Some Blundering About Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1×03: Ghosts of Ilyria

“Ghosts of Ilyria” or “I Know This Series Has Been a Bit of a TOS Glow-Up, But This Is Taking Things a Bit Far”

Influences: “The Naked Time” (TOS), “Wink of an Eye” (TOS), “The Deadly Years” (TOS),  “The Enemy Within” (TOS), “Unnatural Selection” (TNG), “Babel” (DS9), Star Trek Into Darkness, Episode 6 of the original radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Let us skip ahead a little. We will circle back around and pick up “Children of the Comet” later, because I’d like to get a little bit closer to real-time with these and also because I am curious whether context will change how I interpret it. For example, if I were to write about “Children of the Comet” this week, I would probably muse on whether they might make it a thing where Sam gets almost-killed every damn week but narrowly survives. Because that would be hilarious. You could even have his last appearance send him off saying that starship service is too dangerous and he’s going to transfer to a nice, safe planetside posting on Deneva. He doesn’t though.

I said last time that there’s a broad sense of doom clinging to the Enterprise in this show, musing whether we might see some tragedy ahead for, just as an example, M’Benga and Una.

Moved fast on that one. Yeah, I guess we learned an entirely plausible reason this week why Una will eventually disappear from canonical Star Trek and why M’Benga is demoted to McCoy’s backup.

Yeah, so. Turns out that Una and M’Benga have Deep Dark Secrets. Also Uhura needs it dark to sleep. Sorta. They keep talking about turning off all the lights to control the spread of the light-based disease, but “turning off the lights” involves dimming them very slightly. Man, this ship is brightly lit.

Also, Cadet Uhura sleeps in a Pullman berth in a room smaller than my work cubicle with two roommates, while Pike’s stateroom has an entire enchanted forest inside it. It’s good to be the boss.

The B-side of our plot is pleasant but a bit thin. Pike and Spock are trapped on the surface by an ion storm, so Spock reads up on the lost Ilyrian colony and Pike…. Is also there. We lay off Pike’s angst over his impending doom a bit. What I like the most about Pike in this episode is that he’s concerned about what’s going on on his ship, but he doesn’t develop the manic, obsessive, “I… must save… my… ship… Four… Hundred… Thirty… Souls are my response…. ability! SPOCK!” desperation that you’d see elsewhere in the franchise. Pike remains much more focused on the problem at hand – that there’s a big scary space-storm trying to kill them and also possibly ghosts. I like the depiction of Pike, but this subplot still didn’t really feel like it had all that much to it. I guess it’s meant to inform Pike’s ultimate understanding that Hey Maybe I Shouldn’t Be Reflexively Racist Against Ilyrians, but given that this was not actually a position he had been demonstrated to hold in the first place, not sure what was accomplished here.

Now, this is in itself an improvement over how this sort of thing would’ve been handled in the past. In the TNG era, we absolutely would’ve seen one of our beloved characters who had always been a decent sort of person in the past suddenly out of nowhere be jaw-droppingly racist for act 1 so that they could have the character growth in act 3 of learning that racism was wrong.

It probably would’ve been Riker.

So they do better here. The only character who actually does care is La’an, and though it hadn’t come up yet, it was baked into the character’s backstory. She’s descended in some unspecified way from Space-Hitler, and she’s already well-established as kind of judgmental and pushy, so her flipping out over the revelation that Una is an augment works with the character – and even then, her anger over Una’s true nature is secondary to her anger over the deception. They eventually make up over strawberries, which is ironic for an episode about a disease, because I think it was the week after this episode dropped that strawberries were linked to a Hep-A outbreak.

Also, La’an’s backstory is getting kind of tragic past the point where I can continue to take it seriously. Is she about to tell us about the time her dad dressed up as Santa but slipped coming down the chimney and broke his neck? (It’s a Gremlins reference. I know it’s hard to Google) La’an angrily explains how she was bullied and tormented for having the same last name as Khan (You know, it’s been what, three generations? They could’ve just changed their name), which was the worst thing that ever happened to her up until her entire family were gutted and eaten by evil space lizard men.

