A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

“So this is all some twenty-year-old vendetta?” Carol asked. “I don’t understand. All this death?”

“We should never have left him there. He should have been returned to Earth to stand trial,” M’Benga said.

“I can’t swear I wouldn’t have done the same,” Jim said.

“La’an wouldn’t have let you,” M’Benga said.

Jim Kirk nodded and took a contemplative bite out of an apple. “The thing is,” he said, “From what Captain Terrell said, Reliant misplaced a whole planet.”

“What are you suggesting?” M’Benga asked, his tone a mixture of defensiveness and curiosity.

Kirk looked at the apple. “I certainly never heard about the Botany Bay incident. Starfleet would never have allowed it. Reliant was on a survey mission, but they thought they were orbiting a planet that doesn’t exist anymore. The only way that happens is if the official star charts were altered.”

David got it. “You think Pike set him up?”

“Admiral Pike would never-” M’Benga protested.

“Not on purpose,” Kirk interrupted. “Not the Chris Pike I know. But none of this makes sense unless someone deliberately hid what happened, hid a whole planet. Maybe he thought he was protecting them. But from Khan’s point of view…”

“So what do we do now?” M’Benga asked.

“Mister Saavik, your thoughts?” Kirk asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “Regulations seem clear. We are currently in a defensible position. Location and nature of enemy forces unknown. Support expected. We should remain here and wait for Enterprise to return. I suggest Captain Terrell, and Doctor McCoy join us here while Commander Ortegas remains with the Galileo to contact Enterprise.”

“Very by-the-book,” Kirk said. “But consider: Khan has a starfleet ship at his disposal. He may be laying in wait. We can reach Enterprise and apprise Admiral Pike of the situation.”

Saavik tilted her head as she considered. “Galileo has no defenses that would offer protection against a Miranda-class starship. Logic dictates that if Khan is ‘laying in wait,’ we would be presenting ourselves as an easy target.”

“Well argued,” Kirk said. “All right, Mister Saavik, we’ll play it your way. Carol, what kind of supplies do you have here?”

“There’s food in the Genesis cave,” she said. “Enough to last a lifetime, if necessary.”

“I thought this was Genesis,” M’Benga said, gesturing at the cavern around them.

“This?” Carol asked. “It took the Starfleet Corps of Engineers ten months in space suits to tunnel out all this. What we did in there, we did in a day. David, why don’t you show Doctor M’Benga and the Lieutenant our idea of food?”

“We can’t just sit here!” David protested.

“Yes we can,” Kirk said. “Saavik is right.”

David, led M’Benga and Saavik out, accompanied by Jeddah, one of the the other young scientists who had made the escape from Regula I.

“I did what you wanted,” Kirk said once they were out of earshot. “I stayed away. Why didn’t you tell him?”

“How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be? You had your world and I had mine. And I wanted him in mine, not chasing through the universe with his father. It’s bad enough with dad…” She choked up at the mention of her father.

“I’m sorry,” Kirk said. He struggled to think of something else to say.

“We argued,” she said. “The last conversation we had was an argument. He wanted more Starfleet oversight of Genesis.”

Kirk nodded. “Is that why he was here? To take Genesis?”

“I wouldn’t let him,” Carol said, defensively. “Neither would David. But he was under so much pressure. He stopped by unexpectedly on his way back to Earth from the Salius system.”

“Salius?” Kirk said, snapping to full attention. He drew his communicator. “Saavik, back here at the double. Things have changed. We’re leaving.”

“Admiral Pike, I have partial decrypt on that message from Starfleet command,” Uhura said. She placed her hand on her earpiece. “It’s…” Her brow scrunched in confusion. “We’re being ordered to abandon our mission and return to Regula I.”

Pike was confused. “We’re responding to a priority distress call,” he said. “We can’t just leave.”

Uhura shook her head. “It’s explicit sir. Priority status has been rescinded from Salius. Enterprise to return to Regula I, secure-” she paused a minute to check the exact words – “Secure all materials related to Project Genesis. This assignment considered override priority.”

Pike turned back to the viewscreen. “Thank you Commander,” he said. “Mister Sulu, prepare to break orbit.”

“Admiral,” La’an interjected, “We can’t just leave. All those people. Una.”

“Override priority doesn’t give us a lot of wiggle room. And… It doesn’t look like there’s anything we can do here.”

“Admiral,” Xon interrupted, “Sensors show a vessel approaching. It’s one of ours. USS Reliant.”

Pike sighed with relief. “That explains it,” he said. “Starfleet must’ve sent them to handle this rather than reading them in on Genesis.” He thought a second. “Reliant is Erica’s ship, isn’t it? Nyota, hail them, we’ll fill them in on the way out.”

“I’m unable to raise them, sir,” Uhura said.

“Interference?” Pike asked.

“Shouldn’t be a problem at this range.”

“They’re requesting communications, my lord,” Joachim reported.

“Let them eat static.”

“They haven’t raised shields,” the young man said.

Khan smiled. “Of course. We’re one big happy fleet. Ah, Pike, my old friend, do you know the Romulan proverb that tells us that revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.”

“A Quality of Mercy” or “Tomorrow’s Enterprise”

“Stone walls do not a prison make,
nor iron bars a cage:
minds innocent and quiet take
that for a hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love
and in my soul am free,
angels alone that soar above
enjoy such liberty.” – Richard Lovelace

Influences: “Balance of Terror” (TOS), “Obsession” (TOS), “Et in Arcadia Ego” (PIC), “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (TNG), “Endgame” (VOY), “These Are The Voyages” (ENT), Star Trek: Early Voyages, “In Harm’s Way” (New Voyages), Doctor Who: “Turn Left”

“In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.” – Leonard McCoy, “Balance of Terror”

Strange New Worlds has not really established a mode of operation other than “Let’s just go fucking nuts”, and this would upset me greatly if it were the only Star Trek currently in production, but we’ve got half a season of Prodigy coming, and they’ve already finished filming season three of Picard and I think they’re already working on season five of Discovery and there’s at least two more shows in preprod right now? So okay. One last time before the break, let’s go fucking nuts.

