Some Blundering About Star Trek: Short Treks 2×06 “Children of Mars”

Star Trek, in the Discovery era, is a show which is much more about people than about plot. That’s largely how television in general works these days, and I’m pretty much all for it. Sure, there’s been times when Discovery has fallen short in its plot logic, but I tend to find that far less offputting than a flaw in character logic. One of the aspects that has aged poorly from ’90s Trek is how often character logic is sacrificed in the name of the plot. From the constant and mundane, “Characters experience severe personal trauma that should affect them for years but which is never mentioned again,” to the more acute, “This week, the galaxy’s greatest engineer is a complete moron because otherwise the plot would be solved 30 minutes too early,” or the recurring, “Despite having worked closely with these people for seven years, no one notices that their crewmate has been possessed by alien ghosts.” And heaven forfend the writers actually have a social point to make, in which case all of the sudden Riker will reveal that he’s actually an overt racist so that he can learn how racism is bad.

If Discovery is more about character than plot, that’s double – nay, quadruple true for Short Treks. We’ve had none of them so far, and they’ve all been far more about character study than about any particular events. Tilly. Saru. Mudd. Craft. Una. Edward. Sidhu. Ephraim. Proxy-Michael-Burnham. Now, this recent run of five has been a bit strange, because who are these characters anyway? In the first season, two of the minisodes were about series regulars and the third was about a recurring villain. The last one is weird, because it’s a character we never see before or after, but it’s so damn good that I don’t care. This time, the focus characters, excepting Michael, are all one-offs, it’s not clear yet how these stories will tie in with what’s to come, and three of them, while good, aren’t in and of themselves compelling enough for me to really understand why I should bother with the emotional investment.

“Children of Mars” is, again, a character study of a pair of one-off characters we’re probably not going to see again. It’s very different from “Q&A”, “The Trouble With Edward” and “Ask Not”, though, in that it’s very clear why this story is here and how it impacts what’s to come. It is, as is probably the ideal mode for Short Treks, a side-story. The main story of the minisode is not really relevant per se, but it’s a story which happens simultaneously with and whose climax is driven by what I can only assume is the key backstory of Star Trek: Picard.

So here’s the story: Kima and Lil are two grade school students who don’t get along and whose parents happen to both work at the Utopia Planetia shipyards on Mars (where, for the sake of continuity, the Enterprise-D was built, but that’s only very broadly relevant). Lil is having a particularly bad day (her dad just told her he’s not coming home for her birthday) and takes it out by launching an escallating tit-for-tat series of scuffles with Kima, culminating in a knock-down drag-out assault in the halls.

Then, while they’re in detention, Mars gets carpet bombed.

This is a very visual epsiode. There’s hardly any dialogue, but it communicates a lot. Like, we have sympathy for Lil, because we start by seeing her home life, how upset she is by her father’s very straightforward, “I’m an ’80s Family Movie Dad Who Puts Career Ahead of Family.” And this is absolutely critical to come first because otherwise, I think we’d be inclined to hate her. There’s a lot coding her as the one we’re supposed to hate. Very straightforwardly, “she started it”: she pushes Kima for no reason, and causes her to miss the shuttle. But also, Lil is human and white and she’s got a kind of patrician bearing to her, and her father is a manager and she hangs up on him in anger. She’s got a clique. Kima is an alien. With face-bumps and neon blue blood and a really long tongue (I mean Gene Simmons-long, not Madame Vastra long). Her mom is a greasemonkey. Kima and her mom wiggle their tongues at each other in what is clearly a cultural show of affection. The principal eyes her suspiciously at one point for no clear reason. Her attacks on Lil are unsophisticated and childish. Everything about the pair is deliberately designed, even in this futuristic egalitarian post-capitalism society to code Lil as a snobby rich kid and Kima as a working-class kid from an immigrant family who gets bullied for not “fitting in”.

There’s lots of other things about the episode visually that make this world feel real in a way that ’90s Trek rarely did. Now, I’m a big defender of the way Trek has depicted Starfleet as real, real stiff – an idea that goes back to Roddenberry’s original concept of Starfleet as being a very different breed of person than the common man, people who are always very formal, very clean, very stiff (And I think there are some places in the canon which do a great job at justifying this – space is hard, and even the pros stand significant chance of death). But this isn’t Starfleet; this is Earth. Se we have a school full of kids who are messing around on their phones. The only difference from modern teenagers is that the phones have holographic screens. The kids in the hall cheer Kima and Lil on when they come to blows. The school itself is very big and very clean and very airy, but it still looks recognizably schoolish. The principal is a Vulcan but he’s coded so hard as a principal that you just know it by looking at him.

