I can tell you I'm sorry, but I can't tell the truth, dear. And what if I could; would it do any good? You'll still never get to see the contents of my shoebox. Shoebox of lies. -- Barenaked Ladies, Shoe Box
I didn’t cry when the monster came. The monster was scary. I didn’t like the monster. Why did the monster come?
The monster breathed fire. I didn’t want the monster to breathe fire on me. I didn’t want the monster to breathe fire on you either.
We told the monster to go away, but the monster didn’t go away. The monster was scary.
When we go to space again, will the monster come? The monster shouldn’t come. Can we go on an Evelyn Family Trip? I want an Evelyn Backpack to go to space.
I want to go to space tomorrow. Can we go to space tomorrow? I WANT TO GO TO SPACE TOMORROW.
2×11January 30, 1998 DINOSAURS IN NEW ORLEANS (Serial 20, Episode 3)
Setting: New Orleans, Louisiana, Near-Future Regular Cast: Hugh Laurie (The Doctor), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Lizzie Thompson) Guest Starring: Paul Eckstein (Voskar), Bruce Harwood (Swift), Jonathan Frakes (Blackwood), Ted Raimi (Dr. French)
Plot: The Doctor almost succeeds in calming the giganotosaurus, but the national guard arrives and fires on it, enraging the creature. The oil platform survivors are cornered, but the dinosaur vanishes before it can attack. Blackwood passes along information from his superiors about recent dinosaur sightings which started around the time contact with the platform was lost, the giganotosaurus being the first one too big to be covered up. He assumes the dinosaurs are related to the therasapiens, but the Doctor can not square the dinosaurs’ ability to appear and disappear with therasapien technology. Swift backs the Doctor and calls in a scientific consultant to assist, wishing to atone for his actions on the platform. The Doctor and Lizzie are chased by a pack of velocirators, which also vanish after mildly injuring Dr. French. This time, the Doctor senses a temporal disturbance and asks Swift to have the TARDIS brought over from the platform so he can use its instruments. As the dinosaur appearances become more frequent, Blackwood prepares to have the city evacuated. Plotting the dinosaur appearances on a map reveals a pattern centered around a building owned by the oil company. Swift attempts to contact his employers for access, but the evacuation has jammed the phone lines. When Blackwood and the Doctor attempt to break in, the giganotosaurus reappears. Meanwhile, Swift’s men are unable to locate the TARDIS on the platform, but in reporting this to Lizzie, they let slip that they’ve previously handled a number of other deliveries of high-tech equipment from the platform to Dr. French’s company on Swift’s orders. When she sneaks into his lab to confront French, she is confronted by Voskar, who shoots her with his weapon.
Special thanks to Vincent Dawn for uploading this.
It can be hard, in a time when geek culture is so prominent and television has become a mature and respected medium, to remember how recently television was largely treated as disposable trash, and how little there was to consume about television shows beyond the text itself. Shows like Doctor Who or Star Trek were the exceptions in terms of shows for an adult audience which had significant merchandising. Anything that gave you a look behind the scenes was rarer still.
That’s not to say there wasn’t anything produced that would give you a look at how the sausage was made, but it was rare, and generally not intended for mass consumption. One thing which pretty much always did exist was a press kit. And through a bit of luck, the video press kit for War of the Worlds is now watchable on YouTube.
In terms of content, it’s similar to a demo reel or pitch tape, like the one we saw many long years ago for George Pal’s own attempt at making a TV show out of his movie. But there, the focus was on getting interest to move the project into production. Here, the show is already on its way to air and at least the pilot is in the can. The press kit’s target audience instead is the media. This twenty minute presentation is basically background research and B-roll for journalists to use when doing pieces on the show. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the original source for some quotes I’ve seen in the various articles I’ve come across about the series.