This episode mines the continuity and the metatext hard, and it mostly works, on pretty much every level and so much about it is lovely. A few things are unlovely, but that’s okay too. Starting at the end, it’s very weird and wild that the arc-lite series made entirely of stand-alone episodes does the first proper season-end cliffhanger we’ve had in a long time. It’s more of a Season 2 teaser than a traditional cliffhanger – not unlike the last-second appearance of the Enterprise in the Discovery season 1 finale – but it differs from Discovery in that it is a continuation of an ongoing character arc, and that the events leading up to it were part of the episode beforehand. Obviously, he was busy with other things, but one wonders why Pike didn’t ask Future Pike why he never sprung Una in between rewriting the destinies of strangers. It’s also very uncomfortable that it comes off like Una is under arrest for being Ilyrian. That’s super gross. They’re going to lock her up, apparently in solitary, no visitors allowed, for a decade at least, for her very existence. I’m not saying this is inconsistent with the treatment of augments we’ve seen elsewhere, but ick. I mean, also, if she’s Ilyrian,  and Ilyria isn’t part of the Federation, wouldn’t repatriation be a more normal thing to do? Now, if she’s being arrested for falsifying records to get into Starfleet – and potentially on suspicion of espionage – that’s different, but it comes off much more like, yeah, she is an Inherently Illegal Person, which is super super gross. (Now, aside here; the Ilyrians in Enterprise are not named on-screen, and everything else about them comes from novels and comics. So I’m wondering now if the SNW Ilyrians aren’t actually meant to be an alien species, but rather an offshoot of humans?)

Before that… They explained the thing. I didn’t actually think they would, and they were nicely subtle about it. I think I mentioned a long time ago that there’s this one gap in the continuity from the original pilot to the rest of TOS that is sort of curious. In “The Cage”, Spock is a very junior officer who has a pretty limited role in the story and barely interacts with Pike directly. Many years later, he risks his own career, possibly the careers of his colleagues as well, and maybe even his own life, to take Pike to the Talosians. This is a big deal, and to be entirely honest, there is nothing else in Spock’s history that explains why he would do this. “He’s fiercely loyal to his old captain,” is convincing as a surface-level cliche, but Pike and Spock don’t seem nearly as close as Kirk and Spock. Yet I don’t think we can comfortably imagine Spock would go to the same extremes for Kirk. Heck, there’s a whole big point in Star Trek IV that “Break a bunch of laws, almost start a war, and get yourself branded an outlaw to save a friend” is a very Kirk thing to do but not at all a Spock thing to do. So why did he do it? Finally we have an answer. Spock sort of has the gist of it now, and perhaps will learn the full details in time, but it appears, through the contrivances of the angry and vengeful gods of continuity, that Pike traded his life for Spock’s.

Pike started the season haunted by the idea that he couldn’t avoid his destiny without dooming the cadets he was fated to save. What this episode has done – and this feels maybe a little contrived, since there’s no real logical connection, just mysterious larger forces – is to revise that and reveal that Pike can avoid his destiny, but the cost will be Spock. We see one way, and Future-Pike implies that the Timekeepers have revealed that this always happens. In every universe where Pike avoids his accident, Spock is sacrificed instead. This is a big heavy thing that probably needed a little more scaffolding than it got, but I can in this case accept it. Actually got a little teary-eyed for that last scene of Spock and Pike in Pike’s office when I realized the full meaning of it. Oh. Oh. That’s why. That’s why Spock would put himself out like that. Because Spock knows that Pike marched willingly into that fate for him. 

It is so interesting that what sets Pike down this path is meeting Maat – one of the future cadets he isn’t going to save. The step he’s about to take was simple enough that he could’ve done this at any time. He has held back from trying to alter the future because he doesn’t want to endanger the people he’s going to save. It’s only when he meets, as a child, one of the ones he doesn’t that it’s time to say “Fuck it” to the inexorable plans of fate. I mentioned back when Pike originally had his vision that part of Pike’s tragedy is that he sacrifices himself to save a room full of cadets and he doesn’t even save them all. He is, in the end, fated to be The One Who Almost But Not Quite Pulled it Off.

Which is, as it turns out, also what this episode is about. As Pike starts writing a letter to the young Maat, warning him to avoid the engine explosion, a movie-era version of himself manifests to tell him of the terrible peril should the sacred timeline be disturbed. (Like the NuTrek implementation of the movie-era uniform, btw, though they don’t go as far with it in the direction of making it look like something a person could actually wear to work every day as they did with other uniforms). Another point that needed more scaffolding, but things are bad enough in Future-Pike’s timeline that the Timekeepers have gotten involved. I wonder if this will be expanded upon in the future, because, yeah, there’s an ongoing war with the Romulans, but it’s hard to see that alone as justifying this level of “Yeah the whole timeline is in danger.” I don’t really get the impression that Future-Pike comes from a place that is bad enough to merit pulling a Sam Beckett and Setting Right What Once Went Wrong. I do believe that things could proceed from there to this hypothetical “end of everything” sort of bad future, and that the Timekeepers foresaw this and convinced Future-Pike of it. Future-Pike very clearly knows more about the fate of the universe than his own perspective should allow. He’s been shown that things Spock won’t do for another century yet are the only path to lasting peace with the Romulans. If they (or, indeed, some other NuTrek) revisits this in time, I look forward to them tying the pieces all together.

