Well I don’t know how I managed to donk that up. Got these two in the wrong order. Hope the jokes still work.
“Lift Us Where Suffering Can Not Reach” or “The Ones Who Walk Away From Legal Action By The Estate of Ursula K. Le Guin”
Influences: “The Cloud Minders” (TOS), Some other thing which momentarily eludes me…
Yeah. It’s Omelas. It’s just Omelas. Let us acknowledge that, take a deep breath, and move on.
Except, of course, that it’s not quite is it? I mean, it is, but Omelas is a parable and this is a narrative. And one thing that means is that our heroes spend most of the runtime helping courier the sacrifice child to his horrifying fate, with the Ones Who Walk Away explicitly depicted as the villains. It’s only at the climax, when Gamal turns “heel” that they become the tragic heroes instead. Also, it’s kind of key in Omelas that most people deal with the deal they’ve made by profoundly not thinking about it. On Majelas, everyone does think about it. They honor it. They respect it. As Alora points out, it’s Pike‘s civilization that makes a point of not thinking too hard about the suffering of the underclass on which their privilege is built. (She’s talking to the audience, obviously; the Federation is not supposed to be like that. Any other Trek, especially TNG, would not have let that stand; Picard or Kirk would absolutely have given a speech there about how they used to be like that but that the key to becoming The Federation was learning not to look away). Indeed, we’re told that the Majalans have spend years, probably longer, trying unsuccessfully to figure out a way to not base their civilization on child-torture, which is more than you can say for the people of Omelas or the people of Salem, on the whole.
The biggest problem with SNW’s implementation of Omelas is that it relies, in a way utterly uncharacteristic of NuTrek in general, on the Enterprise crew being very, very dumb until the climax of the episode, whereupon it is too late. I mean, come on. The whole thing is coded so transparently. Let’s have Pike’s girlfriend get very obviously cagey and change the subject whenever they sidle up to why the bad guys want to stop the ascension. Or how the ascension works. Or Pike wanting to investigate. Also, she lives in a castle and her guards carry pointy spears that shoot Comically Evil Splash-murder beams. I think it’s the same sort of sploosh-murder as the Confederation phasers in Picard. Good people do not use guns which kill you by causing your body to humorously sploosh into nothing. Good people do not, generally, live in flying castles over rivers of lava. I think Pike failed to pick up on what a big red flag that was.
Now, credit where it’s due: we get a Strange New World! A civilization which lives in flying castles over rivers of lava powered by child-torture is indeed strange and new. Well, it’s strange. Trek did flying cities before and, as we have said, the whole concept is a very straightforward lit of Le Guin. However, I am very disappointed that we don’t actually get any good visuals depicting these flying cities. We see scenes set on them, and we see the planet from orbit, and we see the internal mechanisms of the flying city. But where are the establishing shots showing a city hovering in the sky? You don’t use “Floating cities” and not give us the establishing shot showing a city with nothing underneath it high in the sky. The establishing shots we do get don’t actually convey the fact that the cities are meant to be floating. How do you mess that up?
The Majalis sets, though, I like. I realize it’s just “Castle, sort of vaguely 17th century French”, but it reminds me a lot of the set designs so often used in TOS for “toga”-style advanced aliens. You ever notice how we rarely see alien civilizations in TOS whose aesthetic is “future”? They usually live in caves or castles or, inexplicably, Greek ruins, but they’ve got super advanced technology and often they act sort of aloof and have something really gross and backward in their culture like they keep slaves or love bloodsports or conduct wars by email or derive their energy from child-torture. Yeah. That. Very spot-on.
Another big flaw in their implementation of the Omelas plot is what they’re getting out of the deal. This child-torture is necessary, we are told, to keep the cities aloft. The Majalans also have quantum medical technology – this is important to the moral dimensions here – but that doesn’t seem to be directly dependent on the child-torture; the kid is just there to keep the cities up. Outside of that, I mean, they live in buildings made of stone, and their space technology isn’t close to par with the Federation: Enterprise destroys two of their ships by accident. The implication seems to be that the Majalans are getting an incredibly sweet deal out of this child-torture, but all we actually see is that their medical technology is a few generations ahead and they get to live in flying castles. Their entire civilization could be brought down – literally – by someone Just Saying No to child-torture, or possibly by Yugi using his Catapult Turtle to launch his Dragon Champion at them. And that’s a very necessary thing on a planet that is otherwise uninhabitable! Yet, it is something of a hard sell for me to fully embrace the idea that the Majalans can’t find an alternative. Making things fly is, point of fact, something all spacefaring civilizations manage at some point. And living on an uninhabitable planet is, point of fact, something all spacefaring civilizations have an alternative to. (Why, by the way, are the people of Prospect VIII living on Prospect VIII when there are many other non-shitty planets in the galaxy?) What is a starbase – say, the broadly paradisiacal Starbase 1 we saw just last week other than a floating city not powered by child-torture? Not to mention that the technology to make an literal city of the traditional Crystal Spires and Togas type float powered not by child-torture but by the entirely mundane everyday sort of exploitation of the proletariat is a thing which also exists in this era and is probably already a Federation member by this point. (Oh, wait, is that the point? Is the point of this “What if The Cloud Minders but Only Torturing One Child Instead of The Entire Proletariat?” What a dumb thing to be the premise of this episode.
