“Oh man. It’s about this group of people traveling together on a spaceship, just like you. Only they’re not running from killer robots or anything. They’re just exploring. Fucking anything can happen on this show. Sometimes it’s fantastical, sometimes scary, sometimes just an intellectual or moral dilemma. The focus is on the people though, and how they work together to try and figure shit out.” He’s so animated, using a lot of hand gestures, but he settles down to tell her this one simple but very important fact: “They’re great characters, Adia.”

They are. So he has to ask, “Have you ever met Captain Kirk? Or Spock?” He’s almost afraid to know. What if she says that the real Captain Kirk is an asshole? No matter what she said earlier, he knows you can’t trust TV to tell you the truth about what’s what. It might be a lesson he learned frighteningly late in life, but he did learn it. More or less, anyway.

She’s so nice that it’s making him feel guilty again. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, giving her a tiny reassuring smile. “I promise I’ll be fine.”