A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

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.

“The Elysian Kingdom” or “Hey, the costume department said the King Arthur thing fell through and we could have these fantasy medieval costumes for free if we wanted”

Influences: “Masks” (TNG), “The Royale” (TNG), “The Killing Game” (VOY), “The Bonding” (TNG), “Lonely Among Us” (TNG), “Imaginary Friend” (TNG), “Clues” (TNG), Dramatis Personae” (DS9), “Metamorphosis” (TOS), “Our Man Bashir” (DS9), “Far Beyond the Stars” (DS9), The Bernice Summerfield Adventures: “Oh No It Isn’t!”

Let us skip over “The Serene Squall” for the time being, as I have nothing useful to say about it yet. I may come back later to make a “Nice top”/”They have a name” joke or a “We don’t talk about Sybok, no, no” joke.

For a ten-episode season, Strange New Worlds seems to have a high proportion of Weird Ones. So, still light on the “new worlds”, but hitting it out of the park on the “Strange” I guess.

And just check out the list of influences there. Yeah, this is a “Lonely Space-Consciousness Takes A Liking To Someone And Does Magic Stuff” episode, which is a pretty popular high-concept Trek idea, most especially associated with TNG, but cropping up elsewhere too.

We’ve had all these parts before. The lonely non-corporeal consciousness. The ship transformed. The characters compelled to act out a story. The characters being mind-whammied into thinking they are the characters from the story. I’m not even sure if this particular combination is unique.

M’Benga has gotten a pretty fair share of screen time this season compared to some of the others, but this is his proper focus episode. We also showcase Hemmer quite a bit, and I’m starting to like him. In particular, because he actually plays against expectations here. Your gruff, cynical characters, you expect them to chuff at a Shenanigans episode, being all angry and not wanting to play along. But once Hemmer understands what’s going on, he honestly seems to be perfectly happy to roll with it. Just like, “Fuck it, yeah, I’m a space wizard now.” I kinda love it, with his adoption of theatrical flair as he showcases the full power of his powerful wizard powers.

It’s also the biggest showcase we’re going to get for Ortegas, which is upsetting, because she’s not even herself for it. And I have some misgivings about the mechanism of getting M’Benga to the bridge by having her clock herself unconscious on the corner of her desk because she didn’t sit down properly before putting the ship in gear.

Ortegas has shown up a lot and gotten in a lot of bon mots, but she hasn’t really had any focus in depth; we just don’t know a lot about her other than that she’s got a quick and fun retort whenever the situation calls for it. And this in a small way undermines what is in general a very well-constructed episode. Because one thematic element that seems to run through it gets muddled with Ortegas. It seems like in recasting the Enterprise crew as the characters of the Elysian Kingdom, there’s a deliberate inversion of archetypes. The strong, hard, tough-as-nails La’an becomes a timid, preening princess. Uhura, the young cadet uncertain in her life path becomes the strong, confident tyrant. Spock, a scientist renowned for his honesty and integrity becomes a treacherous wizard. Una, who is at least on paper, cold, detached, and clinical, becomes the ethereal guardian of the forest, at one with nature. Bold, brave and loyal Space Daddy Pike becomes a simpering, cravenly, treacherous chamberlain. And just in case you missed the point, he’s got flamboyantly bad hair too.

But what do we make of Ortegas, who takes on the role of Sir Adya, the valiant knight? I mean, she’s cool, a lady of action, and as quick with her tongue as with her sword, which is not a cunnilingus joke, but we can work on that later. Is that playing against type for Ortegas? I guess maybe insofar as probably Ortegas is laid-back and easygoing? But Ortegas is also very cool and quick-witted, so I don’t know. Possibly Sir Adya is meant to be an overly stiff, serious character, but they play her so over-the-top that she’s goofy anyway, so that undercuts the point if there is one.

Also, Ortegas and Una’s characters are lovers. A bit starcrossed because of their respective roles as the loyal, serious knight and the free-spirited protector of the forest, but they are absolutely warm for each others’ forms. And this particular element came from Rukiya, not from the book, where they never met. (I’m not 100% sure Sir Adya is meant to be a woman. The illustration in the book looks male, but not unambiguously so. M’Benga uses female pronouns when reciting passages about her, but he might be adjusting the story based on what’s going on around him at this point) I mean, Rukiya wanted them to “team up”; she doesn’t tell the audience whether this included smooching.

(Chapel doesn’t quite fit into the “playing against type” thing either, being cast as some kind of mystical healer, which, kinda?)

But like I said, this episode is very well-constructed. I like how M’Benga moves from thinking he’s being pranked, to suspecting that he is hallucinating from the chemicals he’d taken to the face earlier, to rolling with it and using his knowledge of the Elysian story to his advantage (He’s right; he should’ve anticipated Pike/Rauth’s betrayal); these stories tend to linger too long on the part where the hero refuses to play along with the scenario. I wish the transformation of the Enterprise had gone a bit farther than the occasional torchiere and the odd hanging pennant.

What an odd coincidence that the Benny Russel book M’Benga had been reading to his daughter for the past year just happened to be an apt metaphor for a father desperately clinging to his dying child in a way that denied her the chance at her own life. Honestly a point against him that he never noticed how the moral of the story could apply to his own life. I want to give this story some credit here for not bothering with a misdirect. They never really speculate on why the Boltzmann Brain is recreating the story, but in particular, they don’t try to make us suspect there is something sinister to it. Hemmer and M’Benga are clearly starting without the assumption that they could make sense of its reasons on their own.

Just like Hemmer rolled with being a wizard, he rolls with the revelation that M’Benga’s been keeping his daughter in a save-game in the transporter. Reno would’ve at least had a snarky “Oh fer Chrissakes, what the hell are you doing to my transport buffers? This is what ya get for not calling an expert, numbnuts.” I think “just rolls with it,” is probably the distinctive element of Hemmer’s characterization – an aspect of his pacifism, that he finds a way to work with the situation rather than against it. Hemmer and everyone else gets their minds wiped at the end of the episode, though, saving us from the repercussions of M’Benga being held accountable. Though he proceeds to tell Una the whole story at the end. I wonder if he included the bit where she was boning Ortegas.

It’s weird, now that I think of it, that this episode ends where a TNG episode begins, basically. The crew had just run into some trouble involving a big swirly thing in space, then they all suddenly wake up and it’s five hours later with no record of what happened. And the Enterprise crew here seems content to just roll with it, rather than spending an entire episode doing a procedural mystery to work out what happened to them. There’s possibly two crewmen with arrows in their shoulders. Moving on.

But I deliberately sidestepped around the climax, of course. Because, yeah. It is, objectively speaking, a little twee. The Boltzmann Brain sensed Rukiya’s loneliness, it wanted a friend, so it brought her out of the transport buffer, cured her space cancer (Odd that there is not only no payoff from what M’Benga learned from Omelas, but if anything he seems farther than ever from a treatment), and brought her story to life for her. Cool. But she’ll relapse if they leave the nebula. So M’Benga and the Enterprise can stay there forever, or they can leave her behind.

And they try not to say it, but let us not sugar coat it: “It’s only her body that’s dying,” says Debra. But that is the usual kind of dying. Staying in the nebula with Debra is dying. I mean, she turns into a magical space angel, sure, but again, we are still talking about something isomorphic to the usual form of death. This is a story about end-of-life care, and M’Benga realizing that it is time to let his daughter die.

I am still tapdancing around the subject here. “King Ridley wanted to keep the Mercury Stone, as it protected him and made him happy… until he learned it had a soul, and that it would die if he held onto it; he had to let it go, even if it meant he would not be happy anymore.” Perhaps one day Fresno will watch this episode and have something to say about mirrors and the fact that Rukiya, is the Mercury Stone. Mercury, which is both a fluid and a mirror. Yet by characterizing it as a “stone”, implied to be fixed in form, just as Rukiya, in the transport buffer is both formless – having no physical existence, yet fixed in form, unable to grow or change, frozen in a moment. Held fixed in formlessness, her body will live but her soul will die. Instead, she becomes a non-corporeal being like Debra: formless, but not fixed. Her body will die, but her soul will live, and, as we are shown a moment later, free to grow up, conveniently on fast-forward so that M’Benga can see the truth of it.

“Even if it meant he would not be happy anymore.” I can’t type that out without weeping. It is, perhaps, a black mark that she reappears a moment later and tells him to be happy and he says he will. Hopeless Star Trek optimism rather than honoring the choice. He did the right thing. He gave her up. He let her go. He did it because it was right. Even if it meant he would not be happy anymore. That’s what a parent does.

The end.

“Spock Amok”* or “Hijinks Ensue”

Influences: “Shore Leave” (TOS), “The Trouble with Tribbles” (TOS), “Turnabout Intruder” (TOS), “Amok Time” (TOS), “Turnabout Intruder” (TOS), “Data’s Day” (TNG), “Lower Decks” (TNG)

* “Spock Amok” is clearly a double-reference to the TOS episode “Amok Time” and also to the Warner cartoon “Duck Amuck”. It kinda works?

Oh good. A goofy one.

To be honest, I think we’re a little early in the series to do a goofy one. Watching the gang cut loose doesn’t carry the same weight when we haven’t spent a lot of time watching them be not-cut-loose. Also, this gang is pretty chill on their on-days already. There’s nothing shocking or subversive about watching Chapel cruising for casual sex or M’Benga going fishing, or whatever Ortegas was doing – why didn’t we get to spend more time with Ortegas? (We also do not see what Hemmer does. And while I’m not as in love with Hemmer as some people, after the reveal last week that he wanted to be a botanist, why not have a scene of him chilling out somewhere on this giant greenhouse space station?)

So really, it’s mostly about the Spock/T’Pring plot and the Una/La’an plot. And… Hoo boy. Really, watching Una and La’an play Enterprise Bingo because they’re uncomfortable with their reputation as buzzkills is definitely a plot that would work better in season three than season one. I’ve been saying this about Una since we learned her name back in “Q&A”: this whole “We finally get to see the softer side of the brilliant, cold, detached Number One” thing only works if we sometimes get to see the brilliant, cold, detached side of her as well, and that’s one front on which Strange New Worlds hasn’t delivered (The other front? Actual Strange New Worlds. This week’s Strange New World is the oldest, Earth-adjacent starbase). And I like Una. I think she’s been great. But she hasn’t really been “Number One”, and that means that you don’t really get a lot of punch out of these “But really Number One is still a soft and compassionate person with normal needs and wants” scenes. It is abstractly interesting to see what mildly-subversive-rulebreaking-fun would look like for the Enterprise crew: phaser duels in the halls, using the transporter to recharge your gum, etc., but it doesn’t have a lot of weight to it. Taken in tandem with last week, sure, it’s good to see some fun. It doesn’t do much for me, though. It’s nice, and maybe that should be enough? The climax of their story is Una deciding that rather than sneaking out in space suits to sign the deck plate, she’ll set up a pressurized force field so they can rawdog it on the hull. This sounds very cool and awesome. Maybe in IMAX? The cinematography lets me down here. It’s shot too close, maybe? Or maybe CGI space shots are just sufficiently normalized here that the impact is muted. Whatever it is, I can very clearly see that they were going for a sense of grandeur and majesty. I just don’t feel it. They get to see the R’ongovia ship unfurl its solar sails and fly the flag of Federation while standing unprotected among the stars (I mean, aside from the forcefield) and they are clearly moved by it, space being the sort of thing one normally only sees on a viewscreen or through glass. But, of course, I am still watching it on a rectangle of plastic, and I just saw basically the same FX shot from Pike’s POV a few seconds ago. This is like if you were watching The Wizard of Oz on a black-and-white television. Sure, the music and Judy Garland’s reactions tell me this is a big deal, but that’s for them, not me.

Oh, the R’ongovians. Are also there. I dig the whole, “Their civilization is based around radical empathy, so Pike wins the day by empathizing with their misgivings about joining the Federation,” thing; that’s good old-fashioned A-Plot/B-Plot/C-Plot thematic mirroring, what with Spock and T’Pring trying to empathize with each other and Una and La’an trying to empathize with the rank-and-file. But it’s the weakest of the subplots, not really going into a lot of depth or earning its reveals. Possibly interesting that the R’ongovians seem to get hung up on the concept of democracy, which has some multi-layered logic to it. You might at first think that radical empaths would value democracy. But if they reflexively adjust themselves to match whoever is speaking, governance based on many disparate voices all talking at once is probably disorienting for them (To clarify, I don’t think this is meant to be any sort of “Alien Power”, but rather a cultural bias in how they approach social interaction, or at least political interaction). This is likely why they insisted on speaking only to a single representative – having Pike, April, and Spock all come at them from different directions would have been a problem. Also, Uhura is just literally there and isn’t allowed to contribute anything to the plot, and that makes me sad. On the plus side, we see Pike wearing the SNW version of Kirk’s Casual Friday Green Wraparound uniform. Not sure it make a lot of sense for him to wear it to a function of this import. Also, I think of that uniform as “casual”, but Pike’s version appears to be leather, which tells me things I was not ready to learn about how Pike spends his leisure time.

