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Tales From /lost+found 237: S06E08
6×08 Rosa: Harm diverts the TARDIS to Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. When they meet a seamstress by the name of Rosa Parks, the Doctor has to face a situation where the one thing he must not do is try to make things better.
Synthesis 9: One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small
Or maybe I’m just grumpy because it reminds me so much of the other “Drugs are bad, mmkay?” episode.
We haven’t done one of these in a while, because we pretty much burned through all the episodes that pair up well. There’s a handful of episodes that have close similarities in their sci-fi plots, but neither season really uses the “big sci-fi concept” as the primary focus of its stories very often, and the actual centers of the respective stories don’t tend to have a lot to do with each other. They’re both built around the sci-fi concept of mind control via signals embedded in music, for example, but “Choirs of Angels” is centered around the big set piece of Ironhorse comforting Harrison as he comes down from a bad trip, while “Terminal Rock” is primarily about Kincaid trying to rescue the flame-of-the-week’s brother from a life of delinquency. And “Breeding Ground” is (to my consternation) mostly about the tragedy of Doctor Gestaine, while “Unto Us a Child is Born” is a straight-up creature feature heavily inspired by It’s Alive.
In the case of comparing “So Shall Ye Reap” to “Synthetic Love”, though, it’s time to do some introspection. Because in this case, it’s not just the sci-fi kernel of the stories that are similar, the plots at large are broadly similar in interesting ways, and also they display similar flaws. More importantly for our purposes, they differ from each other in ways that I think are really representative of the shift from season one to season two.
Speaking purely on the technical merits, I am hard pressed to call one or the other “better”. Certainly “Synthetic Love” made me angrier, while “So Shall Ye Reap” just kinda left me cold. The first season’s complete failure to make any sort of proper statement is disappointing, but I guess that’s better than the outright moral repugnance of the second season’s implication that ending the war on drugs was a major contributor (indeed, possibly the main contributor, since it’s the only one that is explicitly called out) to the collapse of society. On the other hand, though, “Synthetic Love” at least tries to contextualize drug abuse – the junkies it shows us are sympathetic, many of them clearly suffering from mental illness and explicitly using narcotics to self-medicate. The overwhelming presentation of addicts is as victims with a disease in need of medical help, rather than as a dangerous “criminal element” to be corralled in the name of “law and order”, with even the junkies who resort to violence in order to fund their addiction depicted primarily as pathetic rather than as dangerous thugs. Remember, this was at a time when the prevailing view of “the drug epidemic” among white America was heavily centered around visions of gang violence at the hands of dark-skinned, drug-fueled “super-predators” (Admittedly, one wonders how much the presentation was skewed by the racial demographics of the Toronto acting scene of 1989).
The season one episode doesn’t lean into the racially-charged gang violence motif either, of course, but it’s thoroughly divorced from any sort of cultural context. Involvement with the actual drug trade is entirely off-screen; we don’t see any “regular” addicts, just kidnapping victims who have been forcibly addicted to the alien drug as part of the experiment. What it does do is show us a drug which does what unhip white people have always kinda imagined vaguely-defined “drugs” did anyway: turn people into super-powered, unthinking, unstoppable murder machines. It’s practically Reefer Madness. And while it’s clear in text that it’s special alien tinkering that has made the drug do this, the way people react to it, and the ease with which Suzanne and Norton work out the details conveys a potent subtext: sure, this is a specially modified drug, but turning anyone who so much as looks at it instantly into an unstoppable super-powered killing machine is a normal sort of thing for drugs to do. Note that they’re willing to share that with Novak before they reveal the truth about the aliens; there’s nothing explicitly alien about the drug modifications themselves.
