Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Paul Stamets

For Stamets, the 'fungi' of the earlier nod to the Beatles on this list didn't always translate into the pun of its homophone 'fun guy'. In the beginning, Stamets was a particularly challenging character. Whilst not a conventional scientist, he was certainly more buttoned up than The Fab Four's early attire. As Anthony Rapp put it to StarTrek.com in 2020,

He's a passionate scientist who cares deeply about his work and his integrity […]. Then [he] is conscripted into a war effort, so he chafes at that, and has really high standards, which makes him short with people.

When we first met Stamets in Context Is for Kings, that 'shortness' was on full display via another reference to the Beatles. "My Uncle Everett plays in a Beatles cover band. It hardly makes him John Lennon," Stamets says rudely to Burnham, concluding the rest of the ill-mannered exchange with the equally impolite, "Go somewhere else, please". His bad mood wasn't without reason, however. If tone is set from the top, then it was Mirror evil all the way down for season one, and the Klingon War from just above.

Stamets began to loosen up over the years, to the extent that he even joked about his "pre-tardigrade DNA" surliness in the fifth season episode Face the Strange. Bohemian was beside the point, but there was the promise to Culber of a performance of La bohème at a Kasseelian opera house on a moon near Starbase 46 in Into the Forest I Go. La bohème is the Puccini opera which inspired the musical Rent, for which Anthony Rapp originated the role of Mark Cohen, and Wilson Cruz later played Angel.