So the main thrust of the episode is that Spock and T’Pring are having some relationship troubles. Spock has a nightmare where his Vulcan Side and his Human Side have to fight in the ritual of Kal-if-fee, which means fighting with the giant bladed Q-Tips while onlookers play the Kirk-Spock-Fight-Song on their hexagons full of tiny bells. This is the most enjoyable TOS homage we’ve had so far, but it’s also, like, deep, man. When you realize that Spock tells T’Pring about this right now – about how he has literal nightmares about his human side and his Vulcan side doing the Kal-if-fee fight – and that in ten year’s time, she is going to use this against him. She is literally going to force him to reenact his nightmare. Honestly, the fact that Spock’s relationship with T’Pring seems to be going well right now is very uncomfortable given how it ends. So Spock’s deep fear is that he isn’t Vulcan enough for her. That she finds his human side gross. Given that it turns out that punishing Vulcans who embrace emotion is her job, this seems like a reasonable fear. But the really wonderful thing they do in this episode is to show us what her actual issue is: it’s not that he’s too human. It’s that she fears that he’s only marrying her out of duty and that if he had his freedom, he wouldn’t choose a Vulcan, or at least not her – which is triggered bad when he misses their special cone-shaped dinner for a work thing. Remember, theirs is a culture that has arranged marriages. You would think that an unemotional Vulcan would be okay with marrying for duty. But SNW remembers that Vulcans have emotions, they’re just private about them. They took T’Pring, who the audience is kinda primed to hate, and made her the avatar of what relationship anxiety would look like in a Vulcan. Vulcans are intensely private about their emotions, so secure attachment in a Vulcan relationship must require a really intense reading of your partner’s subtle cues. A Vulcan would, indeed, marry purely out of duty. But a Vulcan wouldn’t lie about this. Because Spock is culturally Vulcan, biologically half-human, and psychologically somewhere in-between, T’Pring can’t trust that he would be honest about his feelings, and she can’t trust that her experiences reading the subtle clues to Vulcan emotions are accurate for him, and on top of that, Spock works much harder at hiding his emotions than other Vulcans, precisely because he’s half-human and terrified of letting his human side show among his people.

And, like, Spock’s experience of Vulcan culture is not an entirely happy one. He was bullied as a child. He had a learning disability that was misdiagnosed. He was the victim of a terror attack. His pet died tragically. His father was emotionally distant and berated his career choices. It Spock were to say, “I really do not want anything to do with this whole traditional Vulcan arranged marriage and I’m not really even all that into Vulcans romantically, but I’ll do this because I’ll feel guilty if I don’t,” that would, point of fact, be entirely believable behavior (Okay, small note here – Spock went into Starfleet over his father’s objections rather than going to the Vulcan Science Academy. This is a counterpoint to the idea that Spock might enter a loveless marriage purely out of duty. But it’s not a contradiction; people are messy). This is why Spock’s defense when he skipped out on dinner, or back in episode 1 when he skipped out on Engagement Sex, landed so poorly with T’Pring: for Spock, he’s saying, “I want to be with you, but I can’t”; for T’Pring, he’s saying, “I view you and my job as competing obligations rather than things I am emotionally invested in.” Every time Spock says, “I don’t want to do this but I’d feel guilty if I didn’t,” T’Pring wonders if he said the same thing to Chris when he booked time off to go see her, and the more he does it, the more it hurts.

So they swap bodies. Because that is a thing Vulcans can do now. I get it; we had Spock stash is soul in McCoy when he died (Does… Does that mean that Spock and McCoy had sex on the astral plane? Not complaining if true, just curious), and one time Surak’s soul got stuffed in Scott Bakula for a bit. But it was a lot more nebulous in those cases, and it didn’t really seem like taking on someone’s katra was really getting their whole identity so much as something more nebulous and soul-ish. This, instead, is much more Goofy Body Swap Episode. Which, of course, this is. They do go very high-road with it. T’Pring immediately calls out the fact that this seems like the sort of thing that would lead to hijinks, but it mostly doesn’t. They come out to Pike basically right away, and Spock comes out to Chapel right away. Circumstances require both of them to do each other’s jobs, but only Spock gets any hilarity out of it, cold-cocking a revolutionary. T’Pring approaches the R’ongovia negotiations from a position of skepticism about the Federation, and that turns out to be the right move with them, but she doesn’t make any amusing faux pas.

Spock, meanwhile, has to go do T’Pring’s job. And it turns out she’s a cop? We had previously established in last season’s Discovery that the Vulcan version of the criminal justice system involved sending people to Time Out at a meditation retreat so they could have a good long think about what they’ve done. T’Pring speaks about it primarily in terms of shepherding Vulcans who have strayed from the “path of logic”. You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s actually illegal to be illogically emotional under Vulcan law. It’s almost an afterthought that Spock clarifies that the dude she’s looking for incited an uprising. Spock’s ultimate solution of decking Barjan for being an asshole is kinda fine, but if the point of the scene is “Oh see, T’Pring would never do that, but Spock would,” maybe establish at any point in the series’s 60-year history that Spock is the sort of dude who would punch someone in the face in response to a snide remark about his friend (Obviously, if you talk smack about his mom, Spock is going to lose it, but generally he’s more into wrestling holds and strangulation than a right hook). I do, on the other hand, like that Barjan, despite being part of the emotion-embracing Vulcan counterculture, is incredibly racist toward humans, rather than thinking they’re cool and exciting. It strays from the fished-out pool of “Logical Vulcans hate humans for their emotionality, but a Vulcan who is more open about emotions will find humans fun and cool.” Turns out that you can embrace emotion and still be an asshole.

Not 100% sold on the end of that plot though. They swap back by asking Chapel and M’Benga for help, and they find an entirely medical solution, involving some zaps to the forehead to, uh… Make their souls uncomfortable enough that they’ll pop out? Weirdly, I feel like something more cliche and magical would work better here; there’s an uncomfortable interface with M’Benga using medical science to reverse a quasi-mystical soul-swap, even as he admits that katras are basically magic. If they’d put in the work to earn it, maybe, or even if we were in the world of Star Trek: Enterprise where space medicine was a lot more, “I’ll just rub you with urchin goo and hope for the best; medicine is not an exact science and our understanding of evolution is comes mostly from Chick tracts.” By which I more seriously mean that the confidence with which M’Benga and Chapel approach the problem conflicts with the extent to which their solution feels like an ass-pull. You could see other generations of Trek reaching the same medical intervention, but only after a few scenes of them trying stuff and failing before finally conceding that katras are magic and the best they can do is a desperation move where they try to spook the katras and hope they will just magically do the right thing.

And then we end on the unsubtle hinting of Chapel being interested in Spock. Interested enough that she will give up her happy freewheeling life of ethical non-monogamy and settle down for a decade of fruitless pining. This is upsetting, but far less upsetting than it is inevitable; we all know that Chapel is going to crush on Spock, so it has to happen at some point in SNW. But they did such a good job at establishing that isn’t who she is at this point in her life that any movement in the direction of her becoming the wet rag who spends years pining for a man unable to show affection is both unwelcome and premature. This just doesn’t justify a shift like that.

This episode is fine. Not as good as a complete product as some of the previous ones. I would’ve liked the “light” episode to have more variety to it, spend more time with the others, be goofy in more ways than the world’s most tame body swap (Spock doesn’t even notice that he’s got lady bits until Chapel points it out to him. This is possibly the only body swap episode of any show ever to not at least include a little nod to the experience of trying out the alternative equipment load-out. I mean except the first time Star Trek did that, because it was the ’60s and they were more concerned with getting in their required amount of gender role essentialism).

Anyway, I really like the denouement between Spock and T’Pring, with them both owning their own anxieties. And more than that, I’m fascinated by one particular observation from Spock: that he likes being in Starfleet because it’s the first time in his life that he hasn’t felt rejected for being “too human” or “too Vulcan”: in Starfleet, it is enough for him to be “Just Spock”. Starfleet values him as an individual rather than as a Vulcan, Human, or hybrid. I love this because of the contrast with Una a few weeks ago: Spock rejoices in the one thing that left Una uncomfortable. She lamented that it wasn’t enough to be “Just Ilyrian”, but Spock is content to be “Just Spock”.

I wonder how much that difference will play into whatever destiny Una has coming.

“Memento Mori” or “The Wrath of La’an”*

Influences: “Balance of Terror” (TOS), “Disaster” (TNG), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, “The Year of Hell” (VOY). There’s also at least two episodes of DS9 that I think this draws from, but I can’t remember enough details to look up the titles.

* If they don’t use “The Wrath of La’an” as an actual episode title, it will be the biggest missed opportunity since they named this series “Strange New Worlds” instead of Star Trek: Pike Hard.

You know, for a show called “Strange New Worlds”, you know what this show has been a little light on? Worlds that are strange and new. We had a world back in the first episode that was new, but, tbh, not all that strange. There’s a world in the second one but the gang doesn’t actually go to it. Last week’s world was strange, sure, but the overwhelming majority of the action takes place on the Enterprise. Ditto this week. And next week, spoilers, will take place while the Enterprise is docked back at Earth for repairs. Seriously, “Pike Hard” would have been a delightful name for this show and technically more accurate than “Strange New Worlds”.

Let us start with the realization that I am going to end up spending an unwise amount of money to buy a full set of Remembrance Day lapel pins, particularly after I already spent a stupid amount of money on Discovery and Lower Decks lapel pins, and they didn’t even have a Confederation of Earth or La Sirena pin set out yet. Hey, if an episode begins with Pike’s voiceover explaining that today is a holiday where everyone wears pins commemorating ships where they lost friends, and La’an can’t bring herself to wear a pin, what’s the one thing you can absolutely guarantee will happen at the end of the episode? Yeah, wow that is heavy-handed.

Also, it turns out Chief Kyle was on the Shenzhou? And Chapel was on the Farragut? The former, fine. Sure. Okay. But you’d think that Chapel having been on the Farragut (as a civilian?) when it lost half it’s crew to the cloud monster might have come up at some point?

This week is a tense cat-and-mouse game between a crippled Enterprise and a couple of Gorn ships. I’m not entirely on-board with the decision to lean in so hard on the Gorn as evil boogeymen; in their original appearance in the TOS episode “Arena”, they came off as assholes, sure, but it felt like they had a legitimate dispute with the Federation, and maybe it’s just me, but the impression I got by the end of the episode was that the Gorn could be reasoned with and might eventually join the Federation. Here, La’an is pretty clear that the Gorn view mammals as prey and just kinda get off on being violently evil for the lolz. They edge a little close to Enterprise-levels of coyness with the Gorn. I do like that they are more explicit here than Enterprise would be, making it clear that the Gorn are known-of to the Federation, but there’s been no formal first contact, and survivors of encounters with them are so rare that there’s never been confirmed and documented face-to-face contact, but it’s not the thing which fanboys usually assume, where because Kirk treated them as a new species, literally zero humans had ever met one or even heard of them. I bring up Enterprise because it was so fond of these very cutesy, “The NX-01 gang meets a species that was introduced as ‘new’ in TNG but it’s okay because no one says their name,” plots.

Also, though, I wonder if there’s a larger trend that this touches on. We know by now that Jim Kirk is destined to make an appearance in Strange New Worlds at some point. And I wonder how they will play him. Because you can take a lot of what has happened in SNW and in season 2 of Disco as throwing a bit of very lowkey shade at Kirk. Pike knows who Spock’s parents are. He knows about his sister. Kirk is repeatedly surprised by the existence of Spock’s family. Pike knows, winkingly, about the mirror universe; Kirk is ignorant. Chapel apparently has some connection to the Farragut disaster and it’s not clear if Kirk knew this. Half of Kirk’s crew served under Pike. Pike calls Kirk’s brother “Sam”, when in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Jim’s robot duplicate claims that no one else calls him that. I think they might be trying to deliberately send out vibes that maybe Kirk is just… Kind of dumb? There’s been multiple occasions now where you get the impression that things which will one day be surprising to Kirk are approached by Pike as, “Yes, of course all captains know about this; we just don’t talk about it.”

But back to the Gorn, I like that Pike’s reaction to learning it’s the Gorn he’s up against carries a hint of a reflexive dismissal: even though he knows the Gorn are real, La’an has basically told him that his ship just got attacked by bigfoot: the Gorn of the mid-23rd century are like the Borg of the mid-24th: they’re cryptids. La’an disputes this, of course, but she does acknowledge where Pike’s coming from. She instinctively knows that to Pike and the rest of the crew, she may as well have told them they were being attacked by Slenderman, but for her, the Gorn are very real. We don’t actually see any Gorn in this episode, which weighs the narrative in favor of Pike’s perspective rather than La’an’s. The Gorn are an unseen, violent force that the Enterprise has little defense against. (The fact that we do not see any Gorn in person is a shade disappointing, especially after Pike even warns the crew to get ready for hand-to-hand combat).

