I am the farmer; I work in the fields all day. Don't mean to alarm her, but I know it was meant to be this way. -- Barenaked Ladies, Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank

Some Blundering about Star Trek: Short Treks 2×04 “Ephraim and Dot”

First, a leftover observation from “Ask Not”:

The episode ends with Pike dropping Cadet Sidhu off in Engineering. As in, he walks her to the door and shows her the engine room, and just leaves. He doesn’t hand her off to anyone. He doesn’t even point and say, “That guy over there? He’s your new chief. Go ask him for your first assignment.” Is that a normal thing to do? In fact, it kinda looks like the place he drops her off is like some kind of balcony overlooking engineering without any obvious way to get down from there to the rest of the ridiculously huge engine room. Is this another test?

Anyway, “Ephraim and Dot”. I was a little unsure about doing these in this order because Wikipedia and Memory Alpha disagree on the order of the episodes. But putting it here makes a certain pattern emerge: “Q&A” was pretty much just a straight vignette giving a B-plot from a hypothetical Star Trek series set on Pike’s Enterprise. So was “Ask Not”. Between them was “The Trouble With Edward”, a short little dive into utter lunacy that is just fucking nuts and I love it to pieces, and I’m sure the fanboys will all get angry because they want Star Trek to be SRS BSNS and be more obsessive about continuity.

If they’re working to a pattern then, it might make sense that if episodes 1 and 3 are played-straight Traditional Star Trek b-plots, then episode 4 would, like episode 2, be something wacky.

“Ephraim and Dot” is Star Trek doing Tom and Jerry. You should leave now if you can’t handle that.

The short begins in the style of a Black and White, 16 millimeter, ’50s educational short film about the life cycle of the interstellar tardigrade. I have not explained much about interstellar tardigrades in Trek, but Discovery season 1 established that man-sized tardigrades have an innate ability to navigate magic mushroom space purely of their own volition. That’s why Hugh got himself tardigraded up. In the real world, tardigrades are cute little near-microscopic critters that became trendy in pop science for a while because they’re cute and they’re weird and they have shown impressive resistance to conditions such as heat, cold, radiation, high pressures, low pressures, and space.

One of the large interstellar variety, named Ephraim (Nothing in the show actually tells us which one is Ephraim and which one is Dot, and the traditional style of these cartoons would imply that the tardigrade’s name should come second, as it’s the prey, like Jerry or Tweety or the Roadrunner. But there’s an established “DOT-7” model of robot in Discovery and real-world tardigrades were discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze, so draw your own conclusions), is looking for a safe place to lay her eggs when the Enterprise bumps into her asteroid.

Ephraim pokes around it a bit, giving us a chance to see Kirk and McCoy meeting Khan through a window. Dot, a maintenance robot, identifies Ephraim as an intruder and pops outside to taze her. But Dot falls through the service hatch, causing a tumble and a chase to ensue.

Ephraim eventually finds herself in the warp core, where it lays its eggs. Dot catches up and drags the tardigrade away, almost jettisoning it, but Ephraim gives the robot the slip and buries it in a pile of tribbles. Dot finally manages to eject Ephraim while a shirtless Sulu threatens Kirk with an epee outside.

Using the mycelial network, Ephraim chases the Enterprise past the giant glowing green hand of Apollo, past the doomsday machine, through the Tholian web, and around Space Lincoln. It finally catches up to a refitted Enterprise as it battles the Reliant, and enters the ship through a hole blasted by Kruge’s Bird of Prey. Dot roughs the tardigrade up pretty good, but Ephraim goes full-on Mama Water Bear and is about to clobber Dot with a wrench but a pile of debris falls toward the clutch of eggs.

Dot tazes the distracted Ephraim again and forces it out an airlock. But when the robot returns to putting out fires from the battle, it notices one of the eggs. It locates the clutch just as the computer announces the self-destruct sequence.

