jonathan frakes

Beyond Belief

‘Star Trek’s Jonathan Frakes calls out your lies with this new meme

'It never happened.'

 

Stacey Ritzen

Internet Culture

Posted on Apr 20, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 2:21 pm CDT

Actor Jonathan Frakes, best known as William Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation, starred on a lesser-known Fox series for three seasons from 1998 to 2002. Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction was an anthology that featured stories about unusual occurrences including ghosts, psychic phenomena, the supernatural, or seemingly impossible coincidences.

It was then up to the audience to guess which stories were based on fact and which ones were works of fiction, which Frakes would typically hammily reveal with a twinkle-eyed pun or another witticism at the end of the show.

Which brings us to last week, when Twitter user @softsynthbear brilliantly compiled and edited together 47 entire seconds of Frakes telling us that we’re wrong.

“It’s false,” Frakes says in the video. “No way. Not this time. We created it. Not this time. No. Not this time. It’s totally made up. Pure fiction. It’s fiction. It’s fiction. We made it up. We made this one up. It’s a made-up tale. It’s a total fabrication. It never happened.” And … it just goes on and on and on like that for like 30 more seconds.

Frakes is already perfectly memeable in a variety of ways as Commander Riker, and this latest offering was no exception as people began retweeting the clip as a clever way of calling themselves out on their own bullshit.

Others used the clip to call out additional examples of nonsense, such as student excuses, so-called “good” billionaires, and made-up Twitter shenanigans.

https://twitter.com/Cameronbcook/status/1118677401901387776

Someone else used the meme to roast the phenomenon of people thinking there was a genie movie starring Sinbad n the ’90s.

And finally, Frakes—who typically has a good sense of humor about the strange ways the internet obsesses over him—weighed in on the meme, tweeting the YouTube link to the clip with the hashtag, #ProudToBeAMeme:

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*First Published: Apr 20, 2019, 3:46 pm CDT