When you couple the lack of any sort of social context with the mindless murder machine aspect, “So Shall Ye Reap” ends up leveraging the same, “Drugs are bad, mmkay? Because they’re bad. They’re really bad. For reasons. Reasons of them being bad,” thing that I disliked so much about “Synthetic Love”. Both stories rely heavily on the presumption that the audience will do the heavy lifting for them, so they don’t actually need to do the work of convincing you that drugs represent an existential threat to the audience’s white middle-class heteronormative American way of life. In “Synthetic Love” this manifests throughout the story largely as a kind of overall laziness – a laziness that crops up over and over again in the second season, really (Remember the completely unsold and offhanded assumption that the audience would go along with Suzanne in being horrified by the concept of test tube babies? Not that season one was entirely free of it; remember when Suzanne conveyed the apocalyptic horror of Y-fever by describing it as, “The same thing that killed all those people,” with no further explanation of who “all those people” were). Season one isn’t nearly as big on “moral panic” episodes, so the impact isn’t as manifest. But that final scene is one place where it really sticks out. Harrison and Novak look positively repulsed by the test subjects licking up the alien drug from the floor. Harrison looks like he’s going to be sick. Ironhorse has this stoic, thousand-mile stare that seems like it wants to say something like, “I’ve seen this before, once, long ago, in Mai Lai. I tried to forget it. I tried so hard…” This is a show where we’ve seen people get their faces casually ripped off, and people melted, and people get an alien fist shoved through their face. Earlier in this episode, we saw a woman’s head get turned around a full 180. But it’s people in hospital gowns licking Pepto Bismol off the floor that prompts the big reaction shot. That’s almost a punch-line: hero stoically ignores scene after scene of bloody gore, but someone eats something off the floor and it freaks them out.
This presumption that the audience would go along willingly may also be why no one in the production phase did anything about the extent to which the aliens’ plot makes no sense. The second season is messier, more slipshod, and generally lacks the sparkle of the first, but at least the Morthren tend to be working from plans that make a basic kind of sense and are oriented toward a reasonable goal. Humans are dangerous and the Morthren don’t have the resources to attack directly, so they set up a plan to pacify humans, particularly the unruly street-mob sort of humans (who we’d established back in “Terminal Rock” were a direct, persistent threat in a way that the dysfunctional power structures of the dystopian setting really failed to be). Almost every second season episode shows the Morthren working toward a specific goal of either acquiring something they need or mitigating a specific threat. Almost every first season episode shows the Mor-taxans pretty much going, “Let’s kill a bunch of humans by….” then throwing a dart at a copy of Newsweek. There are exceptions of course, and it’s noteworthy that in the first season, the exceptions are the really good episodes, while in the second season, not so much. This week, the thing the dart hit was “designer drugs”. It’s not a good plan, to the point that the script itself doesn’t seem to have a solid handle on the details. Again, it feels almost like a Matt Groening joke being set up. Can’t you imagine a scene in Futurama that arrives at the punchline, “Oh no; your plan to make them uncontrollably violent has made them violent. And uncontrollable!” (shades of The Simpsons‘s “That throwing stick trick of yours has boomeranged on us!”).
And yet, the detachment from social context ends up being the saving grace of “So Shall Ye Reap” in some ways. It kept the episode down to a level of merely disappointing, rather than being actively upsetting like “Synthetic Love”. “Synthetic Love” is at its heart a pretty disgustingly reactionary story. Pretty much all of society’s ills are blamed on narcotics, and the narrative frame feels like a “Take that!” to anyone who favors decriminalization. More than that, even, the depiction of rehab centers as something sinister – not just because they were involved in the Morthren plot, but even before that, tainted by their association with the pharmaceutical industry – seems to be selling a message that not only is decriminalization wrong, so is treating drug abuse as a medical rather than criminal problem. It may not come right out and say it, but process of elimination leaves you with the sense that the message here is, “Addicts don’t need treatment; they need punishment.”
On the other hand, though, at least the second season episode made me feel something.
