A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

You know, I rather liked Michael’s breakthrough last week that “twin moons” referred not to a planet with two moons, but a planet where two of its moons moved were in sync. This week, Michael and Saru will talk knowledgably about fine details of Romulan culture while in the middle of a desperate fight for their lives.

I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense that they might have a detailed understanding of Romulan poetical styles and a callback to the Picard Season 1 trivia about Romulan houses having a fake back-door. I mean, I say it out loud and it is, indeed, weird that they would have these facts ready to hand, and I feel like the scene would have been easier to take if they’d had to call up Discovery and have Zora do a google search instead. But at the same time, Michael is legally a citizen of the Romulan homeworld and her mom is an adopted Romulan, and Saru is shortly going to be the first gentleman of the Romulan homeworld, so if any of the regulars are justified in knowing stuff about Romulan culture, it’s these two. Yet it once again brings home the fact that Discovery stopped being a show about twenty-third century people a long time ago. From Michael’s perspective three years ago, no one even knew what Romulans look like, and now she can just casually recognize that a poem fails to match the traditional structure of a particular Romulan form.

Like I was saying last week, this is why I think Paramount is justified in ending the show. Discovery has become “Just Star Trek but in the 32nd Century” now (I have even worked out that by now, Discovery has some 32nd century natives on board in addition to Adira. There’s a Bajoran bridge officer and a Ferengi bartender and either a second Saurian or they’ve redone Linus’s makeup), while Strange New Worlds is “Just Star Trek but in the 23rd century”. And I think this is also making it a hard sell to greenlight Star Trek Legacy, because right now, it seems like that would just be “Just Star Trek but in the 25th Century”. They don’t need three different versions of “Just Star Trek, but with slightly different visual motifs to indicate what year it is.” On the other hand, they’ve got “Star Trek as a Comedy” and “Star Trek but for Kids” (Admittedly, also cancelled) and they’re coming out with “Star Trek But Grimdark” and “Star Trek But At College”, which are a much bigger departure from the core Trek “Just dudes having adventures in space” concept, and thus justify their existence more. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of the concepts; it’s that we don’t need three minor variations on the same show. Well, at least, normal people don’t; I eat this shit up.

This week’s A-plot is Michael and Saru’s final mission together, doing some tomb raiding on a dead planet. For those keeping score, the Promelians were another long-dead one-off TNG race like the Progenitors, this one from the episode where Geordi has a fling with a holographic reconstruction of the Enterprise’s designer and it is super creepy and pervy because the writers wanted to do “Geordi is a nerd and this awkward with women” but had a great deal of contempt for nerds, so they wrote him as kind of an incel. An element of the Promelian characterization that has carried over is that while their technology was less advanced than 24th century Federation technology, they built things to last, which means Saru gets to whip out his Fuck-Off-Murder-Darts against some two-thousand-year-old automated defense drones. (Again, no recognition here Michael and Saru are roughly equally displaced from the time of the Promelians as from the present day of the series). It’s a lovely touch that Michael makes a point to order the Dots to go undo the tomb desecration done by Chiana and D’argo, who beat them to the clue, but overlooked the hidden fifth stanza.

While this is going on, there’s a couple of B-plots. We get some good material for Tilly and Adira as they puzzle out how to keep Saru and Michael alive. We introduce the incoming plot complication – Adira is thinking about dumping Grey. Turns out that they’ve never really spent any time apart before and Adira thinks they might actually like being by themself. Hell of a thing to come back from the dead and then get dumped though. Also, I’m once again struck by how little the fact that Adira is joined to a Trill symbiont has to do with their character. Awkward enby teen genius is a perfectly fine character (Adira is the least awful teen genius the franchise has ever given us), but if you’re going to toss in “Also has the memories of several lifetimes possibly including their ex-boyfriend and a Starfleet Admiral,” that should make some kind of impact, shouldn’t it?

We’ll get a chance for Adira to interact with their Trill side next week, though, what with the fifth verse pointing Discovery to Trill, I’m sure they’ll be a major part of the A-plot rather than just having a little side-plot to dump Grey. Right now, they get to interact with Rayner, via telepresence, because time and space and distance means nothing in the 32nd century. He doesn’t do much, this is just to establish his value so we buy it when Michael asks him to replace Saru. He has a lot to learn about how to connect to other people though.

Our other B-plot involved Book, who pulls out that Secret Courier Communications Mushroom from season 3 to see if Chiana and D’argo are willing to cash out. They are not. (Minor point here, Stamets refers to the Spore Lab as “Main Engineering”, because he serves the narrative role of the chief engineer in this show, even though technically he’s a scientist, because no one is going to believe Tig Notaro giving technical exposition. If she ever shows up.  Reno still counts as chief engineer, though, just in the TOS sense of “Mostly pipes up to be salty about how you’re mistreating her engines and tell you that she’s working on it,” rather than the TNG sense of “The nerd who solves your technical problems through technobabble.”

The big reveal that Chiana is the daughter of the previous Dread Pirate Roberts Booker Cleveland is kind of a jaw-dropping contrivance, but look, we need an angle for connection here. Chiana and D’argo have done some murdering, but not too much. I’m curious whether they both get to live or not. They might need to kill D’argo off to give Chiana an enemy she’d side with the Federation against.