Ephraim rushes back toward the Enterprise, but is cold-cocked by the explosion, waking up just in time to see the flaming wreck do its final death-dive into the atmosphere of the Genesis planet. A badly damaged Dot drifts by, and Ephraim prepares to vent her rage on it, but Dot opens its chest panel to reveal a pile of happy tardigrade hatchlings. The nature film narrator muses on what adventures might await them as Ephraim clutches Dot to her chest in a (water) bear hug and the happy family magic mushrooms away.

This is adorable. It feels very Chuck Jones, despite the fact that it doesn’t really fit the usual pattern – those cartoons always focused on the pursuer getting battered as fate favored the plucky prey animal. You never really worry about Jerry the way you worry about Ephraim, because you know that Tom’s the one who’s about to get an anvil on his head. One thing that they do particularly well here is that you feel entirely sympathetic to both of them. Dot is just doing its job; Ephraim is an intruder. And Dot isn’t even being mean about it or anything. It even says, “Live long and prosper,” when it kicks Ephraim out the airlock the first time. Ephraim isn’t taunting Dot or trying to cause trouble. It’s not clear how much Dot understands about what it’s encountering on the Enterprise, but, like, it starts out trying to dig a hole in the side of the ship, and that’s not really something they can just let slide.

I feel like there’s probably a better match for the archetype they’re homaging here than Tom and Jerry, but I can’t recall a specific one (I feel like I have literally seen an old Warner cartoon where the pursuer finally succeeds in evicting the prey, then discovers that aw shucks it was only guarding its babies, and has to go out and rescue its vanquished foe).

It’s real cute. It’s also a bit of an egg hunt in the non-literal sense as well, as a big chunk of the episode is excuses to play archive footage. This sort of thing often bothers me, but here, I’m cool with it, since it’s all down to little background details rather than intruding on the story. One oddity of the structure, though, is that it clearly is meant to take place over the course of years (this is set up early, as the nature film narrator mentions that tardigrade eggs take a long time to hatch), but it is not edited to make it feel like a montage – rather, the action feels continuous. Maybe that points to something else, since it’s established that tardigrades have an unusual relationship with time.

The animation is… Well, it’s not great, to be honest, but it’s passable. It’s a cel-shaded computer animation style that reminds me a lot of the past few generations of Transformers. Elements don’t quite meld correctly. Dot, for instance, looks very CGI, in a way that makes you imagine it’s supposed to look like it was added in post – just as a DOT-7 would look in live-action Discovery. The human characters look sort of flat and slightly uncanny. They remind me of the flash-animated reconstructions that the BBC has done for some of the missing Doctor Who episodes, where it’s an uncomfortable mix of the minimalism of old Filmation stuff and the hyper-realism of Ralph Bakshi’s rotoscoped stuff. The Enterprise itself has a kind of comic book look, and if you told me that the short was actually meant to look like a comic book overall, I’d buy it. Ephraim, on the other hand, has elements of Disney-cute mixed with a Warner toon’s immateriality. It moves very fluidly and stretches and snaps and springs like a Looney Tune. And, of course, there’s the fact that it is incredibly obviously modeled on Stitch.

Other visual elements are all over the place. The M-113 salt monster which appears as part of the nature film’s opening sequence looks great and a bit Scooby-Doo. The planet-eater looks awful. Lincoln doesn’t look like Lincoln at all, but possibly he does look like Lee Bergere.

Most interesting for fans, of course, is the TOS-era Enterprise. It’s done in the Discovery style, with the double pylons, long shuttle bay, and lots of red detailing in hallways that have windows everywhere. This was to be expected, of course, though according to some of the people that worked on the Constitution-class redesign for Discovery, one of their design principles was make changes that could conceivably have been “removed” in later refits – leaving open the possibility that by Kirk’s time, the Enterprise would’ve been “upgraded” to its classic look.

