Anika and Liz put on some fancy costumes, murder some Gorn babies and agree: that was definitely a season of television.
But did we actually like season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
Erm. Well.
- Remember when we were afraid this would be the Pike, Spock and Una show? It’s definitely not the Una show, and we have different opinions on whether or not it’s a Spock show!
- It’s fascinating how season one of SNW shares a lot of problems with season one of TNG, but no one is out there arguing that TNG’s first season was good
- Anika has to “well actually” Liz
- The Elysian Kingdom:
- We just want M’Benga to be happy, is that so much to ask?
- It’s 2022 and the depiction of queerness in SNW is roughly on par with DS9 in the 1990s (this is not a compliment)
- All Those Who Wander:
- #GornRights
- “Straight-up Aliens rip-off” is a feature not a bug for us, but the depiction of the Gorn is even more troubling than it was in “Memento Mori”!
- PLEASE make Star Trek hire a disability consultant because the depiction of disability and mental illness in any Trek overseen by Akiva Goldsman is dreadful and offensive
- Children, whether Gorn or human(ish), don’t have rights in this series, and Anika finds that TROUBLING
- Lifting a Spock/Uhura scene — body language, camera angles and all — from Star Trek (2009) but subbing in a white woman was … well, the optics aren’t great, y’know?
- The Quality of Mercy
- We don’t often say this, but we hate everything about this episode!
- Like, don’t remake “Balance of Terror” if you don’t understand Kirk, Spock, Romulans or the plot of “Balance of Terror”
- It makes a good double feature with “These Are The Voyages…” but that isn’t really a good thing
- We have a new appreciation for Greenwood!Pike and the (relative) lack of ableism in his story
- The Great Man Theory of Star Trek history
- The ending is … exactly the same as the ending of season 2 of Lower Decks? At least for once it’s a white woman facing the Federation’s capricious justice system?
Transcript
(Please note this transcript was generated automatically by Apple Podcasts, and though it was edited by a human, some errors may remain.)
Liz: Welcome to Antimatter Pod, a Star Trek podcast where we discuss fashion, feminism, subtext and subspace, hosted by Anika and Liz. This week, we’re discussing the final three episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1, “The Elysian Kingdom,” “All Those Who Wander,” and “A Quality of Mercy.”
That was certainly a season of television, Anika.
Anika: And whole episodes.
Liz: There were plots and scripts and all the things you’re meant to have. Definitely a season of television. Was it any good?
Anika: So, against my better judgment, but in service to the podcast—
Liz: You’re a good person.
Anika: —I watched these three episodes again just now, all in a row, three hours.
Liz: Thank you for your service.
Anika: And I learned some stuff. I noticed things watching them together that I didn’t notice watching them apart. So it was worth it.
Liz: Yes. It was good.
Anika: But I have to say that by the time I got to the third episode, the season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” my notes turned into … everything is just caps lock and a bunch of exclamation points. They show the ‘previously on’ for that episode. And it’s all Una saying, “Maybe you don’t have to kill yourself to save people or ruin your life by becoming disabled. That’s the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a person.”
And in that moment, I started writing my angry notes and it was all the way back to, I hate Disco season two because of those stupid Klingons and their stupid time crystal that created this whole mess.
Liz: Right, it’s definitely the Klingons’ fault.
I will say I have certainly been disappointed in season one of Strange New Worlds. I have rewatched nothing and I couldn’t pay attention to certain episodes because they were silly and not emotionally engaging for me. And I just want to say from the beginning that I understand that my opinions are subjective and they are not fact. So if I say something is objectively bad, I mean that, but I also understand people are going to think differently and that is in fact objectively good. I just think they’re wrong.
Anyway, my brother messaged me last weekend to say he’s finished Strange New Worlds and he thinks it might be Star Trek for Republicans. And then he followed up a couple of minutes later and said, “No, I think that’s too harsh. I think it’s Star Trek for people who were liberals 30 years ago.”
Anika: That’s such a good description. But I wouldn’t even say 30 years ago because when did The West Wing end? It’s Star Trek for those people.
Liz: Oh my goodness. And I loved The West Wing when it happened and I wrote fic for The West Wing, and it is one of those things which has aged so badly that when I see references to it now, I cringe.