But they’d better get on with it. There are not a lot of episodes left. We’ve got a solid and predictable structure of the rest of the season with the incredibly telegraphed revelation that the Terrible Secret of Space (future edition) is a key in six parts. I wonder which one will be The Power of Friendship.

Well okay. Didn’t mean to take three months off, but I found I really enjoyed not having the pressure of churning out a weekly article added to all the other fucking pressure I experience every moment of every day. It’s not that I don’t have things I could say – I’ve been mulling over a plot for an Admiral Pike Timeline version of Star Trek III-and-IV (The biggest part of the idea is the observation that if it’s Pike who steals the Enterprise to go to Genesis, he’d obviously recruit Pelia rather than Scotty to help him), and I’ve been trying for years to summon up the energy to finish off the War of the Worlds thing (I am just giving up on the two different 2019 versions because life is too short to force myself to keep watching either of them). But my family has way too the fuck much going on for me to handle, and since I can only cut things from my own personal schedule, reducing my cognitive load means that I have to do fewer “me” things. (Yes! I know this is somewhat pathological! But I can’t very well tell my wife to cut my daughter’s dance class for the benefit of no one but me; that’s not only selfish, but weird. It gets even more pathological when I realize that the 8 hours a day I spend at work is probably the best part of my day because I fully understand the requirements on my time and other things aren’t allowed to interrupt or supersede or double-book). So we are where we are.

And where we are is, “Two new episodes of Discovery dropped last Thursday.” Kinda wish they’d push it back to Wednesday, honestly.

Where did we leave off with Discovery? Let’s see. Book’s doing community service for all the theft and piracy and war crimes and nearly inciting an intergalactic war. Tilly’s off running Starfleet Academy. Saru and T’rina are dating. Grey’s on Trill studying to be a Guardian. He’s an android now, but that doesn’t seem to be a big deal in the 32nd century. Peace has been made with Species 10-C, Earth and Ni’var are back in the Federation, the Emerald Chain has collapsed, all seems right with the universe. So let’s break that up.

First off, who’s missing? I saw Reno in the trailer, but she’s not in this episode. Bryce got written out near the end of last season to go work on a secret project for Kovitch. From the latest rumors about Section 31, it appears that Georgiou was sent back to the early 24th century, during the “Lost” era between TOS and TNG. Nilssen is absent with no explanation; Linus is working the Spore Drive console on the bridge.

The first good thing I’ll observe is that while this is still very much in the “Michael is the main character” mode, they seem to have decided that it’s time for her arc to move on. She’s confident in her role as captain of Discovery, and the show feels confident of her in that role. The angst over finding her place that directed the character for the first four seasons doesn’t put in an appearance in the season opener. Her only big angst just at the moment is that she officially breaks up with Book over that whole thing where he sided against her to run off with Tarka and committed war crimes and nearly started an intergalactic war. As previously mentioned.

For those of our other characters who deign to show up, we get a lot of new depth. Tilly is coming into her own as a character, and there’s a hint of budding romance with… A dude whose name I do not remember.

Saru’s been offered an ambassadorship, which will take him away from Starfleet (Last season, I think they said he was destined to eventually take command of the new Voyager once his term ended in Kelpien government, but it appears he just crystalized into Michael’s permanent XO instead), and he gets a character arc in this episode that leads him to take it, deciding that T’rina’s companionship is more than enough to fill the gap in his heart from leaving Discovery. And then she proposes to him, so even better. God those two are so cute together. They could so easily have done some kind of bullshit to imperil their relationship, but they didn’t; these are two very mature adults, and despite being romantically inexperienced, they can be open and honest with each other and themselves. Like, there’s a moment early in the episode where she tells him not to take her into account when deciding whether or not to quit Starfleet. And for a moment, he looks like he might be hurt. But instead of letting him feel that she’s unwilling to commit or doesn’t care, she explains herself, that she will be there for him and support him and is fully committed in either case, and she won’t be any less content with their relationship if he chooses to keep the job that involves a lot of travel.

Paul’s new trait is a concern about his own legacy. We saw hints of this from time to time – Lorca tempting him with the suggestion that his name would be remembered alongside Zefram Cochrane and Elon Musk (Some people like to imagine this was a hint of Lorca’s true nature, that he thought of Musk as one of history’s great engineering luminaries. But I think it’s just part of Trek’s longstanding tradition of future historians radically misreading people. See also Kirk’s history teacher who thought that the Nazis were pretty great aside from that one thing). But it wasn’t really a big deal like it is in this episode. While Discovery’s spore drive has been repaired since he burned it out last season, Tarka blowing up the new model and the fact that navigating the network can only be done by two known species, both of which are extinct has led to Starfleet deciding to shelve the project and focus on the Pathway drive instead (Which might be in production now? Rayner mentions not having one, but in a way that comes off like the rollout is already underway and he’s salty about how far down the queue he is). So Paul is feeling bummed about how history will remember him. It comes up again when he notices an allusion to Altan Soong in the serial number of a memory module from a dead seven-hundred-year-old Soong-type android antiquities dealer.

