A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Charades or I am Curious (Yellow) or How I Meld Your Mother

See Also: Faces (VOY), Rascals (TNG), Stargate SG-1 “Divide and Conquer”, Doctor Who “Curse of the Black Spot”
Contains strange new world?: Yes!
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in this episode?: Peak SNW right here, baybee.

So the SAG-AFTRA strike is finally over which means I have to get off my ass and start writing about Star Trek again I guess. I was kind of enjoying not writing, to be frank, but I should probably try to do more creative stuff. Thinking about doing another Admiral Pike-verse fanfic.

The thing is, I don’t actually have all that much to say about the rest of the season of Strange New Worlds other than “It’s great. It’s really great.” This one provoked some mixed emotions from me.

I got to ask. I mean, probably not, right? But maybe? You’ve got aliens named Yellow and Blue and the resolution to the plot arc requires Christine to own up about whether or not her and Spock are fucking. Is this an easter egg referencing the 1967 Swedish erotic film series?

So the hijinks. I guess an SNW “thing” is “Vulcan Hijinks at the midpoint of the season”? They even played a riff on the TOS “shenanigans” leitmotif just before Spock drops an F-bomb. The basic outline is… Kind of shocking in that it feels like what would happen if Star Trek were a ’60s sitcom. It has strong I Love Lucy energy. Here’s what happens: Spock takes Nurse Chapel out to study a Weird Swirly Thing on a planet near Vulcan, and they get blown up. Fortunately, the swirly thing is owned by some godlike aliens, whose insurance covers the bill. Only when they found the shuttle full of two blown-up humanoids and 3/4 of the DNA they found was human, they figured the other quarter was a mistake, and put Spock back together a fully human. And they’ve only got a limited time to fix it before it becomes permanent for some reason! Okay, Good solid Star Trek plot so far. But incoming hijinks: Spock is scheduled to have the very important and awkward ritualistic dinner with his fiancee’s parents that very night! And T’Pring’s mom is a total bitch who already hates Spock for being a filthy half-breed and if she disapproves, the wedding will be off! And I mean, it would be terrible if Spock and T’Pring didn’t end up getting married! Also, Fred and Barney have their Water Buffalo meeting tonight! And Laura’s toe is stuck in the spigot! And Superintendent Chalmers will be here for dinner in 20 minutes!

So okay. There’s a lot going on here. It’s a funny plot. And it’s insightful too. One of the best things is that Spock doesn’t spend the episode being angry and feeling violated about having his DNA changed. It’s a nice change from the past few generations of Trek having people meet the weirdness of the universe first and foremost with annoyance. But more, the reason Spock isn’t upset is related to the reason he has such a hard time pretending to be Vulcan: it’s because his Vulcan upbringing has not prepared him for pretense. He knows how to act like a Vulcan, but not how to pretend to be a Vulcan. He doesn’t know how to be un-genuine (A skill he will, of course, learn as he grows older). He doesn’t keep trying to suppress his emotions when he’s a human, because suppressing emotions isn’t part of his understanding of humanity, so why would he?

I love that he blows up at Sam for being a slob. This is part of a cute little montage where they recreate scenes from the cold open, showing how Human Spock reacts differently, to the discomfort of his colleagues. Spock doesn’t know how to deal with his human emotions particularly in that he does not know with how to express emotions in a healthy way. He’s used to dealing with Vulcan emotions: big, rampaging, primal emotions that have to be tackled and suppressed. What he’s not used to are slipper human emotions that you need to embrace and direct rather than suppress. It’s kind of lovely. And Amanda’s there! Amanda is wonderful as always, and I love how easily she just rolls with everything – a human woman living on Vulcan has to learn to just roll with things. And what’s her reaction? She has to teach her son how to lie. For a Vulcan, suppressing your emotions and acting stoic is genuine. For a human, it’s an affectation, and Spock has to learn how to perform a different thing than his truth.

Of course, when she beams aboard and Spock puts on a little Starfleet beanie to hide his ears, I could not help but be disappointed that we had the literally perfect moment to canonize the Emco Star Trek “Spock” helmet and they just passed it up.

T’Pring’s dad is great too. I mean, sort of. It’s a little uncomfortable to have this very dated stereotype of the domineering mother-in-law and the henpecked father-in-law. But it’s still kind of funny to watch this dude very clearly make the logical decision that that it would be irrational to disrupt domestic harmony without exceptional provocation.

But I don’t think we can avoid addressing the elephant in the room.

Leonard Nimoy was Jewish. And his lived experience of being a Jewish actor in the middle of the 20th century in America was an experience of being a kind of permanent-partial-outsider; having to put up with people making jokes about hook noses and secret world-ruling conspiracies and funny diets and modified penises. Of being never quite accepted, not allowed to join the best country clubs, always being slightly suspect. Of perpetually being a “funny foreigner” whose culture and cuisine were viewed as “odd” in the best of times. Of having his loyalties challenged. And that lived experience is a huge part of what he brought to the role of Spock. The modern Spock, whether it’s Quinto or Peck playing him, leans into portraying Spock as neurodiverse, but the original Spock was very much – and here’s that notion we addressed recently with Pelia coming up again (She’s not even in this episode! You start off saying Amanda and Pelia are old friends, then you bring back Amanda and you contrive an excuse for Pelia to not be around?) – a “Space Jew”. So we have a bit of a problem when we launch into the “Spock’s a human now!” montage.

Frankly, even if Spock weren’t deliberately and consciously constructed as a metaphor for the Jewish experience, it would be a little problematic to make one of your choices for depicting the explicit markers of “humanity” be “loves bacon”. It’s particularly bad in this context, but even in any context, you’re absolutely lowkey asserting that “All True Humans Love Bacon”, in a way that implies that vegetarians, Jews and Muslims are somehow not-quite-real-true-humans. In context, it takes the extra step of sending the message that Spock has been, in a sense, cured of his Jewishness. Yuck. Ew. Gross. No. (To make matters worse, I’m pretty sure T’Prell’s “Overbearing Mother-in-law” stereotype is also Jewish-coded. Maybe not deliberately, but that’s the trouble with ethnic stereotypes; they’re ground into the culture so deeply that you can evoke them without even noticing you’re doing it. You sort of sense T’Prell wanting to point out that T’Pring could just as easily have had an arranged marriage to a nice doctor without a shiksa mother.)

I think that scene is symptomatic of a significant misfire in the episode’s design. They were clearly trying to do something clever here: rather than contriving a reason for Spock to have to “learn to be human”, or go around lamenting the loss of his True Self, or being confounded about how to deal with these new urges and impulses, they did something new and more interesting. Spock just completely naturally adapts to his situation, because the thing Spock is not used to is faking it. He is completely earnest about his new feelings and impulses, up to and including an uncomfortable moment with La’an when he notices that he’s horny.

One really cool implication here is a reversal of what the popular Spock Lore would tell you: Spock does not spend his life holding his “human side” in check: he, like all Vulcans, spends his life holding his Vulcan side in check – the powerful, savage emotions. The reason Spock struggles is not because his human emotions are interfering with his Vulcan logic, but because the level of restraint needed to control his Vulcan emotions is pathological to his human side.

But the misfire here is that, in a sense, Spock was human already. They’re all human. This is Star Trek. Aliens aren’t aliens; they’re metaphors for one part of the human experience or another with a funny forehead. And so, we’re left with Spock “turning human” in a way that equates “human” with being cis-white-hetero-male-American. And not a vegan one.

Now, like I said, there’s a lot to enjoy here. I mean, when Chapel and company go back to meet the godlike aliens and are magically transported to a void with black tile floors and crinkly cellophane walls, that sort of thing is absolutely my bag. I love me a “magically transported to a black void surrounded by the title sequence from a ’60s British movie”. The Kerkovians are delightfully weird. Aloof, legalistic, and one gets the impression that the legalism is a kind of Karen-y kind: mostly an excuse to declare things not-their-problem. It’s a little much the way Chapel is still reluctant to admit her feelings even when it becomes clear that’s what Yellow needs to hear in order to give her standing to file a complaint. Boy it’s going to be uncomfortable if she immediately backtracks on this and becomes aloof and gives the impression that this is just a casual fling for her immediately.