Tales From /lost+found 236: S06E07
6×07 Planet of the Ood: “I can’t do this anymore. I want to go home.” After learning Melody Pond’s true identity, Sammy demands that the Doctor take her home. But that’s easier said than done: as soon as they arrive back on Earth, the TARDIS is commandeered by none other than the Doctor’s former companion Harmony Beck. The Doctor doesn’t even have time to ask how Harm ended up on twenty-first century Earth before she’s sent them thousands of years into the future, where they will learn of the terrible secrets on the planet Oodsphere.
Some Blundering About Star Trek: Short Treks 2×02 The Trouble With Edward
First, a leftover from last week:
- So as I said, Pike is barely in “Q&A”… But he does have one really good moment. When Spock finally reaches the bridge, Number One tries to cover the depth of their exchange before by pretending that she doesn’t know Spock well and has to look up his name on her tablet. And Pike gives her a look when he does this that absolutely screams, “I know this is bullshit because there is no way you don’t have his name memorized, but I have no idea why you’d want to pretend you didn’t, and I trust you, so I’m just going to roll with it.”
Now, last time, I said that if you just explained what the episode was about on paper, it sounded good, but in execution, I was underwhelmed. Guess what happened this week?
The exact opposite. This episode shouldn’t work. And let’s get that out of the way: there are some serious problems with the logic of this episode. Not the least of which is that it’s utterly unbelievable that someone like Edward would be allowed to grow to maturity and wasn’t fed to wolves as a child. I mean in Star Trek. In the real world he’d probably be a senator. And, y’know, just straight-up ignoring conservation of matter.
I don’t care. This is great. It is spectacular. It is hilarious.
It is the origin story of the tribbles.
And the origin story of the tribbles is, “They were created by an incel to show up that stupid bitch Stacy of a captain.”
(If you are complaining right now that tribbles were presumed in all other appearances to have evolved naturally in a predator-rich environment, just… don’t? Please? No one cares. Besides, “They reproduce exponentially because they’re born pregnant,” makes little enough sense that, come on, “They were genetically modified to breed fast,” is a pretty substantial improvement. When tribbles turn up in Enterprise and Discovery, they aren’t nearly the threat they are in their other appearances, so yeah, it’s a better backstory that the fast-breeding tribbles are an abberation)
I will excuse you if you need to sit down for a moment.
Okay, quickly then: Presumably a short time before last week’s minisode, Anson Mount once again gets pretty much just a cameo as he sees off Lynne Lucero, Enterprise’s science officer, who has just been promoted to captain of the USS Cabot. The Cabot is stationed over the planet Pragine 63, and I’m guessing that the name is a joke, and I have several candidates but am not sure which one. Her mission is to help with a food shortage. The newly minted captain’s first staff meeting introduces a handful of scientists who are all working on clever ways to increase food production. And Edward.
Edward Larkin is an awkward, nebbishy guy played by H. Jon Benjamin, who I hear is on Archer, but mostly he feels like a budget-rate Paul Giamatti. And if you’ve watched a lot of science fiction, then you know to expect that he’s going to be awkward and weird and nerdy but ultimately he’ll be vindicated and maybe even get a kiss because he’s a nerd, and we need to make the fans feel good about themselves and remind them that they’re good people and someday the jocks who bully them will learn to respect them.
Only that doesn’t happen. What actually happens is that Edward is utterly horrible and makes things bad for everyone, because Edward is not a good person and he does not deserve respect and vindication.
Anyway, Edward is clumsy and awkward and can’t get his tablet working when Captain Lucero calls on him and gets very flustered and resentful when the female officer next to him fixes it for him. Edward’s idea is that he’s got these critters called tribbles. Which are – this is how he actually describes them – basically big furry scallops (How I’m going to be referring to tribbles from now on). He suggests they’d be good to hunt, which I think tells you something about Edward, that he doesn’t intend for people to farm tribbles; no; he means for them to be wild game.
There’s something of the techbro about Edward – the sort of guy who is very good at solving technical problems and very bad at reducing societal problems into technical ones, and is so full of Dunning-Kruger that he has no idea that these are two different things and also that what he just invented is a bus.
