Some Blundering About Star Trek: Short Treks 2×05 “The Girl Who Made the Stars”

So, the pattern. As previously discussed, I seem to like the even-numbered Short Treks more than the odd-numbered ones, and having selectively chosen to place this episode in the number 5 slot, I have self-fulfilled the prophecy.

The story isn’t bad or anything. But, like “Ask Not”, it lacks the Mad Fun of “The Trouble With Edward” and “Ephraim and Dot”. More than any of the minisodes we’ve had so far this interseason, it feels like a preface to the upcoming third season of Discovery. Whether it’s meant in a narrative sense or just a metaphorical one remains to be seen, and I guess could go both ways.

Even though it lacks “Ephraim and Dot”‘s mad whimsey, “The Girl Who Made the Stars” is far from being a conventional episode, though. It does have an in-universe presumably-canon framing device (There’s an obvious reason, but I feel like it might have been nice to have done the framing sequence as live-action rather than animation for this reason), but the story proper is a fable.

The story, told to a young Michael Burnham by her father, is a version of a story from, I think, the Saan people of south-western Africa. As an adult, Michael would allude to a different version of the myth in reference to the Red Signals. It’s a combination of a Just-So story and a coming of age story (The original myth sounds like it may be a parable about menarche).

In the story, the First People were hunter-gatherers. Soil-exhaustion prevented them from transitioning to agriculture, as they could not expand their farming range farther than a single day’s travel for fear of the Night Beast which stalked the starless night.

A young girl defies the tribe’s elder and sets out on her own at night, determined to prove that there’s arable land over the horizon. She almost falls victim to the Night Beast (a big-ass flying snake), but it’s scared off by the light of a falling star. The girl follows the star to find an otherworldly being. It commands her to lead her people out into the universe, and gifts her with a glowing orb. On returning to her tribe, she responds to their chastisement by breaking open the orb, releasing starlight to fill the night sky. The little girl would grow up to be a great explorer and a great warrior, shown (though the narration doesn’t give details) as an adult slaying the Night Beast.

This is a cute and pleasant story and I have no real objection to it. One thing I particularly like is that Mike Burnham refers to the otherworldly being as repairing its ship and taking off, and he quietly includes the concept of soil exhaustion in the backstory. Obviously, an actual ancient African myth in its original form would have the visitor be explicitly supernatural. But this is a twenty-third century dad telling a story to his twenty-third century daughter. Of course he’s going to unthinkingly describe the otherworldly being who falls to Earth from space in terms of an alien whose ship made an emergency landing. I like that he’s not coy about it. If I tried to tell this story to my kids, they’d absolutely suggest that it was an alien. There’s an obvious stylistic contradiction in that this story is set in a universe where stars aren’t naturally occurring but come out of a magic orb, but who cares? A writer writing a fantasy story might object, but a dad telling his daughter a bedtime story?

And I like that the Night Beast is “real” within the context of the story – it’s not a baseless superstition. There really are monsters out there in the dark, and the light of knowledge doesn’t dispel them, rather it equips us to defeat them. That’s a pretty darn Star Trek sentiment. That kind of mixing of real and fantasy is how myths really work, and that’s something that modern retellings of ancient myths often downplays – because ancient myths aren’t, by and large, our myths, we tend to retell them from an outsider perspective, fixing them and pinning them down in a canonical form, and making sure they’re devoid of anachronism. So I dig a story that treats the myth as a living thing that can adapt itself to fit the sensibilities of the audience.

In light of all that, then, why do I say that I don’t like this one as much as the even-numbered episodes? Well obviously, there’s the question of, “What’s this doing here?” What light does this story shed on the rest of the Star Trek universe. Based on the Discovery season 3 trailer, I feel like the primary relevance of this story is allegorical. I am not overly crazy about Discovery trying to morph itself into a remake of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda to begin with, but there certainly seems to be a thematic resonance here. The trailer places symbolic import in the reveal of a future-past Federation flag, one showing only a few stars. When you take into account that the nameless girl of the fable is the same CGI model as young Michael Burnham, it seems like they’re laying on pretty thick that it is Michael’s Big-D-Destiny to “Bring Light to the Universe” and “Slay the Beast in the Darkness”. It’s all a bit The Chosen One for me.

But even this is a fairly modest complaint. The much harsher criticism I have of “The Girl Who Made the Stars” is this:

It looks like hot garbage.

“Ephraim and Dot” was very stylized. It mixed a few disparate elements in its art style, drawing mostly from Disney for the visual style of Ephraim, and a sort of comic book style for the Enterprise with a few other things going on there which all worked together to give the whole thing an air of not-quite-reality that helped you remember to not take it too seriously (and if you really want, you can also interpret it as a visual interpretation of the fact that we are watching these events from the perspective of a being that does not experience reality the same way we do).

“The Girl Who Made the Stars” is straight-up Pixar-style CGI animation. And the big problems here are, one, that it is Pixar’s visual style being used on precisely the things that style is least good at – normal human beings – and two, this was clearly not made on a Pixar budget by animators of Pixar’s skill. Both animated shorts look like they were made on the cheap, but “Ephraim and Dot” wisely chooses to give us a slightly surreal world. “The Girl Who Made the Stars” gives us Mike and Michael Burhnam having a conversation in a bedroom on a Starfleet space station, only she’s got Anime Eyes, her lips don’t move quite right and she’s made of plastic. They’re using a visual style that maximizes the uncanny valley effect, and on top of that, they aren’t even doing an especially great job at it.

Maybe there’s going to be a more literal connection between these events and season 3 of Discovery. Certainly the premise as we understand it so far isn’t going to be enough on its own to carry the show with the strength it had last season. So maybe the Night Beast or the alien who gave the girl the power to make the stars will have some more direct counterparts to help flesh out the story. “Discovery tries to restore the fallen Federation,” is not honestly a good enough story arc, but it could be a good enough background premise in which to tell a good enough story arc about something else. That would be nice.

In any case, I’ll give this one a solid two Space Lincolns out of four.

Hm. Upon reflection, Space Lincoln is not really all that distinctive when changed from color to monochrome.

We’ll return for “Children of Mars”, which I’m told is a prelude to Star Trek: Picard. See you then.