Anyway, they sort everything, and there’s a cool bit where the Vulcans call up Christine to be dicks to her and she wistfully muses about having just traveled across dimensions to gain the medical knowledge of godlike aliens before telling the officious Vulcan to go fuck himself. Spock successfully mind-melds with his mother, because for some reason, part of this “Meet the in-laws” ceremony involves the mother-in-law watching the groom  mind meld with his mother. This bit I do not really understand. Now, the part of the ritual where you sit and listen to your in-laws complain about you, that makes perfect sense. Not sure why your mother-in-law needs to watch you mind meld with your mom though.

It’s wonderful development for Amanda, though, and the way they play the reveal is done well. First, Spock describes the memory they shared as just an ordinary scene from his childhood. Then, having finished the ceremony, T’Prell goes on to insult Spock’s mom. As you do. This might actually be the official origin story of “Talking smack about Spock’s momma is his berserk button.” We haven’t seen it happen earlier than this in his chronology. Only later do we get the reveal: the “ordinary” scene was the first time the other kids invited Spock to play. And through Amanda’s eyes, he realized that however bad he had it, his Vulcaninity being constantly challenged, Amanda had it worse. Spock was bullied, but there were times when he was accepted. He’s got a smokin’ hot girlfriend. He got accepted to the academy. He’s chief science officer on a flagship. But there’s never been any reward for Amanda. The other mothers never accepted him. And even Spock’s greatest accomplishments were colored with that, “It’s especially impressive given your shitty mom,” thing. It’s heartbreaking and wonderful. Sarek married Amanda, as we know, because he loved her. But no one’s ever really addressed why Amanda married Sarek, or what she gave up to do it.

Of course, Spock losing his cool, despite having been re-Vulcaned, and revealing the charade leads to T’Pring dumping his ass, and this is something I have some feelings about, at this stage in my own journey of self-discovery, and after what we saw back in Spock Amok last year. Because once again, they’re making me sympathetic to the lady who is gonna try to get out of an engagement by getting Spock to murder his boss.

Because, once again, it comes down to Spock’s insecurities. In his time of crisis, he basically got everyone on the ship working together to bail his ass out, but he was afraid to tell his girlfriend. And, I mean, he tried. But there was that anxious attachment, once again, that inner voice that told him that if he opened up to the person he cared about most about his insecurities, if he showed her weakness, she would reject him. She’s no T’Prell, but Spock still feels in his green heart that his relationship with her depends on maintaining a steadfast Vulcan appearance. And T’Pring is certainly not blameless here, but how in the world is a Vulcan woman – a woman who’s mother is T’Prell, no less – supposed to know how to make a man like Spock feel safe and secure in their relationship if he won’t open up to her?

…

Is what I would say, if the breakdown of Spock’s relationship with T’Pring were about the negative cycle stemming from Spock’s fearful-avoidant attachment style interfacing with T’Pring’s dismissive-avoidant attachment style. But at some level, where they’re really going with this is mostly just shuffling T’Pring out of the picture so that Spock and Christine can make out. Which, obviously, is step one in the path to her transition from the freewheeling mad scientist bisexual icon of Strange New Worlds to the flat character hopelessly pining for the unavailable Spock. Great. Cool. We’ll do that then.

Among the Lotus Eaters or I AM KI-RISTOPHER

See also: The Paradise Syndrome (TOS); “Court-Martial” (TOS); Conundrum (TNG); Workforce (VOY); Stargate SG-1: “The First Commandment”, “Beneath the Surface”; Heart of Darkness
Contains strange new world?: Strange yes, new, technically no.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Sorry, mythology allusion this time. Very TOS.

I am having a very bad day after a very bad weekend, after… Well there’s been good moments in my life too at some point I guess. Anyway, just wanted to get that out of the way in case I’m a dick about this episode.

One choice Strange New Worlds has made that I’m less than 100% on-board with is to firmly position itself as “The prequel to the original series”. I mean this in a denser sense than just by the obvious virtue of being set before it. Enterprise and Discovery were both set before the original series, but they didn’t engage with the original series in the way of being a prequel. They were more Rings of Power and less The Hobbit. Enterprise might well have been described as a prequel to The Next Generation, but its interaction with TOS was more in-line with the interactions that ’90s Trek had with it: treating it like the embarrassing grandpa that they could occasionally hit up for a reference, but treating it generally with an uncomfortable mixture of reverence and disdain. Y’know, because we should respect our forbears but you never knew when it was about to say something incredibly racist.

(Aside: Evelyn is performing this week in The Aristocats for drama camp. She got worried the movie was being pulled from Disney+ since she couldn’t find it on her tablet. I had to explain that child profiles are blocked by default from watching the movies that contain particularly noteworthy racism. The racism in The Aristocats is far enough in the background that you could miss it, but I’m glad Disney paid enough attention to slap a disclaimer on it. Evelyn tried to make me explain the history of casual racism in Disney properties, but fortunately she fell asleep during the first 45 minutes of me trying to explain the caterers in The Ugly Dachshund, a movie which I firmly believe probably counts as a hate crime)

Strange New Worlds, on the other hand, really does seem to want to present itself as a kind of redemptive reading of the original series. It tries to show us a lot of the same “Space is weird” stuff that was a big deal in TOS, and got downplayed later in the franchise. It wants to pick up on things that were present in TOS, and show them in a way that is somewhat consistent with TOS, but smooths out the limitations of ’60s network television, and it revisits the original series with an eye toward what was actually there, without getting lost in the cruft of 50 years of pop culture.

So why aren’t I 100% on-board? I mean, I like it. It’s great. But still… The choice to make SNW an direct TOS prequel means that one thing it really isn’t is a sequel to “The Cage”. It’s a little disappointing to me how little Strange New Worlds draws from the original pilot. Famously, Spock is the only character from the original pilot to be brought back for the second pilot. Strange New Worlds brings back… Spock, Pike and Una. With Chief Kyle, Uhura, Sam, Jim, Chapel and M’Benga, there’s twice as many TOS characters in SNW as Cage characters. Strange New Worlds puts Pike in Kirk’s green Casual Friday uniform, not the gold turtleneck (Though that does make a cameo in a photo on Pike’s shelf). There’s no glass communicators or ridiculous hand-cannons. There’s no gooseneck speakers everywhere. The ship has its red highlights (Added after the second pilot at the request of the network to make the show pop a little more as a “killer app” for color television). I love Erica and M’Benga and La’an, but I’m curious about Colt and Boyce and Tyler. (Actually I don’t care about Tyler).

So this week, they actually did bring back something from “The Cage”, and it’s a surprising choice. Rigel VII. Well-read viewers will vaguely remember that “The Cage” opens with Pike depressed and considering retirement after losing several crewmembers in a massacre on the primitive planet Rigel VII. If you pay careful attention, Spock walks with a limp in “The Cage”, which is supposed to be the result of an injury he took during that adventure, though no dialogue tying that together made it to screen. This week, surprisingly, we go back there, since the locals landscaped a Starfleet delta into the garden, and that presumably means Pike left behind some swag. Okay, that’s a heck of a hook. I guess we could do something interesting with that; Strange New Worlds similarly started with Pike depressed and considering retirement as he comes to terms with his very gently impending doom, so maybe there’s a good parallel here to see Pike come back to the place that almost ended his career five years earlier…

Or not. There’s not really any particular reason this week’s Strange Old World had to be Rigel VII, and Pike doesn’t really have any space to reflect on his unresolved trauma from the last time he was here, because he spends most of the episode not remembering it. (Also, kind of uncomfortable: there seems to be a mild implication that the reason Pike’s crew in “The Cage” skews so much more white than in SNW is that they were the only ones left after Pike led an ethnically diverse away team to be massacred). The planet doesn’t even look as cool as that really nice ’60s matte painting.

Yeah… So… It turns out that the reason the previous mission went so badly is that there’s radiation on this planet that makes your brain stop working, and if you spend the night there, you wake up in the morning like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, consigned to the terrifying fate of marrying Adam Sandler.

None of this came up the last time they were here, because it takes about 6 hours for the radiation to start messing with you – this time, they’re parking far enough away that they had to hike to town.