Minor point against the episode: they use a boarding tunnel to evacuate the cargo ship but we don’t get a VFX shot of it origamiing into position like we did the last time Enterprise used a boarding tunnel back in Discovery. This does bring me to another note, which is that I spent years complaining that NuTrek doesn’t do enough Starship Porn, and apparently I was still holding that cursed money’s paw from last week one of those times, because this episode, like “Children of the Comet”, has a lot of Starship Effect Shots, and… It’s not great. Firstly, the compositing isn’t fantastic; the Enterprise doesn’t always look like it’s part of the environment. Also, the lighting on the Enterprise is often terrible – trying to make it look like it’s part of the environment by having it constantly shadowed or reflecting things or just looking kind of flat. But more than that. One of the recurrent issues people had with the visual effects back when Star Trek used physical models is that space ships were depicted like battleships. They didn’t move a lot, and mostly just traded shots broadsides, like it’s the Napoleonic Wars. And now… They do not. And one thing that’s increasingly clear when they do this in Strange New Worlds is why the Discovery looks the way it does, and why La Sirena looks the way it does. Because the concepts that went into the design of the USS Enterprise back in the 1960s presumed that it was a Big Naval Vessel – a battleship. It is designed to look like it moves like a battleship. The Enterprise looks like it’s supposed to be tanking, not dodging. The USS Enterprise doing fancy maneuvering in space sounds really cool, but when you actually look at it… It looks kinda goofy, because he Enterprise has this big flat top part, and this narrow bit at the bottom and these spindly bits in the back, and it is shaped roughly like an aircraft carrier. You know what did this okay? Battlestar Galactica. The fighters did the fancy stuff; Galactica sat there and tanked nukes because it was big and heavy and shaped like a brick. We have a little of that when Enterprise defeats one of the Gorn ships by diving too low into the brown dwarf, relying on Enterprise to simply outlast the smaller ship – which in fact, hilariously crumples under the pressure.

After the whole thing last week revealing Una as Ilyrian, it’s sort of odd that they have her spend the entire episode laid up from the gut wound she receives before the title sequence. The bits with Una, M’Benga and Chapel in sickbay are oddly detached from the rest of the plot. I assume the big goal here is for M’Benga to pay it backward for Una’s help last week in keeping his daughter safe, but it just doesn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the episode, and it’s always a little disappointing when Chapel doesn’t have much to do. I kinda liked the reference to Chapel having studied “archaeological medicine” and thus being qualified to stitch Una up by hand. Having her describe septic shock as being like, “Giving birth through your mouth,” not so much.

An oddity of this episode compared to other Starship Disaster episodes from the franchise is that despite how badly Enterprise is banged up, they never lose contact with large parts of the ship. Different groups of people are isolated in different places, but they can still talk to each other. That’s very different from the archetype for this sort of plot, the TNG episode “Disaster”, where a major plot element was that the folks on the bridge couldn’t even be sure anyone was alive in the stardrive section.

Speaking of “Disaster”, it’s a bit jaw-dropping the extent to which Uhura and Hemmer’s plot is a straight-up carbon copy of the Geordi/Crusher plot from that episode. Trapped in a cargo bay: check. Cargo about to explode: check. Blind engineer: check. Problem ultimately solved by opening the back door: check. The main point of divergence is that Hemmer is injured early on, forcing Uhura to do most of the manual labor, which also parallels plot elements of “Disaster”: Picard’s subplot where his ankle is broken so he needs a bunch of children to do all the actual work. Once again, Hemmer is good and all (His little aside about how he reconciles Aenar pacifism with Starfleet’s military role is welcome, even if it connects only loosely to the rest of the plot. Also, he mentions that he’d wanted to be a botanist, but doesn’t say why he went into engineering instead. Is there a deleted take where he explains that he just wasn’t any good at it, and Uhura makes a “green thumb” reference that comes off as crass given that she’s using a metaphor about color and thumbs to a blind man with a broken hand?), but I’m still not feeling the tremendous love I see a lot of other people giving him. He’s… Fine? I’m a little discouraged about the thing where Aenar have precognitive abilities. Not unlike Geordi’s VISOR, they make a subtle shift that I think partially undermines what’s interesting about making the character blind: there’s a sense in which he kinda isn’t blind; he just has a different kind of sensory apparatus. That said, Hemmer’s blindness is much more legitimate in its presentation than Geordi’s, both in the way it’s written and the way it affects his approach to the world, and also in the fact that Bruce Horak is, in fact, blind, while Levar Burton is not.

The Uhura-Hemmer subplot is an interesting parallel, because the rest of the plot isn’t really that close to “Disaster”; most of “Memento Mori”‘s focus is on the cat-and-mouse game between Enterprise and the Gorn, which makes this more similar to… Honestly a whole bunch of other episodes where the hero-ship is outgunned and needs to hide out and wait for a strategic moment to make full advantage of their limited resources. Among the modernizations of the plot this time around is that Pike’s first plan is structured like the kind of saving throw we’re used to seeing, but it backfires: he drops their one remaining torpedo onto the Gorn, and that much works (They’re in the gravity well of a brown dwarf, so things still fall when dropped), but the Gorn expected as much and sacrificed one of their ships so that the explosion would alert the rest of their fleet to Enterprise’s position. We get some very nice Star Trek-style technobabble when Spock explains how to repurpose the atmospheric data used for navigation to locate the Gorn, and Pike very helpfully provides the analogy of turning a compass into radar. The technobabble around the “Pike Maneuver” is less good, and I had a hard time quite figuring out the plan here, possibly less because the plan was complicated and more because it wasn’t but the narrative wanted us to feel like it had a lot of gravitas. Also gravity. The maneuver just seems to be a gravitational assist – this is a perfectly normal thing that real spacecraft do. It’s hard in context because their ship is badly damaged, they have to tuck in close to a black hole, they’re already under the strain of the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, and they’re being chased by murderous lizard-men, but it’s not a conceptually complicated maneuver. But they throw in some other stuff that kind of sounds reminiscent of the Picard Maneuver to do with the sensor distortions close to a black hole, and they’re gonna whang the exploding atmospheric processor out the back while they fly by, and it’s just hard to quite follow all the details, and it sounds like more is happening than actually is.

I think the plan just boils down to using gravity assist to pull a quick skedaddle, using the exploding equipment to fake their own deaths. Possibly the proximity to the black hole is creating an optical illusion that will make the explosion appear big enough to act as cover? Because in the end, the Gorn apparently think the Enterprise has been destroyed and have already left by the time the ship makes it around the far side of the black hole, rather than sticking around to make sure.

Of course, throwing around phrases like “Gravitational slingshot” in a Star Trek story gets the imagination fired up, so it’s unexpected that nothing else comes of it. Like nothing. I’d have to review the dialogue in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” to be sure, but I don’t think anything there proclaims in a firm way that time travel by gravity slingshot had never been done before – it’s more like one of those things where everyone was broadly familiar with the concept, but the details hadn’t been worked out yet. So to not get anything at all about it is odd. Even just, say, one line from Spock about how the gravitational slingshot had caused a minor distortion in the chronometer. It’d be a great place to touch base back to Discovery, even: Spock mentions the possibility that the maneuver they just did could possibly create a time warp, and Pike very pointedly “reminds him” that the Vulcan Science Institute Has Declared Time Travel to be Impossible. It’s an idea you could stick in your pocket here for why Spock is able to do the math for time travel so easily later in life: he’s actually been thinking about this for years on account of his sister.

And then there’s La’an. This is really very clearly her episode, which makes it strange that she feels sort of bracketed from a lot of what’s going on. Big point in her favor, and the show’s, is how easily she owns her PTSD about the Gorn. She doesn’t fall into the cliche we saw with Tilly or Detmer in past seasons of Discovery and spin the wheels for a while refusing to acknowledge how much her trauma has affected her. When Pike asks her about her experience with the Gorn, she immediately confesses that she’s suppressed most of her memories about it because of the trauma. And they take the step explicitly that Discovery only took implicitly, having Spock directly say that mind-melds aren’t a substitute for therapy, and that powering through one’s mental defenses is bad actually. Also, they mention Spock’s sister who apparently had been scrubbed from the official record? I know Spock mentioned that he was never going to talk about her again, but I’m not clear on why erasing her entire existence was necessary. The existence of Discovery isn’t classified; Pike was openly wearing a Discovery pin. It’s just that the circumstances of its loss were covered up. This is similar to the weirdness in the premiere, where Spock admits to the whole time travel thing, rather than just going with the cover story-compatible, “Discovery was lost during a battle”.

I do really dig the gambit of Galileo blinking its lights at the Gorn ships to get them to shoot at each other. Honestly kinda feels like an Adventure Game Puzzle. The one thing that I find weak about it is that when we see the notebook in La’an’s memories, it’s clear that the Gorn light-based communications aren’t a language. They’re a substitution cipher for English. Like, there’s a one-to-one correspondence written out in that notebook for the Latin alphabet to Gorse code. Also, as much as I like the puzzle-solving aspect of it, there’s a slightly gross note to making the Gorn so cartoonishly unpleasant that their one weakness is that it’s trivial to get them to turn on each other by making them look weak.

But in all, it’s another solid episode at least on the surface level. It’s fun. It’s actiony. It’s human. It doesn’t quite transcend that, but it also isn’t really trying. If this were the only Star Trek currently on the sorta-air, I might not be as excited as I am, but Strange New Worlds is the first Nu-Trek to really feel like it was made from the ground up to be part of a Star Trek ecosystem. This is not “the time they finally got it right” or “the one that didn’t go too Woke(tm)” or “the good one”. It’s the one that was made to fill this niche. What I’m most excited for now? We’ve already seen that this past season of Picard, while far from perfect, was a lot more focused than the first. If the people making these shows are starting to get the message that if they’re gonna make a dozen shows, they can tailor each one to a particular piece of the puzzle, that frees them up from having to shoehorn Everything for Everyone into Every show. And if that means that Discovery‘s fifth season might actually commit its entire episode count to something without meandering off for a few episodes? Yes, please.

So last week when I said I didn’t care if it made no sense and I just wanted them to go fucking nuts… Probably shouldn’t have said that while holding the cursed money’s paw. Oh well.

Yeah, the resolution to the whole “Two Renees” thing is that Tallinn is going to impersonate Renee so she can get murdered by Soong. That’s certainly something. It feels like a waste. I mean, there was a perfect out here to have it turn out that Soong’s poison doesn’t work on Romulans. I assumed that was what was coming: send Tallinn to go do something that would’ve killed Renee because her Romulan physiology would protect her. That way she could go on to be Laris’s grandmom. Why is Tallinn Romulan in the first place? Just to explain why she looks like Picard’s housekeeper? Can’t it just be that lots of planets have an Orla Brady? Same as how lots of planets have a Jeffrey Combs? Also… We clearly see that she’s got her human ears on when they’re sneaking around the launch site. We established that she can only use her appearance-changing gizmo once every eight hours. Again, why?

We got this side-plot of the rest of the gang taking out Soong’s drones, but it seems like just busywork. It’s nice that it gives them something to do, and we have some semblance of traditional Trek competency porn for Rios and Raffi – who’ve largely been denied a chance to show off their skills this season. The real attempt on the mission is that Soong bullies his way into a private meeting and straight up murders Renee with poison. Or at least, he thinks he does. And remember, at this point the Borg queen is gone, Q is gone, Kore is gone; he’s doing this purely on the queen’s word that in the absence of Renee Picard, he will be remembered fondly in the fascist future. When it was to save his daughter, he was distraught and conflicted about resorting to violence. When it was to hold up his end of the deal with the scary space lady, he used hired intermediaries. But when it’s to make himself super famous, he’s willing to remorselessly murder a woman face-to-face with his literal hand.

It’s a good thing I lack the business acumen to be a techbro. Because when I look at that desperate, cloying fear that they will fade away and cease to exist if the world stops adoring them… Yeah, I could see myself trying to justify a little astronaut-murder. What I don’t like about Soong’s arc, though is just how hard he is to defeat. One thing I liked in Discovery is the extent to which their crap villains always turn out to be trivial to defeat once the crew stops fucking around. It’s a very clean message. Here, Soong, despite being kind of a joke of a human, takes just an infuriating amount of hard work and sacrifice from a crew that has mostly been all on the same page for this whole adventure.