That exchange, along with a couple of others, I think highlights why it’s probably okay for Discovery to end now. Paul thinks of Altan Soong as a legendary scientist from centuries in the past, just as Tilly and Michael think of Vellek and Picard as characters from the distant past. Fred is a “primitive” Synth, of a design that hasn’t been made in hundreds of years, and they’re impressed with him as a historical artifact himself (A historical artifact who is an antiquities dealer. That’s fun). But these are all things which post-date these characters by more than a century. And no one comments on that. No one comments on the weirdness of a crew from the mid twenty-third century investigating a secret from the late twenty-fourth century while in the thirty-second century. There’s no observation of the fact that Michael, Paul, Hugh, even Saru are culturally more similar to Vellek, Picard, and even Fred than they are to Kovitch, Rayner and Vance. Because after about the mid-point of season 3, the Discovery crew haven’t really acted like displaced refugees from the twenty-third century; they’ve fully integrated themselves into thirty-second century life. And that’s not a bad thing – a constant frustration when an Issekai sort of story goes on for a long time is the way the fish-out-of-water character can be compelled for the sake of the narrative to remain a weird and aloof fish-out-of-water who never adapts to their environment. But, as the pathway drive winning out over the spore drive reinforces, there’s not not much left to justify this show continuing as Star Trek: Discovery, rather than moving on to just be “A Star Trek Show Set in the Thirty-Second Century. Discovery itself is effectively a thirty-second century ship, the crew are effectively thirty-second century people. It doesn’t make all that much difference that they’ve got a novel propulsion system or that the captain is Spock’s sister or that the first officer is a Kelpien. Back in season 3, we still had the fact that they hadn’t lived through the Burn as something that set them apart – Discovery had become a show about the return of Those Old Scientists to bring a new enlightenment to a world that had been plunged into a sort of new dark age. But now, it’s just Star Trek in the 32nd Century. The 32nd Century setting is interesting, but there’s no real need to stay connected to the 23rd.

But anyway, what’s this season about?

Turns out they cribbed the plot wholesale from season 10 of Stargate SG-1. I mean, more or less. So way back in season 6 of TNG, there was this cool episode where Picard goes chasing around the galaxy on a very Indiana Jones-style adventure that culminates in everyone learning that a race of ancient and very smooth humanoids had evolved billions of years before any other life, and, being lonely, kickstarted evolution in the galaxy, and that is why so many planets gave rise to intelligent life that look like members of the Screen Actor’s Guild with prosthetic foreheads. And literally nothing ever came of this. But now, eight hundred years later, the notebook of one of the unnamed background Romulans from that episode has turned up, and they haven’t come all the way out and said it yet, but it’s pretty clear that he found the device the Precursors used in this kickstarting, and now Starfleet has to find it before it falls into the nebulously-defined “wrong hands”. (Okay, I say “nebulously”, but they namecheck the Breen and the Tholians. The Breen are the most boring and pointless antagonists in Trek history, and the Tholians, despite being a TOS one-off whose only particular trait was punctuality, have not really had enough said about them to give me an opinon).

Yeah, there was this whole thing in Stargate where they found the machine that their own precursor race used to reboot life after a plague wiped most of it out, and they had to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. I will add as a minor side-note here that there really shouldn’t be any precursor technology for them to find, because the whole reason the precursors encoded their message in DNA was that they knew there would be absolutely nothing left of their civilization by the time more spacefaring sentients evolved.

That’s our setup, and Michael is only very reluctantly read-in by blackmailing Doctor Kovitch. You’ll remember him from the last two seasons; he’s… Okay, still don’t know what his job is. He’s an expert on the mirror universe, in charge of Starfleet Academy, in charge of intelligence, he runs a secret project that Bryce got written out to join, he was in charge of the effort to figure out the 10-C, he was in charge of declaring Zora a legal person, and I think he’s also Hugh’s therapist? Let’s just say he’s the Federation’s Mycroft Holmes. Also he wears a 21st century suit and eyeglasses and he is played by David Cronenberg, and I love how insane this is, but it’s starting to get hard to handle.

I’m writing this in the break I’m taking between episodes one and two, so I assume at some point in the next hour or so, this season’s new add, Captain Rayner, will misplace his own ship and replace Saru as Michael’s number one. Rayner seems fun so far. He’s free-wheeling and goal-oriented and a bit reckless, willing to endanger others to accomplish his mission. He’s also apparently a Kellerun, a one-off species from DS9 who tried to off Bashir and O’Brien, but for entirely noble reasons. Fortunately, in the past eight hundred years, they have evolved past their penchant for big shoulder pads and man-buns. He seems like the sort of dude who needs to learn a season-long lesson in the importance of connecting with other people, trusting his teammates, and putting love and faith and trust above cold pragmatism, which, fortunately, is the main thematic arc Discovery characters take.

Speaking of, I assume we’re going to get some proper antagonists at some point. Because the ones they try to sell us on in “Red Directive” are just about the most obvious fake-outs I’ve seen. I am having a hard time remembering their names, so I will call them Chiana and D’argo because they absolutely seem to be a couple of Farscape characters who somehow ended up in the wrong show. They’re former couriers who’ve turned to roguery since the courier economy collapsed. They’re like the intermediate-level villains from a Tomb Raider story – the ones who are always competing with Lara or Indy or Nathan Drake to find the treasure, but for selfish rather than noble reasons. The sort who are destined to help the hero out like one time at the three-quarters mark in the story when they realize that the other bad guy is a literal Nazi who isn’t seeking the Spear of Longinus just for money but to resurrect Cthulhu or something. They’re violent, unscrupulous and don’t care who gets hurt, but they’re also fiercely and lovingly devoted to each other, in a way that may or may not be sexual. And as we know, in Discovery, if you have the capacity to love other people, you’re not exiting the show without some form of redemption. Also, what the hell kind of “wrong hands” are these two for the power of creation to fall into?