How do we get from Memento to the violent attack on the away team five years earlier? Fucked if I know. Oh, sure, Zack says something about how the memory loss makes the people paranoid and violent… Except… It doesn’t? La’an and M’Benga do have little fits of paranoia, but every other amnesiac character we meet is completely chill about it; like the lotus-eaters the episode is named after, the laboring class has learned to live with permanent amnesia and happily go about their labor. The guards are violent, but only in your typical Fantasy Medieval Castle Guards kind of way, and they get to keep their memories (There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it explanation that the helmets are made of a mineral that blocks the radiation. The castle does the same). It’s a nice enough metaphor, and the whole setup of the pacified, amnesiac workforce exploited by the castle-dwellers is very classic Trek stuff. That’s all very good. Of course, it’s also been done. A lot. There’s a Voyager episode about it, and an utterly shameless SG-1 knockoff of that episode about it. And they’re both bigger in scale. To be honest, the bit about the castle-dwellers exploiting the workers isn’t a big thing here. Zack is an interloper; he didn’t create the two-tier system, and it doesn’t appear that the castle-dwellers, and whatever ruling class Zack deposed in his takeover, actually understood what was going on. They were still a medieval society, remember. There’s no reason to believe they weren’t doing the best that they could. And absent the deus ex starship of the Enterprise removing the radiation source, there was nothing they could really do to improve their lot. Which is why we don’t see Pike leading an uprising and leading the outsiders to rebel against the corrupt leaders. We just see Pike personally storming the castle to bring down Zack, the crewman he left for dead years ago.

Zack… Is there. I guess. We don’t get to dwell on Pike’s feelings about having left someone behind, because Pike only gets about three total minutes of knowing about it, and we don’t get much insight into Zack’s experience of it either: he’s gone a big Colonel Kurtz, but he tells us approximately nothing about how he managed to install himself as the ruler of this civilization or his experiences. He just insists that Rigel VII changes you. There might have been a tragic story here about Zack spending time among the field Kalar, subject to the constant migraines and memory loss, to eventually be brought to the palace – perhaps to explain the crate of supplies Pike also left behind? Maybe he had to go through the experience of learning he’d been left for dead by the Enterprise multiple times? Or maybe someone just foolishly handed him a phaser while he was still in a brain fog and the next thing he knew, he was king. I don’t know, and the show isn’t interested in giving time to it.

I won’t bother with complaining about all the ways in which a civilization whose workforce has the memory of a goldfish doesn’t make sense. That is adequately addressed by the criticism of every other story like this. Luke tells them that they retain skills and emotions, even though they lose memories, but how does one develop skills under those circumstances? Obviously, the Kalar are stuck at a medieval level because the labor force can’t be trained to do anything that takes more than a few hours to learn, but how do they master things like walking or going to the bathroom or, y’know, reproduction. It’s hard to imagine enough pregnancies making it to term to keep a stable population.

I do like the little element that Pike pieces together parts of what’s going on from the fact that he’s way too soft and pretty to have spent his life doing hard labor. Then he goes on a murder spree. I know there’s this climactic scene where Pike recovers enough of his sense of self to not summarily execute Zack, thus disproving Zack’s claim that the planet “changes you”. But, I mean, no one comes to help Zack when Pike attacks him. There’s no one left alive in he palace? No one comes in afterward to interfere with M’Benga treating La’an or Pike scooping up all the Starfleet tech.

So we’ve got this A-plot where Pike and M’Benga and La’an are stuck on the not-as-dangerous-as-previously-indicated Rigel VII without their memories, subject to violence and paranoia. Only not so much because after one scene, La’an, M’Benga and Pike all sort of instinctively know they can trust each other because “the heart doesn’t forget”. And the rest of the field Kalar are all pretty placid and zen, not violent and paranoid. And the main motivator for Pike is that M’Benga needs his medical knowledge restored to treat La’an’s gaping gut-wound. But then we’ve got this B-plot where basically the same thing is happening on the Enterprise.

Either one of these would have been enough story for a whole episode, and so splitting the plot up like this underserves it a little. Just as the story on Rigel VII stays in tight on Pike, not really addressing the bigger picture of what this lifesyle does to the Kalar, the story on Enterprise narrows its focus to Ortegas.

Ortegas is the last member of the regular opening-titles cast to go without a focus episode. This one and “The Elysium Kingdom” are the closest she’s gotten, and they’re both “The crew are not themselves” episodes. I’m getting angry with the show’s failure to give Melissa Navia some worthy material. Ortegas is heavy with signifiers marking her as really cool, and it’s made cooler by little moments that undercut that, like her attempt to make “Vamoose!” a catchphrase, or her being cute and adorable when she thinks she’s going on an away mission, followed by her sadness and hostility when it turns out she can’t go. But they just refuse to give her proper focus. Also, they seem to be making it a thing that she doesn’t get along with Spock, in a way that’s borderline racist, and that is the opposite of cool. Her inheriting the role of suspecting Spock in “A Quality of Mercy” is a defunct timeline, of course, but then they have her calling Spock out two weeks ago over playing chess with Pasalk, and being bitter at him for bringing the news that she’ll need to fly the Enterprise rather than go to Rigel VII. And it’s Spock that Ortegas lashes out at when she comes out of her amnesiac fugue on the bridge, not knowing who she is, who he is, or what she’s doing there.

Everyone’s lost their memory, and with the exception of Ortegas and Spock, they’re content to just mill around in the halls. Spock is still at his station, but has no idea what to do. Ortegas panics, and has the computer guide her back to her room (first time we’ve heard the Enterprise computer talk, I think? Also, to annoy the continuity nerds, the computer guides her to her cabin by flashing the lights in the hall to lead the way, a feature that was kind of explicitly presented as a cool new thing on Galaxy-Class ships in TNG). But there’s tricky maneuvering they need doing to avoid smashing the ship on the asteroid belt, and when the computer reveals to her that she’s the only one who can save them, she’s able to access her operant memory (There’s decent logical consistency with how the memory loss works, establishing early that they’ll all still be able to do their jobs, at least at a basic level, but they won’t remember what those jobs are), and her emotional connection to her job role gives her the confidence to return to the bridge and take the conn. It’s a pretty good scene as she squares up and marches back to the bridge, chanting, “I am Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship.” It’s pretty cool lowkey Spock-development for him to trust her, too.

Of course, “I’m Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship” is kind of a sad ending for the character arc at the other end of the episode where she’s eager for the chance to do something, anything other than just fly the ship.

You know, this gets me thinking, though. Insofar as Strange New Worlds has deliberately positioned itself as a prequel to the original series, every character has the specter of an exit strategy over their head. Right now, we know Spock is going to basically stagnate in his career for the next decade, and that’s something the show is probably going to want to justify. It looks likely that Uhura is going to slowly work her way up, but she’s going to do it from that same chair she’s in now. M’Benga is going to stay on the Enterprise, but as a specialist rather than CMO (We have at least the precedent of Hugh on Discovery to help with that, since post-resurrection, he didn’t go back to CMO but became Discovery’s therapist instead). Pelia, we can probably assume, will move on just by virtue of the fact that she’s here on a lark to begin with (Oh hey the immortal with thousands of years of memories suddenly losing her memory would have been a neat thing to show in this episode! Or at least a funny little, “I got my memory back! Whoah there are a lot of things I would rather have kept right on forgetting!” scene at the end?). But we’re all sort of primed to expect something to happen to explain why we never hear from Una, La’an, and Ortegas again. Now that we’ve established that Una has been on Enterprise since it was April’s ship, it seems kind of like they’re attaching her to the Star Trek mythology of the Enterprise exerting a mythical pull that few officers willingly just rotate out of. We definitely will need to justify why Una doesn’t succeed Pike as Pike succeeded April. Will it be tied to her heritage? Will she be offered her own command before it’s Pike’s time to step aside? Will she end up buying it to a face-full of Gorn-Jizz like Hemmer? La’an as a character is just screaming to nobly sacrifice herself. In the other timeline, she becomes Kirk’s first officer, and there’s definitely some glances exchanged that, in light of last week’s episode, hint that La’an pursued Kirk deliberately because she secretly enjoyed it when he pressured her to accept his hot dog. But such a thing happening in the prime timeline would be hard to reconcile.

Now, though, with Ortegas, we might have a clear opening, and if they do get around to giving her a character arc, it makes sense that what takes her away from Enterprise would be the realization that she’s going to have to leave if she ever wants to be something other than “And I fly the ship”.

