Among the Lotus Eaters or I AM KI-RISTOPHER
See also: The Paradise Syndrome (TOS); “Court-Martial” (TOS); Conundrum (TNG); Workforce (VOY); Stargate SG-1: “The First Commandment”, “Beneath the Surface”; Heart of Darkness
Contains strange new world?: Strange yes, new, technically no.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Sorry, mythology allusion this time. Very TOS.
I am having a very bad day after a very bad weekend, after… Well there’s been good moments in my life too at some point I guess. Anyway, just wanted to get that out of the way in case I’m a dick about this episode.
One choice Strange New Worlds has made that I’m less than 100% on-board with is to firmly position itself as “The prequel to the original series”. I mean this in a denser sense than just by the obvious virtue of being set before it. Enterprise and Discovery were both set before the original series, but they didn’t engage with the original series in the way of being a prequel. They were more Rings of Power and less The Hobbit. Enterprise might well have been described as a prequel to The Next Generation, but its interaction with TOS was more in-line with the interactions that ’90s Trek had with it: treating it like the embarrassing grandpa that they could occasionally hit up for a reference, but treating it generally with an uncomfortable mixture of reverence and disdain. Y’know, because we should respect our forbears but you never knew when it was about to say something incredibly racist.
(Aside: Evelyn is performing this week in The Aristocats for drama camp. She got worried the movie was being pulled from Disney+ since she couldn’t find it on her tablet. I had to explain that child profiles are blocked by default from watching the movies that contain particularly noteworthy racism. The racism in The Aristocats is far enough in the background that you could miss it, but I’m glad Disney paid enough attention to slap a disclaimer on it. Evelyn tried to make me explain the history of casual racism in Disney properties, but fortunately she fell asleep during the first 45 minutes of me trying to explain the caterers in The Ugly Dachshund, a movie which I firmly believe probably counts as a hate crime)
Strange New Worlds, on the other hand, really does seem to want to present itself as a kind of redemptive reading of the original series. It tries to show us a lot of the same “Space is weird” stuff that was a big deal in TOS, and got downplayed later in the franchise. It wants to pick up on things that were present in TOS, and show them in a way that is somewhat consistent with TOS, but smooths out the limitations of ’60s network television, and it revisits the original series with an eye toward what was actually there, without getting lost in the cruft of 50 years of pop culture.
So why aren’t I 100% on-board? I mean, I like it. It’s great. But still… The choice to make SNW an direct TOS prequel means that one thing it really isn’t is a sequel to “The Cage”. It’s a little disappointing to me how little Strange New Worlds draws from the original pilot. Famously, Spock is the only character from the original pilot to be brought back for the second pilot. Strange New Worlds brings back… Spock, Pike and Una. With Chief Kyle, Uhura, Sam, Jim, Chapel and M’Benga, there’s twice as many TOS characters in SNW as Cage characters. Strange New Worlds puts Pike in Kirk’s green Casual Friday uniform, not the gold turtleneck (Though that does make a cameo in a photo on Pike’s shelf). There’s no glass communicators or ridiculous hand-cannons. There’s no gooseneck speakers everywhere. The ship has its red highlights (Added after the second pilot at the request of the network to make the show pop a little more as a “killer app” for color television). I love Erica and M’Benga and La’an, but I’m curious about Colt and Boyce and Tyler. (Actually I don’t care about Tyler).
So this week, they actually did bring back something from “The Cage”, and it’s a surprising choice. Rigel VII. Well-read viewers will vaguely remember that “The Cage” opens with Pike depressed and considering retirement after losing several crewmembers in a massacre on the primitive planet Rigel VII. If you pay careful attention, Spock walks with a limp in “The Cage”, which is supposed to be the result of an injury he took during that adventure, though no dialogue tying that together made it to screen. This week, surprisingly, we go back there, since the locals landscaped a Starfleet delta into the garden, and that presumably means Pike left behind some swag. Okay, that’s a heck of a hook. I guess we could do something interesting with that; Strange New Worlds similarly started with Pike depressed and considering retirement as he comes to terms with his very gently impending doom, so maybe there’s a good parallel here to see Pike come back to the place that almost ended his career five years earlier…
Or not. There’s not really any particular reason this week’s Strange Old World had to be Rigel VII, and Pike doesn’t really have any space to reflect on his unresolved trauma from the last time he was here, because he spends most of the episode not remembering it. (Also, kind of uncomfortable: there seems to be a mild implication that the reason Pike’s crew in “The Cage” skews so much more white than in SNW is that they were the only ones left after Pike led an ethnically diverse away team to be massacred). The planet doesn’t even look as cool as that really nice ’60s matte painting.
Yeah… So… It turns out that the reason the previous mission went so badly is that there’s radiation on this planet that makes your brain stop working, and if you spend the night there, you wake up in the morning like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, consigned to the terrifying fate of marrying Adam Sandler.