About half of the 20-minute runtime is an overview of the series. It opens on stock footage from the 1953 movie, some of the same clips from the show’s opening. A narrator lays out the backstory as usual: an alien invasion, stopped by bacteria, then we cut to footage from the pilot, the scene of Ironhorse’s crew filming the dump site, as the narrator explains how the alien remains were stored and forgotten. We cut to the money shot from the credits of the alien hand pushing its way through the melting drum lid as the narrator informs us that one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction stories of all time is coming to television:
This variant isn’t as common as the one we saw on the cover of the novelization, but I’ve seen it once or twice before. So we have at least three different versions of the series logo, each following the same basic idea, but with a completely different style to the text and a different drawing of the alien hand and globe. What’s especially interesting is that this version is animated – the hand materializes around the globe and the words appear letter-by-letter accompanied by a blinking green cursor effect. The extra effort makes me wonder if this version was intended to be used for the series, and if so, what prompted the change.
We get some nice behind the scenes footage, a very short clip from “The Resurrection”, and from the jail scene in “Thy Kingdom Come”. There’s an interview with Greg Strangis, who explains how the series contradicts the film by changing the aliens’ death into forced hibernation, and their new ability to possess human hosts. Greg is filmed in the Land of the Lost Cave set, and though he’s upbeat, he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable giving an interview on camera, stumbling a little over his words and with a slightly nervous posture. His father seems much more comfortable in his own short clip, talking up the threat of aliens infiltrating society at all levels.
Vampire Lords – A race of creatures who fed on the blood of sentient beings. The Vampire Lords claimed to have been nearly exterminated by the Time Lords in the distant past [US: Lords of Blood], however, this account conflates the Vampire Lords with the Great Vampires, an older, non-humanoid race. In fact, the Vampire Lords were a chimeric species created by the Great Vampires as a servant race by combining their own biodata with that of humanoid species [TDA: Vampyre Science]. One example of this process was done by the King Vampire to create the Three Who Rule from the crew of the Earth ship Hydrax [OS: State of Decay]. Vampire Lords could convert other humanoids into vampires by feeding on them [NA: Blood Harvest]. According to one legend, Rassilon was bitten by the King Vampire and became a Vampire Lord himself [MA: Goth Opera]. Vampires were extremely resilient and could be killed only by decapitation, destruction of the heart, or prolonged exposure to the sunlight of their homeworld. Vampire Lords were quantum entangled with their progeny. When a Vampire Lord died, any other vampires it had created within the planet’s current lunar cycle would revert to their natural, non-vampiric form [US: Lords of Blood]. Vampire Lords lacked the Rassilon Imprimatur, and suffered serious physical damage from time travel [US: Human Nature]. The Forge recovered a sample of Great Vampire DNA and were able to create a new race of Vampire Lords [BF: Project: Twilight, Project: Valhalla]
I could lie and tell you that it’s bittersweet, here at the end, to finally be done with Thomas and Yvonne Phelan’s Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II. It’s not bittersweet. It’s pretty great, actually. That I still have any fondness left for any form of War of the Worlds after this is kind of amazing. It’s pretty much been one shitshow after another. There are three small mercies here in the final act of this nightmare play:
Side four runs a few minutes short to accommodate the credits and copyright notice
The whole act is set on Mars, so we won’t be seeing any more of the Earth case
Just as the first tape led off with a full recap of the last ten minutes of episode 2, episode 4 leads off by replaying the entirety of the last scene of episode 3, so we technically already covered the last ten minutes way back in 2017.
We left off with the Orion crew, Jessica Storm, and her hired gun Walsh (the narrator implies that the rest of Storm’s crew is there too, but no one ever refers to them and episode four will have them back on Artemis) bitching at each other in a cave on Mars. They keep that up for bit, with Nikki needling Jessica for being passed over by NASA. Previously, they’d always asserted that it was Jessica’s lack of experience that gave Ferris the edge despite her superior test scores. Here, Nikki asserts that it’s Jessica’s complete inability to work with others or, y’know, lead in any sort of meaningful way. Jessica for her own part insists that it was simply sexism that led the “old boy scouts” at NASA to pick Jonathan over her.
After a bit more arguing, Townsend declares that the smoothness of the tunnel implies it was constructed with machinery, which adds credence to the possibility of a concealed exit.