Anika: I’m not dinging The West Wing from 12 years ago. I don’t know when The West Wing ended or the people who loved it then or the people who love it still. I’m dinging the idea of those liberals who are like, we’re gonna get along with all the good Republicans.
Liz: Yeah, I remember when Strange New Worlds was announced, and you and I were unenthusiastic and we were concerned that it would be the Pike, Spock and Una show, and that if there was a diverse supporting cast, they would primarily serve the white main characters. And in fact, it turns out to be the Pike and Spock show.
Anika: Not even Spock, okay? I know that the entire point of the last episode is that Spock is the most important person in the universe. However, Spock got a lot to do, but he did not have an arc. He had parts, little bursts of, maybe I will have some characterization, but then they remembered that they couldn’t do that because it happens later.
Liz: That’s kind of part of the problem that they spend so much time on Spock, but Spock’s story is told. It’s like doing a Spider-Man origin again.
Anika: And it’s not clever, the way Into the Spider-Verse tells the Spider-Man origin story five times in one night. And it’s great. And this is, we are going to make Spock a focal point for this story, and then we’re not gonna do anything with it because we can’t.
Liz: They tell you a lot about him, but they don’t really tell you anything we didn’t already know. Save the relationship with T’Pring, which is great. I love it, but it’s also increasingly difficult to reconcile with canon. Canon being TOS. I guess I’m implying that I don’t think Strange New Worlds is canon. I’m certainly not going to go that far. No, it’s canon, it’s real Star Trek. I just don’t like most of its choices.
Anika: I just think it’s entirely, yeah, it’s not the Pike and Spock and Una show, and I don’t think it’s even the Pike and Spock show. I think it is literally the Pike show. He’s the only one who learns something, but the problem is that what he learns is horrible.
Liz: I have had this problem since “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach”, but I really hate Captain Pike.
Anika: Right, and we’re supposed to love him. But okay, we haven’t even talked about the other two episodes that are better, in my opinion.
Obviously, everything that I say on the podcast is in my opinion. Please take that as you will. I am not saying that you shouldn’t like Pike or you shouldn’t like “A Quality of Mercy” or you shouldn’t like Strange New Worlds. I’m just saying I have a lot of problems.
Liz: I do find it fascinating that the fandom, and not just the straight cis white men of fandom, have embraced Strange New Worlds so unquestioningly. I think a few episodes ago, I compared it to season three of Voyager, where it’s competent but not groundbreaking.
And then by the end of this season, I think it’s more like season one of The Next Generation, where there’s some interesting ideas, but so much of it is just going around seeing people who need help, and all they offer is a lecture on how they need to be more like the Federation, and then they wouldn’t need help, and not doing anything else. And obviously TNG radically improved, but the thing is, no one is out there arguing that TNG season one is a great piece of television.
Anika: Yes, so TNG radically improved, and you feel like we shouldn’t go back to that? Shouldn’t we have moved forward? I’m not saying that every new Trek shouldn’t be given the training wheels for the beginning, and we shouldn’t expect brilliance right off the bat. This was a functional first season.
Liz: The thing is though, is there any other franchise, is there any other series where we give them a season or two seasons to stuff around and be second rate? Stranger Things was great out the bat. The Umbrella Academy was great from the first episode.
Anika: There’s so much more television now that it has to really grab you. It either has to be great, or have that sort of niche that finds an audience of very passionate people who can keep it going, one or the other. And I think that with Strange New Worlds and with Star Trek in general, they are banking on the fact that audience already exists, the niche Trek audience. And so they’re coasting on the idea that they’re okay. And plenty of people love this, whatever.
Liz: A lot of my friends became casual Trekkies with season one of Discovery because they felt welcomed by the show. It was telling a story which introduced them to the audience and made them feel like they had a place here.
And then Picard and now Strange New Worlds have made them feel unwelcome. And on the one hand, you have Prodigy, which is also steeped in nostalgia, but has a proactive, anti-gatekeeping concept and style. And A, it’s animated and it’s a kids’ show and no one’s watching it. But it’s also not getting a fraction of the attention that Strange New Worlds and Picard get.
I just feel like by aiming exclusively for the nostalgia crew, they’re not giving themselves and Star Trek the opportunity to grow. And I need more than nostalgia. I’m sorry. I love the idea of seeing familiar people and places. But the thing about The Next Generation is that it was earned. They went so many years before they even mentioned the name of a character from TOS.
