Secrets of a former spoiler-holic – Guest Clack

Michael Hinman is the founder and site coordinator for Airlock Alpha, a science-fiction site that is part of the BlipNetwork. I’ve met Mike at a couple of events in the past, and I asked if he’d like to write something up for us. I’m happy he chose to write on the subject of spoilers, because it’s one I still struggle with today.

For the longest time, Feb. 10, 1997 was a special day for me, and it’s hard to believe it’s been more than 12 years since that time.

Worf and Garak are captured by the Jem’Hadar while looking for Garak’s old intelligence boss (and soon-to-be-revealed daddy) Tain. It was an OK episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a two-parter that started with “In Purgatory’s Shadow,” but an episode that would stick with me for a long time.

Through the course of events, we learn that Tain and even the Klingon Martok are not the only Alpha Quadrant prisoners there. Also being held was none other than Dr. Julian Bashir.

As the guards brought him into the cell, dressed in the uniforms that had just gone out of style, my chin was completely on the floor. That meant this whole time, at least the last few episodes, the Bashir on DS9 was not Bashir, but a Changeling.

This wasn’t the greatest twist ever. Hell, it wasn’t the greatest twist on DS9. But it has a special place in my heart because it would be the last time in more than a decade that something would happen on a television show I enjoyed without me knowing about it first.

That is life as a spoiler-holic. And I wasn’t just any old spoiler-holic … I was a spoiler-king (or at least the jester … let’s just say I was in the royal court somewhere). A year after that episode aired, I launched SyFy World, which would become SyFy Portal in 2001, and finally just last month Airlock Alpha. With competitors like TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly making more money on a bad day than I would see in a lifetime, I was clearly outmatched, even in this new online world. But I was determined to succeed, and succeed, thanks to the wonderful, beautiful and cuddly spoiler.

It all started when I got a peculiar e-mail in my inbox. It was from someone associated with the then first-run syndicated show Earth: Final Conflict. They had details about upcoming scripts, and because it was no secret that I had a news background beyond the Internet, this person felt he or she could trust me to share these tidbits of information.

I balked at first. I mean, it hadn’t been that long before when studios were shutting down websites and such, and the last thing I needed was some sort of copyright or intellectual property battle on my hands. I also didn’t want to compete with Tribune Entertainment, which produced E:FC, and give fans any reason to NOT tune into the show.

So I spent a couple nights thinking about it, and formulated what would become the spoiler bible for my sites over the next decade: Tease interesting things, but stay away from climaxes, and stay away from reveals so big that readers may not feel the need to actually watch the show. And my spoiler career was born, built on the back of spoilers. Sometimes it was fun knowing something what others didn’t. Even in the most recent wave of Battlestar Galactica episodes, I was more playful than teasing when I would boast about my knowledge of the final Cylon, or what was really happening in the final episodes of the show. In fact, even today, I still possess knowledge that I have yet to impart anywhere, and have no plans to.

But there is a burden that comes with it too. The popular belief, one that I helped enforce, is that I avoid conventions and such because I have an issue with crowds. While such a phobia does exist, I have been known to overcome fear when I need to (or want to). But in reality conventions had always had negative results for me because fans would want to know what’s coming up on their favorite shows, whether I actually knew anything or not, and would get very angry when you wouldn’t give them the answers they were looking for.

Clacked by Keith McDuffee
on Mar 16, 2009 @ 12:00 EST5EDT