They argue for a few more minutes about forming a search party before working out that there are nine of them. Walsh doesn’t want to go, and takes Jessica aside to reveal that he’s smuggled a gun down with him in spite of the Martians’ instructions. The gun is never mentioned in episode four. He tries to threaten Jessica out of sending him on a search party, but she convinces him that she’d detonate Orion-1 with her dying breath if he tried anything. As a consolation, she orders him to kill the Orion crew once they’ve found an exit.
The Orion crew notices them sharing a hearty villain laugh, but this has no impact on their behavior because why would it. The gang splits up, with Talbert, Townsend and Pirelli taking one tunnel, Morgan, Ferris and Walsh a second, and Jessica, Nikki and Rutherford the third, which I’m sure won’t end badly. As they disappear into a tunnel, Mark Rutherford, still thinking he’s a character from a ’50s sitcom, grouses to himself about it in a way that completely ignores the fact that he is a prisoner on Mars with a woman who has been hired to murder him.
Hey, wait up! Wait for me! I can’t believe those two. They’ll kill each other before the day’s over. How did I get stuck in the middle again? This is the last time I ever allow myself to come between those two…
Actually, in what is either a clever subversion or just the writers getting bored, team three doesn’t descend into any sort of love triangle antics. The reason that’s weird is that the next ten minutes is basically the same scene playing out twice. Because the adverse influence in these caves — episode four reveals this all to be an elaborate Tor simulation — teams one and two quickly devolve into deadly love triangles.
What?
The narrator informs us that the space explorers do not notice the faint, distant sound of machinery that is rhythmic and hypnotic. It kinda sounds like an old printing press. It is never explained nor does anyone ever mention it again. Presumably it is meant to be the mechanism that compels everyone to fight, “hypnotic” being the key term here. But I’ll note that they never actually explain it. They also don’t ever come right out and say that these scenes are some kind of simulation or illusion. Possibly they’re not; it could well be that these events really do play out physically, and are somehow undone later using Martian powers. If these events are a simulation, then the narrator’s description of a mechanical device nearby casting some sort of hypnotic spell is misleading at the least.
Talbert laments that they don’t have Mark’s phosphorescent subterranean lamp, which prompts Pirelli to get annoyed at his complaining. Talbert gets angry at being berated in front of Townsend. Pirelli doesn’t understand his complaint at first, but then comes around, as if his own mind is filling in a backstory to match his current state of mind.
Though that’s smart enough that I find it hard to believe that it’s what this story would be going with, especially as they leave the details unsaid rather than having different groupings of characters explain it in painful detail three times. Talbert confesses that he’s “sweet” on Townsend, and when she defends him to Pirelli, Pirelli becomes suddenly jealous, accusing her of two-timing him. Pirelli insists that the two have been in a relationship for some time, which makes Talbert fly off the handle, but only confuses Townsend.
Talbert and Pirelli come to blows, and the narrator tells us that “for the first time in her life”, Townsend finds herself unable to decide whether to intercede and who to help. It seems possible that they’re trying to make a point here about Gloria being unaffected by whatever’s happening to the others. That fits well with the hints in episode four that I took as suggesting she might be an alien changeling. But again, that’s far cleverer than I’ve come to expect from this, and again, you wouldn’t think the writers would have nearly enough chill to let it go without copious exposition.
We can do this. We’re gonna make it. One more cassette to go. Two more posts and we’re free.
Hey, you know who isn’t going to appear in this episode?
So, did you reckon that the segue last time heralded a return to Mars and the actual plot? Have you learned nothing at all from our time together, dear reader? Well, good news: we will return to Mars this time. At the 30 minute mark. Out of thirty-five.
No, first it’s time for more adventures of Ethan Allen Ratkin. Young Ethan wanders into a “bad part of town,” we are told. This “bad part of town” comes off as pretty much being Sesame Street back in the ’70s before it got gentrified and working class monsters like Franklin and Forgetful Jones were priced out of the place. (Seriously, I recently watched some old Sesame Street from the ’70s and was really struck by how much shabbier it looked, but also how much more it looked like a real place that just happened to be a mixed community of puppets and humans. There’s people all over the place just going about their daily lives in the background and the whole street looks lived-in, unlike the contemporary street which is very clean and sterile and rarely has anyone visible on the street other than the characters actively participating in the scene.)
