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    Lifelong ‘Star Trek’ Fan Leaves Behind a Massive Trove of Memorabilia

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    Troy Nelson and his younger brother Andrew were almost inseparable.The two youngest of six, they were born two years apart. They lived together in their childhood home in Bremerton, Wash., for more than half a century. Near their home, there is a park bench on which they carved their initials as young boys.The Nelson brothers never married or had children. They worked together at the same senior home. They even once, as teenagers, dated the same girl at the same time while working different shifts at the same pizza shop. This lasted a week until they realized it.“Two parts of one body,” Evan Browne, their older sister, said of their relationship in an interview.On Feb. 28, Andrew Nelson, who had been treated for cancer for years, went to feed the chickens and ducks that were gifts from Ms. Browne to her brothers. He had a heart attack and died. He was 55. Just hours later, Troy Nelson, who was stricken with grief, took his own life. He was 57.“He had talked about it before,” Browne, 66, said, tearfully. “He said, ‘Hey, if Andrew goes, I’m out of here. I’m checking out.’ Andrew would say the same thing, and then it really happened.”The collection of “Star Trek” memorabilia left by Mr. Nelson is among the largest known, according to the president of a nonprofit that focuses on the franchise.Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Game of Thrones’ Star Liam Cunningham Is Now in ‘3 Body Problem’

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      Born and raised in Dublin, Liam Cunningham speaks in Joycean streams of consciousness that often have no discernible beginning, middle or end. He talks with his hands and taps his feet, salting his anecdotes with friendly F-bombs, catching his breath only long enough to take a puff of his distinctively scented e-cigarettes. They aren’t very popular on the set.“They smell like if you took the cardboard that comes with a dry cleaned shirt and held it over a burner,” said D.B. Weiss, who, with his production partner David Benioff, has given Cunningham choice roles in “Game of Thrones” and now “3 Body Problem.” A heady new science-fiction series, based on a trilogy of novels by the Chinese author Liu Cixin, “3 Body Problem” premieres Thursday on Netflix.In it, Cunningham plays Thomas Wade, the no-nonsense spy master who leads a team of physicists chosen to save the world from a very slow-moving but ominous alien invasion. Unlike Davos Seaworth, the emotionally vulnerable knight Cunningham played in “Thrones,” Wade is gruff, bellicose and secretive, an enigmatic authority figure whose back story left even Cunningham with questions.With Benedict Wong, right, on “3 Body Problem,” Cunningham plays a no-nonsense spy master who leads a team of physicists.Ed Miller/Netflix“So little about him is known, and everybody you talk to that’s seen this thing is like, ‘What’s his story?’” Cunningham said on an Austin hotel patio during the South by Southwest Film Festival, where the series had its world premiere. “He’s got the U.N. Secretary General on the end of the phone, and people do what he tells them to, and you go, ‘Who’s giving him this authority?’ And the funny thing is, I never felt the need to talk to the boys” — Weiss and Benioff, that is — “they never offered, and I never asked, which probably is not a good thing to say, I should probably say to everybody, ‘Oh, I know everything about him, but I’m not telling you.’”Breath. Puff.Cunningham, 62 with salt-and-pepper hair and bright blue eyes, came to acting relatively late in life. He worked as an electrician until he was 29, spending a chunk of his 20s in Zimbabwe bringing electricity to rural communities. “You know the song ‘Wichita Lineman’?” he asks, referring to the ’60s country hit by Glen Campbell. “That was me, except I was the Zimbabwe lineman. For an Irish, pale-skinned elf from Dublin, it was mind-blowing.” For a time he worked in a national park, “the size of Belgium and with 16,000 elephants.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators on Their New Show, ‘3 Body Problem’