To Edward’s mind, there’s just one problem with this plan. Everyone else sees many, many problems with this plan, but Edward just sees the one. (To be honest here, I wish they’d actually voiced some of the problems with breeding tribbles as a food source; it just seems to go without saying that this not just a bad idea, but an offensively bad one. I assume the grounds here are basically, “People will not want to eat an animal as cute as a tribble,” though, I mean, I’ve eaten cute animals before. Rabbit. Lamb. Antelope. So I wish they’d actually explained the problem instead of hanging a big part of the episode on the assumption that the audience would not question the fact that Edward’s idea is bad) Namely, tribbles reproduce slowly. But don’t worry: he can genetically manipulate the furballs to increase their reproductive rate. And since he’s not entirely sure whether they’re sentient, he’ll also modify them to be brain damaged as well, just to make sure it’s all ethical.
Captain Lucero politely reassigns Edward to climatology, and everyone goes out of their way not to laugh at him. But, see, Edward is a man and he has not been permitted to get his own way, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to talk smack about her to the rest of the crew and go ahead and genetically modify the tribble anyway, before sending multiple “anonymous” reports to Starfleet command accusing Lucero of stupidity and incompetence. After confirming with the rest of the crew that Edward is a talented biologist and a whiny little bitch who can’t stand it when he doesn’t get his own way, Captain Lucero orders him transferred off the Cabot. It’s too late, though, as little baby tribbles are popping off of Edward’s test subject in a scene reminiscent of Gremlins, and he barely has time to wander down the halls in his underwear before someone notices the ship is infested.
Never one to take responsibility, Edward’s first reaction is an unconvincing, “Oh my God, who did this?”, though he still seems to think that the fact that his plan “succeeded” vindicates him. Lucero points out that disobeying a direct order is going to look bad on his permanent record.
And then one of the most surreal and wonderful sequences in the history of Star Trek ensues to the tune of Bing Crosby’s “Johnny Appleseed” (A nice touch here: the opening bar of “Johnny Appleseed” sounds more than a little like the comedy leitmotif from the Original Series soundtrack) as the crew of the Cabot fights a losing battle against the tribbles. First, they’re just scooping them up into cages (Edward is scooping them up into a soup pot. He initially says that he doesn’t personally have any interest in eating the critters, but it quickly becomes clear that the dude has a bit of a Gargamel-style fixation on consuming small cute creatures). Things take a more sinister turn when the tribbles get into the ship’s systems, causing the transporter to fail, and their reproduction is fast enough that they’ll exceed the ship’s life support capacity. The whole “born pregnant” thing? “Well, when you mix human DNA with tribble DNA, crazy stuff happens.”
Yep, these are not merely augmented tribbles: they are tribble-human hybrids. Let me remind you once again that genetic experimentation on humans is one of the biggest no-nos there is under Federation law. And whose DNA did he use? I will grant, Edward makes a fine point when he says, “What? Like Noel’s DNA would be any better?” Everyone’s super grossed out, though, probably because Edward is still pushing, “If everyone eats their fair share, the population will level out,” as a strategy.
Meanwhile, someone walks by in the background wearing a kind of vacuum cleaner backpack to suck tribbles up off the floor with a satisfying pheumatic tube “whoomp” sound. Just a little touch to remind us that even when the text tells us that this is SRS BSNS, we’re still watching a show where the threat to the heroes is basically a pile of animate merkins.
Shit’s serious now, so they break out the phaser rifles and start a sort of very gentle Aliens parody, with security officers working their way down the halls shooting tribbles, and a shot of a crewman screaming as she’s engulfed, and it’s absolutely wonderful when we show an exterior shot with tribbles visibly rising up behind the windows. We cut to a computer screen issuing a pressure alarm before it cracks under the weight of the growing tribble mass.