Now, speaking of the specter of the exit. Just how doomed do we think Captain First-Name-Not-Yet-Spoken Batel, esq., is right now? They start off with Pike breaking up with her because he feels guilty that the thing with Una seems to have torpedoed her career in the JAG office, since Pasalk is angry and got her passed over for promotion. But they reconcile at the end because his emotional connection to her persisted even when he was amnesiac, and he’s dedicating himself to not pushing other people away just because of his own insecurities about his impending doom. And she definitely does not show up in seven years when he gets his face melted off, and Spock definitely does not consult with her about his plans, and Pike definitely experiences no awkwardness about ditching her to go spend his retirement with Veena. So… Horrible fate? Messy breakup? Face-full of Gorn-Jizz? We set up a potential Gorn war as part of this season’s tension, so someone’s got to get Gorn’d.

So that’s where we leave it. Next week we roll into the midpoint of the season, and I assume it will be an episode where no one is acting out-of-character and no wacky hijinks ensue.

(Reads Capsule Preview)

“Spock gets turned fully human and has to deal with that, but also it happens right when he’s supposed to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.”

Motherfu–

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or Let’s Kill (Baby) Hitler

See also: “The City on the Edge of Forever” (TOS), “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (TOS), “Time’s Arrow” (TNG), “Past Tense” (DS9), “Future’s End” (VOY), “Storm Front” (ENT), Star Trek IV, Season 2 (PIC)
Contains strange new worlds: Not unless you count Toronto.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Not this time

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

• How many of us had to memorize this at some point?

The sidelining of Pike continues, oddly. Was Anson Mount busy? I don’t think filming for this season would have overlapped with Doctor Strange.

Anyway, for the second time, we get to hang out with Paul Wesley’s Jim Kirk, and I’ve just now realized that Paul Wesley played one of the vampire bros in the TV “adaptation” of LJ Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (Scare quotes here because the adaptation was incredibly loose, in the specific sense that they really just made a Twilight TV series and changed the title to a property they could afford the rights to. And, in a move that I hope will make the chronic complainers think twice before complaining about a line in the teaser, once again, he’s playing an alternate universe version of Kirk.

This gives me a segue to bring up something I wanted to mention last week, but didn’t because I ran out of time, what with it being midnight on Tuesday, and Dylan wouldn’t go to bed, and I’d had an absolutely miserable couple of weeks. One thing that’s conspicuously not addressed in “Ad Astra Per Aspera” is the fact that we kinda know that, had Pike not gone through his life-changing experience with his future self, Una would still be in jail. She would very probably be serving out the 20-year sentence for sedition. So what’s changed? It’s weird, because Pike is barely in that episode. The only thing he does is get Neera to agree to defend Una, and I can’t imagine he didn’t do that in the other timeline.

My best guess is that it comes down to Pike’s scene with Batel. Perhaps the unchastened version of Pike, the one who wrote the letter to Maat, would have insisted on taking the stand himself, and in doing so, given testimony that precluded Neera’s asylum defense. Or worse, he could have gotten himself into so much trouble that Una sacrificed herself to keep him from a court-martial. I can believe that the Pike who lived through the experience of “A Quality of Mercy” is one who is more willing to step back and let things unfold as they will, rather than forcing himself into the center of things, convinced – in a Jim Kirk sort of way – that only he could fix it.

Also, if I hadn’t run out of time, I’d have linked to Steve Shives’s Starfleet Lawyer video, because it’s hilarious.

But anyway, we’re full-circle around back to Kirk. I still don’t think Paul Wesley looks right for the part, but I’ll happily admit he acts right for the part. I’m really impressed by the extent to which they are writing him as a younger Kirk in the mold of TOS season 1 as it actually was, rather than the decades of pop culture that accreted around the character. He’s charming and he’s bold, but he’s not overly rogueish, not a huge rulebreaker, and incredibly intelligent. And where we see Kirk Swagger, it’s in him delighting in hot dogs and sightseeing, because he’s from a future where Earth is a barren wasteland. I love that they have him hustle chess to get them some spending money in 21st century Toronto. Apparently enough money that they can afford a three-room suite for a night in a downtown highrise. How much are hotels in Toronto? (Oh, and did you notice? Kirk says that 2D chess is a “child’s game.” Remember how Kirk ultimately beats Khan? By exploiting his two-dimensional thinking. And if you take a close look in the background when La’an meets her ancestor? He’s got a 2-D chess set in his room.

I love that this episode is set in Toronto. I love that Kirk mistakes it for New York. Despite the sign saying “Toronto” in the background.

So just like in Picard Season 2, the timeline gets broken and there’s no Federation. But there’s a nice balance here: humanity doesn’t go Full Nazi in this timeline; they actually do kinda okay for themselves, but not great.

Well, they’re doomed, but still. The Enterprise still exists, with nearly the same crew. But Kirk is the captain instead of Pike. And rather than forming a Federation, Earth goes it alone. But they’re not dicks about it; Kirk is perfectly cordial with this timeline’s Spock (whose existence implies that Earth maintains diplomatic relations with other worlds, even if they’re not allied), and humanity’s refusal to help their neighbors isn’t about xenophobia but resources. They’ve been losing a war to the Romulans for a very long time, and Earth itself is uninhabitable after wars, bombardments, and occupation. I mean, it makes sense that a Romulan seeking to destroy the Federation wouldn’t derail history in a way that causes the MUCH WORSE Earth Confederation to rise, so in this timeline, humanity goes in a similar direction to the prime timeline – they still seem to be doing the whole fully automated luxury gay space communism thing – but they’re in a weaker position with fewer friends.

Picard gave us a dark future where, by implication at least, because it was Soong’s shields rather than Europa’s microbes that kept the Earth alive, humanity never learned to look to the stars for their salvation. La’an mentions that in her history, it was the help of the Vulcans that lifted humanity out of the barbarism of the 21st century wars to start their utopian project. By implication here, in Kirk’s timeline, humanity never went through that barbarous period, never needed friends to help it stand. So whereas Rene Picard taught humanity to look to the stars for salvation, Khan Noonien-Singh taught humanity to look to itself as a source of danger. Remove the first, you get a xenophobic nightmare world that views the outside as a threat. Remove the second, you get a slowly dying state that thinks it has problems enough of its own to involve itself in outside affairs.

Yeah, so, Khan. This episode is in a very deliberate way a response to “The City on the Edge of Forever”. That episode hung on the contrivance that if Edith Keilor, a 1930s humanitarian, were allowed to live, Hitler would win World War II because the peace movement in the US would keep it out of the war. Here, we get basically the reverse: if Khan dies, there’s no eugenics war and contemporary human civilization doesn’t get swept away to make room for the Federation. Instead of killing the good person, we have to save the bad one.

Plus, y’know, Khan is La’an’s great grandpa or something. This is important to her personal journey, since we have several minutes establishing that La’an is having a hard time dealing with her ancestry. She cuts herself off from other people as a reaction to the bigotry she’s faced as a Noonien-Singh, and this episode is about her learning to move past that.

By saying that, no, really, it’s a good thing that grandpa was a genocidal maniac. In the long-term. One thing that is a little hard to take in this episode is just how long it takes her to figure it out. One has to assume it was not just dumb luck that led the dying time traveler to her; he presumably sought her out because of her familial link to Khan. They’re actively trying to figure out how the timelines diverge, yet when Kirk doesn’t recognize her name, she’s too overcome by the warmth it generates in her loins to not have the name precede her to notice that, hey, maybe the apocalyptic war that didn’t happen in the new timeline is the big change they’re supposed to fix.

Of course, it also takes Kirk a very long time to remember that Toronto is doomed to explode in the opening bid of the war his is currently fighting. He’s like, “Yeah, I remember reading about this bridge in Toronto exploding,” and it’s basically hours later that it occurs to him that, “And then a day or two later the whole city got blown up by Romulans.” Memory, she is fickle.

This leads me to the one big complaint I have about the episode, which is the extent to which the plot is driven by the characters just sort of luckily stumbling forward into things. The time agent just happens to escape to the Enterprise in front of La’an (Okay, he probably did that on purpose? Because she carries the genetic marker that unlocks the door? Now, having your door locks key to a genetic marker that is implanted in the user rather than using biometrics is dumb… But it is believably dumb for the sort of insane billionaires I imagine are running the Noonien-Singh institute. I bet they ) They just happen to get a hotel room with a view of the bridge, then just happen to encounter the Romulan agent when Kirk’s getting harassed by the cops, then literally wander around Toronto at night until they luck into wandering close enough to the secret underground fusion reactor to set off Pelia’s watch. And, I mean, that’s kinda how “City on the Edge of Forever” goes too – everyone just happens to show up at the exact right place and time for the climax. So it does end up working, I think, but it works on the strength of the character performance rather than the plot.

