Encounter at PhACT with John de Lancie

Several weeks ago, PhACT presented a unique event at their monthly meeting: an interview of a Hollywood actor. I had the good fortune to participate. For the better part of an hour, I interviewed John de Lancie in a virtual session live-streamed over both Zoom and YouTube.

John de Lancie Zoom Session — The Zoom session with Rob and John de Lancie.

Before I get to the details, let me answer a few questions that readers may have: What is PhACT? and Why is a Skeptical Inquirer article reporting on an event featuring an actor? A few may even ask, Who is John de Lancie?

Well, PhACT is the clever acronym for a skeptic organization, the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, the twenty-six-year-old Philly based skeptic group that hosts monthly meetings at Philadelphia Community College featuring speakers of interest to the skeptical community. In the long-ago pre-pandemic before-time, PhACT hosted speakers such as Joe Nickell, Michael Shermer, Benjamin Radford, Paul Offit, Richard Saunders, and even James Randi, with presentations given at a lecture hall in the college. Since the pandemic, they have hosted monthly virtual presentations.

As to the question concerning the PhACT interest in an actor: that is best explained by the answer to the third question, Who is John de Lancie? De Lancie is arguably best known for playing one particular character: the enigmatic (“mad, bad, and dangerous”) god-like villain Q of the Star Trek franchise. Introduced in the 1987 pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint,” de Lancie went on to play the popular role in five Star Trek series (including the upcoming Picard season two).

John de Lancie in his first appearance as Q and in his upcoming return to Star Trek in season 2 of Picard.

For those who aren’t Star Trek fans, the character Q may nevertheless be familiar due to the numerous Q memes circulating on the internet intended to ridicule QAnon adherents. These make use of the parallel between the Star Trek character’s name and the pseudonym, Q, of the anonymous instigator of the political conspiracy.

For those who don’t follow Star Trek, and also somehow have managed to avoid social media, de Lancie may still be familiar due to his many appearances (and voice acting) in over sixty TV series and twenty-six movies since 1977. Perhaps more relevant here, de Lancie is a vocal advocate for humanism, science, and reason.

PhACT is my local skeptic group, and the folks who run it know that I had interviewed de Lancie for Skeptical Inquirer. So Eric Krieg, responsible for booking their speakers, asked me what I thought about de Lancie speaking to the group and asked if I was willing to reach out to him on PhACT’s behalf.

Full disclosure: during our conversations supporting the 2019 Skeptical Inquirer interview, it took all my fortitude to remain professional and not let the fanboy out of the closet. Yes, I am a huge Star Trek fan, especially of The Next Generation series. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I eagerly anticipated every new Q episode. So having a chance to interact with de Lancie for that 2019 Skeptical Inquirer interview, and then chatting a bit at CSICon 2019 after his talk, was both unexpected and amazing. The possibility of reconnecting with him for a live interview would be truly astounding.

John de Lancie signing his book “I, Q” for Robert Palmer at CSICon 2019 — John de Lancie signing his book “I, Q” for Rob at CSICon 2019

To ensure this happened, I recall that I challenged several of the PhACT management team to mortal combat using Klingon bat’leths. The lone survivor would get to do the interview. Well, maybe not. As we skeptics understand, memory is unreliable. Maybe all that was just a fantasy. Maybe they were extremely accommodating and just let me do the interview without any disagreement. In any case, we decided that I would interview de Lancie one-on-one and then turn it over to PhACT’s Becky Strickland with ten minutes left to field audience questions and close the meeting.

I will summarize the interview here, but for the details, I highly recommend watching the video on YouTube. Watch it, if for no other reason than to witness what happened when I asked de Lancie an off-limits question. How many people can say they were banished to the Q Continuum during a live-stream?

John de Lancie was born and raised in Philadelphia, so I started the conversation asking about that. This led to a discussion of the impact of dyslexia on de Lancie’s early life. Judging by the Zoom chat comments, people were moved by his experience, which provided evidence that this learning disorder need not prevent affected children from achieving great things. As de Lancie put it, “For some of us, it takes a little longer to put our pants on in the morning. But that’s not what the issue is. The issue is what you do with the rest of the day.”