Also infuriating is the extent to which Renee Picard is such a minor character in a story where she is the lynchpin of history. I mean, it’s a choice, I guess. Typically for modern Trek, the finale resolves the plot about 20 minutes in, leaving the rest of its runtime for

And in the end, Soong flies back into a funk upon learning that he’s failed to murder the right person, only made worse when his daughter deletes his life’s work. Which leads to him pulling out a folder about Khan that he keeps in his desk. Since there will be no follow-up on this next season, it feels like a waste. Not sure how this weaves into the retconning of the Eugenics war we’re simulcasting over on Strange New Worlds. Is this meant to mean that Soong is going to create the augments? Is Khan Noonien-Singh actually meant to be the second Khan, and the references to him being from the ’90s are the result of historians conflating him with the project that inspired Soong? Given Soong’s age, did he actually work on the augments back in the ’90s, and that folder is meant to be just the very oldest part of his research, all he’s left with now that Kore’s deleted the rest? Should I even care?

It is, of course, at this point in the episode that we reveal that the alien benefactors of the Supervisors are…. The Travelers?

I mean, it kinda makes sense. The Travelers are maybe higher-dimensional beings, which would explain why Gary Seven, despite apparently not having any time travel capacity of his own, knows enough future history to identify where Kirk and Spock come from, and how Tallinn can have an understanding of Renee’s destiny. On the other hand, the last Traveler we met had to hitchhike in order to get around on this plane of existence – their whole thing was bumming around the universe, trying not to get involved. They really seem to be possessed of any sort of material resources like bank vaults of rectangle-shaped smoke cloud transporters.

I’m burying the lede. The lede is that Wil Wheaton returns to Star Trek for a cameo as…. Well, if I’m being honest, he returns to play Wil Wheaton, Geek Icon and Geek Culture Commentator. It’s just that for some reason he’s doing a weaksauce cosplay of Wesley Crusher, a minor character he used to play back when he did dramatic acting before he found his true calling. This is fine, because Wil Wheaton generally a better person to be than Wesley Crusher. Wesley Crusher, for some reason, has come back in time to hire Kore Soong to be a Watcher. Since Isa Briones has confirmed she won’t be in season 3 of Picard, this plot point means basically nothing.

Also, they disappear in what look like standard 25th century transporter sparklies rather than a 2022 visual update of the original “phasing” effect or the Supervisor transporter effect. Boo.

Finally, we get to the showdown between Q and Picard and… They hug it out. Of course they do. Q derailed all of history for no better reason than to help Picard get over his mother’s suicide. Because he likes him. Q assures Picard that he has no higher agenda, nothing important is coming for which Picard needed an important lesson about trust and letting go of the past…. Except that is is plainly not true, as we see when the gang gets home. And why has Q been such an unrelenting asshole this whole time about it? He hit Picard at one point. Is that just the depression talking? His, mine, whoever’s.

So yeah, everyone makes up and it is very happy and sad, and Picard and Q hug it out like the old friends they kinda sorta are, because Picard put the skeleton key back in the hidey-hole where his younger self will find it three hundred years later. I’m still confused about where it came from. And it only cost a whole bunch of human lives, two Romulan lives, Jurati’s humanity, and a surprising number of windows. I note here that per Q, Tallinn dies “in every timeline”. I’d like to know how that works out, because it’s only due to Q’s interference that the danger Renee was facing ended up being a murderous techbro rather than her own personal demons. Tallinn only needed to sacrifice himself because Q and Agnes convinced Soong to stop the Europa mission.

Unless… Wait… Okay, is it possible that Q never actually did anything to the timeline? I brought up before that it seemed odd that, from Q’s point of view, he was messing with Renee after the Confederation Timeline was already established. So, if we compare this to, say, “All Good Things”, perhaps we should understand that it’s not a matter of Q manipulating the timeline. Rather, when Jean-Luc destroys Stargazer – and the Borg Queen with it, one assumes – this creates a paradox, and the timeline reconfigures all on its own, to a stable configuration where the Europa mission fails. All Q did was to preserve memories of the previous timeline in Picard and his pals – one last gift to his old friend. It’s easy enough to interpret Q’s belligerence back at the beginning of the season as frustration that even after all this time, Jean-Luc still responded to fear with violence, thus endangering the timeline. The problem here is still that we don’t have any good reason for why the Europa mission would fail: that doesn’t seem like a natural progression without Q’s interference. Could we imagine some other catalyst for Soong trying to off Renee? Or perhaps some other form that her anxiety might have taken – that without Q playing therapist to stoke her anxieties in one particular way that was amenable to a big Picard Speech, she might have bailed out of the mission anyway?

(Q also mentions that he is dying alone, which might prompt some to wonder about his wife and kid. But I think it was well established that family relationships among the Q are very different than among humans. Also, here I might invoke the EU novel I, Q. In that, it’s the universe at large rather than Q personally that is dying (God decides to commit suicide. It’s complicated),  and Q is the only member of the continuum who doesn’t see this as an exciting opportunity to embrace oblivion. If it’s the continuum as a whole rather than Q individually that’s dying, it could well be that everyone else, including Q and Q, have already moved on, and only Q has lingered behind on this plane of existence to take care of unfinished business.)

Rios deciding to stay in the past is just about the most satisfying conclusion his barely-extant character arc could have. The little detail that he goes on to die young in a bar fight is…. Okay. Am curious how a dude who escaped from ICE in a violent breakout and has no documentation is going to travel freely around the world or even get home from France, but I guess maybe they get to keep Tallinn’s stuff? And if you had any doubts about the things I’ve repeatedly said about how pointless Rios is, keep track of how long it is from when the gang returns to the Stargazer and when any of Rios’s crew notices that their captain is missing. (Also, no one notices that Agnes is missing, which I am sure would play merry hell with her abandonment issues if she had not gone off to found the moist space cenobite polycule). Besides, we could always have Santiago Cabrera return as La Sirena’s emergency holograms, most of whom were more interesting characters than Rios. Except that Santiago Cabrera has already confirmed that he won’t be in season 3 of Picard, so never mind.

Raffi and Seven are very cute in the back half of this episode. They don’t have much left to actually do, but it’s nice. Raffi gets to threaten Q over Elnor’s death, and I like the detail that Q seems not to know who Elnor is, but then casually deflects that it was Annika’s husband who killed him. Elnor gets better, of course, one last gift from Q born from the energy he has left over since Rios stays behind. Of course, Evan Evagora has already confirmed that he won’t be in season 3 of Picard, so this plot point means nothing.

The end for Q, parting with Jean-Luc as old friends, the reveal that he was, deep down, always his favorite, and that all these tests were, on some level, a kind of gift, is exactly the ending I always wanted for Q, and yet it doesn’t quite work, because it doesn’t feel earned. In their desire to avoid telegraphing the ending, they made the natural end of Q’s arc feel like an ass-pull. They made it feel like an ass-pull despite the fact that we all kind of knew this was where it had to go anyway. They failed to avoid telegraphing the ending but succeeded in making the only possible end not feel like the natural consequence of the story.

Back in the future, the Borg Queen fails to give any explanation for why she showed up wearing a mask and refusing to explain herself. I mean, she has a good reason for what she’s doing, but why be so cryptic about it when she literally could have just taken the damn mask off and saved everyone a lot of trouble? Maybe we are going with, “She looked at all possible timelines and decided this one had the most panache.”

I realize emergency powers and all, but I’m a little disappointed in Janeway if she “went to bat” for getting Seven into Starfleet but Picard could just snap his fingers and fiat her into a commissioned captain and give her a ship. Also not a great look for Raffi that she never returns to her own ship for the big exciting climax.

Which is… I mean… I guess we should just wait and see if they’re going somewhere with this? So it turned out that Old Lady Agnes and her giant Borg Space Vagina shows up and freaked everyone out because they needed a fleet of ships with Borg enhancements because she needed a fleet to protect the quadrant from an impending Big Swirly Thing In Space. We get absolutely no explanation for this Big Swirly Thing in Space and nothing happens with it other than that it turns into a “new kind” of Transwarp Conduit.

And then the Borg ask to join the Federation so they can hang out by the Big Swirly Thing in Space just in case anything nasty comes through. I mean, it’s kind of lovely – the Federation making peace with the Borg feels like the perfect endcap to the TNG era. And it fits fine with the one reference to the Borg we got from the 32nd century – referring to them as something relevant even in their time, but not presented as an ongoing or persistent threat. That’s compatible with the Borg of the far-future being a Federation ally of limited influence.

The devil’s in the details, though. Because the Borg have shown up now leading into a bigger mystery – the transwarp conduit is a very obvious setup for future developments. Only Allison Pill has already confirmed that she won’t be in season 3 of Picard, so this plot point means nothing.

There’s a ton of good stuff in this show, but it just does not hang together properly, and despite considerable improvements in pacing and focus, it still just can not commit to exactly which story it’s going to tell – and it sure does look like they’ve made the decision to completely retool for the final season and just become the nostalgic romp everyone wanted them to be. Maybe that will work, but dammit, you actually got me to be interested in some new stuff.

I don’t know. Maybe there’s a bit of a misdirect here. Given that Paramount has taken the tack of “You know what we need? More Star Trek series running concurrently,” this season will in retrospect turn out to have all been a backdoor pilot for Star Trek: Sexy Space Ladies, and will follow the 25th century adventures of Captain O’Nine (Don’t call her “Captain Hansen” or you will die) of the USS Stargazer, her girlfriend Captain Musiker of the USS Excelsior, and Queen Agnes of the USS Scary Space Vagina as they deal with Lovecraftian horrors that come through the transwarp conduit, ably assisted by Space Legolas and a challenging double-role for Isa Briones as Android Ambassador Soji and her identical great-grandmom Kore the Traveler. Guest stars Brent Spiner as a parade of identical Soongs and Jeffrey Combs as everyone else.

Okay, I’ve actually made that seem super cool. I just made that up in my head and I am more optimistic about it than the Section 31 spin-off that’s apparently still coming eventually.

“Ghosts of Ilyria” or “I Know This Series Has Been a Bit of a TOS Glow-Up, But This Is Taking Things a Bit Far”

Influences: “The Naked Time” (TOS), “Wink of an Eye” (TOS), “The Deadly Years” (TOS),  “The Enemy Within” (TOS), “Unnatural Selection” (TNG), “Babel” (DS9), Star Trek Into Darkness, Episode 6 of the original radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Let us skip ahead a little. We will circle back around and pick up “Children of the Comet” later, because I’d like to get a little bit closer to real-time with these and also because I am curious whether context will change how I interpret it. For example, if I were to write about “Children of the Comet” this week, I would probably muse on whether they might make it a thing where Sam gets almost-killed every damn week but narrowly survives. Because that would be hilarious. You could even have his last appearance send him off saying that starship service is too dangerous and he’s going to transfer to a nice, safe planetside posting on Deneva. He doesn’t though.

I said last time that there’s a broad sense of doom clinging to the Enterprise in this show, musing whether we might see some tragedy ahead for, just as an example, M’Benga and Una.

Moved fast on that one. Yeah, I guess we learned an entirely plausible reason this week why Una will eventually disappear from canonical Star Trek and why M’Benga is demoted to McCoy’s backup.

Yeah, so. Turns out that Una and M’Benga have Deep Dark Secrets. Also Uhura needs it dark to sleep. Sorta. They keep talking about turning off all the lights to control the spread of the light-based disease, but “turning off the lights” involves dimming them very slightly. Man, this ship is brightly lit.

Also, Cadet Uhura sleeps in a Pullman berth in a room smaller than my work cubicle with two roommates, while Pike’s stateroom has an entire enchanted forest inside it. It’s good to be the boss.

The B-side of our plot is pleasant but a bit thin. Pike and Spock are trapped on the surface by an ion storm, so Spock reads up on the lost Ilyrian colony and Pike…. Is also there. We lay off Pike’s angst over his impending doom a bit. What I like the most about Pike in this episode is that he’s concerned about what’s going on on his ship, but he doesn’t develop the manic, obsessive, “I… must save… my… ship… Four… Hundred… Thirty… Souls are my response…. ability! SPOCK!” desperation that you’d see elsewhere in the franchise. Pike remains much more focused on the problem at hand – that there’s a big scary space-storm trying to kill them and also possibly ghosts. I like the depiction of Pike, but this subplot still didn’t really feel like it had all that much to it. I guess it’s meant to inform Pike’s ultimate understanding that Hey Maybe I Shouldn’t Be Reflexively Racist Against Ilyrians, but given that this was not actually a position he had been demonstrated to hold in the first place, not sure what was accomplished here.

Now, this is in itself an improvement over how this sort of thing would’ve been handled in the past. In the TNG era, we absolutely would’ve seen one of our beloved characters who had always been a decent sort of person in the past suddenly out of nowhere be jaw-droppingly racist for act 1 so that they could have the character growth in act 3 of learning that racism was wrong.

It probably would’ve been Riker.