It’s a good episode, it’s a good setup. I think the landspeeder sequence went on too long. It was a good way to show how Rayner’s priorities were a problem – he blows up the Chiana and D’argo’s cave to stop them hiding, so they blow up the whole mountain so that Discovery and Antares have to beach themselves to block the resulting avalanche from wiping out the city of adorable poverty-stricken space-bedouins (and specifically the two adorable children whose landspeeder broke down outside of town directly in front of Michael.)

Charades or I am Curious (Yellow) or How I Meld Your Mother

See Also: Faces (VOY), Rascals (TNG), Stargate SG-1 “Divide and Conquer”, Doctor Who “Curse of the Black Spot”
Contains strange new world?: Yes!
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in this episode?: Peak SNW right here, baybee.

So the SAG-AFTRA strike is finally over which means I have to get off my ass and start writing about Star Trek again I guess. I was kind of enjoying not writing, to be frank, but I should probably try to do more creative stuff. Thinking about doing another Admiral Pike-verse fanfic.

The thing is, I don’t actually have all that much to say about the rest of the season of Strange New Worlds other than “It’s great. It’s really great.” This one provoked some mixed emotions from me.

I got to ask. I mean, probably not, right? But maybe? You’ve got aliens named Yellow and Blue and the resolution to the plot arc requires Christine to own up about whether or not her and Spock are fucking. Is this an easter egg referencing the 1967 Swedish erotic film series?

So the hijinks. I guess an SNW “thing” is “Vulcan Hijinks at the midpoint of the season”? They even played a riff on the TOS “shenanigans” leitmotif just before Spock drops an F-bomb. The basic outline is… Kind of shocking in that it feels like what would happen if Star Trek were a ’60s sitcom. It has strong I Love Lucy energy. Here’s what happens: Spock takes Nurse Chapel out to study a Weird Swirly Thing on a planet near Vulcan, and they get blown up. Fortunately, the swirly thing is owned by some godlike aliens, whose insurance covers the bill. Only when they found the shuttle full of two blown-up humanoids and 3/4 of the DNA they found was human, they figured the other quarter was a mistake, and put Spock back together a fully human. And they’ve only got a limited time to fix it before it becomes permanent for some reason! Okay, Good solid Star Trek plot so far. But incoming hijinks: Spock is scheduled to have the very important and awkward ritualistic dinner with his fiancee’s parents that very night! And T’Pring’s mom is a total bitch who already hates Spock for being a filthy half-breed and if she disapproves, the wedding will be off! And I mean, it would be terrible if Spock and T’Pring didn’t end up getting married! Also, Fred and Barney have their Water Buffalo meeting tonight! And Laura’s toe is stuck in the spigot! And Superintendent Chalmers will be here for dinner in 20 minutes!

So okay. There’s a lot going on here. It’s a funny plot. And it’s insightful too. One of the best things is that Spock doesn’t spend the episode being angry and feeling violated about having his DNA changed. It’s a nice change from the past few generations of Trek having people meet the weirdness of the universe first and foremost with annoyance. But more, the reason Spock isn’t upset is related to the reason he has such a hard time pretending to be Vulcan: it’s because his Vulcan upbringing has not prepared him for pretense. He knows how to act like a Vulcan, but not how to pretend to be a Vulcan. He doesn’t know how to be un-genuine (A skill he will, of course, learn as he grows older). He doesn’t keep trying to suppress his emotions when he’s a human, because suppressing emotions isn’t part of his understanding of humanity, so why would he?

I love that he blows up at Sam for being a slob. This is part of a cute little montage where they recreate scenes from the cold open, showing how Human Spock reacts differently, to the discomfort of his colleagues. Spock doesn’t know how to deal with his human emotions particularly in that he does not know with how to express emotions in a healthy way. He’s used to dealing with Vulcan emotions: big, rampaging, primal emotions that have to be tackled and suppressed. What he’s not used to are slipper human emotions that you need to embrace and direct rather than suppress. It’s kind of lovely. And Amanda’s there! Amanda is wonderful as always, and I love how easily she just rolls with everything – a human woman living on Vulcan has to learn to just roll with things. And what’s her reaction? She has to teach her son how to lie. For a Vulcan, suppressing your emotions and acting stoic is genuine. For a human, it’s an affectation, and Spock has to learn how to perform a different thing than his truth.

Of course, when she beams aboard and Spock puts on a little Starfleet beanie to hide his ears, I could not help but be disappointed that we had the literally perfect moment to canonize the Emco Star Trek “Spock” helmet and they just passed it up.

T’Pring’s dad is great too. I mean, sort of. It’s a little uncomfortable to have this very dated stereotype of the domineering mother-in-law and the henpecked father-in-law. But it’s still kind of funny to watch this dude very clearly make the logical decision that that it would be irrational to disrupt domestic harmony without exceptional provocation.

But I don’t think we can avoid addressing the elephant in the room.

