Geek Culture and Darwinism: Two things on TV shows (#SFWApro)

There are lots of things to criticize Big Bang Theory for (gender essentialism, sexism, etc.) but this isn’t about any of them. It’s about something much more trivial that nevertheless annoys me: The writers delusion that anything involving fantasy or SF is geek stuff and not mainstream-people stuff.
For example, some time back Penny (Kaley Cuoco), Leonard’s non-geek girlfriend, made it clear she never saw Lord of the Rings and knew absolutely nothing about it, apparently because it’s the kind of geeky stuff only the nerds of the world would be interested. And that’s just batshit ridiculous. Even back in the last century, a lot of mainstream readers read Tolkien; now, after the movie trilogy, everyone knows LOTR. They may not have seen it, but they know it. And if they think that silly elf and hobbit stuff is just too silly, well, that makes them the oddballs, not the people who love it.
On a more recent episode, Bob Newhart (who’s had a recurring role as a Bill Nye/Mr. Wizard type TV science educator) shows up as a ghost incarnated as as a Jedi—the Yoda to Sheldon’s Luke Skywalker. And Newhart’s totally, utterly baffled: Yoda? Light sabers? WTF?
As Mighty God King points out here (though not in response to BBS), the idea that people in the mainstream have never seen Star Wars, let alone never heard of it (or heard of the Force, Jedi, Darth Vader, etc.) is absurd. It’s a billion-dollar franchise, and the original movie alone is #6 on IMDB’s current list of top-grossing US films. Hell, my mother’s in no way a geek or a nerd and she saw it on first release.
In short, as so many people have pointed out in recent years, a lot of geek culture is now mainstream culture. Not all of it, sure, but the border’s way more porous than it used to be.
Now for something positive to say, we have the most recent episode of The Tomorrow People. The series centers on Stephen (Robbie Amell), who discovers in the first episode he’s one of a new race of psionic mutants, the Tomorrow People. His uncle Jedekiah (Mark Pellegrino) sees the TP as a threat to humanity, and runs the agency in charge of capturing (or killing) and neutralizing them.
At this point in the season, the real villain is Bathory (Simon Merrell), a TP with a plan to wipe out humanity. Jedekiah, understandably unenthused, is working with a TP scientist on a way to counter Bathory’s plans and mentions in passing that he fears them because they’re the end of humanity: When a new species shows up, the old ones dies.
And the scientist, Irene (Laura Slade Wiggins) points out that no, that’s balderdash: We didn’t wipe out the Neanderthal, for instance, we bred with them. Which doesn’t change Jedekiah’s views, but it’s still refreshing to hear. Fiction often presents these clashes as if human and mutant were completely separate species who can’t co-exist. The evolutionary truth is more complicated.
It’s a nice moment of sanity.