Like, Kirk is satisfied with his life and his timeline, despite the problems, and he calls La’an out on the presumption that she has a right to replace it with hers. What wins him over is the reveal that Sam is alive in her timeline. He doesn’t specify what became of Sam in his, but Sam Kirk is a rich source of tragicomedy. Sam died in Kirk’s timeline, but he’s also going to die tragically in the prime timeline. It’s just that it’s a few years off. Also, possibly to appease the fanboys, Kirk reiterates a point from “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” where he claims that everyone else calls him “George”: La’an simply calls him out as mistaken on this. It turns a continuity blunder into part of Strange New Worlds’s implicit running gag that Kirk is weirdly oblivious to the personal lives of those around him.

Kirk is oddly unconcerned with the fate of his crew, but never mind that. It actually feel pleasingly human to have him focus on the fact that, if they succeed, he personally will cease to exist, replaced by a doppleganger. Kirk, of all people, would accept this as his duty, and he kinda does. But it’s a hard thing to accept, and Trek is full of people in similar circumstances just stoically accepting it rather than expressing the fact that, yeah, dude is about to un-write his own past. La’an proposes that she might be able to save him, thanks to the time device’s ability to shield people from timeline changes, which is so obviously untenable going forward that her just saying it kind of seals Kirk’s fate.

Yeah, Kirk is going to die, much in the way that I kept expecting him to die last season. We’ll get to that.

Now, the plot is not entirely “People just wander around.” There’s a few very good setup-and-payoff scenes, it’s just that they’re not central to the plot. Like, we get a fun scene of Pelia at the beginning, framed as a combination of comic relief and insight into La’an estrangement from the people around her. But it ends up setting up La’an and Kirk’s trek out to Vermont to meet an inperceptibly younger Pelia. Who ends up not being able to help them, because she’s not an engineer yet. But that’s okay they just sort of luck into the fact that the radium hands on old watches (the ones that made the painters’ lips fall off!) would act as a fusion reactor detector anyway. Characters going back in time and pre-meeting their colleagues is something Trek’s done several times, but Guinan is the only one where we had the advantage of meeting them when they’re in a completely different place in their life.

It’s also pretty well-played how the Romulan agent sets up Kirk and La’an. That photo of a Romulan warbird is presumably fake – she faked it knowing Kirk would recognize it, in order to manipulate him into pursuing the fusion reactor, and leading her to the Noonien-Singh institute (Okay, wait, though. It’s on the wall in big letters. This is not a secret facility. Sure, what they do might be a secret, but who they are clearly isn’t. I’d been thinking that she blew up the bridge hoping to follow whoever came to retrieve the evidence. But she could’ve just looked them up in the Yellow Pages. Kirk and La’an needed to follow them because they didn’t know what they were looking for, but the Romulan did). She’s pretty great as an antagonistic character. I like the angle of her having been stuck on Earth for 30 years (But still isn’t used to the ears) because Khan wasn’t from the ’90s like he was supposed to be. “I hate temporal mechanics,” yeah, yeah. (My fan-theory: “Project Khan” was a ’90s genetic experimentation program. Khan was named for it. By the 23rd century, confusion in the historical record has caused people to conflate Khan the 21st century man with the older project. Khan himself might have encouraged this as propaganda to build up his own mythos). I like that on hearing La’an’s name, she tries to win her over with the promise that she can survive the change to the timeline. And it’s a nice callback to Picard that with her dying breath, she triggers her self-destruct implant. Harder to reconcile with Picard is that Romulan time agents don’t even know how their plans are supposed to work, they just do what the computer tells them. Romulans have a deep distrust of Thinking Machines according to Picard, so that’s hard to swallow. If she’d gone with, “I just follow orders; my superiors made the call,” that would fit a little better, since it would be reflective of the paranoia and secrecy of Romulan culture. I do like the idea of the assassin not really knowing how her actions are supposed to affect world affairs because knowing isn’t her job. Just find the details a little flaky.

Then, of course, there’s the dead body in the room. It’s pretty interesting that Kirk, famous for some high-stakes bluffs, dies from having his bluff called… Except, as he points out with his dying breath, he wasn’t bluffing. It doesn’t do much good, but he’s exactly right that shooting him would set off the alarms. It’s a solid choice that Kirk’s death isn’t some big noble sacrifice, too. You could easily see that coming, but no, he just gets shot by the bad guy in the course of the climax. Doesn’t even actually resolve the plot, since even with the alarm going off, they still make it all the way to Khan’s bedroom. They have done such a good job of introducing Kirk in a way that is true to TOS, but doesn’t allow Kirk’s gravity to become a black hole. Here, he’s just a good guy who’s fun to hang out with, and while we all know who he’ll be someday, he’s not the hero of this moment. So Kirk dies, Khan lives, history is saved. Green Omni, kid; good job. (I am pleased to see that I am not the only person on the internet who thought of Voyagers! when they saw the hand-held time device that lights up red and turns green when you’ve fixed history).

La’an can’t talk to anyone about it, and they even skip the expected scene at the end where Pelia reminisces about the mysterious woman who stole a watch and convinced her to go into engineering. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pelia doesn’t remember these events at all; it was a long time ago, after all.

Looks like next week, we’ll be getting back to more traditional ensemble adventures on strange new worlds. But before that, I’ll leave you with this thought: The assassin melts her body to nothing to destroy the evidence. La’an wipes her fingerprints from the gun then leaves it in a room with a young boy. Okay. Fine, I mean, this is baby Space-Hitler after all. But… There’s a dead body out in the foyer (A lot of people seem to take it for granted that Kirk’s body would disappear when the timeline corrected, but I don’t see how that follows. They’ve already diverged from his timeline before he dies; in his timeline, the Romulan blew up the fusion reactor, she didn’t try to assassinate Khan directly). A body that was killed with that gun.

Now, we do have to assume that this is a powerful, clandestine operation, so Khan isn’t going to be arrested or anything, but surely there is going to be some complicated questions over why he’s got the murder weapon from a crime that occurred in the foyer. Perhaps his start of darkness will be that time he was falsely accused of murder? Perhaps they brought him out there and asked if he knew anything about this dead guy… And Khan never forgets a face…

Ad Astra Per Aspera or Nobody Expects the Starfleet Inquisition

See Also: “The Menagerie” (TOS), “Court Martial” (TOS), “The Measure of a Man” (TNG), “The Drumhead” (TNG), “Author, Author” (VOY), “Doctor Bashir, I Presume” (DS9), “Supernova, Part 2” (PRO), ’90s Courtroom Dramedy, (I am purposefully omitting a ton of other episodes because they feel less influential)
Contains strange new worlds?: Sorta? Not really. There’s a cameo in the pre-title sequence.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Sorta… It’s the Enterprise-era Starfleet Motto, which they talk about a few times.

Weird. Star Trek has had plenty of Courtroom Drama episodes over the years. But this one is very different from all of them, on account of… It’s actually a courtroom drama. We’ve had episodes with courtroom scenes, and we’ve had episodes that center around a trial, but I don’t think there’s ever actually been an episode where the whole of the episode is the process of a courtroom trial. “The Measure of a Man” comes closest, but even there, it’s mostly about the ensemble contemplating their relationship with Data.

Also, as court proceedings go, “The Measure of a Man” is bullshit. I mean, Starfleet declares Data to be property, and then has a trial where his captain is the defense and Riker is the prosecution, on the basis that they took a couple of classes in law school? And the good guys win on the basis of Picard giving an impassioned speech rather than any sort of legal anything.

There’s a DS9 episode about Cardassian courts and an Enterprise episode about Klingon courts, but they’re both not so much about making a legal argument as a philosophical one about how those respective alien judicial systems are broken and corrupt (I rather like the Enterprise one, because it justifies a lot about Klingon culture, establishing that Klingons go through cycles of being a basically functional civilization that frames a wide variety of social interactions as honorable contests of skill, and long periods of being stabby glory-hounds. Also, Archer loses his case and is sentenced to life imprisonment on the inescapable penal colony from Star Trek VI, whereupon everyone just shrugs and bribes the guards to let him escape. I love this because it honestly was kinda easy for Kirk to escape Rura Penthe).