None of this came up the last time they were here, because it takes about 6 hours for the radiation to start messing with you – this time, they’re parking far enough away that they had to hike to town.
How do we get from Memento to the violent attack on the away team five years earlier? Fucked if I know. Oh, sure, Zack says something about how the memory loss makes the people paranoid and violent… Except… It doesn’t? La’an and M’Benga do have little fits of paranoia, but every other amnesiac character we meet is completely chill about it; like the lotus-eaters the episode is named after, the laboring class has learned to live with permanent amnesia and happily go about their labor. The guards are violent, but only in your typical Fantasy Medieval Castle Guards kind of way, and they get to keep their memories (There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it explanation that the helmets are made of a mineral that blocks the radiation. The castle does the same). It’s a nice enough metaphor, and the whole setup of the pacified, amnesiac workforce exploited by the castle-dwellers is very classic Trek stuff. That’s all very good. Of course, it’s also been done. A lot. There’s a Voyager episode about it, and an utterly shameless SG-1 knockoff of that episode about it. And they’re both bigger in scale. To be honest, the bit about the castle-dwellers exploiting the workers isn’t a big thing here. Zack is an interloper; he didn’t create the two-tier system, and it doesn’t appear that the castle-dwellers, and whatever ruling class Zack deposed in his takeover, actually understood what was going on. They were still a medieval society, remember. There’s no reason to believe they weren’t doing the best that they could. And absent the deus ex starship of the Enterprise removing the radiation source, there was nothing they could really do to improve their lot. Which is why we don’t see Pike leading an uprising and leading the outsiders to rebel against the corrupt leaders. We just see Pike personally storming the castle to bring down Zack, the crewman he left for dead years ago.
Zack… Is there. I guess. We don’t get to dwell on Pike’s feelings about having left someone behind, because Pike only gets about three total minutes of knowing about it, and we don’t get much insight into Zack’s experience of it either: he’s gone a big Colonel Kurtz, but he tells us approximately nothing about how he managed to install himself as the ruler of this civilization or his experiences. He just insists that Rigel VII changes you. There might have been a tragic story here about Zack spending time among the field Kalar, subject to the constant migraines and memory loss, to eventually be brought to the palace – perhaps to explain the crate of supplies Pike also left behind? Maybe he had to go through the experience of learning he’d been left for dead by the Enterprise multiple times? Or maybe someone just foolishly handed him a phaser while he was still in a brain fog and the next thing he knew, he was king. I don’t know, and the show isn’t interested in giving time to it.
I won’t bother with complaining about all the ways in which a civilization whose workforce has the memory of a goldfish doesn’t make sense. That is adequately addressed by the criticism of every other story like this. Luke tells them that they retain skills and emotions, even though they lose memories, but how does one develop skills under those circumstances? Obviously, the Kalar are stuck at a medieval level because the labor force can’t be trained to do anything that takes more than a few hours to learn, but how do they master things like walking or going to the bathroom or, y’know, reproduction. It’s hard to imagine enough pregnancies making it to term to keep a stable population.
I do like the little element that Pike pieces together parts of what’s going on from the fact that he’s way too soft and pretty to have spent his life doing hard labor. Then he goes on a murder spree. I know there’s this climactic scene where Pike recovers enough of his sense of self to not summarily execute Zack, thus disproving Zack’s claim that the planet “changes you”. But, I mean, no one comes to help Zack when Pike attacks him. There’s no one left alive in he palace? No one comes in afterward to interfere with M’Benga treating La’an or Pike scooping up all the Starfleet tech.
So we’ve got this A-plot where Pike and M’Benga and La’an are stuck on the not-as-dangerous-as-previously-indicated Rigel VII without their memories, subject to violence and paranoia. Only not so much because after one scene, La’an, M’Benga and Pike all sort of instinctively know they can trust each other because “the heart doesn’t forget”. And the rest of the field Kalar are all pretty placid and zen, not violent and paranoid. And the main motivator for Pike is that M’Benga needs his medical knowledge restored to treat La’an’s gaping gut-wound. But then we’ve got this B-plot where basically the same thing is happening on the Enterprise.
Either one of these would have been enough story for a whole episode, and so splitting the plot up like this underserves it a little. Just as the story on Rigel VII stays in tight on Pike, not really addressing the bigger picture of what this lifesyle does to the Kalar, the story on Enterprise narrows its focus to Ortegas.
