Some Blundering About Star Trek: Short Treks 2×02 The Trouble With Edward

First, a leftover from last week:

• So as I said, Pike is barely in “Q&A”… But he does have one really good moment. When Spock finally reaches the bridge, Number One tries to cover the depth of their exchange before by pretending that she doesn’t know Spock well and has to look up his name on her tablet. And Pike gives her a look when he does this that absolutely screams, “I know this is bullshit because there is no way you don’t have his name memorized, but I have no idea why you’d want to pretend you didn’t, and I trust you, so I’m just going to roll with it.”

Now, last time, I said that if you just explained what the episode was about on paper, it sounded good, but in execution, I was underwhelmed. Guess what happened this week?

The exact opposite. This episode shouldn’t work. And let’s get that out of the way: there are some serious problems with the logic of this episode. Not the least of which is that it’s utterly unbelievable that someone like Edward would be allowed to grow to maturity and wasn’t fed to wolves as a child. I mean in Star Trek. In the real world he’d probably be a senator. And, y’know, just straight-up ignoring conservation of matter.

I don’t care. This is great. It is spectacular. It is hilarious.

It is the origin story of the tribbles.

And the origin story of the tribbles is, “They were created by an incel to show up that stupid bitch Stacy of a captain.”

(If you are complaining right now that tribbles were presumed in all other appearances to have evolved naturally in a predator-rich environment, just… don’t? Please? No one cares. Besides, “They reproduce exponentially because they’re born pregnant,” makes little enough sense that, come on, “They were genetically modified to breed fast,” is a pretty substantial improvement. When tribbles turn up in Enterprise and Discovery, they aren’t nearly the threat they are in their other appearances, so yeah, it’s a better backstory that the fast-breeding tribbles are an abberation)

I will excuse you if you need to sit down for a moment.

Okay, quickly then: Presumably a short time before last week’s minisode, Anson Mount once again gets pretty much just a cameo as he sees off Lynne Lucero, Enterprise’s science officer, who has just been promoted to captain of the USS Cabot. The Cabot is stationed over the planet Pragine 63, and I’m guessing that the name is a joke, and I have several candidates but am not sure which one. Her mission is to help with a food shortage. The newly minted captain’s first staff meeting introduces a handful of scientists who are all working on clever ways to increase food production. And Edward.

Edward Larkin is an awkward, nebbishy guy played by H. Jon Benjamin, who I hear is on Archer, but mostly he feels like a budget-rate Paul Giamatti. And if you’ve watched a lot of science fiction, then you know to expect that he’s going to be awkward and weird and nerdy but ultimately he’ll be vindicated and maybe even get a kiss because he’s a nerd, and we need to make the fans feel good about themselves and remind them that they’re good people and someday the jocks who bully them will learn to respect them.

Only that doesn’t happen. What actually happens is that Edward is utterly horrible and makes things bad for everyone, because Edward is not a good person and he does not deserve respect and vindication.

Anyway, Edward is clumsy and awkward and can’t get his tablet working when Captain Lucero calls on him and gets very flustered and resentful when the female officer next to him fixes it for him. Edward’s idea is that he’s got these critters called tribbles. Which are – this is how he actually describes them – basically big furry scallops (How I’m going to be referring to tribbles from now on). He suggests they’d be good to hunt, which I think tells you something about Edward, that he doesn’t intend for people to farm tribbles; no; he means for them to be wild game.

There’s something of the techbro about Edward – the sort of guy who is very good at solving technical problems and very bad at reducing societal problems into technical ones, and is so full of Dunning-Kruger that he has no idea that these are two different things and also that what he just invented is a bus.