The name “Ensign Lance” amuses me for some reason. It feels very “Ensign Skippy”.

I will risk the wrath of the fanbase here by saying that Hemmer is…. Fine? I do not really connect with the tremendous love he seems to be getting on the internet. He’s fine. He’s gruff and self-assured and cocky in a deadpan way, but while he fits into the tradition of Comically Gruff Trek experts, I don’t find him as amusing as Reno or even T’Ana.

The story does a good job of keeping its themes all tied up nicely together. Enterprise is investigating a lost Ilyrian colony. Ilyrians are outcasts, unable to join the Federation because they use genetic engineering. Unlike humans, they didn’t abuse it to turn themselves into space-Nazis, but rather they practice a more holistic, Crunchy-Granola kind of genetic engineering to adapt themselves to Strange New Worlds instead of terraforming. I spoke recently (or maybe I haven’t. I don’t know what order things are in any more) about the confused status of genetic engineering in the Federation at the time of various incarnations of the franchise. It’s always been presumed illegal (Except that one TNG S2 episode), but the hardness of the ban and its social implications have varied. We saw in Discovery that Stamets is a transgenic tardigrade, which they said at the time was illegal but just handwaived, “Eh, Starfleet will give us a waiver because it’s important.” Later, Saru just trivially asks the doctor to modify his and Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly’s lungs to an alien atmosphere, and two weeks ago, Nurse Chapel very casually dicked around with everyone’s DNA. Though I believe Chapel did specify that what she was doing was epigenetic, so I could believe there’s a carve-out for that sort of thing. This episode comes down that the legal ban is pretty hard, and the episode really wants us to accept that there’s a strong cultural taboo, but it just does a terrible job at selling that. Literally everyone Una tells about it is just like, “Nope, don’t care,” except La’an, who isn’t even in her right mind when she lashes out about it.

Google tells me that the Ilyrians appeared in an episode of Enterprise where they tried hamhandedly to show us that things were all dangerous and morally gray now because Archer committed just straight-up space-piracy against them FOR THE GREATER GOOD. But those Ilyrians don’t say anything about genetic augmentation and are rubber forehead aliens, unlike Una, who is close enough to human to pass regular medical examinations. Fair, given the whole “genetic augmentation” thing, but I assume this means the name of her species was pulled out of a hat. Ilyria was also a historical region in the Balkans, and I think is one of those names traditionally used in old western European stories to mean “In a land far, far away.” It’s where Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is set.

The medical mystery aspects play out in much the way we’d come to expect from ’90s Trek. Competence porn at its finest. Chapel gets just a little time to shine – a well-placed line here and there that works well but leaves me wanting more. It’s really M’Benga’s show for most of the mystery, which makes it a bit unsatisfying when he succumbs to the light-sickness himself and thus sleeps through the climax. It seems like Chapel never gets it herself, an oddity that goes utterly unexplained. The resolution is a little hard to follow. La’an tries to open up the warp core for its tasty dangerous lighting, and both her and Una get a fatal dose of radiation – here’s a callback to Star Trek into Darkness of all things, because Una’s genetic augmentations allow her to heal from that. But for some reason, her augmented immune system also heals La’an, and in doing so, gives her immunity to the light plague, leaving her with chimeric antibodies that Chapel could synthesize into a cure. Una herself didn’t produce antibodies because her immune system worked differently. I even looked up what chimeric antibodies were, and I still don’t understand how that applies here, since Una didn’t have antibodies, and besides, why would light-plague antibodies be transferred and chimeritized to La’an? And what about scarecrow’s brain? I can just about get behind the whole “Una’s immune system cured La’an’s radiation poisoning”, since that is the one thing that they straight up established in Star Trek Into Darkness that you could do with augment blood. That it could just happen spontaneously due to proximity is…. Actually just plausible because of the TNG episode “Unnatural Selection”. But we’re still grasping here to connect all these things up. Do you just get instantly cured of whatever malady you happen to have if you stand next to Una when she does one of her healing Solar Flare Attacks? Maybe if they threaded the needle a little more by making it explicit that the light from the open warp core also filled the room with the virus? I mean, it almost works. The pieces just don’t quite line up, and that’s grating.