You know, just writing it down makes it sound a little overwrought, doesn’t it? Pike from the 2270s travels back to the 2250s to send that Pike forward to the 2260s because Spock needs to make it to the 2380s to protect the timeline so that Vulcans and Romulans can reuinify in the 2600s or thereabout.

But anyway, The Future! Past! Present! Whatever! Future-Pike zaps Present-Pike into the body of Slightly-Less-Future-Pike, right smack into the TOS episode “Balance of Terror”. Like, right into it. “Balance of Terror” opens with Kirk officiating at a wedding, and Pike has to quickly recover and cover when he comes to himself halfway through the benediction.

What follows is in many places a close retelling of the TOS episode. I wish they’d done a bit of redecoration of the Enterprise sets to help convey this being a different time, though. We’re almost a decade in the future but the changes on the Enterprise are subtle. Possibly this is meant to be unnerving, because it’s just a bit askew from both SNW and TOS. Uhura is still there, now a Lieutenant. Spock is Pike’s first officer, and he refers to himself as “Number One”. Ortegas and Mitchell are still flying the ship, but they’ve swapped seats. M’Benga seems to still be CMO, and Chapel is there, but wearing a uniform now. We neither see nor hear the name of the Enterprise’s engineer, but we do hear a somewhat overblown Scottish accent from off-screen. Even Sam is still on the Enterprise.

But there are changes. Everyone seems a lot stiffer, Spock especially. The arc of Spock’s personality is something I’ve been troubled over before. The Spock of Strange New Worlds seems more in touch with his human side than the Spock of TOS, which is fine, but the catalysts for his evolution as a character haven’t fallen in the right order so far, with the implication that Spock rejected his humanity multiple times in his life, but all of them prior to the time period of this series. Possibly this is where the arc with T’Pring is going, since we know that he’s deeply insecure in his relationship with her specifically over his humanity. Will he reject his humanity in a doomed attempt to protect the relationship? Or will he accept the failure of the relationship, remaining in the engagement only out of duty, and reject his humanity as a coping mechanism? But that’s a discussion for another season. Like I said, everyone seems stiffer on Enterprise now, and while Spock carries the heaviest part of it, Ortegas is upsettingly hostile here. Like, downright unlikeable. She even gets her racism on against Spock, who she has worked with for a decade now, because she is being slotted into the role Lieutenant Styles played in “Balance”. I just, ugh. Not Ortegas. Why Ortegas? You had a perfectly good one-off TOS character you could use here. Put him in Mitchell’s seat.

We finally get an overt, confirmed-in-dialogue statement that no human has ever seen a Romulan before, which is very mildly annoying but okay (I’ve always preferred the idea that it was, in fact, known by the higher-ups, but the fact that Romulans look like Vulcans just wasn’t widely publicized specifically out of fears of racism tearing the nacient Federation apart). What’s more interesting is the speculation that the Romulans leaked this deliberately at this particular moment in history, in the hopes of sowing bigotry. A bit weird that the Romulans in this episode are Northerners, in light of this, since when you add the brow ridge, it’s no longer nearly so clear to say that Romulans and Vulcans look alike – they look about as alike as half a dozen other species look to humans. Also, how the fuck do you remake Balance of Terror for NuTrek and not get James Frain to play the Romulan commander? Heck, you do that, and you can slap a brow ridge on him and it still totally works. Probably works better. “Hey Spock, is it just me or does that Romulan commander look like your dad? I mean, other than the brow ridge.”

Significant parts of the episode play out as before. Hansen Al-Sallah dies in the attack on the outpost (He’s wearing a different badge than the Enterprise crew, though the Farragut crew wears the usual arrowhead. Looks like they are going with what I believe is the original intent here, that the insignias are not ship-specific, but specify something else, with most starship crews wearing arrowheads, and certain other duties wearing something different. I think Al-Sallah’s badge is slightly different from the one “Commander Hansen” had in TOS. Similar, but more obviously a variation of the arrowhead), the Enterprise is damaged, they shadow the Romulans, Spock suggests attack rather than restraint based on his knowledge of Vulcan’s history, the Romulan commander is open to negotiation but his second sends a transmission against orders because he wants to get his war on. They try the same failed gambit with the comet’s tail, Enterprise loses phasers to the plasma weapon. Also, there’s a lot of shots which do that “Face in shadows except for the eyes” thing on Pike and Spock that TOS did a lot for effect but which is not really part of modern cinematic language.

Given that they made a bunch of new Romulan models and the new model for the Farragut, I’m sad that the Enterprise also isn’t outwardly different. From the magazine that came with the Eaglemoss model of the Discovery Enterprise, I learned that one of the ideas that went into its Discovery redesign was the possibility that later refits might bring the Enterprise closer to its TOS look – the runway behind the shuttle bay and the extra bits on the nacelle pylons are things that could be removed later. Also, a shame we don’t get a furtive glimpse of Admiral Pike’s Enterprise-A. (I’m actually imagining a whole alternate version of TWOK now with Pike, which perhaps I will write out at length later).

One of the large metatextual elements here is that it’s the same Pike we’ve been watching all season going through these events. It’s not the Pike of an alternate-2260s, who has ten more years of experience. And yet, he’s expected to do what the Pike of this timeline would have done: he is not here to fix things, but to witness why he shouldn’t be here. Pike seems to forget this at times. You’d expect this to be a major part of the episode, Pike struggling with self-doubt, whether each decision he makes is the one that leads to the bad timeline his future-self wants to prevent. Or struggling with his desire to fix things by avoiding that mistake. Instead, Pike just plays it straight, approaching the situation as himself. This is very odd, and I find myself wondering why they played it this way instead of having 2250s Pike here purely as an observer, watching 2260s Pike but unable to interfere.