Come to think of it, there was a disease angle there too, with the mineral that paid for the Aradnians lavish lifestyle being a cure for agricultural diseases. Yeah, our side-complication here is that Majalan medical technology could cure M’Benga’s daughter and, ten years down the road, Pike’s meltiness. But they’ve got their own version of the Prime Directive, and they do not really wish to join the Federation. Their reasons are given as them just not really being all that into outsiders as a group. This is a little weird; they seem not to have any bias against individual aliens coming down to hang out, and Alora suggests that it would be perfectly fine for Pike to move there and naturalize as a Majalan citizen. So I think we’re meant to assume it’s not so much “We don’t like outsiders” as it is, “We realize that outsiders are probably going to take offense at the whole thing where our civilization is literally powered by child-torture.”
Tangential to the main thrust of the plot, we’ve introduced our third Pike Girl, in what increasingly feels like an attempt to evoke Kirk. I will at least say that they are evoking a true-to-TOS notion of Kirk as a hopeless romantic and serial monogamist, who falls hard, falls quickly, and falls legitimately, rather than the pop-culture perception of Kirk as just being a cad. I note that their backstory is that he rescued her from a shuttle accident. This is like the twelve-thousandth time someone’s backstory has involved a shuttle accident. Seriously, this is why people are willing to use the Existential Crisis Machine to commute to work. Maybe a transporter does kill you every time you use it, but it at least replaces you with a perfect copy who is already at the office. A transporter accident might kill you, but it’ll be quick and usually painless about it, but more often it will do something humorous and ultimately reversible to you, like sending you to an evil parallel universe (TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”, DS9: “Crossover”), reverse aging (TNG: “Rascals”), time travel (DS9: “Past Tense”), giving you a noisy glow (LD: “Much Ado About Boimler”), leaves-in-face (ENT: “Strange New World”), or turning you into good and evil halves (TOS: “The Enemy Within”), a manatee (TNG: “Realm of Fear”), or Tom Wright (VOY: “Tuvix”). A shuttle accident just leaves you dead and/or a cyborg who has to save her memory to USB at night.
Perhaps it is this romance, along with the prospect of an “out” against his horrific mangling that explains why Pike is so damn dumb for most of this episode, because Alora acts incredibly sus for so much of this episode, and Pike just rolls with it. I swear, it had better turn out at the end of the season that his hair is actually a symbiotic lifeform that is usurping his brain function as it gets larger.
We’ve got this whole side-plot about Uhura being on security rotation so that La’an can play Drill Sergeant Nasty, and it does not really work. La’an is not a funny character, but they gave her a comedy role here, with her over-the-top gruffness, and you can see the end, where it turns out she respects Uhura as a competent future-officer, coming about a light-year away. Also, while it emphasizes different aspects, this is to a significant extent the same plot Uhura had with Hemmer a couple of weeks ago. (By the way, we get a Sam Kirk and his ‘Stache sighting for the first time in weeks for no clear reason other than for him to embarrass himself by talking smack about La’an and he doesn’t get nearly-killed or anything. Why bother?) In other Gruff Character news, I do like the plot arc with Elder Gamal, because he’s such an asshole for most of the story in a way that I think successfully stops you from suspecting his involvement in the plot. If, as most people with enough brain cells to navigate Paramount+ menus, you realize that something terrible is about to happen to the First Elder, you think probably the reason Gamal is so gruff with his son is a defensive thing, to emotionally detach in advance of the pain he’s going to experience when he goes off to college is plugged into the torture machine. Like in every horror story about child sacrifice where the parents are awful to the sacrifice child. But it turns out that he’s deliberately overplaying it because he’s actually very broken up about this and is plotting to destroy his own civilization to save the kid and so he is (a) pissy about the whole tradition and (b) hiding it. It is not unexpected that he walks away from Omelas in the end, but it’s a nice touch that he shares some medical science with M’Benga that might start him on the road to a cure for Space Cancer (Incursion from the future: it will not).
Overall, this feels like an episode that is archetypical of what SNW seems to be going for: it’s very much a story in the mold of TOS, with its shirtless, lady-romancing captain, hamfisted moralizing, and sketchy aliens. Kirk would’ve saved the kid, though, and at a meta-level, I will note that the reason Pike doesn’t is because he’s told that disconnecting him will kill him at this point. A no-win scenario. Kirk would save the kid anyway precisely because he doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario, then moralize to Majalans about how they’re going to have to toughen up and learn to live without flying cities or something. I like the way this episode gave us a modern take on TOS, but it ends like an Ursula K. Le Guin story, not like a Star Trek story, and that rubs a little wrong, the same way it’s rubbed a little wrong how often Chibnall-era Doctor Who has settled on having the Doctor just stand back and be a witness to the atrocities of the universe rather than telling the rules to get fucked and intervening.
got it you hate women being in positions of authority