Anika: Dr. McCoy was in the first episode of TOS.
Liz: He was deliberately not named, though. And that was the only vestige of the original series for seasons to come. I’m sorry.
Anika: I don’t want to well-actually you.
Liz: Please.
Anika: But they definitely mentioned Kirk’s Enterprise in the second episode, “The Naked Now.”
Liz: Okay, yes.
Anika: I understand wanting to black that out.
Liz: I have been well-actuallyed, and I deserve it.
Anika: That’s just what I’m saying. I think that TNG did start out with “We’re going to be really based on TOS,” mainly because Gene Roddenberry was still alive, and so had a huge hand in it, but was influential. This was a legacy piece. And I think that when they actually let go of that is when they got good.
Liz: Absolutely.
Anika: That’s why Strange New Worlds should have already learned this lesson and not be so heaped in it.
Okay, so I have this little list. I have made a little list of people who are served by these 10 episodes, which is only Pike. Then there’s people who appear to be served by these 10 episodes, but I’m not sure they are. And that’s Spock and Uhura. Uhura actually fares better than Spock because we learned a lot more about Uhura than we ever knew before. And she does definitely have an arc.
Uhura has a journey and is a very important character, but only sometimes. She disappears every time she’s not important, she’s not even there. And also, it’s a little bit weird that she levels up into the communications officer we already knew she was. It’s just strange. It’s anticlimactic because we already knew that. And now we also know that she’s never going to be anything else.
Liz: No, no, if Uhura’s arc this season is about making her the character she has been for 50 odd years, that’s disappointing.
Anika: And then we have people who get something to do at least once and twice. And that’s Una, M’Benga, La’an, Hemmer and Chapel. They all got something to do. Hemmer’s arc was mostly about Uhura, although also M’Benga … anyway. And Chapel’s was entirely about Spock, but at least they got things to do.
Liz: They did. And Chapel is such a vivid presence throughout the series that it was really shocking when I looked back and went, oh, all of her stories are revolved around Spock, just like the original series.
Anika: And then we have someone who is allegedly a main cast character that I still could not tell you anything about other than I don’t like her. And that’s Ortegas. And what I wrote in the notes was people who are allegedly regulars, but got as much as or actually less than the Kirk brothers.
Liz: Yeah, look, Ortegas got a second dimension in the flash forward of the finale, and it turns out she’s an asshole. And in some ways, it’s Detmer all over again, in that we have this wildly popular character who actually does nothing, but with Detmer…
Anika: I guess they fly good.
Liz: They fly good. And with Detmer, she has this emotional breakdown in season 3 of Discovery, and she’s an asshole, basically. But we had known her long enough to understand that, even if we had not seen it on screen, there was probably more happening for her than just being a jerk. Whereas Ortegas, I think she might be a full-time jerk.
Anika: So here is something that I learned by watching these three episodes in a row.
Liz: Oh?
Anika: In “The Elysian Kingdom,” which I had written off as none of those people are even those people. So who cares? That episode doesn’t matter, except in that episode, Pike and M’Benga are both saying, hey, let’s try diplomacy instead of fighting and battle, and Ortegas is, from the get-go, “I want to go get these people. I want to take my sword and attack them and win. You have a giant weapon of mass destruction. Let’s use it now.” That is her entire character in the fake place as well as in the fake future. So Ortegas has no personality whatsoever in the reality. And then in fake land, she’s the worst.
Liz: I see how that trait ties in with her behavior in fake “Balance of Terror”, in that there she is also like, okay, let’s go to war then. And that’s a really unpleasant trait. But the thing is, we’re just a couple of years out from the Federation’s war with the Klingons. There is a story there about her experiences in that war and how they have changed her. She was only assigned to the Enterprise in the first episode of this season. She’s new to the ship.
Anika: How is that possible? Because she’s the one who introduces Uhura to how things happen.
Liz: Oh, you’re right. Now I’m confused and I certainly don’t want to go back and re-watch the first episode. But I am going to assume that at some point she was separate from the Enterprise and had some sort of terrible wartime experience that has left her deeply traumatized, and it would be interesting to actually explore that, instead of just having her be there quipping and making weirdly sexual remarks on the bridge and calling for fights.