The climax of the battle changes things up because the Romulan warbird isn’t alone, though. A Romulan armada appears. And… This part I’m not crazy about. The original “Balance of Terror” is pretty amazing for the care with which it establishes the Romulans as not simply Scary Aliens That Are Kinda Supposed To Make You Think of Cold War Enemies in a Vaguely Racist Way. There’s a real sense that the Romulans are a different culture with a different but still valid system of values. The way that they value strength and duty is a big part of it. But… I dunno, especially after playing this multiple times with the Gorn, doing the whole thing where they very publicly blow up the warbird to “cull the weak” and make themselves stronger comes off as just “They’re gratuitously nasty space-thugs”. It somehow feels more racist and less nuanced than the forty years or so from “The Enterprise Incident” up through Enterprise where the whole of the characterization of Romulan culture was pretty much just “shifty”. Where I thought they were going was that the Romulan Praetor would blow up the warbird and offer a very over-the-top faux-pology for the actions of its “rogue” commander who they had just executed for his unauthorized attack, and both sides would stand down and save face, but it would mark the beginning of a period of escalation that put them on the inescapable path to war. Instead, the Romulans are just like “We strong; you week. War now.” Meh.

The biggest divergence from “Balance” is that Enterprise isn’t alone either, though. In this timeline, Pike presumably turned down promotion and remained on the Enterprise, and kept the old gang together. But meanwhile, the USS Farragut is still out there, captained by Jim Kirk, and it shows up to help. And here is where I largely forgive this episode its other shortcomings.

First things first: I do not like Paul Wesley’s portrayal of Kirk at all. Even a little bit. Just doesn’t work. However, the writing of Jim Kirk in this episode is perfect. It is so easy to fall into parody with Kirk. Pike even fears that Kirk is a brash, impulsive, rule-breaking firebrand who is going to start a war…. And he isn’t. Kirk and Pike disagree, but Kirk respects the difference of opinion, respects what Pike is trying to do, and defers to him. He doesn’t go behind Pike’s back or disobey his orders in an act of heroism or glory-seeking. This is a Kirk written by someone who gets the actual, canonical Kirk, rather than the pop-culture Kirk. My favorite detail here is the one time Kirk gets angry with Pike. Because he hesitated. A slight delay in firing on the Romulans because he didn’t want to hit the Farragut. They remembered. They remembered that this is the thing James T. Kirk is hypersenitive to. That this is the thing that makes him Kirk. That he’s haunted by the time he hesitated and people he cared about died.

Also, La’an is Kirk’s first officer, looks like. That’s a nice and understated “Time has gone wrong” irony – that destiny would team him up with the niece of the man who, in the proper timeline, should be his greatest enemy. We know in the Kelvin timeline, the recovery of the Botany Bay went very differently. In this timeline, if those events happen at all, we can imagine that regardless of whether it is still Kirk who does it, or if it’s still the Enterprise, either way things would unfold very differently, as we’d have to imagine the conflict would evolve differently with Khan’s kin on-board, or those who’d worked closely with her. And one wonders whether Khan would’ve been able to conceal his identity at all if anyone one board had researched Khan in depth. That is all well beyond the scope of this story, but hey, maybe we’ll see this timeline again someday. Also, again, how did they miss the obvious opportunity to kill her off so Kirk and/or Pike could scream “Laaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!!” in their pain?

One of the really good misdirects that “A Quality of Mercy” does here is that once it introduces Kirk, it immediately starts trying to kill him. Or more specifically, it immediately starts making us worry about him. This must be it, we think. This is where time breaks. Pike lives, Kirk dies, the universe goes to hell.

This episode is very similar to the plot arc in the comic series Early Voyages. In that version of events, Pike, just as in canon, receives a vision of his future. To mess things up a bit more, Colt – a character from the pilot that NuTrek hasn’t revisited – is zapped into the future herself. In the alternate future, like here, Pike remained on the Enterprise and avoided his accident. But because of Colt’s absence, a young Jim Kirk was assigned to the Enterprise as a junior officer, where his personality clash with Pike ultimately saw him out of Starfleet.

But Kirk makes it. The Farragut is destroyed, and there’s one last group left to beam over… And they make it. He departs in a shuttle for an unspoken backup plan. It turns out to be a very classic-feeling Kirk-Bluff: he brings a fleet of automated mining drones which Pike tells the Romulan armada is a fleet of attack ships – the Romulans have no idea what modern Starfleet warships looks like. But he has to cover the Enterprise’s escape, nobly sacrificing himself to – nope, wait, they beam him out right as they skeedaddle. James T. Kirk will live.

Because – and this is the point where the show pushes it right up to the edge, but ultimately wins me – Pike, as we know, is not the hero of destiny. And neither is Kirk. We spend a big chunk of this episode expecting the message that Pike is the tragic, doomed mentor who must ultimately accept the necessity of sacrifice to save The Chosen One, the Child of Destiny, the man whose narrative gravity must shape the universe. The One True Hero of Star Trek, James Tiberius–

record needle scratch.

It’s not him. James T. Kirk is not the chosen one, who must be protected. James T. Kirk is gonna be fine either way.

It’s Spock. In every timeline that Pike avoids his fate, Spock eats it. Horribly. Missing leg, face-melting radiation burns, brain damage. Beep Beep.

Oh, um, a bunch of other people die too, including Lieutenant Martine, who was the bride earlier. In the prime timeline, it was the groom who died, and he was the only casualty of the battle on their side.