Leonard Nimoy was Jewish. And his lived experience of being a Jewish actor in the middle of the 20th century in America was an experience of being a kind of permanent-partial-outsider; having to put up with people making jokes about hook noses and secret world-ruling conspiracies and funny diets and modified penises. Of being never quite accepted, not allowed to join the best country clubs, always being slightly suspect. Of perpetually being a “funny foreigner” whose culture and cuisine were viewed as “odd” in the best of times. Of having his loyalties challenged. And that lived experience is a huge part of what he brought to the role of Spock. The modern Spock, whether it’s Quinto or Peck playing him, leans into portraying Spock as neurodiverse, but the original Spock was very much – and here’s that notion we addressed recently with Pelia coming up again (She’s not even in this episode! You start off saying Amanda and Pelia are old friends, then you bring back Amanda and you contrive an excuse for Pelia to not be around?) – a “Space Jew”. So we have a bit of a problem when we launch into the “Spock’s a human now!” montage.

Frankly, even if Spock weren’t deliberately and consciously constructed as a metaphor for the Jewish experience, it would be a little problematic to make one of your choices for depicting the explicit markers of “humanity” be “loves bacon”. It’s particularly bad in this context, but even in any context, you’re absolutely lowkey asserting that “All True Humans Love Bacon”, in a way that implies that vegetarians, Jews and Muslims are somehow not-quite-real-true-humans. In context, it takes the extra step of sending the message that Spock has been, in a sense, cured of his Jewishness. Yuck. Ew. Gross. No. (To make matters worse, I’m pretty sure T’Prell’s “Overbearing Mother-in-law” stereotype is also Jewish-coded. Maybe not deliberately, but that’s the trouble with ethnic stereotypes; they’re ground into the culture so deeply that you can evoke them without even noticing you’re doing it. You sort of sense T’Prell wanting to point out that T’Pring could just as easily have had an arranged marriage to a nice doctor without a shiksa mother.)

I think that scene is symptomatic of a significant misfire in the episode’s design. They were clearly trying to do something clever here: rather than contriving a reason for Spock to have to “learn to be human”, or go around lamenting the loss of his True Self, or being confounded about how to deal with these new urges and impulses, they did something new and more interesting. Spock just completely naturally adapts to his situation, because the thing Spock is not used to is faking it. He is completely earnest about his new feelings and impulses, up to and including an uncomfortable moment with La’an when he notices that he’s horny.

One really cool implication here is a reversal of what the popular Spock Lore would tell you: Spock does not spend his life holding his “human side” in check: he, like all Vulcans, spends his life holding his Vulcan side in check – the powerful, savage emotions. The reason Spock struggles is not because his human emotions are interfering with his Vulcan logic, but because the level of restraint needed to control his Vulcan emotions is pathological to his human side.

But the misfire here is that, in a sense, Spock was human already. They’re all human. This is Star Trek. Aliens aren’t aliens; they’re metaphors for one part of the human experience or another with a funny forehead. And so, we’re left with Spock “turning human” in a way that equates “human” with being cis-white-hetero-male-American. And not a vegan one.

Now, like I said, there’s a lot to enjoy here. I mean, when Chapel and company go back to meet the godlike aliens and are magically transported to a void with black tile floors and crinkly cellophane walls, that sort of thing is absolutely my bag. I love me a “magically transported to a black void surrounded by the title sequence from a ’60s British movie”. The Kerkovians are delightfully weird. Aloof, legalistic, and one gets the impression that the legalism is a kind of Karen-y kind: mostly an excuse to declare things not-their-problem. It’s a little much the way Chapel is still reluctant to admit her feelings even when it becomes clear that’s what Yellow needs to hear in order to give her standing to file a complaint. Boy it’s going to be uncomfortable if she immediately backtracks on this and becomes aloof and gives the impression that this is just a casual fling for her immediately.

Anyway, they sort everything, and there’s a cool bit where the Vulcans call up Christine to be dicks to her and she wistfully muses about having just traveled across dimensions to gain the medical knowledge of godlike aliens before telling the officious Vulcan to go fuck himself. Spock successfully mind-melds with his mother, because for some reason, part of this “Meet the in-laws” ceremony involves the mother-in-law watching the groom  mind meld with his mother. This bit I do not really understand. Now, the part of the ritual where you sit and listen to your in-laws complain about you, that makes perfect sense. Not sure why your mother-in-law needs to watch you mind meld with your mom though.

It’s wonderful development for Amanda, though, and the way they play the reveal is done well. First, Spock describes the memory they shared as just an ordinary scene from his childhood. Then, having finished the ceremony, T’Prell goes on to insult Spock’s mom. As you do. This might actually be the official origin story of “Talking smack about Spock’s momma is his berserk button.” We haven’t seen it happen earlier than this in his chronology. Only later do we get the reveal: the “ordinary” scene was the first time the other kids invited Spock to play. And through Amanda’s eyes, he realized that however bad he had it, his Vulcaninity being constantly challenged, Amanda had it worse. Spock was bullied, but there were times when he was accepted. He’s got a smokin’ hot girlfriend. He got accepted to the academy. He’s chief science officer on a flagship. But there’s never been any reward for Amanda. The other mothers never accepted him. And even Spock’s greatest accomplishments were colored with that, “It’s especially impressive given your shitty mom,” thing. It’s heartbreaking and wonderful. Sarek married Amanda, as we know, because he loved her. But no one’s ever really addressed why Amanda married Sarek, or what she gave up to do it.