So we end up with the discovery that the Ilyrians on this planet wanted to join the Federation so badly that they were trying to un-augment themselves, which is why they all died, except for the ones who turned into light ghosts.

There’s no plot hole here; it’s explained okay and follows logically. But still, there’s something dramatically unsatisfying – to the point of being kind of goofy and just feeling wrong about this setup. Maybe it’s because there’s two mysteries going on in tandem that don’t quite tie up. Pike and Spock investigate what happened to the Ilyrians on the surface while Una, M’Benga and Chapel investigate what’s happening on the Enterprise. These should tie up nicely in the end, but instead there’s a tension: around the midpoint of the episode, we learn that Una is immune to the light disease because she’s Ilyrian. This should preclude the reveal on the surface. It’s really weird and uncomfortable from a storytelling perspective that the reveal on the surface is that the Ilyrians were killed off by a disease that Ilyrians not only are protected from, but where their ability to heal from it is the key to the other half of the episode.

While the full explanation – that the Ilyrians on the surface had removed their own healing factor in the hopes it would make them more acceptable to the Federation – is logical, it doesn’t actually make the story more satisfying. Maybe if they’d done it differently, it would be okay. If they’d started from the understanding that the Ilyrians had died from a disease, the mystery would have been “How did they die of a disease that isn’t harmful to their species?”, and then the un-augmentation angle would work as a reveal. But as it stands, we only come to understand what became of the colonists a few seconds before we learn of their project to remove their augmentations, so it’s never, “Why did this disease kill them in spite of their augmentations? Oh, because they removed their augmentations to comply with human bigotry,” but instead, “How did they die? Oh, they got a disease that wouldn’t have killed them except that they removed their augmentations to comply with human bigotry.” Too much of what should be setup is instead shoved down into the reveal. We learn too much about what Ilyrians are and what they can do through the plot on the ship with Una – we don’t have the proper context for the process of the mystery on the planet below until the very end, which leaves that plot terribly unbalanced.

A more balanced distribution to the mystery might have revealed the light disease very early. People on the ship are getting sick. We know that the disease killed the Ilyrians. The mystery is why their augmentations didn’t protect them. What the show-as-made saves for its final reveal should’ve been the middle reveal instead: Spock learns that the colonists had removed their own healing factor. So a normally-augmented Ilyrian would have survived, and Enterprise could be saved by an Ilyrian. Oh no, the Federation’s bigotry toward auguments will be the doom of the ship! Only then should we have had the reveal on Enterprise, that Una is Ilyrian and still has her augmentations. We see how the Federation taboo hurt the Ilyrians, and we see what the Federation stands to gain by moving beyond their bigotry. The episode mostly works in spite of this misstep, but it’s infuriating that it fails to quite tie things together.

And, of course, they could have gotten away with Enterprise knowing ahead of time about the disease, because of M’Benga’s side-plot. You could have started out with Pike explaining, perhaps to Ensign Skippy, that they know the Ilyrians were wiped out by a disease, but it’s safe for them to come investigate because, even though they haven’t isolated the pathogen yet, the biofilters have already proven effective at removing it before infection can set in.

I assume some of the neckbeards have already objected to the existence of biofilters prior to the TNG era. There’s nothing in canon about this, but one of the early TNG expanded universe novels does hinge on biofilters being a recent enough invention that its inventors are still working in the field. Biofilters really only ever come up in the context of not working, as is the case this week, because M’Benga, in a piece of highly relatable content, has been clicking “Remind Me Later” once a day when the medical transporter tells him it’s time to install the latest update.