The Enterprise as it appears in the Star Trek II and Star Trek III scenes is pretty much unmodified from the movie-era design, meaning that we might well assume that Discovery’s “visual reboot” only covers the TOS era – that’s pretty consistent with my general feeling that while the visual style of Discovery does not fit in with TOS, it does actually look very plausible as “A few years before the movie era”. One particular oddity of the short, though: in those last scenes, the Enterprise’s hull is clearly marked NCC-1701-A. Which is not just wrong, but it undermines the plot of the episode: the whole point is that it’s the same ship. It’s weird if this is a mistake, and weirder if it’s on purpose. The Enterprise also shows far less damage from the battle with Reliant and far more from the battle with Kruge (Actually, the damage in that sequence looks more than anything like the Enterprise-A’s battle with Chang from Star Trek VI), and there’s one shot where the ventral hull markings are rotated about 45 degrees, which is weird. Again, getting the Enterprise’s hull markings right seems so straightforward it’s hard to imagine no one noticing they’d gotten it wrong, but what could it possibly mean if it were on purpose?

In the course of this article, I’ve deliberately avoided gendered pronouns for Ephraim and Dot, because this is real weird. Neither one of them actively asserts a gender (Though the narrator does use “her” for Ephraim once). Whether tardigrades have multiple sexes actually varies by species among real-world ones, but you’d think that egg-laying should code Ephraim as female, while being the pursuer in a Chuck Jones-style cartoon should code Dot as male. But to be honest, insofar as either character seems to be deliberately gender-coded, I feel like the writers imagined Ephraim as male and Dot as female. Especially given that they gave them names that aren’t especially gender-neutral. Or that the baby tardigrades literally gestate in a compartment in Dot’s abdomen. But I certainly wouldn’t call anyone wrong who interpreted them as any other combination of genders you like.

As with the other minisodes, I can’t really see how this one might be prefacing events from the next season of Discovery, but it’d be hella cool if it did. I’m giving this one three and a half needlessly sci-fi gimp hoods out of four.

 

I shall return after Christmas to address “The Girl Who Made the Stars”.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged…

So, a little more than twenty years ago, there was this woman I went to school with. We ran in some of the same circles. She was a computer science minor, and I think she was maybe on the newspaper with the girlfriend of one of my buddies and we were in honors together. I was a junior. I can’t remember now if she was a junior or a senior, and I lost touch with her like fifteen years ago.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that she started this rumor around the computer science department that I was seeing this sophomore girl. We didn’t actually know each other especially well at the time; we’d met at the department picnic the previous spring, and I’d invited her to go wander around downtown on Halloween, which was supposed to be a big group thing but everyone else had cancelled. But this preexisting rumor going around took off a lot of the pressure that historically made it very difficult for me to get up the nerve to ask a cute girl out on a date, so I asked her out on the first Friday in December. I took her to a Jane Austin movie at the Rotunda and then the Papermoon Diner on 29th street, and it was only later, at dinner, that she told me that it also happened to be her birthday. That was twenty years ago yesterday.

Mansfield Park Collage
Happy birthday, Leah

To quote entirely the wrong Regency-era romance novelist, Reader, I married her.

Twitter Roundup

Filler due to upcoming Holiday: a few tweets by me I wish to memorialize:

Tales from /lost+found 241: S06E12 (Season Finale!)

So I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and it’s kind of a lot of work for the one or maybe two people who read it. I’m not actually giving up or anything, but I think I’m going to take some time away from it and maybe do something else for a while. Tales From /lost+found will return at Christmas.

Jenna Coleman in Doctor Who
Click to Embiggen

6×12 Two Streams: The Doctor has driven off the creature and saved Lorna and Stefan, but the danger in the Gamma Forest isn’t over yet, as the Doctor’s nemesis and Sammy’s estranged daughter Melody Pond has arrived, and Harmony Beck’s secret agenda is about to be revealed.

Some Blundering about Star Trek: Short Treks 2×03 “Ask Not”

First things first: I neglected to give a rating last time because I immediately forgot the running gag I wanted to establish. So, it goes without saying, I think, that “The Trouble With Edward” merits four weird-ass uncanny-valley Data heads out of four:


That out of the way, let’s move on to “Ask Not”.

Meh.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s perfectly fine. It’s just… There’s nothing to it. “Q&A” gave us the Deep Lore on Spock and a musical number. “The Trouble With Edward” was probably the funniest piece of Star Trek ever written. And then there’s “Ask Not”, which is… Fine.