Of course, Spock losing his cool, despite having been re-Vulcaned, and revealing the charade leads to T’Pring dumping his ass, and this is something I have some feelings about, at this stage in my own journey of self-discovery, and after what we saw back in Spock Amok last year. Because once again, they’re making me sympathetic to the lady who is gonna try to get out of an engagement by getting Spock to murder his boss.

Because, once again, it comes down to Spock’s insecurities. In his time of crisis, he basically got everyone on the ship working together to bail his ass out, but he was afraid to tell his girlfriend. And, I mean, he tried. But there was that anxious attachment, once again, that inner voice that told him that if he opened up to the person he cared about most about his insecurities, if he showed her weakness, she would reject him. She’s no T’Prell, but Spock still feels in his green heart that his relationship with her depends on maintaining a steadfast Vulcan appearance. And T’Pring is certainly not blameless here, but how in the world is a Vulcan woman – a woman who’s mother is T’Prell, no less – supposed to know how to make a man like Spock feel safe and secure in their relationship if he won’t open up to her?

…

Is what I would say, if the breakdown of Spock’s relationship with T’Pring were about the negative cycle stemming from Spock’s fearful-avoidant attachment style interfacing with T’Pring’s dismissive-avoidant attachment style. But at some level, where they’re really going with this is mostly just shuffling T’Pring out of the picture so that Spock and Christine can make out. Which, obviously, is step one in the path to her transition from the freewheeling mad scientist bisexual icon of Strange New Worlds to the flat character hopelessly pining for the unavailable Spock. Great. Cool. We’ll do that then.

Among the Lotus Eaters or I AM KI-RISTOPHER

See also: The Paradise Syndrome (TOS); “Court-Martial” (TOS); Conundrum (TNG); Workforce (VOY); Stargate SG-1: “The First Commandment”, “Beneath the Surface”; Heart of Darkness
Contains strange new world?: Strange yes, new, technically no.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Sorry, mythology allusion this time. Very TOS.

I am having a very bad day after a very bad weekend, after… Well there’s been good moments in my life too at some point I guess. Anyway, just wanted to get that out of the way in case I’m a dick about this episode.

One choice Strange New Worlds has made that I’m less than 100% on-board with is to firmly position itself as “The prequel to the original series”. I mean this in a denser sense than just by the obvious virtue of being set before it. Enterprise and Discovery were both set before the original series, but they didn’t engage with the original series in the way of being a prequel. They were more Rings of Power and less The Hobbit. Enterprise might well have been described as a prequel to The Next Generation, but its interaction with TOS was more in-line with the interactions that ’90s Trek had with it: treating it like the embarrassing grandpa that they could occasionally hit up for a reference, but treating it generally with an uncomfortable mixture of reverence and disdain. Y’know, because we should respect our forbears but you never knew when it was about to say something incredibly racist.

(Aside: Evelyn is performing this week in The Aristocats for drama camp. She got worried the movie was being pulled from Disney+ since she couldn’t find it on her tablet. I had to explain that child profiles are blocked by default from watching the movies that contain particularly noteworthy racism. The racism in The Aristocats is far enough in the background that you could miss it, but I’m glad Disney paid enough attention to slap a disclaimer on it. Evelyn tried to make me explain the history of casual racism in Disney properties, but fortunately she fell asleep during the first 45 minutes of me trying to explain the caterers in The Ugly Dachshund, a movie which I firmly believe probably counts as a hate crime)

Strange New Worlds, on the other hand, really does seem to want to present itself as a kind of redemptive reading of the original series. It tries to show us a lot of the same “Space is weird” stuff that was a big deal in TOS, and got downplayed later in the franchise. It wants to pick up on things that were present in TOS, and show them in a way that is somewhat consistent with TOS, but smooths out the limitations of ’60s network television, and it revisits the original series with an eye toward what was actually there, without getting lost in the cruft of 50 years of pop culture.

So why aren’t I 100% on-board? I mean, I like it. It’s great. But still… The choice to make SNW an direct TOS prequel means that one thing it really isn’t is a sequel to “The Cage”. It’s a little disappointing to me how little Strange New Worlds draws from the original pilot. Famously, Spock is the only character from the original pilot to be brought back for the second pilot. Strange New Worlds brings back… Spock, Pike and Una. With Chief Kyle, Uhura, Sam, Jim, Chapel and M’Benga, there’s twice as many TOS characters in SNW as Cage characters. Strange New Worlds puts Pike in Kirk’s green Casual Friday uniform, not the gold turtleneck (Though that does make a cameo in a photo on Pike’s shelf). There’s no glass communicators or ridiculous hand-cannons. There’s no gooseneck speakers everywhere. The ship has its red highlights (Added after the second pilot at the request of the network to make the show pop a little more as a “killer app” for color television). I love Erica and M’Benga and La’an, but I’m curious about Colt and Boyce and Tyler. (Actually I don’t care about Tyler).