So they do better here. The only character who actually does care is La’an, and though it hadn’t come up yet, it was baked into the character’s backstory. She’s descended in some unspecified way from Space-Hitler, and she’s already well-established as kind of judgmental and pushy, so her flipping out over the revelation that Una is an augment works with the character – and even then, her anger over Una’s true nature is secondary to her anger over the deception. They eventually make up over strawberries, which is ironic for an episode about a disease, because I think it was the week after this episode dropped that strawberries were linked to a Hep-A outbreak.

Also, La’an’s backstory is getting kind of tragic past the point where I can continue to take it seriously. Is she about to tell us about the time her dad dressed up as Santa but slipped coming down the chimney and broke his neck? (It’s a Gremlins reference. I know it’s hard to Google) La’an angrily explains how she was bullied and tormented for having the same last name as Khan (You know, it’s been what, three generations? They could’ve just changed their name), which was the worst thing that ever happened to her up until her entire family were gutted and eaten by evil space lizard men.

The name “Ensign Lance” amuses me for some reason. It feels very “Ensign Skippy”.

I will risk the wrath of the fanbase here by saying that Hemmer is…. Fine? I do not really connect with the tremendous love he seems to be getting on the internet. He’s fine. He’s gruff and self-assured and cocky in a deadpan way, but while he fits into the tradition of Comically Gruff Trek experts, I don’t find him as amusing as Reno or even T’Ana.

The story does a good job of keeping its themes all tied up nicely together. Enterprise is investigating a lost Ilyrian colony. Ilyrians are outcasts, unable to join the Federation because they use genetic engineering. Unlike humans, they didn’t abuse it to turn themselves into space-Nazis, but rather they practice a more holistic, Crunchy-Granola kind of genetic engineering to adapt themselves to Strange New Worlds instead of terraforming. I spoke recently (or maybe I haven’t. I don’t know what order things are in any more) about the confused status of genetic engineering in the Federation at the time of various incarnations of the franchise. It’s always been presumed illegal (Except that one TNG S2 episode), but the hardness of the ban and its social implications have varied. We saw in Discovery that Stamets is a transgenic tardigrade, which they said at the time was illegal but just handwaived, “Eh, Starfleet will give us a waiver because it’s important.” Later, Saru just trivially asks the doctor to modify his and Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly’s lungs to an alien atmosphere, and two weeks ago, Nurse Chapel very casually dicked around with everyone’s DNA. Though I believe Chapel did specify that what she was doing was epigenetic, so I could believe there’s a carve-out for that sort of thing. This episode comes down that the legal ban is pretty hard, and the episode really wants us to accept that there’s a strong cultural taboo, but it just does a terrible job at selling that. Literally everyone Una tells about it is just like, “Nope, don’t care,” except La’an, who isn’t even in her right mind when she lashes out about it.

Google tells me that the Ilyrians appeared in an episode of Enterprise where they tried hamhandedly to show us that things were all dangerous and morally gray now because Archer committed just straight-up space-piracy against them FOR THE GREATER GOOD. But those Ilyrians don’t say anything about genetic augmentation and are rubber forehead aliens, unlike Una, who is close enough to human to pass regular medical examinations. Fair, given the whole “genetic augmentation” thing, but I assume this means the name of her species was pulled out of a hat. Ilyria was also a historical region in the Balkans, and I think is one of those names traditionally used in old western European stories to mean “In a land far, far away.” It’s where Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is set.

The medical mystery aspects play out in much the way we’d come to expect from ’90s Trek. Competence porn at its finest. Chapel gets just a little time to shine – a well-placed line here and there that works well but leaves me wanting more. It’s really M’Benga’s show for most of the mystery, which makes it a bit unsatisfying when he succumbs to the light-sickness himself and thus sleeps through the climax. It seems like Chapel never gets it herself, an oddity that goes utterly unexplained. The resolution is a little hard to follow. La’an tries to open up the warp core for its tasty dangerous lighting, and both her and Una get a fatal dose of radiation – here’s a callback to Star Trek into Darkness of all things, because Una’s genetic augmentations allow her to heal from that. But for some reason, her augmented immune system also heals La’an, and in doing so, gives her immunity to the light plague, leaving her with chimeric antibodies that Chapel could synthesize into a cure. Una herself didn’t produce antibodies because her immune system worked differently. I even looked up what chimeric antibodies were, and I still don’t understand how that applies here, since Una didn’t have antibodies, and besides, why would light-plague antibodies be transferred and chimeritized to La’an? And what about scarecrow’s brain? I can just about get behind the whole “Una’s immune system cured La’an’s radiation poisoning”, since that is the one thing that they straight up established in Star Trek Into Darkness that you could do with augment blood. That it could just happen spontaneously due to proximity is…. Actually just plausible because of the TNG episode “Unnatural Selection”. But we’re still grasping here to connect all these things up. Do you just get instantly cured of whatever malady you happen to have if you stand next to Una when she does one of her healing Solar Flare Attacks? Maybe if they threaded the needle a little more by making it explicit that the light from the open warp core also filled the room with the virus? I mean, it almost works. The pieces just don’t quite line up, and that’s grating.

So we end up with the discovery that the Ilyrians on this planet wanted to join the Federation so badly that they were trying to un-augment themselves, which is why they all died, except for the ones who turned into light ghosts.

There’s no plot hole here; it’s explained okay and follows logically. But still, there’s something dramatically unsatisfying – to the point of being kind of goofy and just feeling wrong about this setup. Maybe it’s because there’s two mysteries going on in tandem that don’t quite tie up. Pike and Spock investigate what happened to the Ilyrians on the surface while Una, M’Benga and Chapel investigate what’s happening on the Enterprise. These should tie up nicely in the end, but instead there’s a tension: around the midpoint of the episode, we learn that Una is immune to the light disease because she’s Ilyrian. This should preclude the reveal on the surface. It’s really weird and uncomfortable from a storytelling perspective that the reveal on the surface is that the Ilyrians were killed off by a disease that Ilyrians not only are protected from, but where their ability to heal from it is the key to the other half of the episode.

While the full explanation – that the Ilyrians on the surface had removed their own healing factor in the hopes it would make them more acceptable to the Federation – is logical, it doesn’t actually make the story more satisfying. Maybe if they’d done it differently, it would be okay. If they’d started from the understanding that the Ilyrians had died from a disease, the mystery would have been “How did they die of a disease that isn’t harmful to their species?”, and then the un-augmentation angle would work as a reveal. But as it stands, we only come to understand what became of the colonists a few seconds before we learn of their project to remove their augmentations, so it’s never, “Why did this disease kill them in spite of their augmentations? Oh, because they removed their augmentations to comply with human bigotry,” but instead, “How did they die? Oh, they got a disease that wouldn’t have killed them except that they removed their augmentations to comply with human bigotry.” Too much of what should be setup is instead shoved down into the reveal. We learn too much about what Ilyrians are and what they can do through the plot on the ship with Una – we don’t have the proper context for the process of the mystery on the planet below until the very end, which leaves that plot terribly unbalanced.

A more balanced distribution to the mystery might have revealed the light disease very early. People on the ship are getting sick. We know that the disease killed the Ilyrians. The mystery is why their augmentations didn’t protect them. What the show-as-made saves for its final reveal should’ve been the middle reveal instead: Spock learns that the colonists had removed their own healing factor. So a normally-augmented Ilyrian would have survived, and Enterprise could be saved by an Ilyrian. Oh no, the Federation’s bigotry toward auguments will be the doom of the ship! Only then should we have had the reveal on Enterprise, that Una is Ilyrian and still has her augmentations. We see how the Federation taboo hurt the Ilyrians, and we see what the Federation stands to gain by moving beyond their bigotry. The episode mostly works in spite of this misstep, but it’s infuriating that it fails to quite tie things together.

And, of course, they could have gotten away with Enterprise knowing ahead of time about the disease, because of M’Benga’s side-plot. You could have started out with Pike explaining, perhaps to Ensign Skippy, that they know the Ilyrians were wiped out by a disease, but it’s safe for them to come investigate because, even though they haven’t isolated the pathogen yet, the biofilters have already proven effective at removing it before infection can set in.

I assume some of the neckbeards have already objected to the existence of biofilters prior to the TNG era. There’s nothing in canon about this, but one of the early TNG expanded universe novels does hinge on biofilters being a recent enough invention that its inventors are still working in the field. Biofilters really only ever come up in the context of not working, as is the case this week, because M’Benga, in a piece of highly relatable content, has been clicking “Remind Me Later” once a day when the medical transporter tells him it’s time to install the latest update.

And this too kinda makes sense but doesn’t quite close the loop. The issue is that because M’Benga hasn’t updated the medical transporter, they’ve still got some out-of-date safety protocols running, and when Hemmer diverted extra power to beam up the away team, the biofilters crashed. I think there was some good visual storytelling when Hemmer runs a diagnostic on the transporter and the lights blink out. That’s a good way to signal to the audience the proximate issue: M’Benga’s transporter is wired up to things it’s not supposed to be wired up to, so that a transporter issue can affect other systems in a way Hemmer wasn’t expecting. The problem here is that the medical transporter isn’t what they were using at the time, so why was it involved at all? This really only needs a little bit of spackle; the idea is something like “Just having one obsolete transporter on the network forced all the other ones to perform the deprecated insecure behavior,” but in context, what we’re told is basically that the transporter they were using has independent biofilters that weren’t affected by the power transfer, but M’Benga’s transporter was affected by it, and this somehow caused the upgraded biofilter in the main transporter to also not work. I also take some issue with the fact that Chief Kyle (another character whose career is apparently not going anywhere since he’s still the Enterprise’s transporter chief ten years later. But maybe that’s okay. As a chief, he’s basically a technical expert with a narrow field, so parking himself in a job forever isn’t unreasonable) isn’t notified about the biofilter failing. There should definitely be a blinky light for that.

M’Benga declined the transporter upgrade because he’s storing his kid in there while he looks for a cure for Space Cancer. Would’ve been a nice touch if she’d had the same kind of Space Cancer as Riker’s kid, since we’d be all primed every time Enterprise encountered something with a silicon brain to wonder whether it might be about to cure M’Benga’s daughter. Wouldn’t quite work, since Thad Riker had a much slower space-cancer than than she does (Though I suppose that’s trivially fixed by the words, “An unusually aggressive form of”). On the other hand, we open up the possibility either of M’Benga’s apparent demotion being punishment for this little gambit, or else him accepting a demotion to remain on Enterprise even after Jim hires on his old friend. Now, the whole thing does stretch credulity just a little. According to M’Benga, a person can be stored in the transporter indefinitely, so long as you occasionally rematerialize them. We’ve got a handful of examples of people being stuck in the transporter for extended periods, and really really long ones were handled as super exceptional – Scotty used his own engineering genius to stay in a transporter buffer for decades, and even then, the method only worked half the time. It’s a little weird to see M’Benga be so casual about it. Just this season, we had the Discovery crew hide in the pattern buffer for what, ten minutes? And that was kind of a big deal. But I guess it wasn’t really depicted as risky in and of itself – no one acted as though there was much chance of being lost that way, but rather of the ship itself being too badly damaged while they were in storage. The desperation of his plan should follow as reasonable from the seriousness of the Space Cancer. It is, though, a little weird how quickly he caves – once he acknowledges that he put the ship at risk, he’s like, “Okay, just let me say goodbye to my kid before we kill her and take me off in leg irons.” It’s…. I mean…. I guess it would feel gross and cliche to have him rant and rave and rage (And you’ve got to be particularly careful about that when there’s the possibility of falling into ugly racial stereotypes about Scary Black men), but this is maybe too far the other way? But it’s all trivially handwaved away.

This is an episode whose individual parts are very good, and I think also the balance of those parts are good. If they don’t quite all align with each other perfectly, perhaps that is what we should expect of this more episodic version of Star Trek. We get a very nice coda where, just as Una lets M’Benga off the hook for endangering the ship, Pike lets her off the hook for being a genetic abomination, and they really take it to the next level by calling out – perhaps just a hair indirectly – the fact that Pike’s realization that Hey, maybe the taboo against genetic augmentation is a little racist, is less than ideal. It is, in fact, Mighty White of Him. Una does not call Pike out for this, though: she internalizes instead, discomforted by the fact that, in the end, she was forgiven because she was “one of the good ones”. She’s never going to be allowed to just be Ilyrian, to live openly in her Ilyrian DNA: she will at best be, “When we called people with genetic augmentations monsters, we were talking about the other ones, not you.”

The blow is blunted a little by the fact that the person doing it isn’t the one who gets called out, and by the fact that the person on the receiving end is played by Rebecca Romijn, but still. Maybe the Dutch Supermodel contemplating institutional racism will go over the heads of the neckbeards who keep complaining about how “woke” modern Trek is for its shameful and constant harping on how people who aren’t straight white men (checks notes) exist.