So this is the first minisode to give us Anson Mount in more than a cameo role. But… Whatever, really. I’m not per se complaining, because it’s certainly not bad. It’s just, like, a perfectly adequate and disposable scene featuring Captain Pike and an engineering cadet who wanted to serve on Enterprise but didn’t make the cut and got assigned to Starbase 28 instead and you just figured out the plot, didn’t you?

Yeah, Cadet Thira Sidhu is working in some random room on Starbase 28 when she gets shaken up and tossed around by an attack on the station by the Tholians. A bunch of redshirts show up with a gold-shirted prisoner in a needlessly sci-fi face mask (Like, you know the neat origama sword Sulu had in Star Trek 2009? It was that except a gimp mask instead of a sword), who they declare to be a mutineer that they need her to look after because the fighting outside has blocked the way to the brig.

Once the mask is off (the redshirts say that they didn’t want to demoralize the rest of the crew by showing them who the mutineer was), Captain Pike immediately orders Sidhu to let him go and help him retake command so that he can lead the Tholians away. He admits to the mutiny charge, explaining that he’d tried to overrule an admiral who wanted him to leave another ship to the mercy of the Tholians as soon as she herself was safe. And wouldn’t you know it, the ship in question is where Sidhu’s husband is stationed, and the two of them were the only survivors of a Tholian attack a few years earlier.

When you add together what you figured out three paragraphs ago with that last bit, you can probably imagine that there are only three ways this episode could go, and only one of them can really work in the five minutes we have left.

Yep, her “rejection” was a feint and this is all a training exercise to see if she’s really worthy of serving on Enterprise. So which is the “right” solution to the exercise? This is probably the most interesting thing in the episode conceptually, though in practice It’s just “okay”.

There are two ways this setup could go. One is that the right thing to do is to follow the rules and listen to orders and not give in to her desire to save her husband and make the Tholians pay and whatever. The other is that the “right” thing to do is to say that Starfleet regulations aren’t a suicide pact and to put saving lives above following regulations.

But what happens is actually somewhere in the middle. I missed a key point the first time I watched this because Dylan had me distracted; I assumed they’d left open the possibility that Pike was lying – that we (or rather, Cadet Sidhu) were supposed to assume that either he or the Admiral had been compromised somehow, and so Sidhu’s decision would be whether or not to believe Pike. But on rewatching, it’s clear that’s not what her dilemma really is: the scenario presumes she will accept Pike’s explanation of the situation as truthful. The question for her is whether to trust his judgment.

Because Pike speaks of saving lives and giving the Tholians “what they deserve,” and – this is important – Pike gives her a legalistic out. They cite regulations at each other: he orders her to release him; she counters that his orders carry no weight because he’s under arrest. He reminds her that regulations dictate that the tactical superiority of the Enterprise means that he should be in charge during a battle. She returns that he is not, at the moment, the captain of the Enterprise. He then pulls out the “reserve activation clause”, which technically means that she’s got the legal authority to reinstate him for the duration of the emergency. She calls this a “loophole”, but I think it’s important here that her ultimate decision is not whether to break the rules, but which rules to uphold.

And ultimately, her decision is that violence has to be the last resort and vengeance shouldn’t enter into it, and on the basis of that, she concludes that Pike is in the wrong: that his plan, to take the Enterprise away from the starbase in order to lure the Tholians off so he can kill them all, is not in line with the Starfleet way, and therefore that it is not the right call for her to exercise her authority under the Reserve Activation Clause to reinstate him.

So he makes some broad threats about her career prospects and tries to leave anyway, whereupon she points a phaser at him. Pike tells the air above him that it’s all good and the alarms stop and he takes off the handcuffs and apologizes for scaring her about her husband (He’s fine). There’s a stirring speech about how war is hell and it’s important for an officer to uphold their duty even when triggered, and she does not immediately grasp the full implication of the test until they beam over to Enterprise to be met by Spock and Una, who is the one who came up with the whole, “Tell them they didn’t make the cut for Enterprise then do a cruel gaslighting test on them to see how they handle it,” plan. Pike drops her off in engineering (We’ve never seen the regular engine room of a Discovery-era ship; engineering scenes on Discovery proper take place in the Spore Lab. We did briefly see a class J training ship’s engine room but that was ten years in the future. Enterprise’s engine room is a huge, multi-story gallery that’s too big to properly take in with just the one quick glance) and is pointedly coy about whether or not the phaser was real.

