Spaceship Down
Newsletter 2025-01-02
I owe my kids an apology. That statement could apply to practically anything. I should say I’m sorry for their entire childhoods. In this instance, I’m trying to atone for a more specific grievance: I defamed their building skills. They failed twice at assembling a massive Lego super star destroyer. I thought I could do better—and I did, briefly. Starting from scratch, I made it several pages of instructions past their furthest point of progress. Then it all crumbled in my hands. I lost days worth of work in a span of two highly traumatic minutes. I now better appreciate how much my daughters accomplished in their two attempts. When they failed, it was because tiny bits fell off faster than they could stick them back on. When I failed, it was because the structure cracked in half like the Titanic post iceberg. My repair efforts led to even more catastrophic ruptures, until I had not two broken chunks, but nearly a dozen. I took that moment with grace and good humor. If you believe that last sentence, you probably also believe in Santa. The words I said in that moment definitely would have landed me on the naughty list.
I hadn’t planned to tell the story of the super star destroyer until I was finished. My mistake was assuming “finished” meant “fully assembled,” not “beyond hope.” I haven’t officially quit, but the stage where I glibly thought I was showing up my kids is done for good. I’m currently going through the five states of grief, although it’s mostly just been anger five times in a row. I have been humbled by inert plastic building blocks. The quality of my enemies has really diminished over time.
I know where I went wrong: the day I was born. More precisely, my most recent downfall started on step ten of the instruction book, where I put a handful of the right bricks in the wrong order. I didn’t realize my error until step 550. The span between those two milestones represents six days of work. On Christmas Eve, I put in at least twelve hours during our movie marathon, although the first hour was spent disassembling the evidence of the last failed attempt. I’ve worked on it between three and five hours a day almost every day since then, culminating with Monday night, when I went to bed early after all my hard work literally fell apart. My preferred method for dealing with strong feelings is unconsciousness. Misaligned Legos can’t get me in my dreams.
Before I get any further, let me address the elephant in the room: These aren’t name brand Legos. They’re a nearly identical knock-off band called Mould King. Hate on me all you want, but there’s room in the world for competing brands of building blocks. The Mould King pieces are fully compatible with real Legos. I swap them interchangeably with my genuine sets whenever I lose pieces, which happens a lot. Any plastic part that leaves my line of sight for more than a few seconds has likely disappeared into another dimension forever. I assume they go there to hang out with my missing earbuds.
I thought the Mould King version I was working on was an exact copy of a gargantuan out-of-production Lego set released in 2011 and discontinued in 2014. This is not to be confused with the baby set of the Executor now on the market, which has 630 pieces and measures a mere 17 inches in length. The original behemoth had exactly 3,152 pieces and spanned more than four feet when fully assembled. To my untrained eye, the picture in my instruction book of the completed model (which might be as close to it as I ever get) looked the same as the picture on the official Lego set. Then I glanced at the piece count. My set has 7,788 pieces, more than twice the number found in the original. The two sets get to the same place by drastically different means. There’s more than one way to build a giant gray wedge in space.
The Mould King option was the more reasonable route. On the second-hand market, a new-in-the-box, name-brand, out-of-production super star destroyer can sell for nearly two thousand dollars. The Mould King version, which is still flying off assembly lines, is closer to two hundred dollars on sale. Old Legos sets hold their value better than gold. That’s great for collectors who keep their sets in the original boxes forever but less than ideal for casual hobbyists who just want something to do with their hands while they watch TV. Besides, I got this set as a gift. Actually, my kids got it for the triple birthday party from my buddy, Greg. He correctly mathed out that it cost about the same to buy them one huge combined set rather than three separate medium-sized ones. I also can’t rule out that he bought it because he knew how many problems it would cause in my life. This is the most completely I’ve ever taken over any of their toys. It was a mercy, really. After my kids put in six months of futility, it was my job to relieve them of their frustration while also proving I’m better than them in every way. Things only work out that way in my dreams.
If I had followed the instructions perfectly, maybe I’d be done by now. I’m not capable of making it through more than a thousand steps without committing a few mistakes. I sometimes have trouble following instructions that are short enough to fit in a calendar alert. It’s a miracle any of my kids ever get picked up on time. The shortcomings of the Mould King instruction book are also present in the instruction books for official Lego products. It’s often hard to tell exactly where pieces connect, especially when the colors are the same. Luckily, that’s not a problem on this project. Just kidding. All seven thousand plus pieces are light gray, dark gray, or black. The black pieces are relatively rare compared to the other two colors, which are really just one color in different shades. It’s no wonder that, when connecting gray to gray to gray for hundreds of steps in a row, I sometimes get off by a stud or two, leading to a dramatic structural collapse hours or days down the line. I shudder to think of how much time I spent with a massive sausage finger jammed against the page, trying in vain to count out the correct number of plastic bumps. If the instructions would list numbers so I didn’t have to count, it would solve a significant portion of my issues. If that’s not an option, I want an instruction book the size of a road atlas meant for people my age. The fact that I even know what an atlas is proves I’m too old for this.
The super star destroyer is shaped like a wide broadsword. The majority of its outer surface is four angled planes, and the whole structure is supported above the ground on pillars. I had to be careful about how I pushed the pieces together lest the various components break apart. If I can’t fix a problem by applying brute force, I’m out of ideas. I also frequently had to flip the entire structure upside down to stick things on the bottom. That required me to use the awkward catcher’s mitts I call hands to strategically support the weight of the structure without crushing it or knocking anything off while also precisely applying pressure to get the new pieces to stick together as tightly as possible. For added difficulty, the whole thing was three feet long at that point, making it that much easier to damage as I flipped and re-flipped it. No wonder the girls, and especially Waffle, could barely handle it. The ship was nearly as long as she is tall. Even my long orangutan arms were stretched to the limit. Still, with a healthy dose of self-delusion, I plugged away. Surely, if I kept adding one brick at a time, the ship would be done someday.
Much of my time was spent simply searching for the right piece in a sea of gray. That would have been easier if I were the first one to attempt the set. The bricks were packaged in the order they were needed. However, on their earlier two attempts, my kids made it to bag four. That meant I had to scavenge through the contents of all four bags dumped in one big pile to find what I needed. With great perseverance, I made it to bag five. I even sent a picture to my kids bragging about it. That’s where my hubris caught up with me, which wasn’t hard for it since I’m not fast.