I think it’s cool that fandom has latched on to a one-dimensional female character of color instead of a one-dimensional white guy, but I don’t see the appeal and maybe it’s because I know Melissa Navia was rude to you at the premiere, but I don’t like her.
Anika: Yeah, she hasn’t done anything to win me over, on screen or off screen.
So, let’s start at the beginning with “The Elysian Kingdom,” or a dying Black girl’s fan fiction takes over the Enterprise with the help of a space cloud.
Liz: So, I went into this, I saw the preview pictures and I was like, oh no, because I hate the holodeck romps, I hate costumes and silly fake medieval fantasy stuff in Star Trek. I don’t like any of that. But then I saw it was a M’Benga episode, and we had just been complaining about the lack of M’Benga episodes, so I was like, I am going to find it within myself to enjoy this, and I did. It was a great episode for M’Benga and a great episode for Hemmer and Rukiya, and everyone else was having a lot of fun.
Anika: My question is, it’s a great episode for Hemmer, why is Hemmer so prominent in this episode when he’s going to die in the next one?
Liz: I am also furious about that. I’m furious about Hemmer’s death in general, because this was also where he became a more three-dimensional character to me, in that he’s not just a blind grumpy guy who loves fixing things, he’s also a massive goofball who really gets into larping. And I love that, I want to see more of that.
It was so fun to see, first he’s angry that the world doesn’t make sense, and this nebula is trying to pull his brain out through his nose, and then he really gets into this wizard role. And it was just so fun and delightful to watch. And this relationship that we saw between Hemmer and M’Benga, where they were colleagues who got on well, but they weren’t really friends, and certainly Hemmer didn’t know anything about M’Benga’s life. And then by the end of the episode, they’re good friends. It’s great.
Anika: It’s sad to me that we get all of that and then immediately lose it. And the thing is, that episode proves that M’Benga is so lonely. His only maybe friend is Una. She knows his name, so that’s good. They use first names. She knows his secrets. They’re kind of adorable. I totally ship it.
Liz: He also knows her secrets.
Anika: Yes. I really love their relationship. But instead of seeing their relationship at all, we get this arc of M’Benga and Hemmer that he immediately loses.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: So he almost had a second friend, but he doesn’t. And also, he lost his daughter.
Liz: Yeah. M’Benga is one of my favorite characters. He may actually be my favorite character. And he is certainly the one that I would most like to spend time with. So it would be nice to spend time with him.
And I find “The Elysian Kingdom” frustrating in a way, because it’s much too early in the series to have an episode where everyone’s playing different roles, but they don’t reveal anything about them, about the real characters. We get an actual queer relationship on screen, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the series or the characters themselves. Certainly, Una/Ortegas is not suddenly a thing. I don’t actually think they’ve ever interacted.
Anika: Do they even know each other.
Liz: They both work on the bridge, so they probably know what the other one looks like.
Anika: And I’m pretty sure they’ve been at dinner parties together.
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
Anika: So breakfast, I guess.
Liz: They’re acquaintances, but they don’t have a secret romance that’s happening. No, and in that way, it was finally some overt queerness that’s not evil. But it immediately became tokenistic in the way that all of this series’ queerness is. Basically the same way it was when they would go to the mirror universe in Deep Space Nine and everybody was queer there.
Anika: Yes, it’s the same sort of maybe somewhere. Queer relationships exist, but not in the actual universe. No, we’ve reverted back to that from Discovery, which is, and even Picard.
Liz: Yeah, even Picard eventually got to the point where they were allowed to have overt queerness. And I tend to blame this on Akiva Goldsman because he is the consistent factor in all the live-action new Treks that I don’t care for or have problems with. But also, I don’t want to let Alex Kurtzman off the hook because he is the guy overseeing all the treks, and he keeps allowing this to happen.
Anika: So the only other thing I want to say about “The Elysian Kingdom,” because again, I don’t think it actually matters, is that I do think it was clever the way that they wrapped up this storyline in that they basically caught the ship in a buffer and said, all you can do here in this buffer is play out this story over and over again.
Liz: Just like Rukiya.
Anika: And so M’Benga got to live firsthand and realize what he was doing to his child. And I think that’s interesting, and I wish that they had explored that in any way instead of Spock’s wig.