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      In an interview, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo discuss their latest fantastical epic, the alien space saga “3 Body Problem” for Netflix.The “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were finishing off their hit HBO series after an eight-season run and wondering what was next. That was when the Netflix executive Peter Friedlander approached them with a trilogy of science-fiction books by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin called “Remembrance of Earth’s Past.”“We knew that it won the Hugo Award, which is a big deal for us since we grew up as nerds,” Benioff said of the literary prize for science fiction. Barack Obama was also on record as a fan.Benioff and Weiss dipped in and were intrigued by what they found: a sweeping space invasion saga that begins in 1960s China, amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and involves a superior alien race that has built a rabid cultlike following on Earth. A heady mix of science and skulduggery, featuring investigations both scientific and criminal, it felt utterly unique. “So much content right now feels like, ‘Oh, here’s another forensic show, here’s another legal thriller,’ it just feels like it’s a version of something you’ve seen,” Benioff said. “This universe is a different one.”Or, as Weiss added, “This is the universe.”Those novels are now the core of “3 Body Problem,” a new series that Benioff and Weiss created with Alexander Woo (“True Blood”). It premiered on opening night at the South by Southwest Film Festival and arrives Thursday on Netflix. The setting has changed along the way, with most of the action unfolding in London rather than China (although the Cultural Revolution is still a key element), and the characters, most of them young and pretty, now represent several countries. But the central themes remain the same: belief, fear, discovery and an Earth imperiled by superior beings. Among the heroes are the gruff intelligence chief Thomas Wade, played by the “Thrones” veteran Liam Cunningham, and a team of five young, reluctant, Oxford-trained physicists played by John Bradley — another “Thrones” star — Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzáles, Jess Hong and Alex Sharp. Can they save the world for their descendants?In an interview in Austin the day of the SXSW premiere, the series creators discussed life after “Thrones,” their personal ties to “3 Body Problem” and the trick to making physics sexy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The series is quite different from the books, particularly the settings and characters, both of which are a lot less Chinese. How did this come about?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Gives Sci-Fi-Obsessed Silicon Valley a Reason to Party

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      In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco on Thursday evening, tech workers from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled next to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook founder, chatted as others sipped from cannily named cocktails like the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut Campari, sweet vermouth) and the Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear purée, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry veteran, dropped by. Alex Stamos, the former head of security at Facebook, was also spotted.“Do you think they’ll let me take home one of the freaky sandworm popcorn buckets?” someone in the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets had become a sensation across social media.The techies were all there to celebrate Silicon Valley’s newest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the latest movie adapted from the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped inspire many of them to become interested in technology. The film, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada over the weekend, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie.”The invitation-only private screening at the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly show focused on sci-fi and fantasy films. And it was not the only game in town.Across Silicon Valley — from venture capital firms to tech executive circles — people had booked their own private screenings of the movie, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the venture firm 50 Years invited founders, friends and investors to “come fuel your imagination with stellar science fiction” in a theater takeover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adam Sandler’s ‘Spaceman’ Has an Identity Crisis, Like Many Space Movies

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      With the release of Adam Sandler’s odd, middling and expensive new Netflix film, a look at space movie misfires of the past and how history repeats itself.Not long into “Spaceman,” Adam Sandler’s new somber sci-fi space movie on Netflix, it becomes quite clear that it’s struggling to channel something greater, something better, something already respected.Sandler’s character, a Czech cosmonaut named Jakub, has spent many months alone in a ship investigating a mysterious purple cloud — alone except for an alien arachnid called Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). Hanus speaks to Jakub — about fear, guilt, pain and the origins of the universe — in a soothing yet stilted tone, evoking the voice of HAL 9000, the conflicted A.I. entity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” from 1968.The central themes in “Spaceman,” loneliness and disconnection, are fundamental in many cerebral space movies including “2001,” but perhaps more so in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet space drama, “Solaris,” about a small crew of scientists who come mentally undone. “Spaceman” also has some “Gravity,” some “Interstellar,” some “First Man,” some “Ad Astra,” the New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review.Many middling sci-fi space movies have faced such fates: measured not by what they are but by what they wished they were. Often these films have the potential to be brilliant. “Spaceman” was directed by Johan Renck, who won two Emmys in 2019 for his work on the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl”; Sandler, while a comedian, has soared in complex dramatic roles, notably in “Uncut Gems” and “Punch-Drunk Love”; Jakub’s wife is played by Carey Mulligan, who is up for a best actress Oscar this month for “Maestro.”What is toughest to forgive, though, is that “Spaceman” commits the biggest movie no-no of all: It’s boring. “It is not fun-bad,” Wilkinson writes. “It is maudlin-bad, belabored-bad and also pretty boring-bad.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Code 8: Part II’ Review: Helping a Child in Danger