To Edward’s mind, there’s just one problem with this plan. Everyone else sees many, many problems with this plan, but Edward just sees the one. (To be honest here, I wish they’d actually voiced some of the problems with breeding tribbles as a food source; it just seems to go without saying that this not just a bad idea, but an offensively bad one. I assume the grounds here are basically, “People will not want to eat an animal as cute as a tribble,” though, I mean, I’ve eaten cute animals before. Rabbit. Lamb. Antelope. So I wish they’d actually explained the problem instead of hanging a big part of the episode on the assumption that the audience would not question the fact that Edward’s idea is bad) Namely, tribbles reproduce slowly. But don’t worry: he can genetically manipulate the furballs to increase their reproductive rate. And since he’s not entirely sure whether they’re sentient, he’ll also modify them to be brain damaged as well, just to make sure it’s all ethical.

Captain Lucero politely reassigns Edward to climatology, and everyone goes out of their way not to laugh at him. But, see, Edward is a man and he has not been permitted to get his own way, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to talk smack about her to the rest of the crew and go ahead and genetically modify the tribble anyway, before sending multiple “anonymous” reports to Starfleet command accusing Lucero of stupidity and incompetence. After confirming with the rest of the crew that Edward is a talented biologist and a whiny little bitch who can’t stand it when he doesn’t get his own way, Captain Lucero orders him transferred off the Cabot. It’s too late, though, as little baby tribbles are popping off of Edward’s test subject in a scene reminiscent of Gremlins, and he barely has time to wander down the halls in his underwear before someone notices the ship is infested.

Never one to take responsibility, Edward’s first reaction is an unconvincing, “Oh my God, who did this?”, though he still seems to think that the fact that his plan “succeeded” vindicates him. Lucero points out that disobeying a direct order is going to look bad on his permanent record.

And then one of the most surreal and wonderful sequences in the history of Star Trek ensues to the tune of Bing Crosby’s “Johnny Appleseed” (A nice touch here: the opening bar of “Johnny Appleseed” sounds more than a little like the comedy leitmotif from the Original Series soundtrack) as the crew of the Cabot fights a losing battle against the tribbles. First, they’re just scooping them up into cages (Edward is scooping them up into a soup pot. He initially says that he doesn’t personally have any interest in eating the critters, but it quickly becomes clear that the dude has a bit of a Gargamel-style fixation on consuming small cute creatures). Things take a more sinister turn when the tribbles get into the ship’s systems, causing the transporter to fail, and their reproduction is fast enough that they’ll exceed the ship’s life support capacity. The whole “born pregnant” thing? “Well, when you mix human DNA with tribble DNA, crazy stuff happens.”

Yep, these are not merely augmented tribbles: they are tribble-human hybrids. Let me remind you once again that genetic experimentation on humans is one of the biggest no-nos there is under Federation law. And whose DNA did he use? I will grant, Edward makes a fine point when he says, “What? Like Noel’s DNA would be any better?” Everyone’s super grossed out, though, probably because Edward is still pushing, “If everyone eats their fair share, the population will level out,” as a strategy.

Meanwhile, someone walks by in the background wearing a kind of vacuum cleaner backpack to suck tribbles up off the floor with a satisfying pheumatic tube “whoomp” sound. Just a little touch to remind us that even when the text tells us that this is SRS BSNS, we’re still watching a show where the threat to the heroes is basically a pile of animate merkins.

Shit’s serious now, so they break out the phaser rifles and start a sort of very gentle Aliens parody, with security officers working their way down the halls shooting tribbles, and a shot of a crewman screaming as she’s engulfed, and it’s absolutely wonderful when we show an exterior shot with tribbles visibly rising up behind the windows. We cut to a computer screen issuing a pressure alarm before it cracks under the weight of the growing tribble mass.

And if you are about to get upset about the fact that they never say what the tribbles are eating or where their biomass is coming from, you can just fuck right off because I will not have silly things like basic physics ruin a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make me terrified of the prospect of being buried alive in a pile of fur-covered scallops.

Besides, exactly the same thing happened in “The Trouble with Tribbles” and all they needed to say was, “Oh, the tribbles got into the food slot mechanism.”