Now, this is…. It’s not perfect. There’s a strong sense of “Mystical forces of time are punishing Spock for Pike’s defiance,” and “Really the Chosen One is neither Pike nor Kirk,” is stronger if the next part is, “Actually it’s some third person you never heard of,” than if it’s the guy whose name comes second in the credits.

It couldn’t actually be a nobody, I guess, in order to give it the proper weight. It has to be someone we know does something important in the future. It could perhaps have been Uhura, that would be cool. But ideally, it would be something very left-field. The problem is that we don’t have a whole lot of —

Oh, shit, duh. I know who it should’ve been. Will Decker. There are some extraordinary reasons they certainly don’t want to revisit one of the two major guest characters from a TOS movie who ends the film being permanently removed from their home and taken to another and very different world after saving the Earth from an impossibly powerful machine creature linked to stuff that happened in the audience’s native time, played by one of the parents from Seventh Heaven. But still, the ideal thing here would be that we have a very minor character in SNW – a junior officer whose identity hasn’t had attention called to it. Someone along the lines of Mitchell or Chief Kyle. Then, ten years in the future, they die horribly in these events, and this is meaningful and moving for Pike because he cares about his people, and cares about the ones who’ve gotten character focus as much as the ones who haven’t. And then the audience puts it together that, hey, this was that one-off character in TOS or the movie era who saved the day at one point. I picked Decker just now because TOS doesn’t really have a lot of examples of one-off characters saving the day in a critical moment. Later Trek is good for that; episodes where a one-off character death isn’t just canon fodder but a noble sacrifice.

Anyway, Spock is a good choice too, and has all this bang-on stuff where it justifies “The Menagerie”. Just a little less powerful than you’d hope.

The other thing which I feel needed more scaffolding, though, is that Pike isn’t just sacrificing himself. The episode calls this out at the beginning, makes it a trigger. But it sort of forgets it at the end, reducing it to just a plot device. Maat Al-Sallah is going to die. Pike chooses the universe where Maat Al-Sallah dies, in order to save the millions who will die in the second Romulan War, but really to save Spock.

That’s a little yikes.

Maat’s dad dies either way. Dude is fucked. Pike does not know this, of course; he knows Hansen dies in the bad timeline, but his fate in the prime one might be different. However, Pike knows that in the prime timeline he will fail to save Maat Al-Sallah. We know that six months after burying his son, Commander Al-Sallah is going to die as well. We can speculate, of course. Did he spend his last few months comforted that his son died alongside his childhood hero? Did he resent the cadets Pike did save? Did he feel guilty over the injuries Pike received in the failed attempt to save his son? These are not questions the episode is interested in. The fact that Pike is not just sacrificing himself to prevent the Romulan War timeline is not something the episode is interested in. Maat? The adorable child who’s a Pike fanboy who Pike wants to save but if he does he’s dooming-

Oh.

Oh shit.

I get it now.

I… I feel… Respected?

I did not know successful television could have subtlety like that.

This isn’t Pike’s Kobyashi Maru, and it’s not his Yesterday’s Enterprise, and it’s not just a reenactment of the decision he already made back on Discovery.

This is Pike’s Omelas. They never actually say it. They never call attention to it at all. In fact, they call attention away from it. But that’s what this is. Pike has the chance to save the kid. He made his peace with his own death, but then WHAM, there’s this kid. He can save the kid. He wants to save the kid. But the cost is war with the Romulans. And Spock.

Holy shit. That’s the through-line for the season, isn’t it? We deal with child-death or endangerment in what? “Memento Mori”, “Lift Us Where Suffering Can Not Reach”, “The Elysian Kingdom” and “All Those Who Wander” all revolve around child-murder, and the good guys have complicity in three of those. Plus “Children of the Comet” is literally called “Children of the Comet”. That’s at least as many episodes aimed at child-murder as there are dealing with the more straightforward motif of whether one can – or should – change what one is fated to become. How did we find ourself in a Star Trek whose dominant themes includes, “Sometimes you just have to kill children”?

What are y’all doing?

“All Those Who Wander” or “The Wrath of La’an” – no, wait, I used that one. How about, “In Space, No One Can Hear You Rip Off James Cameron”. Eh, too close to the Omelas thing. Okay, then. We’ll go with “Children of the Gorn”

Influences: “Arena” (TOS), “All Our Yesterdays” (TOS), “Impulse” (ENT), “Empok Nor” (DS9), “Context is for Kings” (DSC), Alien, Aliens, Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda

I watched this episode with my Mother-in-Law. She was convinced the little kid was evil. She reckoned she was putting some kind of mind-whammy on M’Benga when he conflated her with his daughter, because why would M’Benga still be distraught and not thinking clearly when encountering an endangered little girl, it’s been a whole week since his daughter died ascended to a higher plane of existence.

Man, wow, that is kind of obvious, though, isn’t it? Wow. Let’s start the episode off by saying a fond goodbye to beloved cast member with a guaranteed future Nyota Uhura, and also to Other Cadet We Have Never Met Until Now. Also congrats on your promotion, Lieutenant Skippy. I’m sure you will have a long and successful career ahead of you. (Noticed: La’an misses Pike’s big breakfast because she’s with her therapist. Nice small touch there. Also, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelets”)

So the plot of this episode is that the Enterprise is on its way to deliver power thingers to Space Station K-7 (Which is, fun fact, the one from “The Trouble With Tribbles”), but they pass a crashed ship on the way. Since Enterprise has to make that delivery on-time, the away team is going to be all on their own to fix and re-launch the ship. Pike goes down with a team consisting of five regulars, two obvious expendables, and Sam Kirk, who is doomed but not today.