 

Do you like forward momentum? Well fuck you then, because not this week. Well, I judge too harsh, because I think some stuff happened? I don’t know. Before Picard, I tried to watch the new Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode and I think it sucked? I mean, I have not liked a single piece of the new season of MST3k yet, but I can’t tell if that’s because I’ve been watching them on my Sad Nights, or if I’ve outgrown MST3k, or because they do, in fact, just suck? I don’t know, man. I’ve been drinking.

So… The big main plot of this episode is “Picard and Guinan spend most of the episode locked in a room trying to help a character we haven’t met before and won’t see again to experience some personal growth unconnected to the rest of the plot linked to an experience with no relevance to anything else in the series.” Sure, other stuff happens, but that’s the main scaffolding the episode hangs on. This is a character growth episode, and what little plot progression happens is mostly setup.

Picard figures out that Wells’s backstory is that he got partially mind-whammied by a Vulcan, and he’s spent his life confused by that and thinking aliens want to eat his brain. Wells – I assume his first name is Herb – is a nothing character I don’t give a shit about and he backs down almost instantly. The more important thing that comes from this too-long bit is that Q finally shows up, answering Guinan’s call, and reveals that he’s powerless, which we knew (not so powerless that he can’t hack Soong’s computer or somehow pass himself off as an FBI agent), but also that he is straight up literally dying, which we heretofore only suspected. He does not reveal what the hell this is all about beyond the cryptic questioning whether a single act can change a lifetime. Which…. I think we already kinda knew? I don’t know, man, there is absolutely no way the payoff can be matched to the setup. It feels like we’re maybe back to Q trying to get Picard laid. (Also: I try not to complain about continuity, but Guinan knows Q can kill each other. I don’t believe that was something that had ever been tried prior to the Q civil war. Or maybe it’s just a “Hasn’t been tried in a very long time” sort of thing…)

More character development! A very cute romance between Teresa and Rios. Are they setting up Rios to remain in 2024, since he kinda is a wet rag as a starship captain? Are they setting up for Teresa to pop forward to 2400 because so far this season has largely been a remix of Star Trek IV and First Contact?

Raffi and Seven have it out a bit over Raffi’s issues. I am… Not entirely happy, given how much I have loved the relationship so far. If I want to see two people struggle with their relationship because the anxious one is engaging in protest behavior, I can just ask my therapist to repeat what I just said back to me. But… Yeah. So, the main thing I’m taking away here is that Seven is actually in just a remarkably solid emotional state. Because she’s able to confront Raffi’s issues and hold space for them without attacking. She calls her out, doesn’t let her get away with it, but Seven doesn’t engage in protest behavior herself, and she’s supportive of her girlfriend and understanding.

And then Agnes nearly chokes Raffi out. Also Agnes boned a dude off-screen then murdered him when sex turned out not to be enough to provide the Human Connection Fix the queen wanted. A single partner isn’t enough to sate the queen, sending her instead into a murderous rampage. We pause here because there are a lot of jokes for me to make, even if I limit myself to the better ones:

1. Sounds like that very particular genre of romance novels Leah likes.
2. Sounds like accidental polyamory but okay.
3. Sex is natural, sex is great, sex is best when it’s eight-on-eight.
4. It’s Star Trek and it’s called a “Borgy”
5. We are the Borg. We saw you from the end of the bar. We like your vibe. Resistance is futile.
6. Hey girl, are you Borg, because I’d like to add my biological distinctiveness to your own.
7. I can’t make the “Nice top”/”I have a name” joke because I don’t think the Borg Queen actually does have a name.

I sometimes feel like they wrote a lot of this script having confused the Borg queen for a Cenobite. In fairness, she’s got the look down, and holy shit a Borg Cube is basically a sci-fi puzzle box… Queen Agnes also eats a cell phone battery for the lithium, and goes on to eat some car batteries for the… Car batteries do not use lithium, except for electric cars, but never mind. Seven has nasty flashbacks of tasting the lithium they force-fed her as a child to help the nanoprobes take. I’m not clear on what Raffi means when she describes lithium as a “stabilizing metal”. The words on their own make me feel like they should mean that adding lithium to things would make it less reactive… But that isn’t…. how…. lithium…. works? Lithium is highly reactive and has a low binding energy in its nucleus; it’s great for nuclear reactions and chemical reactions. Lithium has a ton of uses, but the only one I can think of where I’d call it “stabilizing” is psychopharmacological – it’s pretty well-known that it’s used medically as a mood stabilizer. And that would make total sense, in context, given that we now know that the efficacy of Borg nanoprobes is impacted by brain chemistry. Except it’s weird that Raffi would go immediately there rather than mentioning the fuckton of other things lithium does, and Seven’s explanation doesn’t really sound like she’s talking about the effects of mood stabilizers. Also, this is probably just a matter of tone, but why does Seven need an explanation of what lithium is? It plays out like one of those, “Ah, your primitive Earth metals; my advanced people do not use such stone-knives-and-bearskins things,” as though lithium was a specific product of twenty-first century Earth technology rather than, y’know, an element.

The fourth leg of our plot is that Q provides Kore with the cure for her condition – the thing Soong had wanted from him. But since she knows her origin story now, this does not go the way he wanted, and Soong does a pretty straightforward heel-turn here where he makes it clear that, yeah, this is all about his ego. Why does Q do this? He set it up ahead of time apparently, but why? To punish Soong for failing to derail the mission? “You didn’t do what I wanted so to punish you I will give you the thing I promised you”? To set up Soong to be desperate again? But he still was? Maybe Q is just being a dick? Kore walks out on him, but, kind of inexplicably, the Borg Queen shows up to carry out the rest of Q’s plan by destroying the Europa mission.

This is a weird move. Soong only wanted to derail the Europa mission for the sake of Kore, but now Kore’s gone and he’s got what Q was offering, so he no longer needs to derail the Europa mission or torment himself by becoming a murderer. But then the queen pops in and explains that if he derails the Europa mission anyway, he can take its place as the savior of the Earth. Now, this some decent loop-closing. Adam Soong was a hero in the history of Confederated Earth, and now that we have the insight to frame it properly, the drone-operated sunshield he had flying over Kore before to let her go outside and test Q’s cure is clearly meant to be the antecedent of the global shield we saw from Picard’s window. So at this point, Q has become somewhat redundant. Note though that the thing the Queen is promising Adam is what leads to the destruction of the Borg collective. So she’s helping destroy her own people. What does she get out of it? According to Seven, the Queen wants to take La Sirena, so it appears that Soong’s side of the deal is that he’ll help her do that, and in return, she’ll help him destroy the Europa mission. So she’s planning to create the empire that destroys the Borg in return for a twenty-fifth century attack ship of modest size. Is she banking that she can reconnect with the collective of this time, and give them enough of a head start on the Confederation to change the outcome? This still seems like a bad plan. Why even dangle that as the prize for Adam? Isn’t there anything else she could offer? Or some other insane billionaire she could hit up for a gang of mercenaries? Or, like, a biker bar or something? Because that seems to be what she gets out of this: some mercenaries she can nano into a new race of Borg.

At this point, again, possibly because of the amount of creme de menthe in my system, it is getting hard to remember why we are on the precipice of the future turning out shitty. So let’s recap:

1. Originally, Q changes the timeline because… Mysterious reasons having something to do with wanting to know if one choice can change an entire lifetime. So he plans to play up Renee’s insecurities so she quits, derailing the mission. But he loses his powers and Picard shows up to give a Picard Speech, so Q hires Soong.
2. Now, Soong wants to derail the mission because that is Q’s price for curing Kore. Soong has no personal stake in the mission, but he is a donor, so he is presumably at least a little pro-mission. But Q gives Kore the cure anyway and she abandons her evil dad, so he responds like most of the people currently in the room with me when the threat of abandonment overwhelms him and hits the bottle.
3. Now, the Borg Queen should be invested in the success of the Europa mission, because its failure lead to the extinction of the Borg. But then, I guess, the Federation timeline didn’t go great for the Borg either, since Seven tells us that the Borg are on their last legs by 2400. But she wants La Sirena, so she reveals carefully selected details about the Confederation timeline to Soong, convincing him that he should derail the Europa mission.
4. So where we are at the end of episode 8 is that Soong now wants to destroy the Europa mission in order to prevent a discovery that will save the world, so that he can save the world instead (badly).
5. And now, in a feedback loop, the Queen wants to destroy the Europa mission because that is Soong’s price for helping her capture La Sirena. I feel like she’s taking a considerable risk here that Soong won’t just try to capture La Sirena himself in order to reverse engineer it.
6. I think at this point Soong buys Twitter, possibly so that he can use it to harass his ex’s new girlfriend?
7. And then you put the chicken in the boat and bring the fox back?
8. And what about Scarecrow’s brain?
9. You know what? Since no one else will step up and do it, I will. Jean-Luc Picard, go fuck yourself.

 

Okay so let’s drop everything for a week and talk about Strange New Worlds because I finally managed to build up a buffer.

I do not like that Strange New Worlds is rewarding the people who have spent the last four years saying that NuTrek would be good if only they made it more about white men on ships named Enterprise.

But then they turned around and showed stock footage of the attempt by republicans with full knowledge and approval of the leader of their party to violently and illegally overthrow the US government and murdered elected officials, and described it as the first stage of the conflict that became World War III. (Guess who got yelled at on Quora for describing January 6 as an “insurrection” when it was “really” a “peaceful protest, unlike the violent racial insurrection of BLM.” Hint: he also has a fucking awesome Alice in Wonderland diorama on his dining room table), so this show is okay in my book.

In particular, Strange New Worlds gets us past what’s been the biggest actual problem with modern Star Trek: the extent to which the arc-heavy storytelling competes for screen-time with the franchise’s traditional strength of using self-contained adventures to showcase a strong ensemble. For example, Discovery spent three quarters of its season leaving me very angry that Reno had not yet appeared. To contrast, I can not even begin to say which character on Strange New Worlds I am disappointed didn’t get more screen-time, because they are all wonderful and all got a few minutes.

Also, I’m lying and it is Ortegas. The only problem with Ortegas is that sometimes she is not on screen, yet everyone isn’t just standing around asking, “Where’s Ortegas?”

So Strange New Worlds seems to have chosen to go light on story arcs, but in their place, there seems to be a much heavier emphasis on character arcs. It seems natural now, but it caught me by surprise just how hard they’re leaning in on Pike’s acceptance of being, y’know, extremely doomed. Actually, there’s a broad sense of doom hanging over the whole ship, I think, and I wonder how that’s going to go. La’an seems just primed for a character arc that ends in noble tragedy, even if they never get around to going into detail about her name (There is no good reason to assume she has anything to do with the other Noonien-Singh we’ve heard of; lots of people have the same last name. I am sure this is a reasonable explanation). While Chris is dealing with the foreknowledge of his horrifying death, Spock’s opening is a very sexy, romantic, passionate courtship with T’Pring that shows genuine affection between them and a rare insight into what a romantic relationship for young Vulcans would look like, behind closed doors where they’re allowed to express what their culture requires they keep private. But, of course, we all know how this is going to end. It’s going to end with T’Pring dropping Spock for another man, and Spock not really being too broken up about this, except that she tries to manipulate him into murdering his boss to get out of the engagement. I wonder if Elon Musk has considered invoking the rite of Kal-if-fee to get out of buying Twitter. Is that joke still topical by now? And then there’s Nurse Chapel. Nurse Chapel is such a fun, freewheeling, exciting character. I love her to pieces. And yet we know that a few years down the road, she’s going to be a meek, bland character whose only real trait is an unfulfilled crush on Spock. Is that hinting that her story in Strange New Worlds is going to end with her crossing some line, going to far, flying too close to the sun and retreating into herself, a broken shell of the ass-kicking character she once was? Also, is Doctor M’Benga cruising for some career-breaking scandal that will see him demoted to McCoy’s backup under Kirk? (M’Benga has the plausible “happy ending” that maybe he’ll become a specialist, which is kind of a diagonal career move rather than a demotion – seems like that’s what happened with Hugh in season 4 of Discovery; at least, my sense of it is that he’s stepped down as CMO to become the ship’s counselor). And while I doubt they’ll lean into it, Cadet Uhura the Cool and Clever Wunderkind is going find her footing as a mature older officer once day, but there’s apparently going to be a few years in the middle there where she’s mostly limited to saying the phrase “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.” For that matter, is there something horrible we could anticipate from the fact that Una, so beloved in EU material and talked up as a paragon of Starfleetity straight up never appears again in canon?