And if you are about to get upset about the fact that they never say what the tribbles are eating or where their biomass is coming from, you can just fuck right off because I will not have silly things like basic physics ruin a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make me terrified of the prospect of being buried alive in a pile of fur-covered scallops.
Besides, exactly the same thing happened in “The Trouble with Tribbles” and all they needed to say was, “Oh, the tribbles got into the food slot mechanism.”
The crew is forced to give up the ship. Edward tarries as they evacuate to give a full on mad scientist speech about how Lucero thought he was dumb, but he’s not dumb! He’s smart! He showed them! He showed them all! He almost manages to get out, “You’re the dumb one!” before he is crushed to death under a wave of tribbles. Lucero barely manages to seal the escape pod.
Regrettably, we do not get to see the final fate of the Cabot. Even in the age of computer-generated graphics, making a starship pop under the force of a billion simultaneous tribble births is apparently something the budget could not support. Instead we cut to the inquiry, where Lucero is basically yelled at by the admirals. And, I mean, that’s fair. Losing a starship on one’s first day is pretty bad. We can extrapolate that Lucero is not as good a captain as Kirk. We learn that some of the modified tribbles made it to the surface of Pragine 63, and now the planet is uninhabitable to humans. Plus, some of the tribbles made it into Klingon space, causing a diplomatic incident. As for the Cabot itself? “Total and complete structural failure.”
The question of how one man could’ve caused so much destruction is what the episode ends on. Lucero’s answer? “He was an idiot.”
I love this episode to pieces. It’s ridiculous nonsense and that’s something Star Trek needs more of. It’s just such a great rejection of the “Nerd makes good” story. Edward is apparently technically proficient. But he can’t tell a good idea from a bad idea, and he doesn’t listen. They never come right out and say that he’s a misogynist, but it sure does feel like it. Edward, Pike and Noel are the only male speaking roles in the episode (And Noel only counts because he’s finishing his status report when the briefing scene starts); the Cabot’s crew is really diverse, with Edward as the only older white man we see. And Rosa Salazar is great as Lucero. She’s small and unassuming, and she never really projects a tough image despite Pike’s warning that she’ll need to be tough as a captain. This is important in the context of the show because Edward reacts at every turn as though he’s being bullied and belittled and… He totally isn’t. His final speech is all about how Lucero called him dumb.
She didn’t. Not once. Exactly the opposite, she repeatedly spoke of his intelligence. On the contrary, he repeatedly calls her dumb, to his shipmates and in his letters to Starfleet command. Nerdy Guy Makes Good stories are real popular in science fiction, probably because an awful lot of science fiction is written by nerdy guys who would desperately like to believe that the way they were treated in high school was some form of dues paying for the greater rewards to come in the future.
But “The Trouble With Edward” takes pains to ensure we don’t sympathize with Edward as the victim of people who don’t appreciate him or his great intellect. He’s not being oppressed or bullied; he just thinks it’s his right to do whatever the hell he likes, and anyone who tries to stop him is “dumb” and doesn’t deserve his respect. Edward isn’t intimidated by Lucero, and she never becomes forceful or even really angry with him: that’s all just his outsize sense of entitlement telling him that not being allowed to do whatever he wants is a kind of oppression.
He’s an idiot.
And there actually is a serious point here. Space is hella dangerous. Even something as adorable as a tribble can destroy a starship. The last thing we need is a bunch of arrogant manbabies who think they’re too good to follow the rules and who don’t respect the chain of command. Somehow the human race got away with coddling that sort of asshole for, I guess, like, all of history, but you try that shit in space and people gonna die. (Actually, people die a lot here on Earth too, but for most of history we were largely okay with that as long as it was mostly the right sort of people). Fortunately, this is the utopian world of Star Trek so Edward was the only victim. In a more realistic show, he’d be promoted to captain and the rest of the crew would’ve died.
Seriously, this is a good episode to show to your clever boychicks who think they don’t have to follow rules they disagree with. Dylan.