And then the plot of the Alien movies happens. Very straightforwardly. Like, even more overtly than the Omelas thing a few weeks back. They even have a Newt. She serves no purpose in the story proper, but she’s there. Is it just me, or is Strange New Worlds a little derivative?

This episode is good, don’t get me wrong. But man, they are laying it on thick with the Gorn, aren’t they? I’m having a hard time really buying the Gorn as an advanced spacefaring race. It’s kind of important to the believably of the Alien movies that the Xenomorphs aren’t actually an intelligent species in their own right; they’ve got something to do with the Space Jockeys – and maybe the Predators. But they’re basically animals. You would not expect them to be building their own starships. There’s an obvious nod to the Magog from Andromeda as well – not the first time NuTrek has raided it for ideas. But again, the Magog had this whole thing going where they gained the memories of their hosts, and also I think there was some big scary evil intelligence that was helping them out? I don’t know, that show sucked except for the bits that were delightfully insane.

It isn’t necessarily a big thing, and I know it’s kill-or-be-killed in this situation. But it does stick with me that the one significant divergence between this episode and Alien is that it accidentally contains the element of “The main plot of this episode is that Captain Pike and friends hunt down and murder a bunch of babies.” Perhaps this is why they had to paint the Gorn so over-the-top as space-monsters, because it helps you forget that this is a sentient species who build starships and wear spangly space togas and live in cities, and Captain Pike and friends just murdered a bunch of their babies. Again, under the circumstances, necessary. But I notice that Doctor M’Benga does not raise any objections to murdering the non-cute children in this episode. No one voices a reminder that this is a sentient race and could we try trapping them first? Obviously you could have that fail and get one of the Skippys killed (great tension there if Spock advises not-baby-murder, and thus holds himself culpable for the deaths that follow, leading to his willingness to relax his emotional control), but someone should at least have brought it up.

In this episode, we learn that Gorn are born in litters, but within a few hours, the strongest baby Gorn will kill and eat the rest of its litter. Because needlessly nasty and violent. They also reproduce via spitting acid in the faces of their prey, are fertile within hours of birth, and apparently reproduce asexually. I mean, that or the teen Gorn took a few minutes off of killing each other for a sibling orgy. And they’re invisible to both sensors and telepathy (Surprising they would forsake the chance to give everyone motion sensors like in Aliens). In their adolescent form, Gorn kinda look like Gremlins. I am having a hard time handling just how needlessly nasty and derivative this all is. Also I guess Gorn have a race memory or something because La’an expects this hour-old Gorn to be able to understand language and respond to her challenging it.

Another in the long line of SNW’s list of small but significant missed opportunities, La’an warns them that they stand no chance against an adult Gorn. Would have been both funnier and a better tie-in to “Arena” had she said, “The feral adolescent stage is the most dangerous. Once it becomes an adult, we’d have a chance, since they get slower and kind of awkward and unable to turn their necks. But that will take days and we’ll all be dead by then.”
And then we’ve got this whole thing going on where Spock has to unleash his TUMULTUOUS VULCAN EMOTIONS in order to provoke the Gorn out of hiding. But now that he has awakened the savage beast inside, can he truly put it back in its cage? Except… Look, all he does is scream a little. God, this feels so forced. And since it’s going to be La’an who handles the climactic part of the battle, the only purpose it serves in the plot is to set up him hugging Chapel at the end. (I will admit being touched by the hug)

I guess the other thing that matters about it is that Sam is a complete dick to Spock about his emotional reserve before he cuts loose. Ten years later:

Jim: Spock… You nevermentionedthatyou knew my….. Brother.
Spock: Yes, Jim. He worked for me for years. Funny he never mentioned it to you. He was kind of a dick and everyone on the ship hated him. I didn’t think it was appropriate to bring it up when you were in mourning.

So Cadet Skippy and Lieutenant Skippy die, and the last Gorn is killed technically by La’an. I mean, Hemmer makes a big point about how he refuses to be the one to actually do the killing because he is a pacifist. But he totally is the one who hoses it down with the space version of liquid nitrogen, and the fact that La’an hits it with a pipe afterward to shatter it is really a formality. If being flash-frozen solid has not been previously shown to be survivable by the temperature-sensitive lizard-monster-people, I am going to assume he dead. But then we get the telegraphed but still shocking twist: that faceful of lizard-spit Hemmer took a few scenes back which we’d already established was how they reproduce is how they reproduce, and Hemmer’s going to explode into more Gorn babies. So he jumps out the back of the ship and real-for-real dies. Which absolutely sucks for the people who like Hemmer. It’s a good scene. He locks everyone else out, so that they can’t stop him, but he lets La’an stay, because he knows she won’t. He explains that while he can’t sense the Gorn with his Aenar powers, he knows his own body, and thus knows he’s out of time. It’s kind of weird that here, in episode 9 of a ten episode season, we kill off a major character and write out two more, since La’an takes a leave of absence to bond with Newt and Uhura’s tour is over (Uhura at least will still be here next week, so I guess they haven’t gotten around to dropping her off yet). I hope they don’t replace him with Scotty. I like Scotty, but this show has plenty of legacy characters already, and this whole, “Everyone in TOS served with Pike and was super close and chummy with him, though no one but Spock will react to his horrific fate,” thing is clumsy.

I hope when Jim Kirk shows up next season, they make a point that he’s a total square and anyone who serves with him will have to tone it way down compared to the fun, freewheeling style everyone adopts with Pike. That would actually be consistent with the stiffer, more military attitude Kirk has in the early TOS episodes. Bonus points if they hint that it’s actually Spock who makes Kirk lighten up.