Ethan stops outside a pawn shop to be confused by the concept. This is, apparently, the first business he has passed whose purpose confuses him. Pawnbroking is a pretty old profession, and it’s maybe just a little weird that it hasn’t fallen into the scope of Ethan’s theoretical knowledge. The clearly want to make a point here about the schism between Ethan’s book-learning and his street-naivety, but they don’t really know how, so this scene is a lot of Ethan not understanding simple concepts until they are explained to them, then instantly grasping their underpinnings in theoretical economics, then completely failing to make even the smallest logical extrapolation from that.
Hooper! HOOPER!
The shopkeeper comes out to shoo Ethan away from loitering. Like everyone else, he’s a broad, overplayed stereotype, this time a dated archetype of a Brooklyn shopkeeper, with a heavy New York accent. We should probably be grateful he’s not coded strongly as Jewish given War of the Worlds II‘s hamfistedness about such things. I imagine him somewhere between Walter Matthau and Mr. Hooper. Again, the writing clearly wants him to come off as parasitic, but can’t pull it off, leaving us with a real weird (honestly, weird to the point of being kind of enjoyable) sense of him being some sort of kids’s show character. He doesn’t understand Ethan’s big fancy-school words like “mirth” or “collateralized loan”, but gives Ethan a detailed and extremely forthright explanation of his business – he literally says that he profits by human misery.
He explains that people who are down-on-their-luck take out loans from him, backed by something of value. Ethan understands the concept of an interest-bearing loan backed by collateral, but somehow doesn’t realize that the pawnbroker is talking about interest-bearing loans until he explains it. He goes on to assert that most customers can’t repay the loans, so he keeps the collateral, which Ethan doesn’t understand to be a good thing until he is told that the claimed collateral is sold at a profit. Whereupon Ethan instantly understands the economics of the situation and can’t understand why his father doesn’t go into the business.
But the irony doesn’t really land because there’s too much going on in the joke. Pawn shops thrive on human misery, thus it would be an appropriate line of work for Ronald Ratkin, the world’s most cartoonishly evil man. But Ethan doesn’t know and doesn’t believe that his dad is evil. He muses on it anyway, though, because despite being literally told by a pawnbroker that pawn shops work by exploiting people in trouble, he still doesn’t actually see anything evil about it. Just like they do with everything else, the writers rely too much on the audience to just take for granted that pawnbrokers are parasitic to make up for their failure to actually convey anything (An even bigger ask in 2019, given how much the public image of pawn shops has been rehabilitated). Even with the pawnbroker outright calling his business exploitative, the description he gives…. Just doesn’t really convey that. When people are in trouble, he offers them help. That he does it at a profit doesn’t actually make him any worse than any other participant in capitalism. And as he dispels Ethan’s misconceptions, he honestly doesn’t come off as doing anything but what is completely reasonable – recouping his investments and minimizing his risk. There’s no real addressing of the actually unsavory bits of the business – the usury and handling stolen goods – so he comes off as not really significantly different from anyone else who makes secured loans. The only real difference is that reselling forfeited collateral is a major part of his business model.
Fortunately for Ethan, Steinmetz (It is literally always referred to by its full name, “Steinmets Psychiatric Hospital”. It’s just me shortening it) is well enough known that a random pawnbroker in the bad part of town knows where it is. It’s in Connecticut. Now, we have absolutely no idea where this is taking place, so it might as well be on the moon. But the Pawnbroker suggests that it would cost Ethan about $500 to take a cab there. I have no idea how inflation has affected cab fare over the last 20 years, but given current rates, a five hundred dollar cab ride to Connecticut would suggest we’re somewhere in the DC Metro area. Which I guess is plausible. It doesn’t really track with the idea of Nancy imagining they’d send a limo to drive her to Mission Control. But a cab to Connecticut from the general neighborhood of either Johnson Space Center or Kennedy Space Center would be an order of magnitude higher. Of course, it’s plausible that the pawnbroker is simply being facetious, since “Take a cab clear up the Atlantic seaboard,” is not really a serious suggestion, but… It really doesn’t come off that way.