And then, after the credits, just for one last little laugh, we get a post-credits scene. Under a heavy VHS filter, a commercial for Tribbles, the only breakfast cereal with self-replication. There’s a prize at the bottom of each box. Not that you’ll get to the bottom. They’re packed with 18 essential vitamins and minerals. And Edward. Tribbles contain more human DNA than any other leading brand. Available in Original, Hairy Berry, and new Spicy Ranch. They’re pregnant… With flavor!
Tales From /lost+found 235: S06E06
6×06 Dinosaurs on a Spaceship: An ancient spaceship full of prehistoric creatures is on a collision course with Earth. The Doctor calls on the help of Madame Vastra and the Paternoster Gang, but outwitting the cruel Solomon will force him to team up with his enemy, Melody Pond, whose true identity will change the Doctor’s relationship with his companion.
Some Blundering About Star Trek: Short Treks 2×01 Q&A
And we’re back to this, I guess. From now until the premiere of Star Trek: Picard, the second Thursday of every month will see the release of a new Short Treks minisode. But the first one dropped this past weekend, with the next one scheduled to appear tomorrow, so let’s tuck in to Q&A.
This episode was predicted to be a fan-favorite, giving viewers a bit more of Anson Mount’s Pike, Rebecca Romijn’s Number One, and Ethan Peck’s Spock. And from what I’ve seen, the fan reactions have been pretty positive.
You can guess where this is going. I mean, I didn’t hate it or anything, and it’s not like I was expecting something else – these Short Treks have pretty consistently been lighthearted character studies, and that’s exactly what this one is. But it just left me a little cold. It’s a bit more caricature than character study, and bits of it feel at odds with the progression of the characters.
As I mentioned before, while Rebecca Romijn is pretty good as Number One, a big problem with her appearance in Discovery is that she is playing the exception rather than the rule. A central aspect of the character of Number One is that she’s cold, reserved, and clinical most of the time, so that when she does open up and show a softer side, it carries a lot of weight. And Romijn does a great job of conveying, “I’m not normally willing to open up like this, but I will now.” But the show never really gives us much of the “I’m normally reserved like this,” angle. She’s all exception and no rule. “Q&A” at least tries to establish the “most of the time” part, but it’s mostly an informed ability – she starts out cold and clinical, but the mask drops real quick. As much as her role in this story is to show us why Number One is the way she is, we’ve never actually seen how she is, and we only barely do now.
The other thing that this minisode seems to want to do is, if I am being unkind, indulge a fanboy impulse to “fix” old canon. Specifically, to explain why Spock behaves so differently in “The Cage” than he does anywhere else in canon. Eh. Whatevs.
So, “Q&A” is the story of Spock’s first day on Enterprise. The highlight of which is him getting stuck in an elevator. Having been chastised by Number One for failing to display the expected level of curiosity for an ambitious young science officer, he responds by peppering her with questions until she gets annoyed at him. This feels like a sound idea ruined by pacing, because the setup is that she literally tells him that he should be asking so many questions that she gets annoyed, but the number of questions it takes to get her annoyed is three.
One of them is, “What’s your name?” Okay, sure, it’s kinda a thing that Number One doesn’t tell people her name. It’s kinda a big thing. But I mean, she really ought to be used to getting the question, right? Sure, she should dodge or refuse to answer, but “What is my commanding officer’s name?” is an incredibly reasonable question and she shouldn’t be annoyed that he asked.
Also, her name is Una.
Yeah. This is the one thing I really like in this Short Trek: the complete non-reveal that her name is Una, which is done with no fanfare or weight. First time we see her, she’s reading a memo off of a tablet and we can clearly see that it’s addressed to Commander Una. for what it’s worth, Pike called her “Una” back in “An Obol for Charon”, but it wasn’t clear at the time whether that was a term of endearment. Spock finds out her name in his first ten minutes on the job (The reveal is meant to show him being smart, but it feels clumsy in execution. He asks a technical question, and a few minutes later, realizes that the “Una Algorithm” mentioned in her answer was eponymous). I am cool with them telling us her name, but it’s still symptomatic of the flaw in how the character is used, that they set up, “She’s cold and reserved and doesn’t tell people her name,” but what actually gets screen-time is, “She opens up in private and tells a new Ensign her name the first time she meets him.”