And then there is the last minute appearance of Guy Fleegman Sam Kirk, who is even more doomed than Pike. Sam… Is really a kick in the balls, and one that kind of points me in the direction of “Yeah, they are straight up making this a ship of doom.” But also, it’s just so… Ugh. He’s there, in large part, as a taunt. You’ve got your casual fans watching this who are all like, “Whoah, they’re gonna introduce Kirk! We’re going to see Kirk’s young days serving under Pike!” and the Bigger Fanboys are all like, “Oh no Star Trek is ruined forever because everyone knows that canonically Kirk Prime never served under Pike and they only knew each other by reputation, having possibly only actually met once, briefly!” and then they turn around and gotcha both viewers with the reveal that it’s Jim, life, but not as we know it: it’s Captain Kirk’s ludicrously mustachioed brother, doomed to appear as a corpse played by William Shatner in a fake mustache in the TOS episode “Operation: Annihilate!”. But lo! Pike and Sam are old friends, and they served together. On Enterprise. Spock was Sam’s boss.

Look, I love these characters. Possibly excepting Sam; he’s only in one scene. But… They clearly had no problem inventing new characters for this show. They invented some freaking fantastic ones so far. And there’s a wealth of Pike-era characters who don’t have any baggage attached they could’ve resurrected here and given the backstory they deserved. Colt, Tyler, Boyce. The casting of Robert April proves that it wouldn’t even be a problem to rewrite any of those legacy characters to make the show less white or less heteronormative. (Honestly it would be hilarious if they brought back Colt, but depicted her as trans, just because of the wallbanger of original-Pike having made a whole thing out of being uncomfortable with “a woman on the bridge”). I’m far more interested in seeing the other path Star Trek could’ve taken instead of watching Strange New Worlds fall into the gravity well of becoming a redemptive reading of TOS. The extent to which it seems to want to be “Let’s go back and fix the thin and underappreciated elements of the original series,” feels like playing against its strengths. Chapel and Uhura and M’Benga and Sam Kirk are all sort of tainted by their destinies in a way that La’an and Hemmer and Ortegas and even Una really aren’t. If they wanted to do “TOS But Better”, like, they have the option of just doing that. I’m kind of okay with them doing that at some point (I don’t actually think that idea would carry a whole series, but maybe minisodes?), but I think it’s more respectful to this show to do less mining of TOS.

I am a long way into this essay and I haven’t even talked about what actually happens, have I? There is a lot of shirtlessness in the first few scenes, isn’t there? I think this article is going to drop before the one where I comment on topless Allison Pill in Picard, so I will anachronistically reference that and say that I am not sure how I feel about the new less-shirtful trend in Star Trek. Also, Pike is on a first-name-basis with Spock’s girlfriend. Kirk did not know Spock’s dad was the most famous ambassador in the Federation or about either of Spock’s siblings. At some point, we might have to consider the possibility that Kirk was actually just not that good of a friend. Not gonna see Spock committing a capital crime to drag his disfigured ass to a forbidden planet for big-headed voyeuristic weirdos to grant him the illusion of a very horny retirement in return for letting them watch.

Robert April shows up, and that’s dandy. I am entirely cool with them casting a black man as April, but I do feel a little of the same sting I do with the other legacy characters, not that he’s been recast, but that he’s been recharacterized. The Robert April of the animated series and the EU novels was…. A kindly space-grandpa. He wore a cardigan. He probably had Werther’s Originals in his pocket. The one who appears here is just kind of generic Sympathetic Admiral, a character archetype that is much better than the parade of Obstructionist Admirals we had in the TNG era, but are still kind of a dime a dozen in NuTrek. You could replace him with Vance or Cornwall and the scenes barely change. So really, he’s just making me sad that they killed Cornwall, since I really liked her. The actor is great, and I hope he gets some more specific characterization as they go on, but like with the future-TOS characters, his identity feels like a stunt rather than something that informs who he is. Also, small note: they have not yet made it explicit whether April was captain of the Enterprise, a detail only mentioned on-screen in the animated series. It’s not explicit yet if Pike served under him on Enterprise, or some other ship. Apparently in the Kelvin timeline, April commanded a different Enterprise, aligning with the notion that the Constitution Class was delayed by at least a decade in that universe to incorporate technical advances derived from the reports of the Kelvin survivors. I think the prevailing EU attitude until recently was that April’s command of the Enterprise had been limited to its shakedown cruise.

Pike being forced by his boss to go back to work before he’s ready and facing a horrible death is perhaps the most relatable thing to happen in Star Trek since Doctor Jurati saved the day with the power of clinical depression two seasons in a row.

The main plot of the episode – Enterprise is pressed into service early to rescue Una from a First Contact gone bad – is fine, nothing really special in and of itself, but it feels like a redux in many ways of ideas from all over the franchise history. We got to see how Pike approaches the Prime Directive in Discovery more than once, basically the first time in decades that Prime Directive plots haven’s sucked. Of course, they pretty much end the episode with April saving their bacon and declaring that the high command is going to become a lot more hard-ass about it from now on. They even try to do a little “And this is the origin story of the Prime Directive” thing, insofar as April explains that they’re basically rebranding it from “General Order One”, which is how Pike had referred to it most of the time (Kirk uses that terminology at least once in TOS, but it’s exclusively “The Prime Directive” by TNG. Rebranding takes time). It feels reminiscent of lots of Prime Directive stories, or even non-Prime-Directive cultural interference stories. It’s very much a fusion of elements of, say, “A Private Little War” (TOS) and “Patterns of Force” (TOS), but also elements of “First Contact” (TNG), with elements that remind me a lot of the TOS novel Prime Directive and the Captain Sulu audio story Cacophony. And then Pike’s resolution to the situation, audaciously, is pretty much lifted from Star Trek Into Darkness somehow. It’s a modern take on recurring patterns in the franchise that really does take away the best of them.

The plot has a lot of layers and complications, and to be honest a few of them feel unnecessary, like the (admittedly cool) complication of them needing to beam a DNA patch into Spock’s eye while he’s being scanned (Super cool, but I feel like the ability to do mid-transport costume changes and beam things into someone’s eye are perhaps stretching credulity for what the transporter can do in this time period – in the TOS era, it was depicted as pretty dangerous just to beam indoors. Yeah. Check it out: in TOS they hardly ever beam to an indoor location that isn’t a designated transporter alcove, and it’s called out as being tricky a few times; the ease of “site-to-site” transport in TNG was one of the things that was added as a reminder that this was the Future’s Future. It’s a cool idea, but we now have at least four shows set in the post-TNG era where this technology would be more appropriate. They make a great sound, though. There’s a little whistly bit underneath the main shimmer which is lifted from the original pilot version of the sound effect. Everything in this show makes a great sound. This show sounds good. That remix of the theme song? Chef’s Kiss). But they play well together. You’ve got a planet which has been struggling with a “renegade faction” for centuries (“Centuries” feels hard to swallow. After centuries, you’re not a renegade faction so much as a whole separate regime with its own history and culture) that’s produced a warp signature. Una was sent out on a little ship to make first contact, on the assumption that they’d discovered FTL-travel and thus it was time to meet the neighbors. But it turns out they hadn’t: they’re basically at a 20th century level of sophistication, close to a century away from warp drive (The only advanced technology we see is retina scanners). But they were close enough to the battle near Xahea that their space telescopes could detect the fuckton of warp signatures, and reverse engineered that into a bomb.

We are not given the details of how Una and her team ended up captured and imprisoned. It probably had something to do with them beaming to the front door of the high-security military facility where they keep their doomsday weapon, but it’s a little sus that this would, indeed, be First Contact protocol. And I say this recognizing that it is, indeed, first contact protocol as invented by the Vulcans to just literally land right next to the warp signature and say hi. (Not for nothing, but there’s no one left aboard the USS Did-you-catch-this-reference. How were they planning to get back? Transporters don’t have remote controls in this century) The penultimate resolution is that Pike decides that this counts as Their Mess – the usual “out” in TOS Prime Directive episodes: someone else interfered first so the Prime Directive doesn’t apply – and outs himself to the leadership, giving a Kirk Speech about how… we too… were once a primitive and…. violent people, not unlike…. yourselves, but we have…. grown to… understand that only peaceful solutions can bring about… lasting… change. And that doesn’t work, which is kind of lovely. So he has the Enterprise drop into low orbit so everyone on the dingdong planet can get a good look at it and appreciate the fact that he does, in fact, have the power to obliterate their entire civilization from orbit if they get uppity.

That escalated quickly.

But the cool thing, I think, is that even that doesn’t actually work. It’s not enough. It brings the two factions to the bargaining table, but there is no sudden realization that we are not alone and should put aside our differences. Ozymandias’s plan doesn’t work in the long run. So Pike instead bombs them with a PSA about Earth’s own doomsday war in order to scare them straight. I am once again getting ahead of myself because I’m going to talk at greater length about some of this in my Picard stuff that I’ve written but not posted yet. But it appears they’re finagling the timeline again and depicting a second American civil war (not explicitly identified in this timeline with any specific orange failed businessman or white supremacist movement, but I do see a few red hats in the crowd), the Eugenics Wars, and World War III as escalating stages in a continuous conflict. This doesn’t necessarily contradict earlier depictions outright in their entirety. In the US, we study something called the “French and Indian War”, which to the rest of the world was a small theater of the Seven Years’ War, and the “War of 1812” which elsewhere is “A minor British side-campaign during the Napoleonic Wars”, and much of Europe studies the “Hundred Years’ War”, which is basically a series of two to four almost entirely separate but related conflicts taking place over a century and a half (there’s a few wars on either end that aren’t generally considered part of it but easily could be if you wanted), so what counts as a single war with periodic deescalations and what counts as several distinct wars will vary depending on who’s writing the history book. But there’s a strong implication here that there’s no global war with genetically engineered humans in the 1990s; they might be revising the ’90s to be when Khan was born rather than when he rose to power (I suppose it’s also possible that they’re moving to the idea that the “Eugenics Wars” didn’t actually involve Khan at all – that he was, like, the prototype, and his movement left Earth before things really heated up. Could be an attempt to thread the needle on why Kirk is oddly sympathetic about Khan personally, while the Augments inspire blind terror in humans of Archer’s time). In any case, the speech is nice and the big stick is nice, but what really sells the Kileys on peace and cooperation is, in fact, Pike giving them a glimpse of their future, in the form of showing them what Earth did to itself.

Pike is oddly free about telling people how he saw a vision of his own future. And Spock is oddly free about revealing the truth about Discovery to La’an. And he didn’t even need to. He could give the Starfleet version of the story, that Discovery was destroyed in the battle – even saying that much is treasonous. Why leave in the frankly irrelevant detail that Discovery went to the future? It’s enough for her to know that there was a huge space battle between Enterprise, Discovery, the Kelpians, the Klingons, and Section 31. April mentions at the end that he’s been read in on the battle, and now I don’t know if that means he knows what happened to Discovery, or if he believes it was destroyed. Even more confusing, when Spock talks to Pike about his vision, it doesn’t sound like Spock knows what happened. He was there. He knows Pike had a Time Crystal Vision – though he doesn’t know of what. Pike seems to have told Una the most about it, and no one else anything at all. But he very casually opens up to the Kileys about the fact that he recently witnessed his own death. I assume they are building their way toward Spock learning the details of Pike’s doom to close the loop on setting up the framing story for “The Menagerie”.

I am feeling pretty optimistic about this show. After years of complaints that Discovery was too “woke” (when Discovery rarely had anything actually woke in its plots of messaging – it’s mostly your usual “Working together is better than fighting” stuff; what the complainers mean is “It has too many people who aren’t straight white men”), I wouldn’t have been surprised if SNW backed off. But their immediate move is to blame Trump supporters for World War III. And if that is a bit ridiculous, I mean, being ridiculous hasn’t ruined Trek for me since “Threshhold”.

He said the thing! He said the thing! I know I said that the Easter eggs are largely unimpressive to me, but oh did it warm my heart when Rios tells Teresa, “I’m from Chile; I just work in outer space.” Also, for me it is later the same night as I watched “Fly Me to the Moon” and I have followed up the schnapps with a glass of lemonade-flavored vodka on account of I had been looking forward to showing someone appreciation for something, but the something didn’t actually happen, so it would’ve been weird to thank them for it.

So now we’ve reached the point in the story where the gang is ready to just say “Fuck it” to the timeline. Good on them. Rios takes Teresa and her kid to La Sirena, this being the easiest way to explain his deal to her and pay back her trust. Also, the kid runs off shouting, “I’m going to touch everything!” and that is delightful.

We’ll get the very good but shorter part out of the way first. We get some fantastic Raffi/Seven stuff. They even have a very lampshade-hanging scene where Raffi just straight up channels at least ONE audience member by complaining that they shouldn’t get Rios and Jurati back together because that couple is not interesting to the viewers, whereas her and Seven are quite clearly the One True Ship for this show. These two are so cute. And it’s just such a good relationship. I’ve said this before. Raffi and Seven both have their own individual issues, but their relationship isn’t defined by them; it might have started in an underplayed way but right now, this is one of the most naturalistic relationships we’ve seen in Trek – it doesn’t have the fire and fury of some of the “big name” romances, but it feels very real and very honest and very, just normal and sustainable and strong and supportive. #RelationshipGoals.

