No-Man's Lands by Scott Huler

Author:Scott Huler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307409782
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-11T10:00:00+00:00

BEYOND WHAT IT TELLS US ABOUT ODYSSEUS, this episode makes a point about his crew that wasn’t clear to me until my wife pointed it out: “They’re red-shirts,” she said once, listening to me yet again recounting and considering the episodes of The Odyssey. Red-shirts—referring, of course, to the seemingly endless supply of disposable crew members in Star Trek who had the job of going down to check out some new planet, only to be killed, thereby allowing Captain Kirk to defeat a bad guy and usually kiss a girl wearing harem pants.

Odysseus’s crew members do the following things: They get drunk on the shore at Ismarus, causing death for six from each ship. They foolishly eat the lotus, thereupon needing to be dragged back to the ships. They bodily provide three meals for the Cyclops. They go behind Odysseus’s back to open the bag of winds supplied by Aeolus, at the last moment preventing the fleet from reaching Ithaca. And then here, at Telepylus, unlike cautious Odysseus, they row right into a murderous trap, instantly reducing their number by eleven-twelfths. And don’t forget, though there’s only a single boatful left, they’re not done—we know from the proem, the very first words of The Odyssey, that the remainder are going to cause their own deaths by slaughtering the cattle of the sun against direct orders.

If Odysseus seemed like a poor leader in those early episodes, you get a different perspective when you look at these adventures together. You have to figure: Sometimes it’s not the coach; sometimes the team just stinks. Still, most important—and this is the key to the episode—when there’s nothing for it but to run like hell, the thing to do is run like hell. Odysseus doesn’t spend a moment thinking about the honor of leading his last boatful of men to certain death attempting to defend their helpless compatriots. These Laestrygonians are giants; they’re smashing the fleet into kindling and spearing the crews like cocktail weenies. The thing to do is run, and Odysseus runs. It’s great advice, advice I’d give a kid: When there’s way more of them than you, when the battle has devolved into slaughter and there’s no hope, then live to fight another day. Run—just run away.

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