De Lancie also revealed his inspiration for becoming an actor, as well as what triggered his lifelong love of science. It was Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, which he read as a very young boy. Speaking about the characters, de Lancie said, “They dealt with the real world. They had problems. They were real problems. And they solved their problems in a real way. They didn’t spend their time saying ‘Please help me!’ They just went at it, and they did it. And that has informed my life.”

We next discussed what turned de Lancie toward activism. He was touring in a play with Ed Asner on a college circuit. That play was based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, which dramatized the legal conflict about teaching evolution in a Tennessee school in 1925. Discussing the Scopes trial at a Q&A for students at the University of Nebraska, de Lancie was shocked to discover that most of those at his session believed the Earth was created in a single day, on a specific known date, just 6,000 years ago. This made de Lancie extremely distraught regarding the impact of religious fundamentalism on critical thinking skills: “There’s a fine line between faith and delusion.”

This led to a discussion of a science-education project de Lancie created to help improve the situation: a dramatization of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover School District trial. De Lancie described the historic evolution versus intelligent design trial and spoke about the radio play he created out of the thousands of pages of transcripts. His goal is for the play to highlight the clear truth of evolution and the absurdity of the intelligent design claims, both of which were exemplified during the trial in the testimony from the opposing sides. The play was performed to “fantastic” reviews from the audience—but only at one venue just prior to the pandemic. The plan is to make a studio recording, available for free, when circumstances permit.

We next discussed de Lancie’s other science-education project he had teased at CSICon 2019, titled God’s Goofs. This was to be a series of animated shorts intended for children, to bring attention to the flaws in the “design” of human anatomy. Unfortunately, the project proved to be a “much more complicated process” than anticipated and has not been brought to fruition.

I also asked de Lancie about some other current examples of noncritical thinking in the population, including COVID-19 denialism and the rise of QAnon. When asked his thoughts on the Q of QAnon versus his character Q, de Lancie said “I play a God, not an idiot … [QAnon is] just too stupid for words.”

Lamenting the current dearth of critical thinking skills, de Lancie went on to recall the “miracle” of the polio vaccine of his youth and its widespread acceptance. He juxtaposed that to the current COVID-19 vaccine resistance—despite the relatively few deaths from the polio epidemic (about 4,000) versus the 700,000 dead Americans (so far) due to the epidemic.

My final question, before turning it over to Becky Strickland and audience questions, was about de Lancie’s love of sailing. (He sailed a small boat from Los Angeles to Tahiti.) I asked where that interest came from and if it’s connected to his love of science. De Lancie said, just as his love of science did, he believes this too came from Mysterious Island. He enjoys being involved in adventurous stuff where you have to think positively, rationally, and solve problems as (and before) they arise.

Regarding sailing, that topic came up again with the final audience question relayed to de Lancie by Strickland. Coming on the heels of Star Trek’s William Shatner’s Blue Origin suborbital trip to space just a few days prior, an attendee asked if de Lancie is interested in going to space too. De Lancie said he was not, elaborating that he was willing to risk his life at sea, but not with a possible sudden explosive death in a failed rocket launch. My impression was that at sea, due to his sailing knowledge and experience, de Lancie believes he has a fighting chance at surviving any situation, whereas when one is a passenger in a rocket, whatever happens is totally beyond your control. I can’t argue with that logic.

I am happy to report that the PhACT event was a huge success. Not only did the live-stream attract record numbers for one of the group’s meetings, but as of this writing, after just two weeks the YouTube video is fast approaching 600 views, far outperforming all others in PhACT’s seven-year-old upload library (which average 154 views each).

Acknowledgements: On behalf of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, I want to thank John de Lancie for participating in this interview and more importantly for his continuing efforts toward making our world a more rational one.

Additional reading:

Rob Palmer

Rob Palmer has had a diverse career in engineering, having worked as a spacecraft designer, an aerospace project engineer, a computer programmer, and a software systems engineer. Rob became a skeptical activist when he joined the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia team in 2016, and began writing for skepticalinquirer.org in 2018. Rob can be contacted at TheWellKnownSkeptic@gmail.com Like Rob's Facebook page to get notified when his articles are published.