The crew is forced to give up the ship. Edward tarries as they evacuate to give a full on mad scientist speech about how Lucero thought he was dumb, but he’s not dumb! He’s smart! He showed them! He showed them all! He almost manages to get out, “You’re the dumb one!” before he is crushed to death under a wave of tribbles. Lucero barely manages to seal the escape pod.

Regrettably, we do not get to see the final fate of the Cabot. Even in the age of computer-generated graphics, making a starship pop under the force of a billion simultaneous tribble births is apparently something the budget could not support. Instead we cut to the inquiry, where Lucero is basically yelled at by the admirals. And, I mean, that’s fair. Losing a starship on one’s first day is pretty bad. We can extrapolate that Lucero is not as good a captain as Kirk. We learn that some of the modified tribbles made it to the surface of Pragine 63, and now the planet is uninhabitable to humans. Plus, some of the tribbles made it into Klingon space, causing a diplomatic incident. As for the Cabot itself? “Total and complete structural failure.”

The question of how one man could’ve caused so much destruction is what the episode ends on. Lucero’s answer? “He was an idiot.”

I love this episode to pieces. It’s ridiculous nonsense and that’s something Star Trek needs more of. It’s just such a great rejection of the “Nerd makes good” story. Edward is apparently technically proficient. But he can’t tell a good idea from a bad idea, and he doesn’t listen. They never come right out and say that he’s a misogynist, but it sure does feel like it. Edward, Pike and Noel are the only male speaking roles in the episode (And Noel only counts because he’s finishing his status report when the briefing scene starts); the Cabot’s crew is really diverse, with Edward as the only older white man we see. And Rosa Salazar is great as Lucero. She’s small and unassuming, and she never really projects a tough image despite Pike’s warning that she’ll need to be tough as a captain. This is important in the context of the show because Edward reacts at every turn as though he’s being bullied and belittled and… He totally isn’t. His final speech is all about how Lucero called him dumb.

She didn’t. Not once. Exactly the opposite, she repeatedly spoke of his intelligence. On the contrary, he repeatedly calls her dumb, to his shipmates and in his letters to Starfleet command. Nerdy Guy Makes Good stories are real popular in science fiction, probably because an awful lot of science fiction is written by nerdy guys who would desperately like to believe that the way they were treated in high school was some form of dues paying for the greater rewards to come in the future.

But “The Trouble With Edward” takes pains to ensure we don’t sympathize with Edward as the victim of people who don’t appreciate him or his great intellect. He’s not being oppressed or bullied; he just thinks it’s his right to do whatever the hell he likes, and anyone who tries to stop him is “dumb” and doesn’t deserve his respect. Edward isn’t intimidated by Lucero, and she never becomes forceful or even really angry with him: that’s all just his outsize sense of entitlement telling him that not being allowed to do whatever he wants is a kind of oppression.

He’s an idiot.

And there actually is a serious point here. Space is hella dangerous. Even something as adorable as a tribble can destroy a starship. The last thing we need is a bunch of arrogant manbabies who think they’re too good to follow the rules and who don’t respect the chain of command. Somehow the human race got away with coddling that sort of asshole for, I guess, like, all of history, but you try that shit in space and people gonna die. (Actually, people die a lot here on Earth too, but for most of history we were largely okay with that as long as it was mostly the right sort of people). Fortunately, this is the utopian world of Star Trek so Edward was the only victim. In a more realistic show, he’d be promoted to captain and the rest of the crew would’ve died.

Seriously, this is a good episode to show to your clever boychicks who think they don’t have to follow rules they disagree with. Dylan.

And then, after the credits, just for one last little laugh, we get a post-credits scene. Under a heavy VHS filter, a commercial for Tribbles, the only breakfast cereal with self-replication. There’s a prize at the bottom of each box. Not that you’ll get to the bottom. They’re packed with 18 essential vitamins and minerals. And Edward. Tribbles contain more human DNA than any other leading brand. Available in Original, Hairy Berry, and new Spicy Ranch. They’re pregnant… With flavor!