So this week, they actually did bring back something from “The Cage”, and it’s a surprising choice. Rigel VII. Well-read viewers will vaguely remember that “The Cage” opens with Pike depressed and considering retirement after losing several crewmembers in a massacre on the primitive planet Rigel VII. If you pay careful attention, Spock walks with a limp in “The Cage”, which is supposed to be the result of an injury he took during that adventure, though no dialogue tying that together made it to screen. This week, surprisingly, we go back there, since the locals landscaped a Starfleet delta into the garden, and that presumably means Pike left behind some swag. Okay, that’s a heck of a hook. I guess we could do something interesting with that; Strange New Worlds similarly started with Pike depressed and considering retirement as he comes to terms with his very gently impending doom, so maybe there’s a good parallel here to see Pike come back to the place that almost ended his career five years earlier…

Or not. There’s not really any particular reason this week’s Strange Old World had to be Rigel VII, and Pike doesn’t really have any space to reflect on his unresolved trauma from the last time he was here, because he spends most of the episode not remembering it. (Also, kind of uncomfortable: there seems to be a mild implication that the reason Pike’s crew in “The Cage” skews so much more white than in SNW is that they were the only ones left after Pike led an ethnically diverse away team to be massacred). The planet doesn’t even look as cool as that really nice ’60s matte painting.

Yeah… So… It turns out that the reason the previous mission went so badly is that there’s radiation on this planet that makes your brain stop working, and if you spend the night there, you wake up in the morning like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, consigned to the terrifying fate of marrying Adam Sandler.

None of this came up the last time they were here, because it takes about 6 hours for the radiation to start messing with you – this time, they’re parking far enough away that they had to hike to town.

How do we get from Memento to the violent attack on the away team five years earlier? Fucked if I know. Oh, sure, Zack says something about how the memory loss makes the people paranoid and violent… Except… It doesn’t? La’an and M’Benga do have little fits of paranoia, but every other amnesiac character we meet is completely chill about it; like the lotus-eaters the episode is named after, the laboring class has learned to live with permanent amnesia and happily go about their labor. The guards are violent, but only in your typical Fantasy Medieval Castle Guards kind of way, and they get to keep their memories (There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it explanation that the helmets are made of a mineral that blocks the radiation. The castle does the same). It’s a nice enough metaphor, and the whole setup of the pacified, amnesiac workforce exploited by the castle-dwellers is very classic Trek stuff. That’s all very good. Of course, it’s also been done. A lot. There’s a Voyager episode about it, and an utterly shameless SG-1 knockoff of that episode about it. And they’re both bigger in scale. To be honest, the bit about the castle-dwellers exploiting the workers isn’t a big thing here. Zack is an interloper; he didn’t create the two-tier system, and it doesn’t appear that the castle-dwellers, and whatever ruling class Zack deposed in his takeover, actually understood what was going on. They were still a medieval society, remember. There’s no reason to believe they weren’t doing the best that they could. And absent the deus ex starship of the Enterprise removing the radiation source, there was nothing they could really do to improve their lot. Which is why we don’t see Pike leading an uprising and leading the outsiders to rebel against the corrupt leaders. We just see Pike personally storming the castle to bring down Zack, the crewman he left for dead years ago.

Zack… Is there. I guess. We don’t get to dwell on Pike’s feelings about having left someone behind, because Pike only gets about three total minutes of knowing about it, and we don’t get much insight into Zack’s experience of it either: he’s gone a big Colonel Kurtz, but he tells us approximately nothing about how he managed to install himself as the ruler of this civilization or his experiences. He just insists that Rigel VII changes you. There might have been a tragic story here about Zack spending time among the field Kalar, subject to the constant migraines and memory loss, to eventually be brought to the palace – perhaps to explain the crate of supplies Pike also left behind? Maybe he had to go through the experience of learning he’d been left for dead by the Enterprise multiple times? Or maybe someone just foolishly handed him a phaser while he was still in a brain fog and the next thing he knew, he was king. I don’t know, and the show isn’t interested in giving time to it.

I won’t bother with complaining about all the ways in which a civilization whose workforce has the memory of a goldfish doesn’t make sense. That is adequately addressed by the criticism of every other story like this. Luke tells them that they retain skills and emotions, even though they lose memories, but how does one develop skills under those circumstances? Obviously, the Kalar are stuck at a medieval level because the labor force can’t be trained to do anything that takes more than a few hours to learn, but how do they master things like walking or going to the bathroom or, y’know, reproduction. It’s hard to imagine enough pregnancies making it to term to keep a stable population.

I do like the little element that Pike pieces together parts of what’s going on from the fact that he’s way too soft and pretty to have spent his life doing hard labor. Then he goes on a murder spree. I know there’s this climactic scene where Pike recovers enough of his sense of self to not summarily execute Zack, thus disproving Zack’s claim that the planet “changes you”. But, I mean, no one comes to help Zack when Pike attacks him. There’s no one left alive in he palace? No one comes in afterward to interfere with M’Benga treating La’an or Pike scooping up all the Starfleet tech.

So we’ve got this A-plot where Pike and M’Benga and La’an are stuck on the not-as-dangerous-as-previously-indicated Rigel VII without their memories, subject to violence and paranoia. Only not so much because after one scene, La’an, M’Benga and Pike all sort of instinctively know they can trust each other because “the heart doesn’t forget”. And the rest of the field Kalar are all pretty placid and zen, not violent and paranoid. And the main motivator for Pike is that M’Benga needs his medical knowledge restored to treat La’an’s gaping gut-wound. But then we’ve got this B-plot where basically the same thing is happening on the Enterprise.

Either one of these would have been enough story for a whole episode, and so splitting the plot up like this underserves it a little. Just as the story on Rigel VII stays in tight on Pike, not really addressing the bigger picture of what this lifesyle does to the Kalar, the story on Enterprise narrows its focus to Ortegas.