Ortegas is the last member of the regular opening-titles cast to go without a focus episode. This one and “The Elysium Kingdom” are the closest she’s gotten, and they’re both “The crew are not themselves” episodes. I’m getting angry with the show’s failure to give Melissa Navia some worthy material. Ortegas is heavy with signifiers marking her as really cool, and it’s made cooler by little moments that undercut that, like her attempt to make “Vamoose!” a catchphrase, or her being cute and adorable when she thinks she’s going on an away mission, followed by her sadness and hostility when it turns out she can’t go. But they just refuse to give her proper focus. Also, they seem to be making it a thing that she doesn’t get along with Spock, in a way that’s borderline racist, and that is the opposite of cool. Her inheriting the role of suspecting Spock in “A Quality of Mercy” is a defunct timeline, of course, but then they have her calling Spock out two weeks ago over playing chess with Pasalk, and being bitter at him for bringing the news that she’ll need to fly the Enterprise rather than go to Rigel VII. And it’s Spock that Ortegas lashes out at when she comes out of her amnesiac fugue on the bridge, not knowing who she is, who he is, or what she’s doing there.
Everyone’s lost their memory, and with the exception of Ortegas and Spock, they’re content to just mill around in the halls. Spock is still at his station, but has no idea what to do. Ortegas panics, and has the computer guide her back to her room (first time we’ve heard the Enterprise computer talk, I think? Also, to annoy the continuity nerds, the computer guides her to her cabin by flashing the lights in the hall to lead the way, a feature that was kind of explicitly presented as a cool new thing on Galaxy-Class ships in TNG). But there’s tricky maneuvering they need doing to avoid smashing the ship on the asteroid belt, and when the computer reveals to her that she’s the only one who can save them, she’s able to access her operant memory (There’s decent logical consistency with how the memory loss works, establishing early that they’ll all still be able to do their jobs, at least at a basic level, but they won’t remember what those jobs are), and her emotional connection to her job role gives her the confidence to return to the bridge and take the conn. It’s a pretty good scene as she squares up and marches back to the bridge, chanting, “I am Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship.” It’s pretty cool lowkey Spock-development for him to trust her, too.
Of course, “I’m Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship” is kind of a sad ending for the character arc at the other end of the episode where she’s eager for the chance to do something, anything other than just fly the ship.
You know, this gets me thinking, though. Insofar as Strange New Worlds has deliberately positioned itself as a prequel to the original series, every character has the specter of an exit strategy over their head. Right now, we know Spock is going to basically stagnate in his career for the next decade, and that’s something the show is probably going to want to justify. It looks likely that Uhura is going to slowly work her way up, but she’s going to do it from that same chair she’s in now. M’Benga is going to stay on the Enterprise, but as a specialist rather than CMO (We have at least the precedent of Hugh on Discovery to help with that, since post-resurrection, he didn’t go back to CMO but became Discovery’s therapist instead). Pelia, we can probably assume, will move on just by virtue of the fact that she’s here on a lark to begin with (Oh hey the immortal with thousands of years of memories suddenly losing her memory would have been a neat thing to show in this episode! Or at least a funny little, “I got my memory back! Whoah there are a lot of things I would rather have kept right on forgetting!” scene at the end?). But we’re all sort of primed to expect something to happen to explain why we never hear from Una, La’an, and Ortegas again. Now that we’ve established that Una has been on Enterprise since it was April’s ship, it seems kind of like they’re attaching her to the Star Trek mythology of the Enterprise exerting a mythical pull that few officers willingly just rotate out of. We definitely will need to justify why Una doesn’t succeed Pike as Pike succeeded April. Will it be tied to her heritage? Will she be offered her own command before it’s Pike’s time to step aside? Will she end up buying it to a face-full of Gorn-Jizz like Hemmer? La’an as a character is just screaming to nobly sacrifice herself. In the other timeline, she becomes Kirk’s first officer, and there’s definitely some glances exchanged that, in light of last week’s episode, hint that La’an pursued Kirk deliberately because she secretly enjoyed it when he pressured her to accept his hot dog. But such a thing happening in the prime timeline would be hard to reconcile.
Now, though, with Ortegas, we might have a clear opening, and if they do get around to giving her a character arc, it makes sense that what takes her away from Enterprise would be the realization that she’s going to have to leave if she ever wants to be something other than “And I fly the ship”.
Now, speaking of the specter of the exit. Just how doomed do we think Captain First-Name-Not-Yet-Spoken Batel, esq., is right now? They start off with Pike breaking up with her because he feels guilty that the thing with Una seems to have torpedoed her career in the JAG office, since Pasalk is angry and got her passed over for promotion. But they reconcile at the end because his emotional connection to her persisted even when he was amnesiac, and he’s dedicating himself to not pushing other people away just because of his own insecurities about his impending doom. And she definitely does not show up in seven years when he gets his face melted off, and Spock definitely does not consult with her about his plans, and Pike definitely experiences no awkwardness about ditching her to go spend his retirement with Veena. So… Horrible fate? Messy breakup? Face-full of Gorn-Jizz? We set up a potential Gorn war as part of this season’s tension, so someone’s got to get Gorn’d.
So that’s where we leave it. Next week we roll into the midpoint of the season, and I assume it will be an episode where no one is acting out-of-character and no wacky hijinks ensue.
(Reads Capsule Preview)
“Spock gets turned fully human and has to deal with that, but also it happens right when he’s supposed to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.”
Motherfu–