And we’re back to this, I guess. From now until the premiere of Star Trek: Picard, the second Thursday of every month will see the release of a new Short Treks minisode. But the first one dropped this past weekend, with the next one scheduled to appear tomorrow, so let’s tuck in to Q&A.
This episode was predicted to be a fan-favorite, giving viewers a bit more of Anson Mount’s Pike, Rebecca Romijn’s Number One, and Ethan Peck’s Spock. And from what I’ve seen, the fan reactions have been pretty positive.
You can guess where this is going. I mean, I didn’t hate it or anything, and it’s not like I was expecting something else – these Short Treks have pretty consistently been lighthearted character studies, and that’s exactly what this one is. But it just left me a little cold. It’s a bit more caricature than character study, and bits of it feel at odds with the progression of the characters.
As I mentioned before, while Rebecca Romijn is pretty good as Number One, a big problem with her appearance in Discovery is that she is playing the exception rather than the rule. A central aspect of the character of Number One is that she’s cold, reserved, and clinical most of the time, so that when she does open up and show a softer side, it carries a lot of weight. And Romijn does a great job of conveying, “I’m not normally willing to open up like this, but I will now.” But the show never really gives us much of the “I’m normally reserved like this,” angle. She’s all exception and no rule. “Q&A” at least tries to establish the “most of the time” part, but it’s mostly an informed ability – she starts out cold and clinical, but the mask drops real quick. As much as her role in this story is to show us why Number One is the way she is, we’ve never actually seen how she is, and we only barely do now.
The other thing that this minisode seems to want to do is, if I am being unkind, indulge a fanboy impulse to “fix” old canon. Specifically, to explain why Spock behaves so differently in “The Cage” than he does anywhere else in canon. Eh. Whatevs.
So, “Q&A” is the story of Spock’s first day on Enterprise. The highlight of which is him getting stuck in an elevator. Having been chastised by Number One for failing to display the expected level of curiosity for an ambitious young science officer, he responds by peppering her with questions until she gets annoyed at him. This feels like a sound idea ruined by pacing, because the setup is that she literally tells him that he should be asking so many questions that she gets annoyed, but the number of questions it takes to get her annoyed is three.
One of them is, “What’s your name?” Okay, sure, it’s kinda a thing that Number One doesn’t tell people her name. It’s kinda a big thing. But I mean, she really ought to be used to getting the question, right? Sure, she should dodge or refuse to answer, but “What is my commanding officer’s name?” is an incredibly reasonable question and she shouldn’t be annoyed that he asked.
Also, her name is Una.
Yeah. This is the one thing I really like in this Short Trek: the complete non-reveal that her name is Una, which is done with no fanfare or weight. First time we see her, she’s reading a memo off of a tablet and we can clearly see that it’s addressed to Commander Una. for what it’s worth, Pike called her “Una” back in “An Obol for Charon”, but it wasn’t clear at the time whether that was a term of endearment. Spock finds out her name in his first ten minutes on the job (The reveal is meant to show him being smart, but it feels clumsy in execution. He asks a technical question, and a few minutes later, realizes that the “Una Algorithm” mentioned in her answer was eponymous). I am cool with them telling us her name, but it’s still symptomatic of the flaw in how the character is used, that they set up, “She’s cold and reserved and doesn’t tell people her name,” but what actually gets screen-time is, “She opens up in private and tells a new Ensign her name the first time she meets him.”
The core of the exchange comes when Number One tells Spock he should smile less. Sigh. On paper, I really like this. First, I really like the image of a woman in a position of authority telling a man who is her junior to smile less. It’s a lovely inversion of the ugly trope of women always being ordered to smile more by men. And I do kinda like the decision to embrace rather than downplay the “Spock grins ridiculously while playing with the singing Talosian flowers,” scene from “The Cage”. And the idea that Spock’s extreme stoicism in TOS is informed more by a deliberate choice to emulate Number One than by his Vulcan upbringing alone is really interesting.
It doesn’t really fit in with the arc of Spock’s character as laid out by Discovery, though. Bracket Discovery for a minute and let’s look at what we’ve seen of Spock’s character. We’ve got a young Spock in “The Cage” who smiles and shouts (This comes up in “Q&A”; Number One tells him to tone it down). By TOS, he’s extremely reserved and stoic. This peaks with him pursuing Kohlinar in The Motion Picture, after which he backs down a bit and starts appreciating the value of his human side, even if he’s still insulted by being compared to a human. Then he dies and gets better and after this point, we really see a Spock who’s fully at ease with his human side, to the point that he doesn’t even really try to hide his emotions when he meets the Kelvin-timeline version of Jim Kirk.
Discovery adds the backstory that his fallout with Michael caused Spock to spend years forcefully rejecting his human side. After reconciling with her, we see Spock adopt a more integrated personality, similar to his character in the later TOS movies. But he speculates that the pain of losing her again will push him back into his shell. For her part, Michael suggests that the way to avoid this is to make a friend, and basically describes Jim Kirk as the sort of friend who would be good for Spock.