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      In this Netflix sequel, the acting cousins Robbie and Stephen Amell again play gruff men of action — physical and psychic — navigating an urban dystopia.If you didn’t see the 2019 movie “Code 8,” but for some reason decide to take a chance on the sequel, fear not: “Code 8: Part II” begins with a vivid account of a not-too-distant-future where 4 percent of people “possess superhuman abilities” and an authoritarian police force leans hard on robots both two- and four-legged.Having more or less caught you up, the movie, directed by Jeff Chan and streaming on Netflix, once again presents Connor (Robbie Amell), the first movie’s protagonist, now leaving prison and rebuffing his former partner in crime, Garrett (Stephen Amell). (They are real-life cousins, in case you were wondering.)Both are stuck in Lincoln City, a setting as bleak as any other sci-fi hellhole, wherein every day is a day without sunshine.The new story proper begins with Tarak (Sammy Azero), a young criminal who’s trying to help his teenage sister, Pav (Sirena Gulamgaus), find a better life. He steals a bag of money from a couple of corrupt cops and is pursued by a robot police dog in a chase scene that’s brisk, legible and passably tense. He doesn’t get away, and Pav goes on the run. Guess which adult helps her out?Along with a bunch of other contemporary sci-fi tropes (“designer drugs” also feature in this dystopia) we’ve got a child in danger — a child with, naturally, emerging powers of her own. Pav’s talent initially manifests itself by making the TV go wonky when there’s something on it she doesn’t like.In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.Code 8: Part IINot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘She Is Conann’ Review: Queen of the Barbarians

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      This feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian” is a sci-fi horror movie sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust.“She Is Conann,” Bertrand Mandico’s gonzo-feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian,” plays like an opera from hell. In the first few minutes, Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) — a humanoid hound who could be related to the Crypt Keeper — terrorizes an old woman wrapped in foil. The creature, who wears a boxy leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, struts around and monologues in a snakelike whisper, and then bites off a chunk of the woman’s flesh.Rainer leads the hapless dame into a sparkling cavern, where the queen of the barbarians herself, Conann, is perched on a high tower, clutching a human heart that looks more like a Christmas tree ornament.“She Is Conann” is a particularly nasty kind of sci-fi horror movie, sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust. It unfolds almost entirely in a foggy underworld that resembles an elaborate haunted house. As opposed to computer-generated imagery, Mandico relies on built sets and practical effects, which give the film a stagey feel. Its unabashedly excessive scenes of violence also offer a gross-out realism.With Rainer as our guide, the plot loosely revolves around Conann’s ascension to power through the ages. First, she’s an innocent white teenager (Claire Duburcq) who witnesses a band of sadistic warriors chop her mother in half; then, she’s an androgynous 20-something (Christa Théret) who looks like the offspring of David Bowie. In the lengthiest act, she’s a Black woman with a fierce buzz cut and metallic threads (Sandra Parfait) living in a metropolis with her girlfriend.It’s more of a fever dream than an actual story, offering a queer counternarrative to the macho vision of the legendary warrior that is as hypnotic as it is gnarly.She Is ConannNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Gary Graham, ‘Alien Nation’ and ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ Actor, Dies at 73

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      In a 50-year acting career, Mr. Graham appeared in several shows, including “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Incredible Hulk.” But it was in science fiction where he made his biggest mark.Gary Graham, a veteran actor best known for portraying Ambassador Soval on the television show “Star Trek: Enterprise” and the detective Matthew Sikes in the “Alien Nation” franchise, died on Monday at his home in Spokane Valley, Wash. He was 73.His death was confirmed by his wife, Becky Graham, who said the cause was cardiac arrest.After studying pre-med at the University of California, Irvine, Mr. Graham’s first credited role came in 1976, when he appeared in an episode of “The Quest,” a western series starring Kurt Russell and Tim Matheson. That role led to appearances in “Starsky and Hutch,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and other television series.His first regular role in a series was in the “Alien Nation” franchise, which began as a 1988 film starring Terence Stamp, Mandy Patinkin and James Caan. In 1989, Fox adapted it as a television show about extraterrestrials adjusting to life in Los Angeles and trying to blend in. Mr. Graham was cast as Matthew Sikes, the human detective whom Mr. Caan had played in the film. He was paired with Eric Pierpoint as George Francisco, a “Newcomer,” as members of the alien species were called.The show ran for only one season, but it was rebooted for multiple television movies, including “Alien Nation: Dark Horizon” in 1994 and “Alien Nation: Body and Soul” in 1995.Mr. Graham, right, with Eric Pierpoint in “Alien Nation.”AlamyMr. Graham also played Soval, a Vulcan ambassador to Earth, in 12 episodes of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” which served as a prequel to the original series. It wasn’t Mr. Graham’s first experience with the “Star Trek” franchise. He had also played Tanis, a member of the Ocampa species, in an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.”As with other notable portrayals of Vulcans, such as Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, Mr. Graham skillfully depicted a race practiced in suppressing emotion and employing logic as a primary driver of life.After “Enterprise,” Mr. Graham took part in unofficial “Star Trek” fan-produced projects, including the 2007 film “Star Trek: Of Gods And Men.”Gary Rand Graham was born in Long Beach, Calif., on June 7, 1950, and grew up in Anaheim, Calif. His father, Ralph Graham, was a surgeon, and his mother, Rosemary (Taggert), was a homemaker.Mr. Graham’s marriages to Susan Lavelle and Diane Graham ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Mr. Graham is survived by a daughter from his marriage to Ms. Lavelle, Haylee Graham; his sisters, Colleen Bertucci and Jeannine Michele Graham; and two stepchildren from his marriage to Ms. Graham, Scott and Steve Deer. More

