{"id":51630,"date":"2019-10-11T13:52:12","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T20:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trektoday.com\/content\/?p=51630"},"modified":"2019-10-11T13:52:12","modified_gmt":"2019-10-11T20:52:12","slug":"h-jon-benjamin-edward-the-sociopath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/2019\/10\/h-jon-benjamin-edward-the-sociopath\/","title":{"rendered":"H. Jon Benjamin: Edward The Sociopath"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, a new Star Trek: Short Treks<\/em> episode,The Trouble With Edward,<\/em> dropped. It featured H. Jon Benjamin<\/strong> as a rather dysfunctional scientist named Edward Larkin. The actor spoke to IGN <\/em>and Star Trek.com<\/em> about appearing on Star Trek<\/em> and playing the disgruntled scientist. Note: there are spoilers below, so if you haven’t seen The Trouble With Edward<\/em>, wait until you see it before reading the rest of this.<\/p>\n

Benjamin came to Star Trek<\/em> young, watching reruns of the original series. “I can’t specify the exact year,” he said; “but I will say mid-1970s and it was The original series on my living room on the television. I watched when I was probably \u2014 I must’ve been like ten years old. I remember a whole bunch of them [because] I’d watch pretty regularly when I was a kid. That was probably the first science fiction I’d ever seen. So I was fascinated by it.”<\/p>\n

The humor in the Short Treks<\/em> episode is what interested Benjamin in the role. “I’d read the script and thought it was really funny and as I said, because I was a viewer of the original series,” said Benjamin. “[I remember] the tribbles episode being particularly iconic just because of how unique it was relative to the other [episodes]. So when I read The Trouble With Edward<\/em>, it was a really funny idea, based on the outside. That’s sort of what got me interested. And then finding out later that a lot of people had no idea what tribbles were even; [as in] younger people who had come to Star Trek<\/em> later. Some were not aware that tribbles came from TOS.”<\/p>\n

Edward was an “outlier” of a character, said Benjamin. “Just like this one weird twist of what would not normally be… It is clear that his character in the science community would be classified as a loner. A lone wolf.”<\/p>\n

The character made The Next Generation<\/em>‘s Reginald Barclay look normal in comparison. “[You wonder] whether early on [Edward] was given the job by like a family member, you know,” said Benjamin. “That’s one way to look at it. But I think he’s perfectly competent as a scientist, just with no moral compass, no perspective, and no social skills. So I think that’s where he separates himself from everybody else. That was the big, I assume, comedy conceit of the thing. I think he probably considers himself very good at what he does and that there are no consequences to his research. So he’s sort of like a sociopath, I would imagine, but somewhat pathological about his work.”<\/p>\n

Any chance of a return for the unwittingly destructive scientist? “I feel like he did die,” said Benjamin. “I guess somebody had brought up to me — maybe you survived, which I suppose you could make that case. I hope Edward Larkin survived. There must’ve been a button he could press to get out of that… Yeah, I like the idea of bringing this guy back and having him fuck up everything!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, a new Star Trek: Short Treks episode,The Trouble With Edward, dropped. It featured…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2413,9585],"tags":[9952,9951],"class_list":["post-51630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cast-crew","category-star-trek-short-treks","tag-benjamin","tag-the-trouble-with-edward"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"large":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"newsphere-slider-full":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"newsphere-featured":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false],"newsphere-medium":["https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/HJonBenjaminEdward101119CBS.jpg",580,225,false]},"author_info":{"display_name":"T'Bonz","author_link":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/author\/tbonz\/"},"category_info":"Cast & Crew<\/a> Star Trek: Short Treks<\/a>","tag_info":"Star Trek: Short Treks","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51632,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51630\/revisions\/51632"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}