That’s all very lovely. The only real weakness it has is that it doesn’t quite explain Goofy “The Cage” Spock. I’m happy to overlook that. “Q&A” is not. Instead, “Q&A” tells us, in a nicely oblique sort of way, that Spock’s sense of awe in the face of scientific wonder trumps his Vulcan stoicism. We start out with Spock smiling to himself as he gets ready to beam aboard Enterprise.
Una finds a smiling Vulcan disconcerting and tells him to knock it off. That’s kinda weird and uncomfortable. Specifically, she asserts that since Spock’s goal is to someday have his own command, he should keep his emotions to himself, because people won’t take a smiling Vulcan seriously. I get the idea here: we’re being told, in reverse, that Una’s cold, reserved demeanor is her locking herself down in order to present the image she feels she needs to present to be taken seriously as a command officer. I have some problems here.
- “A woman has to hide any hint of softness or sensitivity to be taken seriously in a leadership role,” is an ugly idea that ought not to be true in the real world, and sure as fuck ought not to be true in Star Trek.
- Again, this would work a lot better if they spent more time showing us Number One being Number One and less time having her take the mask off.
- “Spock’s life goal is command” comes out of nowhere. There’s nothing anywhere else in canon to suggest that Spock is even interested in command. There’s basically a whole thing in Star Trek II where Spock tells Kirk that he’s really not that into leadership roles. (Not saying that it wouldn’t be fair to assert that young Spock wants to command, but when he grows older, his goals change, but this is the one and only time we’ve been told Spock wants his own command.)
- If Spock wants his own command, why did he major in Blue Shirt? Surely he could’ve tested into Yellow Shirt.
- Also, Spock spends like twenty years as the science officer aboard the Enterprise. This does not seem like the career path of an ambitious man.
- It doesn’t even really fit with the assertion in this very minisode that what really gets Spock’s motor running is seeing the wonder and majesty of the universe.
- This is Spock’s first day. The arc of Spock’s character just gets hopelessly muddled up in light of this. So wee Spock is learning to embrace his humanity through his bond with his sister, but then she breaks his heart and he rejects his humanity for the next twenty years, except that he also smiles a lot, until his first day on Enterprise where Number One tells him he needs to learn to be more stoic and use his inside voice, but then a couple of years later on Talos IV, he’s grinning like an idiot in front of everyone and shouting all his lines, then he reconciles with Michael and learns to integrate his Vulcan and Human sides, but then he rejects that and becomes a hardcore stoic, but then he gets kicked out of Kohlinar school and goes back to Starfleet and learns to integrate his Vulcan and Human sides again. This conversation with Number One only really works here, on Spock’s first day, but the arc of his character would actually make more sense if you put this conversation after “The Cage” (Possibly a lot of character stuff would make more sense if you placed “The Cage” after season 2 of Discovery, but I won’t get into that here).
The nice thing that happens next is that Spock reasons from her advice that there’s some aspect of herself that Una keeps under wraps and asks her about it. She responds by busting out the Gilbert and Sullivan.
Again, on paper the idea of a minisode centered around Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck singing “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” while stuck in a turbolift on Spock’s first day aboard the Enterprise sounds super charming. Maybe it’s just the way it’s shot? It’s kinda awkward and weird. They are both passable but not great, which I think is possibly deliberate.
Then once they’re done singing, they get rescued and she swears Spock to silence about the musical number and they go to the bridge and meet Pike. Anson Mount gets roughly two lines of dialog and they’re not that interesting. There’s a pretty cool nebula on the screen and he asks Spock if Vulcans experience awe. Spock, having learned an important life lesson from Una, says, “Yes, but we usually keep it to ourselves.” It’s a nice ending, but it doesn’t feel fully earned, because “And then they sing showtunes” is a poor substitute for a deep character growth moment.
The miniscule and generic role Pike plays is a bit of a disappointment. In fact, when Number One describes him to Spock, her description of him is oddly generic as well. He’s a fighter pilot but he abhors violence; he wants you to passionately defend your point of view to him; he’s willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. He likes horses. It’s… just kinda generic. Where’s the stuff like, “He’s obsessively goal-oriented,” or, “He’s not actually all that into being in charge of people,” (which could very easily be integrated into Una’s character; one gets the feeling that Pike probably delegates a lot of the day-to-day telling-people-what-to-do, which means that she has to be good at projecting the full authority of the captain), or “He won’t ask his crew to face a danger he won’t face himself.”
So that’s “Q&A”. It’s not bad by any stretch, and on paper, it’s got good stuff going on. But a weak execution fails to elevate some character moves that, while they certainly would be good somewhere, don’t quite fit where they end up.
I give it two and a half Open-Shirted Portly Old Man Rikers out of four.
Next week: “The Trouble With Edward”.
Proposed Star Trek: Picard side-story: “A Fist-Full of Ones” – Will Riker, Una, and Old Man Picard’s Dog team up to uncover the mystery behind a strange village populated by retired spies, guarded by a murderous weather balloon. Jim Caviezel guest stars on account of Patrick MacGoohan being dead.
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