Also, given that we have already established that M’Benga is the sort of dude who will store his own kid in the transporter for a year while he tries to figure out how to cure her, there is a somewhat higher bar than usual to make me happily roll with everyone just accepting that someone else is doomed and might as well make a noble sacrifice since they definitely can’t be cured.

Another question: what’s up with the Peregrine? It’s apparently Sombra-class, but I took a bit of time trying to work out how it differed from the Constitution-class, and all I could come up with is that it has blue detailing instead of red. There’s a few shots where I thought maybe it was closer in design to the schematic we see of the Terran Empire-acquired of the Defiant, but when you get a better look at the ship at the end, I think it’s just that the nacelle pylons were bent in the crash. It might be smaller? I know it has a smaller crew, but whether it’s meant to be obviously smaller overall, I couldn’t tell. I get why you want a lot of variety in your ships now that the budget allows it, but was there any point in not just having this be another Constitution-class? You could even keep the different color scheme, since Lower Decks gave us that whole thing where ships can have detailing that is color-coded to their mission.

Next week, the exciting season finale. Will they break history? Are they doing the comic book plot where, having seen his future, Pike turns down promotion and stays on the Enterprise forever and gets to redo TOS plots with a fun Pike twist? They sure seem to want us to wonder that before inevitably having our hopes dashed!

Well I don’t know how I managed to donk that up. Got these two in the wrong order. Hope the jokes still work.

“Lift Us Where Suffering Can Not Reach” or “The Ones Who Walk Away From Legal Action By The Estate of Ursula K. Le Guin”

Influences: “The Cloud Minders” (TOS), Some other thing which momentarily eludes me…

Yeah. It’s Omelas. It’s just Omelas. Let us acknowledge that, take a deep breath, and move on.

Except, of course, that it’s not quite is it? I mean, it is, but Omelas is a parable and this is a narrative. And one thing that means is that our heroes spend most of the runtime helping courier the sacrifice child to his horrifying fate, with the Ones Who Walk Away explicitly depicted as the villains. It’s only at the climax, when Gamal turns “heel” that they become the tragic heroes instead. Also, it’s kind of key in Omelas that most people deal with the deal they’ve made by profoundly not thinking about it. On Majelas, everyone does think about it. They honor it. They respect it. As Alora points out, it’s Pike‘s civilization that makes a point of not thinking too hard about the suffering of the underclass on which their privilege is built. (She’s talking to the audience, obviously; the Federation is not supposed to be like that. Any other Trek, especially TNG, would not have let that stand; Picard or Kirk would absolutely have given a speech there about how they used to be like that but that the key to becoming The Federation was learning not to look away). Indeed, we’re told that the Majalans have spend years, probably longer, trying unsuccessfully to figure out a way to not base their civilization on child-torture, which is more than you can say for the people of Omelas or the people of Salem, on the whole.

The biggest problem with SNW’s implementation of Omelas is that it relies, in a way utterly uncharacteristic of NuTrek in general, on the Enterprise crew being very, very dumb until the climax of the episode, whereupon it is too late. I mean, come on. The whole thing is coded so transparently. Let’s have Pike’s girlfriend get very obviously cagey and change the subject whenever they sidle up to why the bad guys want to stop the ascension. Or how the ascension works. Or Pike wanting to investigate. Also, she lives in a castle and her guards carry pointy spears that shoot Comically Evil Splash-murder beams. I think it’s the same sort of sploosh-murder as the Confederation phasers in Picard. Good people do not use guns which kill you by causing your body to humorously sploosh into nothing. Good people do not, generally, live in flying castles over rivers of lava. I think Pike failed to pick up on what a big red flag that was.

Now, credit where it’s due: we get a Strange New World! A civilization which lives in flying castles over rivers of lava powered by child-torture is indeed strange and new. Well, it’s strange. Trek did flying cities before and, as we have said, the whole concept is a very straightforward lit of Le Guin. However, I am very disappointed that we don’t actually get any good visuals depicting these flying cities. We see scenes set on them, and we see the planet from orbit, and we see the internal mechanisms of the flying city. But where are the establishing shots showing a city hovering in the sky? You don’t use “Floating cities” and not give us the establishing shot showing a city with nothing underneath it high in the sky. The establishing shots we do get don’t actually convey the fact that the cities are meant to be floating. How do you mess that up?

The Majalis sets, though, I like. I realize it’s just “Castle, sort of vaguely 17th century French”, but it reminds me a lot of the set designs so often used in TOS for “toga”-style advanced aliens. You ever notice how we rarely see alien civilizations in TOS whose aesthetic is “future”? They usually live in caves or castles or, inexplicably, Greek ruins, but they’ve got super advanced technology and often they act sort of aloof and have something really gross and backward in their culture like they keep slaves or love bloodsports or conduct wars by email or derive their energy from child-torture. Yeah. That. Very spot-on.

Another big flaw in their implementation of the Omelas plot is what they’re getting out of the deal. This child-torture is necessary, we are told, to keep the cities aloft. The Majalans also have quantum medical technology – this is important to the moral dimensions here – but that doesn’t seem to be directly dependent on the child-torture; the kid is just there to keep the cities up. Outside of that, I mean, they live in buildings made of stone, and their space technology isn’t close to par with the Federation: Enterprise destroys two of their ships by accident. The implication seems to be that the Majalans are getting an incredibly sweet deal out of this child-torture, but all we actually see is that their medical technology is a few generations ahead and they get to live in flying castles. Their entire civilization could be brought down – literally – by someone Just Saying No to child-torture, or possibly by Yugi using his Catapult Turtle to launch his Dragon Champion at them.  And that’s a very necessary thing on a planet that is otherwise uninhabitable! Yet, it is something of a hard sell for me to fully embrace the idea that the Majalans can’t find an alternative. Making things fly is, point of fact, something all spacefaring civilizations manage at some point. And living on an uninhabitable planet is, point of fact, something all spacefaring civilizations have an alternative to. (Why, by the way, are the people of Prospect VIII living on Prospect VIII when there are many other non-shitty planets in the galaxy?) What is a starbase – say, the broadly paradisiacal Starbase 1 we saw just last week other than a floating city not powered by child-torture? Not to mention that the technology to make an literal city of the traditional Crystal Spires and Togas type float powered not by child-torture but by the entirely mundane everyday sort of exploitation of the proletariat is a thing which also exists in this era and is probably already a Federation member by this point. (Oh, wait, is that the point? Is the point of this “What if The Cloud Minders but Only Torturing One Child Instead of The Entire Proletariat?” What a dumb thing to be the premise of this episode.