The pawnbroker offers Ethan a dollar an hour doing odd jobs around the shop, to which Ethan responds by misquoting Benjamin Franklin and attributing it to his father. This provides the opening for the pawnbroker to go on a tirade about how evil Ratkin pere is, that he’s responsible for the water shortage and also somehow responsible for the poverty of this particular neighborhood. This continues the pattern of Ethan being told by strangers what a piece of shit his father is which will culminate in Ethan’s decision to turn against the old man in the final episode. Of course, as usual, everyone hates Ratkin and knows the details of Ratkin’s evil machinations despite his complete control over the media and the fact that everyone also thinks that Ratkin is a paragon of industry and it would be political suicide for the government to act against him.
Also, given that the pawnbroker has just explained in excruciating detail how his business is built around human suffering and preserving the cycle of poverty, it’s weird that he’d hold such animus toward the guy who’s almost certainly driven a lot of people to the pawn shop to trade grandma’s wedding band for a half-gallon of water.
Ethan turns the job offer down, but instead pawns his gold watch. Thanks to his shrewd negotiating skills, he’s able to argue the pawnbroker up to seven hundred dollars. Still a far cry from the watch’s true value, but what can you expect. He’s clever enough to reject the pawnbroker’s usual “It’s probably fake,” and “It’s probably gold-plate,” and “Watches aren’t worth much,” but possibly accepts that the engraving (“To ER From RR”) will make it impossible to sell. It feels like a missed opportunity that the pawnbroker doesn’t bring up the possibility that the watch is stolen. I mean, a three thousand dollar gold Rolex is not something a child would normally have, so he could easily have justified underbidding Ethan on the grounds that he needed to protect against the potential for loss if the watch turned out to be stolen. We do get to actually hear the negotiation, though the transaction itself is handled by the narrator, who also foreshadows that Ethan sees a flash of movement through the window of the pawn shop as he leaves.
The narrator tells us that Ethan intuits that taxicabs are rare in the bad part of town, so he sets out in search of a better neighborhood, when he is confronted by the character we know will later become Ethan’s sidekick, Kyle Jordan.
I can’t tell if his name is deliberate, but this is what I keep thinking of when they mention it.
Philosopher’s Stone – aka “Jewel of Time”. An artifact of immense power created by the crystallization of temporal energy. The Doctor described the crystal as a kind of cyst formed by a particular kind of damage to the Web of Time. The Kronos Crystal was a Jewel of Time created by the Guardians of Time and used to trap a Chronovore [OS: The Time Monster]. After that crystal was discovered by the people of Atlantis, legends of its power prompted the alchemists of Earth to attempt to recreate the crystal via a process called the Magnum Opus, a primitive form of Block Transfer Computation [PDA: The Quantum Archangel]. In the 15th century, the alchemist Nicolas Flamel abused Time Lord knowledge he gained from The Doctor to complete the Magnum Opus and produce a Philosopher’s Stone [US: As Above, So Below]. The stone acts as an anchor point for its own independent web of time. A person bound to the stone effectively gains their own private spacetime, rendering them functionally immortal [US: Doctor Who and the Prisoner of Torquemada]. Traveling in time via TARDIS disrupts this private spacetime, causing the user to age rapidly. This private spacetime can also be used to circumvent temporal barriers as were used by the War Lords during the Great Time War [US: War of the Doctor]. Flamel attempted to use the stone to destroy Earth, but was persuaded to redirect its energy in the form of a Rainbow Road into the Time War [US: Doctor Who and the Philadelphia Experiment]. The eighth, ninth and tenth Doctors later used a Schrodinger Cell to create two additional stones, which they used to remove the planet Arcadia from the event horizon of the war. It initially appeared that the stones were consumed in the process, but the eighth Doctor later recovered them and attempted to use them to hide Gallifrey in its own private spacetime [WDA: The Gallifrey Chronicles]. He did not know whether this was successful.
