone with common sense knows it’s bottles of amber maple syrup.

5) Riverdale, s.1 ep. 9 “La Grande Illusion”

“Thicker than blood, more precious than oil, Riverdale’s big business is maple syrup.” So begins the 9th episode of the Netflix series based on the Archie comic strip. We watch a man pour maple syrup from a barrel as if it were single malt in the Scottish Highlands. From there, the camera pans to an entire family engaged in a syrup tasting. We learn that the Blossom family controls the maple syrup industry in Riverdale. But the patriarch has died, creating a power vacuum. Intrigue follows…

6) Wedding Crashers

John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughan) are a couple of players who exploit weddings for romantic opportunities (i.e. to get laid). As they arrive at one wedding, they get into an argument about their back story. Jeremy wants them to pose as businessmen from Vermont who own an emerging maple syrup conglomerate. John thinks this is a dumb idea but Jeremy insists he knows everything there is to know about maple syrup.

7) Love and Maple Syrup, by Gordon Lightfoot

You would think that a Gordon Lightfoot song about maple syrup would appear on an album called Gord’s Gold. But no. It appears on side 2 of his 1971 album, Summer Side of Life. Strictly speaking, maple syrup happens more in the late winter/early spring side of life but who’s going to quibble with Gordon Lightfoot?