Come to think of it, there was a disease angle there too, with the mineral that paid for the Aradnians lavish lifestyle being a cure for agricultural diseases. Yeah, our side-complication here is that Majalan medical technology could cure M’Benga’s daughter and, ten years down the road, Pike’s meltiness. But they’ve got their own version of the Prime Directive, and they do not really wish to join the Federation. Their reasons are given as them just not really being all that into outsiders as a group. This is a little weird; they seem not to have any bias against individual aliens coming down to hang out, and Alora suggests that it would be perfectly fine for Pike to move there and naturalize as a Majalan citizen. So I think we’re meant to assume it’s not so much “We don’t like outsiders” as it is, “We realize that outsiders are probably going to take offense at the whole thing where our civilization is literally powered by child-torture.”

Tangential to the main thrust of the plot, we’ve introduced our third Pike Girl, in what increasingly feels like an attempt to evoke Kirk. I will at least say that they are evoking a true-to-TOS notion of Kirk as a hopeless romantic and serial monogamist, who falls hard, falls quickly, and falls legitimately, rather than the pop-culture perception of Kirk as just being a cad. I note that their backstory is that he rescued her from a shuttle accident. This is like the twelve-thousandth time someone’s backstory has involved a shuttle accident. Seriously, this is why people are willing to use the Existential Crisis Machine to commute to work. Maybe a transporter does kill you every time you use it, but it at least replaces you with a perfect copy who is already at the office. A transporter accident might kill you, but it’ll be quick and usually painless about it, but more often it will do something humorous and ultimately reversible to you, like sending you to an evil parallel universe (TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”, DS9: “Crossover”),  reverse aging (TNG: “Rascals”), time travel (DS9: “Past Tense”), giving you a noisy glow (LD: “Much Ado About Boimler”), leaves-in-face (ENT: “Strange New World”), or turning you into good and evil halves (TOS: “The Enemy Within”), a manatee (TNG: “Realm of Fear”), or Tom Wright (VOY: “Tuvix”). A shuttle accident just leaves you dead and/or a cyborg who has to save her memory to USB at night.

Perhaps it is this romance, along with the prospect of an “out” against his horrific mangling that explains why Pike is so damn dumb for most of this episode, because Alora acts incredibly sus for so much of this episode, and Pike just rolls with it. I swear, it had better turn out at the end of the season that his hair is actually a symbiotic lifeform that is usurping his brain function as it gets larger.

We’ve got this whole side-plot about Uhura being on security rotation so that La’an can play Drill Sergeant Nasty, and it does not really work. La’an is not a funny character, but they gave her a comedy role here, with her over-the-top gruffness, and you can see the end, where it turns out she respects Uhura as a competent future-officer, coming about a light-year away. Also, while it emphasizes different aspects, this is to a significant extent the same plot Uhura had with Hemmer a couple of weeks ago. (By the way, we get a Sam Kirk  and his ‘Stache sighting for the first time in weeks for no clear reason other than for him to embarrass himself by talking smack about La’an and he doesn’t get nearly-killed or anything. Why bother?) In other Gruff Character news, I do like the plot arc with Elder Gamal, because he’s such an asshole for most of the story in a way that I think successfully stops you from suspecting his involvement in the plot. If, as most people with enough brain cells to navigate Paramount+ menus, you realize that something terrible is about to happen to the First Elder, you think probably the reason Gamal is so gruff with his son is a defensive thing, to emotionally detach in advance of the pain he’s going to experience when he goes off to college is plugged into the torture machine. Like in every horror story about child sacrifice where the parents are awful to the sacrifice child. But it turns out that he’s deliberately overplaying it because he’s actually very broken up about this and is plotting to destroy his own civilization to save the kid and so he is (a) pissy about the whole tradition and (b) hiding it. It is not unexpected that he walks away from Omelas in the end, but it’s a nice touch that he shares some medical science with M’Benga that might start him on the road to a cure for Space Cancer (Incursion from the future: it will not).

Overall, this feels like an episode that is archetypical of what SNW seems to be going for: it’s very much a story in the mold of TOS, with its shirtless, lady-romancing captain, hamfisted moralizing, and sketchy aliens. Kirk would’ve saved the kid, though, and at a meta-level, I will note that the reason Pike doesn’t is because he’s told that disconnecting him will kill him at this point. A no-win scenario. Kirk would save the kid anyway precisely because he doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario, then moralize to Majalans about how they’re going to have to toughen up and learn to live without flying cities or something. I like the way this episode gave us a modern take on TOS, but it ends like an Ursula K. Le Guin story, not like a Star Trek story, and that rubs a little wrong, the same way it’s rubbed a little wrong how often Chibnall-era Doctor Who has settled on having the Doctor just stand back and be a witness to the atrocities of the universe rather than telling the rules to get fucked and intervening.