There are oddities too, though. The shuttle that takes them to school is the same model we see in Discovery. Two of the ships under construction at the shipyards are the same class as the Corbett, and two more are a class I haven’t seen before, but they look like possibly a TOS/Discovery take on the Miranda class – a very TOS-era looking saucer with two round nacelles underneath like pontoons. The staff at the school use handheld flip-communicators rather than commbadges (They do have screens, though. which is probably why). In fact, the first thing that actively positions the episode in time comes only a minute or so before the end, when a screen shows Jean-Luc Picard, identified as an admiral expressing shock at the attack. Now, I knew this was a prequel to the new Picard series, and you have to imagine everyone else did too. But the visual design of this episode makes me think that possibly they meant for that to be a surprise. By showing us nothing that placed this in the post-Nemesis era, perhaps we weren’t actually supposed to think it was set in the twenty-fifth (fourth? I think some of the Picard stuff claims that it’s set in the 2390s, but that doesn’t seem like enough time after the end of the ’90s Trek era) century until they showed us Picard? That would also explain why the title card – which is done in Crilee, the TNG episode title font, rather than the TOS font used for the other minisodes – only appears at the end.

It’s also weird that the news report only claims three thousand casualties when what we see looks like carpet bombing across the entire surface of a planet that, at this point in Trek history, is supposed to have many major cities on it. And I’m not quite sure I am happy to accept the entire, “Oh I have a lot of work on Mars and can’t come home for your birthday,” thing in the TNG era. It’s – I can’t believe I am saying this – only Mars. Especially after Discovery had this whole thing where Cornwall and Sarek could basically show up anywhere in the entire galaxy at any time with no notice, I don’t feel like Mars-to-Earth is plausible as more than an ordinary sort of daily commute. (Hm…  I guess I can’t be one hundred percent sure that this is meant to be set on Earth. Technically they could be on some more distant planet I guess). Why aren’t these girls on Mars with their parents anyway? That’s what I’d expected from the trailer, a story of two rivals who become friends while surviving some kind of disaster that strikes at their school on Mars. Instead, “Children of Mars” as a title is figurative: they are “Children of Mars” in that their formative experience is born out of the tragedy. Mars is metropolitan in the TNG era, not some remote outpost. There’s a tacit implication here that Mars is kinda like an oil rig or something. That Mars is not… a… place… to… raise… your… Oh. Y’got me, “Children of Mars”.

The big “this is important going forward” thing, of course, is the nature of the attackers. They fly nondescript black kite-shaped ships and are described as “rogue synths.” Combined with the Picard trailer, it seems pretty straightforward here that we’re dealing with androids. Probably Starfleet-manufactured androids, possibly based on study of Data’s corpse. I mean, sure, “Starfleet would like to take Data apart and figure out how to make a whole army of him,” was, in fact, the plot of a TNG episode. But still, with Discovery‘s presumed decision to base its third season plot on Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, having Picard‘s backstory appear to have been cribbed from Battlestar Galactica is making me pessimistic. “Starfleet created an army of android slaves but they went rogue and want to overthrow their former masters,” is not a place I want Star Trek to boldly go.

I hope we’ll see Kima and Lil again. Probably in a small role. My impression is that this attack depicted here is meant to be the inciting event prompting Picard’s retirement (either directly, or with a few more steps in the middle), so this is likely set many years before the series. I’m curious what becomes of them. The minisode ends with the girls acknowledging their shared pain and holding hands, but since there is literally nothing after that in the episode, it’s not really payoff. Hardly, “The day two enemies became friends,” that the trailer promised. It is quite literally the beginning of their story, so I hope it goes somewhere. Somewhere good, not “They grow up to be obstructionist bureaucrats who hinder Picard because they blame him for dropping the ball on the Mars thing.” I don’t want obstructionist bureaucrats in my Star Trek any more. I got enough of that in the TNG era. I got so much of it that I kept misreading the actually-turns-out-they’re-not-obstructionist-bureaucrats in Discovery.

As a means of doing compelling character drama while conveying some important elements of backstory and foreshadowing, I really appreciate this one. The fact that it’s such a downer keeps it in the realm of “appreciate” more than “love” though. Three night beasts out of four.