Some Blundering about Star Trek: Short Treks 2×03 “Ask Not”

First things first: I neglected to give a rating last time because I immediately forgot the running gag I wanted to establish. So, it goes without saying, I think, that “The Trouble With Edward” merits four weird-ass uncanny-valley Data heads out of four:

That out of the way, let’s move on to “Ask Not”.

Meh.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s perfectly fine. It’s just… There’s nothing to it. “Q&A” gave us the Deep Lore on Spock and a musical number. “The Trouble With Edward” was probably the funniest piece of Star Trek ever written. And then there’s “Ask Not”, which is… Fine.

So this is the first minisode to give us Anson Mount in more than a cameo role. But… Whatever, really. I’m not per se complaining, because it’s certainly not bad. It’s just, like, a perfectly adequate and disposable scene featuring Captain Pike and an engineering cadet who wanted to serve on Enterprise but didn’t make the cut and got assigned to Starbase 28 instead and you just figured out the plot, didn’t you?

Yeah, Cadet Thira Sidhu is working in some random room on Starbase 28 when she gets shaken up and tossed around by an attack on the station by the Tholians. A bunch of redshirts show up with a gold-shirted prisoner in a needlessly sci-fi face mask (Like, you know the neat origama sword Sulu had in Star Trek 2009? It was that except a gimp mask instead of a sword), who they declare to be a mutineer that they need her to look after because the fighting outside has blocked the way to the brig.

Once the mask is off (the redshirts say that they didn’t want to demoralize the rest of the crew by showing them who the mutineer was), Captain Pike immediately orders Sidhu to let him go and help him retake command so that he can lead the Tholians away. He admits to the mutiny charge, explaining that he’d tried to overrule an admiral who wanted him to leave another ship to the mercy of the Tholians as soon as she herself was safe. And wouldn’t you know it, the ship in question is where Sidhu’s husband is stationed, and the two of them were the only survivors of a Tholian attack a few years earlier.

When you add together what you figured out three paragraphs ago with that last bit, you can probably imagine that there are only three ways this episode could go, and only one of them can really work in the five minutes we have left.

Yep, her “rejection” was a feint and this is all a training exercise to see if she’s really worthy of serving on Enterprise. So which is the “right” solution to the exercise? This is probably the most interesting thing in the episode conceptually, though in practice It’s just “okay”.

There are two ways this setup could go. One is that the right thing to do is to follow the rules and listen to orders and not give in to her desire to save her husband and make the Tholians pay and whatever. The other is that the “right” thing to do is to say that Starfleet regulations aren’t a suicide pact and to put saving lives above following regulations.

But what happens is actually somewhere in the middle. I missed a key point the first time I watched this because Dylan had me distracted; I assumed they’d left open the possibility that Pike was lying – that we (or rather, Cadet Sidhu) were supposed to assume that either he or the Admiral had been compromised somehow, and so Sidhu’s decision would be whether or not to believe Pike. But on rewatching, it’s clear that’s not what her dilemma really is: the scenario presumes she will accept Pike’s explanation of the situation as truthful. The question for her is whether to trust his judgment.

Because Pike speaks of saving lives and giving the Tholians “what they deserve,” and – this is important – Pike gives her a legalistic out. They cite regulations at each other: he orders her to release him; she counters that his orders carry no weight because he’s under arrest. He reminds her that regulations dictate that the tactical superiority of the Enterprise means that he should be in charge during a battle. She returns that he is not, at the moment, the captain of the Enterprise. He then pulls out the “reserve activation clause”, which technically means that she’s got the legal authority to reinstate him for the duration of the emergency. She calls this a “loophole”, but I think it’s important here that her ultimate decision is not whether to break the rules, but which rules to uphold.

And ultimately, her decision is that violence has to be the last resort and vengeance shouldn’t enter into it, and on the basis of that, she concludes that Pike is in the wrong: that his plan, to take the Enterprise away from the starbase in order to lure the Tholians off so he can kill them all, is not in line with the Starfleet way, and therefore that it is not the right call for her to exercise her authority under the Reserve Activation Clause to reinstate him.

So he makes some broad threats about her career prospects and tries to leave anyway, whereupon she points a phaser at him. Pike tells the air above him that it’s all good and the alarms stop and he takes off the handcuffs and apologizes for scaring her about her husband (He’s fine). There’s a stirring speech about how war is hell and it’s important for an officer to uphold their duty even when triggered, and she does not immediately grasp the full implication of the test until they beam over to Enterprise to be met by Spock and Una, who is the one who came up with the whole, “Tell them they didn’t make the cut for Enterprise then do a cruel gaslighting test on them to see how they handle it,” plan. Pike drops her off in engineering (We’ve never seen the regular engine room of a Discovery-era ship; engineering scenes on Discovery proper take place in the Spore Lab. We did briefly see a class J training ship’s engine room but that was ten years in the future. Enterprise’s engine room is a huge, multi-story gallery that’s too big to properly take in with just the one quick glance) and is pointedly coy about whether or not the phaser was real.

So… It’s okay. Profoundly… Okay. This would make a fine B-plot in a full-length episode of a TV series that was structured more like ’90s-era Star Trek. But for a minisode, which only has the one plot and not much of it, you really want something more. You either want something which touches a nerve in its own right, like “The Trouble with Edward” or “Calypso”, or even “The Escape Artist” (I suspect “Q&A” was supposed to be like this as well, what with the Deep Lore about Spock and Number One), or else something which foreshadows the upcoming season, like “Runaway” or “The Brightest Star”.

And a character study of a one-off character we’ve never seen before just isn’t that. These minisodes need to be strong all on their own because they’re not feeding directly into future episodes. Why waste time giving us introductory episodes for characters we’re never going to see again. I mean, unless…

Unless…

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Huh.

One and a half cereal mascots out of four, with an option to reevaluate.

 

We’ll return near Christmas for not one but two animated shorts (and in different styles, too; one looks to be cel-shaded, while the other has a distinctly Pixar vibe), “Ephraim and Dot” and “The Girl Who Made the Stars”. See you then.