It does not, perhaps, have the same sense of inevitability about it as addressing Pike’s tragic future. But it was always likely. And if, as I have tried to maintain, Discovery is at its heart about going back into the past of Star Trek for the lost, the broken, and the abandoned, and finding a place to heal, then there’s symmetry in the fact that my blunder through the second season of the show should end here, at the very earliest point, the place where Star Trek began.
Previously, on Star Trek:
Still recovering from tragic events on Rigel IV, the Enterprise receives a distress call from a long-lost colony ship, crashed on Talos IV. Their rescue mission is interrupted when Captain Pike is abducted by the native species, hyper-cephalic telepaths with the power to create powerful illusions. Their own race is dying out due to misuse of their powers, and they want to breed Pike with Vina, the colony ship’s only survivor, for reasons that are somewhat ambiguous. Through a consistent application of anger and violence, Pike persuades the Talosians that humans don’t make good pets. They allow him to leave, but Vina, who in reality is old and severely disfigured from the crash, chooses to remain behind with a Talosian-created simulacrum of Pike, with whom she’d fallen in love. Starfleet bans all contact with Talos IV, eventually elevating the ban to carry Starfleet’s only death sentence.
Two years later…
Completely ignoring the restrictions on going there, Michael zaps her shuttle over to Talos IV at maximum warp. In for a penny, I guess. Lucky thing the Section 31 facility where she started out was apparently close. She drops out of warp right next to a black hole, and desperately tries to avoid it, until Spock shoves her out of the way and flies straight into the thing, because it’s a Talosian illusion to hide the planet. I guess the Talosians have decided they don’t want visitors. They are, all the same, comparatively gracious when Michael and Spock show up uninvited. Vina invites them to beam to the Talosians’ underground lair, where a trio of them explain that Spock is perceiving time in a non-linear fashion and needs his logic turned off to process it, and their fee for resetting Spock’s brain is that she pony up the memory of why the two of them fell out. The Talosians show Michael Spock’s memory of his two encounters with the Red Angel, once as a child, helping him find a runaway Michael before she got eaten by a large Vulcan animal; then again a few months earlier, when he tried to mind-meld with it, and had a vision of the red signals and subsequent destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy at the tentacles of spacecraft that looked an awful lot like the modified probe from last week. He also recognized the Red Angel’s mind as human. After a break for them to snark at each other a bit, the Talosians show Spock’s escape from the mental hospital, with him incapacitating his doctors with a neck pinch rather than killing them.
Meanwhile, the admirals at Section 31 kinda sideline Leland in favor of Georgiou, ordering them to find Spock and Michael, but keep Discovery out of it. Georgiou orders Pike to stay near Kaminar and search for debris from the probe. Pike starts making inquiries to try to find Michael all the same, though Tyler warns him off, not because of Section 31’s orders, but because he fears that if Pike does find them, Section 31 will simply follow them. Hugh is still not feeling himself, and starts a fight with Tyler, trying to make Voq resurface. Later, he leaves Stamets, declaring his former self still dead and insisting they both need to move on. Vina contacts Pike using Talosian powers and they have a moment before Michael and Spock report what they’ve learned. Pike orders Discovery to magic mushroom itself to Talos, but someone (it was Airiam) has sabotaged the spore drive, and combined with the fact that someone (it was Airiam) exfiltrated petabytes of data from Discovery using Tyler’s command codes, it looks like Tyler can’t be trusted, so they lock him up. Discovery heads for Talos at warp, trying to fake-out Section 31, but they fail because someone (it was Airiam) tips them off. Michael shows the Talosians her fight with Spock: after a terrorist attack on her school, she believed the only way to protect her family was to run away. Spock tried to follow her, so she called him a freak and a half-breed to break his heart. Present-Spock agrees that it was a logical thing to do and it taught him the important lesson that humans are jerks and he should repress the hell out of his human side. Michael disagrees, and attributes her behavior to being a stupid kid, but Spock’s still bitter. Leland and Discovery arrive at Talos IV at the same time, and both try to beam up Spock and Michael. Vina appears to Pike again, telling him to let go, so he orders Discovery to give up. Leland flies off with Spock and Michael, ordering Pike to turn himself in for disciplinary action. But he only has a minute to gloat before Spock and Michael disappear, having been Talosian illusions all along, which Georgiou anticipated but didn’t say anything about because she hates him. The real Spock and Michael arrive back on Discovery in the shuttle, and the crew give Pike their support in his decision to go on the run.