The core of the exchange comes when Number One tells Spock he should smile less. Sigh. On paper, I really like this. First, I really like the image of a woman in a position of authority telling a man who is her junior to smile less. It’s a lovely inversion of the ugly trope of women always being ordered to smile more by men. And I do kinda like the decision to embrace rather than downplay the “Spock grins ridiculously while playing with the singing Talosian flowers,” scene from “The Cage”. And the idea that Spock’s extreme stoicism in TOS is informed more by a deliberate choice to emulate Number One than by his Vulcan upbringing alone is really interesting.
It doesn’t really fit in with the arc of Spock’s character as laid out by Discovery, though. Bracket Discovery for a minute and let’s look at what we’ve seen of Spock’s character. We’ve got a young Spock in “The Cage” who smiles and shouts (This comes up in “Q&A”; Number One tells him to tone it down). By TOS, he’s extremely reserved and stoic. This peaks with him pursuing Kohlinar in The Motion Picture, after which he backs down a bit and starts appreciating the value of his human side, even if he’s still insulted by being compared to a human. Then he dies and gets better and after this point, we really see a Spock who’s fully at ease with his human side, to the point that he doesn’t even really try to hide his emotions when he meets the Kelvin-timeline version of Jim Kirk.
Discovery adds the backstory that his fallout with Michael caused Spock to spend years forcefully rejecting his human side. After reconciling with her, we see Spock adopt a more integrated personality, similar to his character in the later TOS movies. But he speculates that the pain of losing her again will push him back into his shell. For her part, Michael suggests that the way to avoid this is to make a friend, and basically describes Jim Kirk as the sort of friend who would be good for Spock.
That’s all very lovely. The only real weakness it has is that it doesn’t quite explain Goofy “The Cage” Spock. I’m happy to overlook that. “Q&A” is not. Instead, “Q&A” tells us, in a nicely oblique sort of way, that Spock’s sense of awe in the face of scientific wonder trumps his Vulcan stoicism. We start out with Spock smiling to himself as he gets ready to beam aboard Enterprise.
Una finds a smiling Vulcan disconcerting and tells him to knock it off. That’s kinda weird and uncomfortable. Specifically, she asserts that since Spock’s goal is to someday have his own command, he should keep his emotions to himself, because people won’t take a smiling Vulcan seriously. I get the idea here: we’re being told, in reverse, that Una’s cold, reserved demeanor is her locking herself down in order to present the image she feels she needs to present to be taken seriously as a command officer. I have some problems here.
- “A woman has to hide any hint of softness or sensitivity to be taken seriously in a leadership role,” is an ugly idea that ought not to be true in the real world, and sure as fuck ought not to be true in Star Trek.
- Again, this would work a lot better if they spent more time showing us Number One being Number One and less time having her take the mask off.
- “Spock’s life goal is command” comes out of nowhere. There’s nothing anywhere else in canon to suggest that Spock is even interested in command. There’s basically a whole thing in Star Trek II where Spock tells Kirk that he’s really not that into leadership roles. (Not saying that it wouldn’t be fair to assert that young Spock wants to command, but when he grows older, his goals change, but this is the one and only time we’ve been told Spock wants his own command.)
- If Spock wants his own command, why did he major in Blue Shirt? Surely he could’ve tested into Yellow Shirt.
- Also, Spock spends like twenty years as the science officer aboard the Enterprise. This does not seem like the career path of an ambitious man.
- It doesn’t even really fit with the assertion in this very minisode that what really gets Spock’s motor running is seeing the wonder and majesty of the universe.