The only time, I think, we see an actual lawyer in a Federation court is “Court Martial” (Nice touch that they brought back the “Stick your hand on this glowing cake pan when you are under oath” device from that, by the way). And, like most of the courtroom episodes, the trial is really more of a structural element; the main part of the story is really the investigation, the gang desperately trying to uncover the truth and find the “real killer”. Of course, finding the “real killer” is only a viable strategy when the accused is not, point of fact, guilty.

Which brings us here, to the most Actually Courtroom Drama-y of Trek courtroom dramas. Because Una is, point of fact, guilty, at the least, of the crime she was initially accused of: falsifying her paperwork. That’s how they getcha. That’s why employment forms have questions on them like, “Do you do drugs?” and “Are you a terrorist?”. Because “They lied on the form” is a very simple and trivial reason to fire someone and very hard to fight, whereas firing someone because in college, they signed up for the campus socialist club because there was a cute boy at the membership table might get you on the wrong end of a wrongful dismissal suit.

Now, the JAG decides to up the ante to sedition, on the surface, as retaliation for Una refusing to go quietly and spare them the embarrassment of a public trial of one of their most decorated officers for violating one of their most racist laws, and that’s a little bit of a stretch. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if this turns out later to be part of something bigger. Later, when Pasalk takes over and starts building the groundwork to threaten Pike and the rest of the Enterprise crew, he flashes a little but very un-Vulcan smug smile that almost makes me wonder if he’ll turn out to be a deep cover Romulan.

But the real joy of this episode is the legal argument. And also, structurally, how well the episode plays its cards. You have this tension between Una and Neera – Nera is the best Ilyrian civil rights lawyer in the galaxy, but there’s bad blood with her and Una. The bad blood is because Nera’s cousin was the victim of a hate crime that launched a persecution campaign that led to the ghettoization of Ilyrians on their home colony, and Una’s family evaded that by passing as human. There’s a lot going on there. Last season, I took a little bit of an issue that they’d chosen to tell the story of a persecuted minority who just wanted the freedom to live openly in her own skin through a character played by a Nordic supermodel. Hey, look, Strange New Worlds pays off my faith once again, because that’s basically the tension between Neera and Una. Neera even outright says it: Una has the privilege of being able to pass. Neera, played by not just a black actress, but a darker-skinned black actress, can’t (I kinda wish they had done something visual to show why Neera can’t pass; it seems clear that, yes, she would not choose to if she could, but it seems equally clear that she didn’t consider it even possible). Now, obviously it is a little bit of a cop-out to get Starfleet to make an exception for the Ilyrian who is a decorated officer and a Nordic supermodel whose augmentations aren’t especially scary, while maintaining their codified bigotry against the ones with funny ears or dark skin or X-ray-vision. But the actual history of civil rights in the US tells us that, yeah, you start with the case that’s easiest to make, you take every advantage you get.

So there’s times in the episode where you start to fear that Neera might be planning to throw Una under the bus – that she either thinks the case is unwinnable or worse, thinks that losing would be better for THE CAUSE – and is going to sacrifice Una to bring attention to the plight of Ilyrians. She attacks April on the hypocrisy of his strict adherence to the genetic augmentation laws given his personal history of laxity when it comes to the Prime Directive. (That’s a fun aside. For all that modern fans think of Kirk as this maverick rulebreaker, the canonical TOS Kirk was a very straight-laced military man; the fact that he sometimes broke the rules was not meant to depict him as a rule-breaker by habit, but rather to emphasize how extraordinary the circumstances were. Pike is far more relaxed than Kirk ever was, and he took a wonderfully casual attitude to General Order One on-screen both in “Strange New World”, and back in Discovery. And the incidents Neera mentions draw April as far more flagrant in his violations of the Prime Directive than Kirk ever was. I hope we get some more backstory about April someday.) April is hurt by this badly enough that he’s angry with Pike later, but April also shows a streak of bigotry as he defends the augmentation ban. It could be that, like with La’an, April is still smarting from the personal betrayal of learning that Una lied to him, but if so, that doesn’t come across here.

Speaking of bigotry, there’s a weird scene where Ortegas is bitter about Spock’s casual interactions with Pasalk, and when you combine it with her alternate-future-self getting Stiles’s unfounded suspicion of Spock last season, it makes a pattern I do not want from Ortegas. Don’t make her an asshole. She’s too cool to be an asshole. Fortunately, the scene ends up light and fun when Spock comes over to apologize – not for fraternizing with the enemy, but for his embarrassing lack of decorum in being so “obviously” passive-aggressive toward Pasalk, which went right over Ortegas, but not M’Benga.

One thing that is really interesting, as Neera builds up Una’s backstory for the judges, is how many things they’re doing here. With a presumed-primary-American audience, with Neera mentioning how slavery was once legal, with the deliberate casting of the dark-skinned actor as the Ilyrian who “can’t pass”, you’re primed to view this as a metaphor for the history of racism and Jim Crow. And it is. But it’s not just that. With the angle of Una being closeted, being unable to seek medical treatment, with the threat of even false accusation being deadly, you’re also primed to view this as a metaphor for gay rights and trans rights. And it is. But it’s also not just that either. What surprised me was Una mentioning that in utero genetic augmentation is a religious tradition among her people. That, in order to live on a Federation planet, her people agreed to give up the practice, but some, including her family, continued to practice in secret. What she’s describing is crypto-Judaism, with Ilyrians taking the role of conversos under the inquisition.

I’ve heard from some Jewish fans who are very tired of Star Trek’s various accidental stumblings into the Space Jew trope. This is a thing that happens a lot because we are in a culture so steeped in centuries-old antisemitism that far too many writers can say, “We’ll make the bad guys hook-nosed aliens who are secretive and love money and secretly run the galaxy from the shadows and have odd dietary restrictions,” and not even notice what they are doing. Even the Lantanites have a (far more benign, but still enough to make you wonder) hint of that – not-quite-humans who walk among us in secret acquiring wealth and power and having a funny accent?

But this is something far more deliberate, and I won’t dare speak to whether this makes it okay, but it’s certainly new and more thoughtful that ways in which Ilyrians are compared to Jewish people particularly in medieval-to-modern Europe aren’t your ugly, scary, “Use the blood of christian babies to make their bread” things, but more, “They’re persecuted and have to move around a lot,” and, “They aren’t allowed to perform their religious ceremonies publicly for fear of persecution,” and, “They are forced by the state to live in ghettos,” and, “The local government imposes pogroms against them,” or, “They are falsely imagined to be inherently dangerous just by virtue of bloodline.” Even more striking, it’s the Federation that’s being cast in the role of the Spanish Inquisition, or worse, certain Very Fine People On Both Sides. This might be subtle enough that no one is angry at NuTrek for being too “woke” by depicting pogroms as bad. Don’t worry, I’m sure the next twist will be obvious enough for them to get angry about.

Perhaps we will get it in a future week, but I’m sad we haven’t gotten to see Pelia and Una interact. Firstly, because Pelia is a joy, and second, because they have this shared experience of having lived most of their lives in the closet (Pelia even used the phrase “came out” last week). Also, I’m hoping Pelia will have charming anecdotes about her past which serve as easter eggs. “Back in the middle ages, I married a human medicine man. He called me a witch. Thought it was just charming misogyny; never had a clue I really was an otherworldly supernatural being,” or “Oh, I first got interested in engineering when I married a mechanic in the 1970s,” or “I took a job once dressing up as a fairy and roughing up millionaires.”