Ortegas is the last member of the regular opening-titles cast to go without a focus episode. This one and “The Elysium Kingdom” are the closest she’s gotten, and they’re both “The crew are not themselves” episodes. I’m getting angry with the show’s failure to give Melissa Navia some worthy material. Ortegas is heavy with signifiers marking her as really cool, and it’s made cooler by little moments that undercut that, like her attempt to make “Vamoose!” a catchphrase, or her being cute and adorable when she thinks she’s going on an away mission, followed by her sadness and hostility when it turns out she can’t go. But they just refuse to give her proper focus. Also, they seem to be making it a thing that she doesn’t get along with Spock, in a way that’s borderline racist, and that is the opposite of cool. Her inheriting the role of suspecting Spock in “A Quality of Mercy” is a defunct timeline, of course, but then they have her calling Spock out two weeks ago over playing chess with Pasalk, and being bitter at him for bringing the news that she’ll need to fly the Enterprise rather than go to Rigel VII. And it’s Spock that Ortegas lashes out at when she comes out of her amnesiac fugue on the bridge, not knowing who she is, who he is, or what she’s doing there.

Everyone’s lost their memory, and with the exception of Ortegas and Spock, they’re content to just mill around in the halls. Spock is still at his station, but has no idea what to do. Ortegas panics, and has the computer guide her back to her room (first time we’ve heard the Enterprise computer talk, I think? Also, to annoy the continuity nerds, the computer guides her to her cabin by flashing the lights in the hall to lead the way, a feature that was kind of explicitly presented as a cool new thing on Galaxy-Class ships in TNG). But there’s tricky maneuvering they need doing to avoid smashing the ship on the asteroid belt, and when the computer reveals to her that she’s the only one who can save them, she’s able to access her operant memory (There’s decent logical consistency with how the memory loss works, establishing early that they’ll all still be able to do their jobs, at least at a basic level, but they won’t remember what those jobs are), and her emotional connection to her job role gives her the confidence to return to the bridge and take the conn. It’s a pretty good scene as she squares up and marches back to the bridge, chanting, “I am Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship.” It’s pretty cool lowkey Spock-development for him to trust her, too.

Of course, “I’m Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship” is kind of a sad ending for the character arc at the other end of the episode where she’s eager for the chance to do something, anything other than just fly the ship.

You know, this gets me thinking, though. Insofar as Strange New Worlds has deliberately positioned itself as a prequel to the original series, every character has the specter of an exit strategy over their head. Right now, we know Spock is going to basically stagnate in his career for the next decade, and that’s something the show is probably going to want to justify. It looks likely that Uhura is going to slowly work her way up, but she’s going to do it from that same chair she’s in now. M’Benga is going to stay on the Enterprise, but as a specialist rather than CMO (We have at least the precedent of Hugh on Discovery to help with that, since post-resurrection, he didn’t go back to CMO but became Discovery’s therapist instead). Pelia, we can probably assume, will move on just by virtue of the fact that she’s here on a lark to begin with (Oh hey the immortal with thousands of years of memories suddenly losing her memory would have been a neat thing to show in this episode! Or at least a funny little, “I got my memory back! Whoah there are a lot of things I would rather have kept right on forgetting!” scene at the end?). But we’re all sort of primed to expect something to happen to explain why we never hear from Una, La’an, and Ortegas again. Now that we’ve established that Una has been on Enterprise since it was April’s ship, it seems kind of like they’re attaching her to the Star Trek mythology of the Enterprise exerting a mythical pull that few officers willingly just rotate out of. We definitely will need to justify why Una doesn’t succeed Pike as Pike succeeded April. Will it be tied to her heritage? Will she be offered her own command before it’s Pike’s time to step aside? Will she end up buying it to a face-full of Gorn-Jizz like Hemmer? La’an as a character is just screaming to nobly sacrifice herself. In the other timeline, she becomes Kirk’s first officer, and there’s definitely some glances exchanged that, in light of last week’s episode, hint that La’an pursued Kirk deliberately because she secretly enjoyed it when he pressured her to accept his hot dog. But such a thing happening in the prime timeline would be hard to reconcile.

Now, though, with Ortegas, we might have a clear opening, and if they do get around to giving her a character arc, it makes sense that what takes her away from Enterprise would be the realization that she’s going to have to leave if she ever wants to be something other than “And I fly the ship”.

Now, speaking of the specter of the exit. Just how doomed do we think Captain First-Name-Not-Yet-Spoken Batel, esq., is right now? They start off with Pike breaking up with her because he feels guilty that the thing with Una seems to have torpedoed her career in the JAG office, since Pasalk is angry and got her passed over for promotion. But they reconcile at the end because his emotional connection to her persisted even when he was amnesiac, and he’s dedicating himself to not pushing other people away just because of his own insecurities about his impending doom. And she definitely does not show up in seven years when he gets his face melted off, and Spock definitely does not consult with her about his plans, and Pike definitely experiences no awkwardness about ditching her to go spend his retirement with Veena. So… Horrible fate? Messy breakup? Face-full of Gorn-Jizz? We set up a potential Gorn war as part of this season’s tension, so someone’s got to get Gorn’d.

So that’s where we leave it. Next week we roll into the midpoint of the season, and I assume it will be an episode where no one is acting out-of-character and no wacky hijinks ensue.

(Reads Capsule Preview)

“Spock gets turned fully human and has to deal with that, but also it happens right when he’s supposed to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.”

Motherfu–