- This is Spock’s first day. The arc of Spock’s character just gets hopelessly muddled up in light of this. So wee Spock is learning to embrace his humanity through his bond with his sister, but then she breaks his heart and he rejects his humanity for the next twenty years, except that he also smiles a lot, until his first day on Enterprise where Number One tells him he needs to learn to be more stoic and use his inside voice, but then a couple of years later on Talos IV, he’s grinning like an idiot in front of everyone and shouting all his lines, then he reconciles with Michael and learns to integrate his Vulcan and Human sides, but then he rejects that and becomes a hardcore stoic, but then he gets kicked out of Kohlinar school and goes back to Starfleet and learns to integrate his Vulcan and Human sides again. This conversation with Number One only really works here, on Spock’s first day, but the arc of his character would actually make more sense if you put this conversation after “The Cage” (Possibly a lot of character stuff would make more sense if you placed “The Cage” after season 2 of Discovery, but I won’t get into that here).
The nice thing that happens next is that Spock reasons from her advice that there’s some aspect of herself that Una keeps under wraps and asks her about it. She responds by busting out the Gilbert and Sullivan.
Again, on paper the idea of a minisode centered around Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck singing “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” while stuck in a turbolift on Spock’s first day aboard the Enterprise sounds super charming. Maybe it’s just the way it’s shot? It’s kinda awkward and weird. They are both passable but not great, which I think is possibly deliberate.
Then once they’re done singing, they get rescued and she swears Spock to silence about the musical number and they go to the bridge and meet Pike. Anson Mount gets roughly two lines of dialog and they’re not that interesting. There’s a pretty cool nebula on the screen and he asks Spock if Vulcans experience awe. Spock, having learned an important life lesson from Una, says, “Yes, but we usually keep it to ourselves.” It’s a nice ending, but it doesn’t feel fully earned, because “And then they sing showtunes” is a poor substitute for a deep character growth moment.
The miniscule and generic role Pike plays is a bit of a disappointment. In fact, when Number One describes him to Spock, her description of him is oddly generic as well. He’s a fighter pilot but he abhors violence; he wants you to passionately defend your point of view to him; he’s willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. He likes horses. It’s… just kinda generic. Where’s the stuff like, “He’s obsessively goal-oriented,” or, “He’s not actually all that into being in charge of people,” (which could very easily be integrated into Una’s character; one gets the feeling that Pike probably delegates a lot of the day-to-day telling-people-what-to-do, which means that she has to be good at projecting the full authority of the captain), or “He won’t ask his crew to face a danger he won’t face himself.”
So that’s “Q&A”. It’s not bad by any stretch, and on paper, it’s got good stuff going on. But a weak execution fails to elevate some character moves that, while they certainly would be good somewhere, don’t quite fit where they end up.
I give it two and a half Open-Shirted Portly Old Man Rikers out of four.
Next week: “The Trouble With Edward”.
Proposed Star Trek: Picard side-story: “A Fist-Full of Ones” – Will Riker, Una, and Old Man Picard’s Dog team up to uncover the mystery behind a strange village populated by retired spies, guarded by a murderous weather balloon. Jim Caviezel guest stars on account of Patrick MacGoohan being dead.
Tales From /lost+found 234: S06E05
6×05 The Impossible Astronaut: After months of searching, the Doctor finally has a lead on Melody Pond and Harmony Lake. The chase will take them back and forth across thirty years of the space race and lead them to a child who shouldn’t exist.
Correct as Usual
Another wonderful thought popped into my head, so:
Tales from /lost+found 233: S06E04
6×04 The Ones Who Walk Away: The Galactic Federation is on the verge of collapse as the “Earth for Earth” movement is pushing to end the alliance. The only thing that could rally the planets of the Federation to unite is the threat of a common enemy. But the unthinkable has happened: the implacable, unstoppable, relentless enemy… is suing for peace.