The whole Enterprise gang is mostly off-to-the-side this week, especially Pike, who barely has a line for half the episode. He’s got a strong first scene, persuading Neera to help, but after that, he’s very deliberately sidelined. Batel – who is both Pike’s Friend-with-Benefits and Una’s prosecutor (It’s explicit now that her primary assignment is JAG, avoiding the weird Trek stereotype of “Instead of actual lawyers, we just make the regulars do it”) – warns him off trying to testify himself, anticipating Pasalk’s attack. And he doesn’t even comment while he watches the proceedings from the Enterprise conference room. And it looks like he’s not in the bulk of next week’s episode either. This is a weird under-playing of them having access to Anson Mount and his hair. La’an gets the most plot of the cast, as she fears that it was her angry personal logs that outed Una. Neera talks her toward confronting her own internalized bigotry. Though not an augment herself, La’an inherited the modified DNA of her forebears, and a lifetime of ostracism because of that has instilled the fear that she might have inherited the tendency toward megalomania. But genetics aren’t destiny – a legitimate different angle for the episode to have taken might have been to point out the way La’an undermines the flimsy justification for the genetics laws. Obviously, it doesn’t make sense that she would be restricted by them: she’s not an augment. And yet, she, through entirely natural means, inherited the DNA that supposedly made her ancestors a risk. If the laws are really about protecting lives, La’an logically must be just as dangerous as Khan. If she is not inherently dangerous, then neither can we dismiss all augments as inherently dangerous. If she is exempt only because, not having been augmented herself, she had no choice in the matter and the Federation correctly does not punish the child for the crimes of the parent, then how can they punish Una, whose modifications were done before she was old enough to consent? Indeed, as far as I know, none of the augments we’ve ever met actually consented to their augmentations. Most of them were augmented before they were born, some before they were conceived. (Bashir and the other DS9 augments were augmented as children, but again, without their consent). The law is just plain racist.

So Neera does indeed do some Picardish things, calling out the inhumanity of Starfleet laws, the bigotry they codify. But the amazing turn here is that she doesn’t ask them to look in their hearts and be their better selves and set aside the law as unjust.

She just out-lawyers them. Or rather, she knows it would be too big an ask to get them to overturn the augment ban. But she also knows that the do get that Una’s good people and this law is hurting good people so she gives them a way out. And she carefully lined up all the pieces into place without it being obvious to the audience what she was really doing. Una’s childhood persecution – including the story of a life-threatening injury she could not have treated because of her biology – related on the stand was dismissed by Pasalk as an emotional appeal. I sure thought that was the point. But no: Una’s testimony established that she faced persecution for her biology and religious beliefs, and that she joined Starfleet to escape that persecution.

While Pasalk and Batel questioned the Enterprise crew to establish what they knew and when they knew it, Neera’s questions seemed to be establishing Una’s character. But they weren’t. They were establishing Starfleet‘s character. With La’an, she focuses on how Una was involved in La’an’s rescue and recovery after the death of her family. Even with April, while Neera clearly relished making him look bad, the thrust of her questioning was to establish something specific: that Starfleet captains have wide discretion in how they interpret the law for the purpose of saving lives.

And there we go. She saves Una and gets Pike off the hook too, and this is the comparatively timely social issue that I assume is going to have twitter angry about Woke Trek. Because we are living through years of posturing that sought to invalidate the experiences of immigrants trying to escape persecution in their home countries, conflates any failure to perfectly complete deliberately byzantine legal procedure as “lying”, and seeks to cut off the legal asylum process through trickery and deception. The legal requirements for asylum in the Federation appear to be pretty similar to the ones in the US: you have to (1) meet the definition of being a refugee (ie., be fleeing the threat of harm or persecution in one’s home or place of habitual residence for a protected reason such as religion or ethnicity), (2) Already physically be present in the place where asylum is sought, and (3) ask for it.  If you’ve watched The West Wing, you know that’s basically the whole thing: the paperwork, the procedural stuff, that goes into whether or not asylum will be confirmed, but if you’re there, you’re persecuted, and you ask, that starts the process and changes which rules apply. Boom.

While we all thought she was doing the Big Picard Speech thing, Neera was actually laying out the technical argument for asylum. Una’s testimony establishes her as a refugee. Joining Starfleet makes her physically present. And coming out to Pike, and subsequently turning herself in to Starfleet is the request. As established in her questioning of April, it was within Pike’s discretion as captain to grant asylum provisionally – it was, in fact, his duty to not turn her in until the process of making the final determination was completed; you are not, despite what certain government officials would like, supposed to arrest someone who’s asked for asylum. Thus, Starfleet has a choice: they can affirm Una’s status as a refugee and grant asylum, or they can reject her asylum request. I don’t think at this point they can even, legally, convict her of sedition; even a denial doesn’t make it sedition for her to have requested. They could, at best, give her the same deal they’d offered for a guilty plea, and discharge her for the paperwork thing.

I love this. I love that the emotional appeal didn’t end up being the point. I love that it really was the law that saved her. They call it a “technicality”, but that’s not the usual sense of the term; it’s not a matter of some piece of paperwork being incorrect or some loophole being inadequately covered. What they’re really getting at here is that it was a narrow ruling – a ruling that is based on the specific details of Una’s case, and therefore does not establish precedent going forward; they didn’t overturn the augment ban, they just decided that Una’s particular case fell outside of its auspices. That’s why Starfleet v. Bashir and Starfleet v. L’Rel are still a century and change away. But it’s something. It’s moving the needle a little. The next time someone wants to challenge the augment ban, they won’t be able to say that Starfleet v. Chin-Riley establishes a right for augments to serve, but they will be able to say that the service record of Commander Una Chin-Riley disputes the claim that augments are dangerous.

I am on vacation right now, but managed to cobble this together before I left. No idea if next week’s will come out in a timely manner.

The Broken Circle or The Roid Rage of Khan

See Also: Star Trek III, Most of Deep Space 9.
Contains Strange New Worlds?: Yep!
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Yep!

We’re off to a heck of a start. Weird decision to sideline Pike for the whole of the first episode, given how much Space Daddy Energy Anson Mount brings, but he’s off this week trying to find Una a lawyer. Man alive the cold open did some telegraphing. Pike thinks the admiralty is concerned about something, but he can’t be bothered, because Una needs a lawyer and there’s only one who could possibly save her, but she won’t return their calls and I guess that’s what the next couple of episodes are going to be about. The cliffhanger at the end at least explains that the Gorn are being more aggressive along the Federation border, enough that there’s talk of war, and that’s what’s got Bob April and the gang up-in-arms. Might end up dragging out the thing with Una for another week since there was no cliffhanger about Pike meeting the lawyer.

This episode is just packed with stuff. Uhura’s back, a full officer now. La’an is back too by the end. We get an adorable new transporter chief who kinda looks like Jett Reno’s mini-me. And the Klingons are back, and people are saying that these are “proper” Klingons with the TNG makeup, but, like, not even quite; they’re way smoother with less pronounced ridges, so somewhere in the middle? And we get an origin story for Spock playing the lyre? They look kind of crap, honestly – too smooth and too clean. I think there’s a Disco-style Klingon in one of the long shots.  (I kinda love this. The Klingons in this episode look stupid, but I am for anything that supports the reading of, “There’s just lots of ways for Klingons to look.”) And the fair folk are real I guess?

Yeah, wow, weird casual thing to just randomly drop there. Our new Chief Engineer (so far she’s an academy instructor who just stopped by for inspection, but she basically ends the episode saying she plans to stick around) Pelia is Lanthanite. I’m guessing the “lan-” part there is meant to be a derivative of Atlantis, because she’s actually an immortal near-human species from Earth, who went unnoticed by humanity until a century after First Contact. They’re out in the open now, but apparently still rare, as no one on the bridge had ever met one. Yeah. She’s a fairy. This kind of works, since Carol Kane is probably fey herself; I mean, when they first showed publicity shots of her, I thought, “I wonder where they found an actress who looks exactly like Carol Kane did thirty years ago?”. Accent is a bit dodgy though. But struggle through the weird voice and she’s a pretty wonderful character. She clearly draws a lot from Guinan – another nigh-immortal near-human who lived secretly among humans for centuries – but the tone of her character is completely different. I love that when she talks to Spock at the end about the downside of being an immortal among mortals, she rejects the Guinan answer – which is enough of an obvious cliche answer that even Spock guesses it. No, the hard thing about being immortal isn’t that you have to see the people you love die. She very wonderfully points out that seeing the people you love die is a thing that happens to everyone. No, what gets to her is boredom. Pelia is above mortal considerations by enough that the only thing that really gets to her is time itself. She’s unpredictable and weird and aloof enough that she immediately guesses that they’re faking a warp core problem in order to steal the Enterprise, and she just rolls with it and helps them out because it’s a lark. Also she’s friends with Spock’s mom, which is really fun. Also waiting for the chorus of people asking why no one mentions to Flint that it’s well-known that Earth has a small population of immortals.