Ooh. A nice, powerful episode that is heavy on character, if a little light on action. I think possibly you could get a stronger pair of episodes by shuffling around some elements between this episode and the last one, but it’s not bad. Honestly, you can coast a lot on the strength of reintroducing Vina and the Talosians. The high points:
The Previously bit at the beginning, using the original footage from “The Cage” in a sort of popup-book style is fantastic.
Upon the reveal that Leland has captured a fake Spock, Georgiou casually remarks that the Talosians pulled that kind of stunt on her once so she genocided the big-headed jerks. And their stupid singing flowers too.
Speaking of, reproducing the singing flowers is a real nice touch.
I think the idea is meant to be that because the Red Angel was unstuck in time, mind melding with her broke Spock’s brain in a more extreme form of the occasional TOS incidents where Spock was temporarily donked up by a bad mind meld. But it also seems like possibly it was just that experiencing the future as a memory of the past was something his Vulcan sensibilities couldn’t process. Which is a kind of interesting idea. There’s repeated references in the episode by both the Talosians and Spock’s human doctors that it’s specifically the Vulcan part of his psyche that was damaged. And there’s an interesting comparison in that last week we saw that, beyond Tilly finding it “freaking amazing” no one on Discovery has had any trouble at all believing that the Red Angel is a time traveler. They all just take it in stride. Compare that to the very often repeated refrain in Enterprise and the Abrams-verse that “The Vulcan Science Academy has determined that time travel is impossible.” You could speculate that a Vulcan-trained mind develops a peculiar weak-spot for time travel.
When Pike accuses Tyler of being behind the exfiltration and the sabotage to the spore drive, it’s not a simple regress to him not trusting him: Pike has just learned about Section 31 using mind-pureeing technology from Michael and he offers the possibility that Tyler might have been mind-whammied into betraying them against his will.
I like that Stamets keeps desperately trying to make things “normal” for Hugh, and it just keeps making things worse because Hugh doesn’t feel normal. This is what becomes Hugh’s character arc: everyone is trying real hard to reassure him that he’s the same person he used to be, but what he needs to accept is that it’s okay for him to be someone new.
I love that the rift between Spock and Michael isn’t just down to a misunderstanding about intentions. Spock knows why she did it. It doesn’t help. This problem wouldn’t have been solved by them talking it out. And the big cathartic reveal doesn’t fix things between them – that doesn’t happen until Michael has her own similar emotional crisis a couple of episodes later.
Not so much a “I liked this” as “This is a thing and I want to note it”: They mention that Talos is restricted, but it’s not treated with the seriousness that it had in “The Menagerie”, where Spock’s life is on the line and I think Kirk and the Enterprise crew are facing serious legal threat too. Does something happen in the next ten years to make Starfleet elevate the restriction on Talos to a General Order carrying the death penalty?
On the other hand, at the end of “The Menagerie”, Starfleet calls them up and is like, “Hey, we heard you were sending Pike there so he could have a nice retirement. We’ll let it slide.” Which now that I think of it is consistent with Discovery‘s repeated, “This is really important, so I’m sure Starfleet will give us a dispensation.” It seemed stranger to me because I’m used to the TNG-era Starfleet Command which exists primarily to be obstructive bureaucrats to slow the plot down.
Of course, since the court martial in “The Menagerie” was an illusion for Kirk’s benefit, the Talosians may have been playing up the seriousness of the charge.