And this too kinda makes sense but doesn’t quite close the loop. The issue is that because M’Benga hasn’t updated the medical transporter, they’ve still got some out-of-date safety protocols running, and when Hemmer diverted extra power to beam up the away team, the biofilters crashed. I think there was some good visual storytelling when Hemmer runs a diagnostic on the transporter and the lights blink out. That’s a good way to signal to the audience the proximate issue: M’Benga’s transporter is wired up to things it’s not supposed to be wired up to, so that a transporter issue can affect other systems in a way Hemmer wasn’t expecting. The problem here is that the medical transporter isn’t what they were using at the time, so why was it involved at all? This really only needs a little bit of spackle; the idea is something like “Just having one obsolete transporter on the network forced all the other ones to perform the deprecated insecure behavior,” but in context, what we’re told is basically that the transporter they were using has independent biofilters that weren’t affected by the power transfer, but M’Benga’s transporter was affected by it, and this somehow caused the upgraded biofilter in the main transporter to also not work. I also take some issue with the fact that Chief Kyle (another character whose career is apparently not going anywhere since he’s still the Enterprise’s transporter chief ten years later. But maybe that’s okay. As a chief, he’s basically a technical expert with a narrow field, so parking himself in a job forever isn’t unreasonable) isn’t notified about the biofilter failing. There should definitely be a blinky light for that.

M’Benga declined the transporter upgrade because he’s storing his kid in there while he looks for a cure for Space Cancer. Would’ve been a nice touch if she’d had the same kind of Space Cancer as Riker’s kid, since we’d be all primed every time Enterprise encountered something with a silicon brain to wonder whether it might be about to cure M’Benga’s daughter. Wouldn’t quite work, since Thad Riker had a much slower space-cancer than than she does (Though I suppose that’s trivially fixed by the words, “An unusually aggressive form of”). On the other hand, we open up the possibility either of M’Benga’s apparent demotion being punishment for this little gambit, or else him accepting a demotion to remain on Enterprise even after Jim hires on his old friend. Now, the whole thing does stretch credulity just a little. According to M’Benga, a person can be stored in the transporter indefinitely, so long as you occasionally rematerialize them. We’ve got a handful of examples of people being stuck in the transporter for extended periods, and really really long ones were handled as super exceptional – Scotty used his own engineering genius to stay in a transporter buffer for decades, and even then, the method only worked half the time. It’s a little weird to see M’Benga be so casual about it. Just this season, we had the Discovery crew hide in the pattern buffer for what, ten minutes? And that was kind of a big deal. But I guess it wasn’t really depicted as risky in and of itself – no one acted as though there was much chance of being lost that way, but rather of the ship itself being too badly damaged while they were in storage. The desperation of his plan should follow as reasonable from the seriousness of the Space Cancer. It is, though, a little weird how quickly he caves – once he acknowledges that he put the ship at risk, he’s like, “Okay, just let me say goodbye to my kid before we kill her and take me off in leg irons.” It’s…. I mean…. I guess it would feel gross and cliche to have him rant and rave and rage (And you’ve got to be particularly careful about that when there’s the possibility of falling into ugly racial stereotypes about Scary Black men), but this is maybe too far the other way? But it’s all trivially handwaved away.

This is an episode whose individual parts are very good, and I think also the balance of those parts are good. If they don’t quite all align with each other perfectly, perhaps that is what we should expect of this more episodic version of Star Trek. We get a very nice coda where, just as Una lets M’Benga off the hook for endangering the ship, Pike lets her off the hook for being a genetic abomination, and they really take it to the next level by calling out – perhaps just a hair indirectly – the fact that Pike’s realization that Hey, maybe the taboo against genetic augmentation is a little racist, is less than ideal. It is, in fact, Mighty White of Him. Una does not call Pike out for this, though: she internalizes instead, discomforted by the fact that, in the end, she was forgiven because she was “one of the good ones”. She’s never going to be allowed to just be Ilyrian, to live openly in her Ilyrian DNA: she will at best be, “When we called people with genetic augmentations monsters, we were talking about the other ones, not you.”

The blow is blunted a little by the fact that the person doing it isn’t the one who gets called out, and by the fact that the person on the receiving end is played by Rebecca Romijn, but still. Maybe the Dutch Supermodel contemplating institutional racism will go over the heads of the neckbeards who keep complaining about how “woke” modern Trek is for its shameful and constant harping on how people who aren’t straight white men (checks notes) exist.