We’re leaning in on Spock’s emotional turmoil, which just complicates the character’s timeline more and more. But I guess this does help play into building toward justifying Spock’s decision, in six years, to risk his career for Pike. Another thing I love is that M’Benga says that Vulcan emotions are stronger than human ones – something Spock alluded to in the original series, but it never really seemed to take with anyone. The next cool tweak to the mythos is that the way M’Benga talks about Vulcans suppressing their emotions via “cognitive blocks”, which hints at something more akin to a somatopsychic effect. I felt that they did a bad job last season with conveying the impact of Spock breaking through his emotional controls to go Beast Mode against the Gorn. And since they’ve decided that this is going to be part of the season’s through-line, that Spock is going to have some long-term damage from that, it’s good that they’re fleshing it out a little. In the moment, it just looked like him yelling a bit and then feeling shaken by it. Having now read half of van der Kolk’s book (Got to go slow with that book; it’s heavy stuff), I know that in the moment it might not look like much, but I am starting to believe that Spock’s experience with the Gorn has given him something which is distinct and alien, but akin in ways to PTSD. A traumatic experience forced his brain to rewire around cognitive blocks that Vulcans spend years building. And the effect of it is not the same as you’d expect on a human psyche, but it follows some of the same patterns.

Also, obviously, he’s hot for Christine. And I mean, who can blame him.

So Spock decides to steal the Enterprise to go rescue La’an after Uhura picks up a message from her, and everyone important decides to go along with it. Including Mitchell, a character who maybe we will learn more about this season, after her presence last season consisting of “And also Mitchell was there.”

Had I known Ortegas was planning to use “Vamoose!” as her “Make the ship go” thing, I definitely would’ve worked it into my fanfic. This whole, “Every captain has a cool thing they say to make the ship go,” idea… I like the idea of it; I like the idea of a Captain’s Catchphrase you can put on shirts and stuff. But… There are only so many cool and relevant phrases to come up with. Sure, Picard saying, “Engage!” was iconic, but there wasn’t really a “tradition”. I had to look it up to learn that Janeway fairly consistently said, “Do it.” I remember Kirk says, “Go, Sulu!” twice in the movies. But the idea of Every Captain Has A Thing emerged mostly in Discovery as a way to make a point of Saru’s difficulty adjusting. He never managed to stick a catchphrase, so when Michael takes over at the end of the season, they legitimize her command by having her immediately come up with the (frankly, just “okay”) “Let’s fly.” Shaw’s got his, “Ah fuck it, whatever.” They make a point of not revealing Seven’s “thing”. So we’re only at like 50% of these “Every Captain Has A Thing” things being something other than a joke. “I would like the ship to go now,” indeed.

But the main thing this episode is about is M’Benga and Chapel. Again, cool, fine. Chapel is probably the most compelling character after Pike, and M’Benga is delightful. It’s weird; I know Babs Olusanmokun looks nothing like Booker Bradshaw, but whenever I try to imagine TOS M’Benga, my brain just shows me a dude who looks like Babs Olusanmokun, but with bigger, more 60s hair. There’s a mention that Chapel applied to go study archaeological medicine on Vulcan for a few months. Don’t know if they will follow that up (A chance for a story where Chapel and T’Pring interact and sow the seeds for their respective future paths?), but I like that they’re leaning in on Chapel being an academic. A good way to redeem the somewhat shallow version of the character from TOS is to present her as this brilliant research scientist, who got a nursing degree mostly so she’d be qualified to do human experimentation, and then did a career pivot for personal reasons, so that during TOS she’s basically slumming it to pay her dues as she takes on the practice of medicine as a dual-class.

The Enterprise crew weren’t involved in the Klingon war. That was a big part of Pike’s Discovery arc, that he had serious survivor’s guilt because of it. That doesn’t factor into anyone particular’s story this week, but M’Benga and Chapel weren’t on the Enterprise during that period, and the did serve, and it comes up here. The titular circle are trying to restart the war in a shockingly cynical gambit to drive up dilithium prices. You almost expect Ferengi (or maybe Orions) to be unseen agents provocateurs in this. They’re building a Starfleet ship out of salvage inside a dilithium mine in order to launch a false flag against the Klingons, because it was really Antifa who stormed the Capitol and jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and it was a perfect phone call and vaccines contain microchips and Hunter Biden’s Laptop. I don’t know. Mitchell identifies the ersatz ship as Crossfield class, but it looks… Nothing like that. It’s got a Crossfield-style saucer, but the rest of the ship is very similar to Riker’s Luna-Class Titan. Even more to the Ares class from the Axanar fan-film. I see some people suggesting that the Discovery and the Glenn are non-standard refits, and possibly a “stock” Crossfield would look like that, but it’s just as likely that the ship is a total kit-bash not conforming to any actual Starfleet design, and Mitchell is just giving the closest approximation possible based on the saucer.

So La’an left last season to reunite Newt with her two moms (Kudos Strange New Worlds for just them be quietly there as the entirely normal thing it is rather than awkwardly hanging a lantern on it just to make sure you got credit) but one of them is radiation-sick from a mining accident which is really due to the starship the bad guys are building. The rest of the gang goes off with La’an to investigate but honestly turns up nothing; M’Benga and Chapel stay to treat Newt’s mom, and get captured by the Klingons and taken directly to their secret lair. Here’s where we learn that ever since a horrific wartime incident, M’Benga carried a bottle of Super Soldier Serum in his medical kit, and him and Chapel shoot themselves up, hulk out and go on a murder spree. It’s pretty intense. They just murder the absolute fuck out of a ton of Klingons, and the whole time, they look sort of horrified at what they’re doing. The show doesn’t have time to deal with the fallout of this, but I assume it will be a deal moving forward. There’s nothing like this with any of the other doctors in Star Trek. Sure, we have Action Bev in Picard Season 3, but even that is sort of slow-moving and methodical, with time for contemplation of the moral complexity. Also, she fights with a phaser, and the only time she actually tries to kill someone who isn’t actively trying to kill her back, it’s when they try to execute Vadic. This is two of our heroes murdering their way through a ship not for their own defense, but to complete a mission, and doing it with their bare hands.

And at one point they turn the camera upside down for absolutely no reason. What the hell. I find a lot of the shots in this episode to be sort of muddy and hard to follow, especially with the amount going on on the screen during the asteroid belt sequence. CGI has made it possible for all sorts of shit to be on the screen, and modern Trek has not been super great about restraint when it comes to that.

And then to my mind, they were very brave about how they handled the climax. In most Treks, after Spock finally destroyed the renegade ship, there would have been a scene revealing that he had logic’d out that if they simply destroyed the ship undetected, the Broken Circle would have tried again. And worse, it was likely that firing on the ship would have alerted the Klingons to their presence. But by waiting until the ship had shown itself to the Klingons, then blowing it up, they created a narrative where the Federation was taking proactive steps to hunt down a rogue ship and had done the Klingons a solid by saving them from these rebels. Then maybe right at the end there would be a little “Or is it?” hinting that maybe that was just an excuse, but they’d leave it open-ended.

But they don’t do that. They leave us with the inescapable conclusion that Spock got lucky that he could sell that narrative to the Klingons; his real reason was quite straightforwardly that he didn’t want to sacrifice Christine. They showed us him abandoning the bridge to go to her, even. I like the bravery there, the willingness to commit, without a wink, to Spock having taken a big risk because his feelings got in the way.

I hope they tie this in to Spock’s larger arc. Back in Spock’s “Origin story”, in Q&A, they tell us that Spock wants his own command. But we know Spock ends up not wanting that. So it would be nice if Spock’s journey in Strange New Worlds shows him reversing on this, and “Spock eventually comes to realize that he is not suited for command because he can’t handle the idea of sending those he leads to their deaths” would be a very poignant way to do that.

I kinda want to take a little time doing nothing major to cool down from the volume of Trekwork.

Suggestions for Seven’s “Make the ship go” cachphrase:

• I would like the ship to go. Now.
• Let’s get dangerous.
• Shazam,
• Let’s rock.
• It’s morphin’ time
• Push the button, Frank.
• Stop. Hammertime.
• In the name of the moon.
• Yabba dabba do!
• Geronimo!
• Allons-Y!
• Excelsior!
• Fun will now commence.