I’ve always felt that there’s a tremendous tonal difference between “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” in how the Talosians come off. Pike assumes they want to keep him as a zoo specimen for their amusement and/or to father a slave race for them, and the show doesn’t really challenge that, with the Talosians letting him go because he’s too violent to be useful. I always felt that the way the archive footage is edited and framed in the “Menagerie” version paints the Talosians as more tragic: their race is dying and what they really want is someone to pass their cultural heritage onto, but they ultimately resign themselves to their fate when the realize that humans would just destroy themselves the way they did. Both aspects are there in both tellings, I think, with the difference being mostly a matter of emphasis. Discovery maintains and reinforces a lot of that ambiguity. There’s never any question of the Talosians refusing to help Spock, but there’s a constant low-key threat that they’ll take Michael’s memories by force if she doesn’t give them willingly. Michael at first balks at the idea, accusing the Talosians of voyeurism, and their rebuttal is itself still ambiguous: “It is how we understand. It is how we survive.” It points to a new element, that vicariously experiencing the illusions they create for their “guests” fulfills some sort of need in the Talosians, which points to the possibility of relationship that is either mercenary or symbiotic, depending on your point of view, and adds a dimension to why they would welcome Pike back years later. It’s interesting that the Talosians have very little agenda of their own here, being a largely disinterested third party, though at the end, they take deliberate action to help Spock and Michael.
I don’t think it’s spelled out in “The Cage”, but it’s broadly understood that the Talosians are a bit like the Eternals in Doctor Who, and rely on lesser beings as a source for the experience and memories they use in their illusions, since their own race has basically used up its imagination.
Having Pike meet Vina again is a great way to beef up the idea that ten years later, he would still have feelings for her strong enough to want to spend the rest of his life on Talos IV with her. Heck, he suggests that even at this point, two years later and still healthy, he’s thought about going back to her.
The closest thing I guess we’re going to get to an explanation for why Spock risks his life to return Pike to Talos IV is that he’s present for Vina’s talk with Pike and knows that Pike still has feelings for her.
Another pleasantly weird thing is Vina’s contradictory feelings. She says it was harder for her after Pike left, with the knowledge of what she’d lost. But she also says that the fake Pike she’d been given was good enough because he was a reflection of the part of Pike that was still inside her.
Interestingly, Pike doesn’t seem to have known about this. He sees the illusory Pike in “The Cage”, though that isn’t shown in “The Menagerie”, as they recycle the footage to represent the real Pike restored to the appearance of health at the end. Which leaves the strange implication that Vina being given her own personal Pike as in “The Cage” did happen, but only after the real Pike left.
“Say goodbye, Spock.” “Goodbye, Spock.”
In Spock’s memories, his doctor suggests that the red signals may be something that had happened before, in the past, and Spock’s vision of them was actually a subconscious memory of having seen them in a historical database. He’s wrong, obviously, but it’s a good theory and it’s good to have someone come up with a more mundane theory first. Also, it’s very similar to how Sarek and Amanda interpreted Child-Spock’s first vision, that Spock had worked out Michael’s location from perfectly mundane clues subconsciously and the vision of the Red Angel was a child’s brain interpreting thought processes it didn’t understand.
Schrodinger Cell – aka “Paradox Box”, “Magic Box”. A Time Lord device capable of protecting its contents from the results of Temporal Paradoxes and the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. Anything placed within the box enters a “quantum null state” until the box is opened. So long as the box is closed, its contents are indeterminate, thus the box could contain any object. During and after the Time War, The Doctor carried a Schrodinger Cell bearing the Seal of Rassilon, given to him by The War King (WDA:The Ancestor Cell), which he planned to open only in his moment of greatest need (US:The Last Time Lord). He considered, but ultimately rejected opening the box when facing Varnax (US:The Mark of Varnax) and the Mothrai (US:Nothing at the End of the Lane). The War Doctor placed the Philosopher’s Stone into his box, allowing the tenth and ninth Doctors to create identical copies of it by removing the stone from their own boxes (US:War of the Doctor). Later, the War Doctor placed the sixth segment of the Key to Time into the box, allowing Alice Jones to remove it in the Guardians’ Domain to complete the key without sacrificing herself. Schrodinger Cells could also be used as a power source by extracting the temporal energy of unrealized potential universes (WDA:Sometime Never). Among its other features, the Pandorica was a Dimensionally Trancendental Schrodinger Cell(BF:The Pandorica Opens, BF:Other Wars).
