LUCIDMEDIA

Polaris 23 Celebrates Sci-Fi, Fandom

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 14 July 2009 10:53

The weather was dark, stormy, with enough rain to officially make a torrent. It’s Saturday morning and the weather’s hardly conducive to a summer festival. Fortunately, this one’s indoors. The Sheraton Parkway Toronto North to be precise. For this was the site of the 23rd annual Polaris Convention (formally Toronto Trek). Polaris is an annual gathering of sci-fi aficionados and enthusiasts who celebrate the genre with panels, screenings and celebrity guests. More than being a love-in for genre entertainment, the membership of Polaris also raise significant funds for Toronto charities, this year the beneficiary was Gilda’s Club, a non-profit group that creates a meeting place for people with cancer and their families, and where cancer patients and their families can connect with others.

This is one of many reasons that Polaris feels like a different kind of con. Around 3,000 people walk the floor of Polaris every year; by comparison Fan Expo attracts 50,000. Also, I got the sense that these are true fans, and are not just the celebrity watchers and the autograph seekers. Although there are those things, there’s also a great deal of just open love for all things sci-fi whether it’s new flagships like Torchwood, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, or old guards like Star Trek and Star Wars. You know that the extraordinary is ordinary when you see a guy in a Next Generation style Starfleet uniform taking a smoke break outside the Sheraton as you walk up.

But it’s more than fictionalized space exploration, of course. One of the panels I went to on Saturday was about fandom and the cult hit in the making, Repo the Genetic Opera. The panel was hosted by the Shadow Cats, a group of Toronto performers who hold annual shows in the Bloor Cinema where they do a shadow cast performance of the film accompanying the screening. The group first met during the original week long engagement of Repo back in November of ’08. When they officially came together, they began taking pages of notes at screenings, examined clips of the film on YouTube and listening to the film’s soundtrack in order to learn the songs. The Shadow Cats talked about how they worked out their production and how the show has evolved, as well as the bizarre misunderstanding/beef between themselves and the Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast. The panel was also joined by a couple of members of the film crew for Repo, which was shot in Toronto.

But a shadow cast is perhaps the ultimate expression of fan ownership, but it’s hardly the only one. There was one panel that was called simply “Nitpicking the Potter Movies,” where a dozen or so fans of the Harry Potter books attacked little bits of the work done on the films as not meeting their requirements for what should have made a good Potter adaptation. The discussion took many forms from answering the question about whether you favourite book is also your favourite movie to talking about who might have been better casting in certain roles. Naturally, the conversation occasionally turned to what’s been missing, and one panellist remarked that given that John Cleese played Nearly Headless Nick in The Philosopher Stone, it would have been awesome had producers got Cleese’s Monty Python castmate Eric Idle to play the poltergeist Peeves. It’s a moot point, of course, given that Peeves has never made the cut for an on-film appearance.

Several panels were set up to discuss specific shows, including new shows like Fringe, which was a panel that I happened to sit in on. It wasn’t a packed room, but the enthusiasm of the fans there more than made up for the numbers as they discussed varying theories as to what the alternative universe thing means for the coming second season of the series. There were also some more thematic panels too, and ones that you might not expect at a sci-fi con. On Saturday afternoon, their was a small panel about procedural cop shows and their place on the TV landscape, especially in relation to the more serialized genre shows. What you came away with was that Polaris made an effort to be as inclusive as possible, while at the same time trying to push fans into new and different areas outside their comfort zone.

But of course a big part of the convention is the celebrity guests. This year, Polaris had a motley crew including Matt Frewer (Max Headroom, Psi Factor), Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica), David Hewlett (Stargate Atlantis), Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate SG-1), Michelle Forbes (Star Trek: TNG, True Blood) and David Nykl (Atlantis).

There were Q&As, autograph session and photo ops as any convention. The Q&As had the usual (and unusual) assortment of fan questions. Forbes was asked at least twice – or the millionth and the million-and-first time – about why her Trek character, Ensign Ro, wasn’t part of the cast of Deep Space Nine. On the other hand she was also asked a lot of questions about the recurrent socio-political parallels between current events and he Battlestar character, Admiral Cain. Forbes was also asked about the most outrageous thing she’s ever done for a role, which she politely refused to answer because its part of an upcoming episode of True Blood.

Upstairs on the ninth floor, far above the main convention area, I got the chance to participate in several press conferences with many of the convention guests, specifically: Hogan, Black and Nykl.

Hogan is an accomplished Canadian screen and theatre actor perhaps best known for his role in the first few seasons of the CTV procedural Cold Squad. That is before he was hired on Galactica to essay the role of the damaged and drunken executive officer Col. Saul Tigh. Hogan talked about how shooting Galactica never felt as if he were shoot a science fiction show, and that working on the show was the only time he felt aware of the post-production process, calling Bear McCreary’s music, “another character on the show.” Galactica, of course, was scuttled this past spring, so the doors must being beaten down for a well-known and talented actor like Hogan, right? Not quite, says the actor who told a story about auditioning for the role of a RCMP officer on the US cable series Psych, for which he was deemed “not Canadian enough” to play. Too bad the character wasn’t a humanoid robot programmed to believe he was human.

Later the press met with two of the Stargate actors back-to-back. Claudia Black, who played Vala Mal Doran in the final seasons of SG-1, made us all introduce ourselves to her individually before we started, which was an odd touch though personable, but still outside the norm for most press conferences I’ve been a part of. While the Hogan conference stuck pretty close to his Battlestar work, Black’s talk ran the gambit from Stargate to Farscape and her work on the Shakespearean stage and what she’s up to next.

David Nykl, meanwhile, is best known for playing Dr. Radek Zelenka on Stargate Atlantis, one of numerous secondary, recurring characters that populate the group of Earth explorers inhabiting an advanced alien city in a distant galaxy. Nykl, like his Stargate character, is from the Czech Republic, and was asked about acting in Czech theatre and the popularity of Atlantis amongst Czechs given that one of their own is a semi-main character. The reaction to the show is, of course, tremendous in Prague and surrounding areas, he says.

Polaris handily proved that a club jazz vibe goes down very well even amongst people in elaborate costumes good enough to fool some Hollywood movie set clothiers. With Polaris 23 in the books, the fans out there can now look forward to Polaris 24. Meanwhile, all our Lucid Forge readers can look forward to our exclusive one-on-one interview with Matt Frewer to be published later this week.