So… It’s okay. Profoundly… Okay. This would make a fine B-plot in a full-length episode of a TV series that was structured more like ’90s-era Star Trek. But for a minisode, which only has the one plot and not much of it, you really want something more. You either want something which touches a nerve in its own right, like “The Trouble with Edward” or “Calypso”, or even “The Escape Artist” (I suspect “Q&A” was supposed to be like this as well, what with the Deep Lore about Spock and Number One), or else something which foreshadows the upcoming season, like “Runaway” or “The Brightest Star”.

And a character study of a one-off character we’ve never seen before just isn’t that. These minisodes need to be strong all on their own because they’re not feeding directly into future episodes. Why waste time giving us introductory episodes for characters we’re never going to see again. I mean, unless…

Unless…

Oh. OhOh.

Huh.

One and a half cereal mascots out of four, with an option to reevaluate.

 

We’ll return near Christmas for not one but two animated shorts (and in different styles, too; one looks to be cel-shaded, while the other has a distinctly Pixar vibe), “Ephraim and Dot” and “The Girl Who Made the Stars”. See you then.

Flash Fiction: The Swim Lesson

A short story that came to me too late for Halloween.

I watch Maria complete another lap of the pool. “Good work,” I said. “You beat your best time by more than a second.”

She treads water and asks, “Really?” I show her the stopwatch. She presses her back to the side of the pool and starts on a set of leg raises. I drop the rest of the way into the water and join her. She starts talking about her boyfriend, and I can’t remember whether or not I’m supposed to know him.

“It sounds like you already know what you want,” I tell her. I have no idea if that’s true yet, but it sounds good. “Just figure out what’s holding you back and whether or not it really matters.”

“Thanks,” Maria says. She cracks her neck and stretches out in the water. “I don’t want to get all sappy. But, like, I really feel like I can open up with you. Be myself.”

That’s a nice thought. “Me too,” I say, and I stretch out too and relax.

“Listen. It’s not me. This isn’t me,” Rebecca says. “You’ve got to get out of here. Run!”

Rats. Relaxed too much there. I turn myself upright.

“Rebecca?” Maria asks, startled. “What was-”

I wave her off. “Sorry. My mind wandered a little.” I take her hands in my hands, and touch her shoulder to comfort her.

It takes her a good ten seconds to figure it out, which is good because I was going to break into a smirk if it took her a second or two more. I’m awful, I know. I like Maria, I shouldn’t be enjoying this so much. Very slowly, she looks at her hands in my hands, then turns her head to where I’m touching her shoulder.

I give her a friendly wave with the tentacle.

She struggles, of course she does, but I’ve got her arms and legs before she knows what’s happened. She goes under, and in her panic she sucks in a lungful of water.

Crud. I try to help her, but she’s thrashing around too much in a full-on freak out. Finally, I manage to get a little tentacle into her ear and tap out, “Hey, slow down or you’re gonna drown. Let me help.”

That does not actually put her at ease, and I can’t blame her, but she’s surprised enough that she freezes for a second so I can get a couple of tentacles up her nose. I suck pool water out of her lungs and blow air in, which is less unpleasant than it sounds, but still pretty gross.

“There. You okay? Stop struggling and I’ll lift you out of the water and we can talk about this. I know this is weird and all, but-”

She does not stop struggling. In fact, she kicks me. Really hard. “Come on,” I tap into her eardrum. “There’s no way you can overpower me, and I’m going to eventually break you if you keep trying.”

She kicks me again. Fine. Okay. We’ll do it the hard way then. I pull one of the tentacles up out of her lung and punch it through her ethmoid bone. Poke around a little and… Ah. Yes. There.

Okay. Do you understand me now?