It looks like they’re going to introduce the obstacle of the queen having locked them out of La Sirena as something that will restrict them for a good chunk of the season, but it turns out to mostly be a mechanism for the gang to find out what’s happened to Agnes: the process of breaking the Borg encryption leads Seven to the records showing that it was Jurati that installed it. We also have a decent “figuring shit out” sequence with Seven smashing a bottle to work out that the queen is stimulating Jurati’s endorphins to speed up the nanoprobes. This plot, one assumes, is going to unfold in more detail next week.

The big Lore (not him) Thing of the episode of course comes at the end, when Picard visits Guinan and we finally get the backstory on something that was raised and the never followed up on thirty years ago. TNG did not merely hint that Guinan was more than a simple bartender. She might be psychic – it’s unclear – she’s sensitive to alterations in the timeline, and the first time she interacts with Q, she adopts a strange defensive posture, and Q cautions Picard about her. But the show never really decided what it wanted to do with all of that. By “Time’s Arrow”, they were ready to shift to the idea that Guinan’s people (I don’t believe they’re given a name until Generations) were extremely long-lived and had a culture that valued empathy and hospitality, but other than that, they were largely mundane, and whatever was going on with Guinan was personal – something that had happened to her between the 1890s and the 2360s. Generations revealed the details of this: Guinan had been left with time-sensitivity as a result of entering the Nexus.

The modern era of Trek has done a lot of mining of its old lore, and bringing back concepts that were discarded in the ’90s. The shift in Guinan’s nature during TNG feels very consistent with the evolution ’90s Trek underwent in what really feels to me like a quest for respectability. Guinan being some kind of fallen god or space witch is a little too Capital-W-Weird for a respectable science fiction show, so she was retconned to be, “Oh she got exposed to a big swirly thing in space which TECH her TECH causing a TECH to her quantum TECH.” So Picard is walking that back. Elaurians are naturally time-sensitive now, no Nexus required. And we finally – finally – get to see what the deal is with her and Q. We don’t have time to get much detail, and frankly I think it’s better to hint at it than explain it in detail anyway, but the Elaurians apparently had a cold war with the Q Continuum. What a wild thing. And Guinan carries around a bit of the truce captured in physical form as a bottle of booze from the treaty signing. This isn’t just bonkers, it’s downright religiously bonkers. Just straight-up Last Supper symbolism. And Guinan can quaff a bit of treaty-juice and use it to summon a Q.

Or rather, she could if Q wasn’t broken. Instead she summons budget-rate Fox Mulder who arrests her and Picard for being aliens. So many Easter eggs in this show, but getting David Duchovny to play the FBI agent was a bridge too far I guess. And Ito Agahayare is a pretty good Young Guinan here. She almost nails “Guinan, but younger, sassier, angrier, but a lot more tired.” I feel like there’s still a little something not-quite-there in her performance, but it’s close.

This brings us to the meat and potatoes of the episode: Tallinn popping into Jean-Luc’s subconscious to go help him deal with his daddy issues.

Speaking of Daddy Issues, last week I had my first real-for-real encounter with the well-documented phenomenon of Mysterious Forest Porn. On one of my walks, tucked against a tree, I happened upon a DVD of, ahem, “Daddy Says I’m The Best 3”. Which, tbh, is really where the series hits its stride.

Tallinn’s neural interface device was very obviously designed for a pointed ear, which was really interesting and curious and man, wouldn’t it have been nice if they had waited for next week to reveal what it’s foreshadowing instead of revealing it about twenty minutes later? This is what I’ve been on about with the episode breaks being weird in this show. They’re chopping the story in odd places in order to get the best cliffhangers rather than chopping the story in natural places to pause from the flow. This is an ’80 Doctor Who-level mistake.

But it’s not without some reason. Because if you don’t get Picard back on the hunt in this episode, what you’re left with is basically a slow, talky episode that loses most of the forward momentum the series had been working on. Everything after Picard wakes from his coma is really part of next week’s episode, but it’s here because it’s also the only time that our ongoing story arc progresses. Remember our ongoing story arc? Something something Q something Renee Picard something “Genocidal polluted xenophobic nightmare”?

(Apparently Renee is fine and getting ready for the Europa mission and Q is nowhere to be seen. Yeah, almost getting run over by a techbro and watching her great-great-great-grand-nephew get hit by a car didn’t have any sort of impact on her. We are running out of time for Renee Picard to be a character in her own right. If they even plan on bothering with that.)

I’m not saying that what happens in this episode isn’t good or interesting, it’s just that it is for the most part about Picard’s inner demons and the connection it has to the story they have been telling is thin at best.

Inside Jean-Luc’s head, Old Man Picard is having an adversarial therapy session with Extra Scruffy Julian Bashir. Oh, wait, that’s James Callis. Playing Picard’s imaginary brain-buddy. This is a much better Easter egg than the streaming era’s usual obsession with making sad sack fanboys feel smart for catching a reference to Gary Mitchell – those fanboys already hated this show for having girls and feelings and therapy.

Why is Picard’s therapist wearing a DS9 uniform, anyway? Actually, I can think of a plausible answer for that. The switch to those uniforms happened between Generations and First Contact. I bet Picard actually did see a therapist during that period. He’d just lost his ship, and more important contextually, his brother and his nephew had just died. Which also means that it was during that period when Picard took ownership of the chateau. So I think there’s good reason that it would be an element from that period in his life that Picard’s subconscious mixes in.

I also notice that Picard questions the presence of the therapist, saying that Starfleet doesn’t use such people any more. I can only assume he’s referring to what I assume is specifically traditional psychotherapy. The therapist makes a reference to Betazoids, though, hinting that in Picard’s time, therapists are exclusively telepathic races. This clearly isn’t the case in the 32nd century.

Or maybe he just means assholes. Picard’s session is way more adversarial than any actual therapy session I’ve witnessed. Tallinn experiences via the story Picard is telling his therapist, and I do really like the way that different layers of reality are interwoven in Picard’s fantasy. Picard is in an office aboard a starship, but he’s also in the chateau. Young Picard and his mom are in the chateau, but also in a dungeon. Also, of course, Picard fails to notice until the climax that his therapist looks exactly like a scruffier version of Julian Bashir. Also his dad.

Yeah, that’s pretty wild. The first half of Picard’s big reveal is that his mother was bipolar and refused treatment. His dad had to keep her locked up during her manic episodes, and Young Picard (Let’s not have this spin-off) interpreted this as his dad being the monster that had kidnapped the queen. With Tallinn helping him, Young Picard escapes the dungeon (Things are pretty metaphorical at this point so I’m not all that sure exactly what’s going on or why Tallinn’s presence makes a difference. I guess the idea is that she allows Young Picard to push through to the reveal instead of remaining in metaphorical denial?) and accepts the reasons behind his father’s behavior, and the specific incident that inspired this dream involved Picard himself nearly dying when his mother lost him in the vineyard’s underground tunnels during an episode.

Wow, there’s a lot going on here. First and foremost is how this sequence plays when you understand Patrick Stewart’s personal involvement. See, Sir Patrick supports two major causes: helping victims of domestic abuse, and helping veterans with PTSD. And the reason is that his father was abusive toward his mother. And only much later in life did he learn that the trigger that started that abuse was untreated PTSD from his father’s experiences in the war. If you’ve ever heard him speak about this, it is really just bone-shaking how he balances these things, that the PTSD doesn’t excuse or lessen his father’s behavior or his mother’s suffering, but he can still acknowledge how his father was suffering as well, and the basic fundamental unfairness that neither one of them got the help they needed. The situation for the fictional twenty-fifth century starship captain is different in key ways, but there is a fundamental similarity in the aspect of a late-in-life revelation which recasts his understanding of his parents’ relationship.

The detail that Yvette refused treatment is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Because it’s a bit of a problem for the Star Trekness of the setting to fall back on what would be a very reasonable plot for a mid-century drama or even a contemporary one, that mental illness carries a heavy stigma and treatment isn’t always available and lots of people never find a treatment option that works for them. Those are all true things about the world we live in, but this is Star Trek, and the idea that Yvette didn’t have access to treatment less barbaric than “Husband locks her up until she’s lucid,” in the twenty-fourth century is frankly too dire to contemplate, so the saving throw, that she refused treatment, shifts the conundrum into one of consent. Maurice wanted her to get treatment, but since she wouldn’t consent, he did the best he could. Perhaps he was wrong to do so – I’ve got to believe that level of child endangerment would justify her being committed non-voluntarily – but it’s not as clear-cut, and his failure is one of judgement rather than morality.

Oh and also Maurice says, of Jean-Luc, “You lived longer, but I kept my hair.” I will note that we did see Maurice Picard once in TNG, via a vision provided by Q, and he was as bald as the rest of the family. Actually, the actors who played Maurice and Robert in TNG kinda bore a familial resemblance to each other. A bit of one to Patrick Stewart, but not nearly so much. This also has me thinking about the time Yvette Picard appeared in TNG, via a Wacky-Space Induced Vision. She appeared there as a very French, very elderly woman drinking tea. I mean okay, maybe Picard’s mom got more French as she aged. But I do wonder now… I think Picard mentions that his mother had died a long time ago. But Picard is in his mid 60s when TNG begins, and his mother looks quite a lot older than that – I’d guess she’s in her late ’80s as depicted there, or older (The actress who plays her in “Where No One Has Gone Before” was 70 at the time; assuming the character is older than the performer by as much as Picard is older than Stewart, that would make Yvette there 85 at least. I’d suggest she might be considerably older than that even), closer to the age she would have been relative to Picard were she still alive. Does this mean that the elderly French woman Picard meets on the Enterprise should be interpreted not as how Picard remembers Yvette from her lifetime, but how he imagines she would look now? “As I get older, Number One, I find I imagine my mother as progressively more and more French.”

Not really important, I guess (or is it?). More interesting is the odd conclusion Picard and Tallinn jump to when he recovers from his coma: that this is what Q was trying to accomplish. That for some reason, this whole thing with altering the timeline and messing with the Europa mission has been about contriving for Picard to reevaluate his relationship with his father.

One: huh? I thought it was an unlikely ass-pull when Michael jumps clean to “Maybe they’re mining boromite,” about the 10-C, but this is… A big leap. And they keep going from there, with Picard further sorting out that this whole exercise has been a way for Q to force Picard to “know him”. Okay, so probably the point here is that Q wants Picard to understand that he’s actually had a good reason for being such a dick all these years – that like Maurice, Q’s monstrous actions – misguided or not – came from a justified place of wanting to protect… Picard? Earth? The Federation? Corporeal existence? From something dangerous and uncontrollable. To be honest, that is where I hoped this one last Q story would go: that something was coming which Q could not stop, and all the things he had done to Picard over the years were to prepare him to face it instead. Maybe that’s where we’re going? It could work. Q’s vitriol at Picard can be easily understood if, say, the Borg who appeared back in episode one really were going to sue for peace, and Q’s angry that after all he’s done, Picard still responded by trying to blow himself up.

But this is all a pretty big leap to make on the basis of Picard’s coma-dream. Picard got conked on the noggin and had a dream about his daddy issues. On the basis of that, he’s going to conclude that Q wanted him to rethink his relationship with his father and thereby come to understand Q’s own greater nature?

Two: Are we going to see Q, son of Q? Because that feels suddenly plausible, that all this is actually Q trying to teach not Jean-Luc, but his own kid the reasons why he’s been such a dick to the ephemerals. Also, as a corollary, it seems pretty likely that Q himself is on his way out. Dying in a literal sense, or about to enter a new phase of his existence, or I don’t know what. There’s a distinctly funereal sense to what Picard and Tallinn speculate about Q’s motives, that Q might be running out of time. Also, we know, but Picard does not yet, that Q’s losing his powers. And we know, but neither Picard nor even Q do yet, that this is likely the last time anyone in the Federation will hear from the Q continuum.

Three: And for no especial reason, Tallinn reveals that, oh, by the way, she’s Romulan, and maybe that is why she looks like Picard’s housekeeper, since people tend to have identical granddaughters in this universe. Is Tallinn going to be tragically sacrificed during the endgame, only for Picard to hook up with her granddaughter? (Where would she get a granddaughter living on Romulus anyway? Is Laris a supervisor as well? Supervisors would have been a closed community since they were descendants of ancient alien abductees, which might justify the familial resemblance). Is Tallinn actually the same person as Laris, having somehow not aged visibly in four hundred years? Why does Tallinn re-point her years for this reveal? Just to justify her not going along with Picard to Ten Forward to be caught with him and Guinan?

Will this be resolved next week? Or will we just fuck around with Budget-Rate-Fox-Mulder? Will he, perhaps, tell Picard to go fuck himself?