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      ‘Alphaville’: A Film That Feels Brand-New

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      Jean-Luc Godard’s hard-boiled sci-fi movie from 1965 returns in a restored version at IFC Center.Cinephiles of a certain age have a Jean-Luc Godard film that when first seen, blew their minds. Mine was Godard’s low-budget foray into dystopian science fiction, “Alphaville.”Having opened the 1965 New York Film Festival, which called it the “first successful incursion of pop art into the cinema,” “Alphaville” returns in a restored, re-subtitled print at the IFC Center, starting Dec. 15.Call it pop art, meta-noir, sci-fi neorealism or the underground precursor to the overblown, effects-driven superhero movies of the 21st century. “Alphaville” inserted itself into popular cinema by appropriating an existing movie icon, the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution, played in seven French thrillers by the frog-faced American actor Eddie Constantine.Thanks to Constantine, “Alphaville” is remarkably close to a “normal” movie (by Godardian standards). And thanks to Godard, Lemmy — one icon among many — lives in a self-aware movie universe. My own eureka moment came when, dispatched to find the German pulp character Harry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Lemmy asks him if their colleagues Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are dead.“Alphaville” is pure pop in the form of gritty vérité — shot on high-speed, black-and-white film almost entirely at night and largely in the then-new Paris business district La Défense. As outrageously callous and bluntly stylized as a comic strip, mayhem is accentuated by Paul Misraki’s start-stop, hyper-melodramatic score, while tough-guy Lemmy quotes Paul Éluard.Inventive and pragmatic, Godard transformed ordinary objects into futuristic gizmos: That a jukebox stands for a spy console, a cigarette lighter receives radio transmissions, an electric fan denotes the supercomputer Alpha 60 and the computer’s flat, guttural croak is that of a man with a prosthetic voice box, is a form of surrealism.Godard was pragmatic in other ways, too. Richard Brody’s biography, “Everything Is Cinema,” suggests that “Alphaville” was designed to get Anna Karina, who divorced the director just before filming began, to say the words “I love you.” She does at the end of the film. Audiences did not. Present at the movie’s premiere, the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris “felt waves of hatred washing up on the screen.”The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, also there, noted that Godard’s “excessively cinematic prank,” provoked annoyance when, shifting gears midway through, it became “a tedious tussle with intellectual banalities.” Perhaps, but to paraphrase Umberto Eco’s essay on cult films and “Casablanca,” where two clichés make us laugh, a hundred clichés make a myth — in this case Orpheus and Eurydice. (In “Alphaville,” Cocteau’s version is referred to throughout.)Like “1984” and any number of recent opinion pieces, “Alphaville” equates totalitarianism with the debasement of language and allegiance to the algorithm. That it makes its points audio-visually may be why many artists prized the film. The conceptualist Mel Bochner celebrated “Alphaville” with a photo-text grid published in 1968 in Arts Magazine. Decades later, MoMA PS1 hosted a show of contemporary art inspired by Godard called “Postcards From Alphaville.”Those artworks have dated but the film hasn’t. Digitally restored, “Alphaville” not only looks but feels brand-new. The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.AlphavilleOpens on Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More