Liz: I completely agree, although Spock was very attractive in this episode.
To me, it was very strange that this is how the Rukiya story was wrapped up, and it feels like at some point, very late in the process, they realized that the actress was going to age too quickly to get away with this for long. And so they were like, oh shit, we just need to throw this out.
And that raises the question, why did they start down this path to begin with? One of the great things about streaming is that you don’t have to lock yourself into a storyline early on because you have time to write and rewrite and everything. Eric Kripke had an interview about this just recently. So it just feels like, once again, and this is common to a lot of Paramount Plus properties, they want prestige drama, but they’re making it like it’s a network procedural.
And the other thing that I have to say is that I’ve seen criticisms of Rukiya’s fate as ableist, either as a magic cure or an encouraging euthanasia for chronic illnesses, which is something that particularly happens in Canada. It’s a particularly Canadian problem, and it’s Canadian people that I’ve seen pointing this out. So obviously it’s on their mind. I disagree. I can see the magic cure trope, but I also think that we shouldn’t conflate a chronic illness, which is something you live with, with a terminal illness, which is actively going to kill you. Rukiya has a terminal illness. She needs a magic cure.
And this is not a euthanasia story, because we see older Rukiya come back and confirm that she is alive and thriving and happy. And that is maybe a little too neat, but I am pretty okay with a story where a Black girl gets an unambiguously happy ending, especially after the bullshit with the first servant.
Anika: I’m still mad that he’s not there with her. He should have ended up in the nebula too.
Liz: They should have stolen him and put him in the buffer.
Anika: I maintain that. What was the point of him finding Rukiya if that wasn’t where that was going? I don’t understand that episode at all. I hate it.
Liz: It hasn’t even aged well over the course of a month.
Anika: No, it’s only been… All right, let’s move on.
Liz: Aliens, “All Those Who Wander…”, hashtag #GornRights.
Anika: It’s definitely Aliens.
Liz: When they found the little girl, I was like, oh, we don’t need to know her name. Her name is Newt. And then we had the literal chest-burster. And I was like, oh, we’re not even going to be subtle here.
Anika: It’s just blatantly Aliens. Sam Kirk got to play Hudson. But I don’t mind that. I have said in this podcast before that I saw Aliens much too young and loved it, and it’s changed me.
Liz: I have seen Alien, but I couldn’t watch Aliens because the VHS copy had such poor sound mixing and my brother and sister were asleep, so I couldn’t turn it up loud enough to hear it. So I’ve never actually seen Aliens, but now I have a giant TV and no children in the house, so I should.
Anika: You have to see Aliens. And also it has really good sound and really good soundtrack that’s important. It’s an important character in the movie. So it’s important to have good sound. Yeah.
Liz: Yeah. I don’t know what we were doing in the 90s with our tiny TVs, with tiny speakers. But overall, I really enjoyed “All Those Who Wander” up until the last 10 minutes, even as I was constantly thinking, but the Gorn are sentient, are a sentient species, how do we get from this where they’re mindless monsters to “Arena” and the depiction of a walking, talking Gorn in Enterprise? This really bugs me.
Anika: So honestly, I think this is my favorite episode of the season.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: It was made for me. It was an Aliens redo, but in Star Trek, it had adorable little monsters that everyone hates but I love. Chapel and La’an, which is interesting because they were on opposite sides of the spectrum, but both Chapel and La’an said lines that I would and have said. They were both me. I just was watching going, that’s me.
And then the Hemmer stuff, I hate it on a storytelling level. I hate it on a series level. It was good. It was presented well. It was well done. It was well acted and well written, and it was good for a horror. I really wish it hadn’t happened.
Liz: Yeah. I, like I said, was having problems with the episode, but I was overall enjoying it. And the problem with the depiction of the Gorn feels like something we can talk and argue about until eventually Akiva Goldsman gets the message and fixes it. I think the writer of this episode had an interview where he talked about his headcanon about how it made sense. And I was like, yes, dude, you literally wrote the script. This doesn’t have to be headcanon.
Anika: Creative written that in.
Liz: But then they killed Hemmer. And looking at Akiva Goldsman’s new Trek, going back to the season two premiere of Discovery, “Brother,” the depiction of mental illness and disability when he is in charge or in a senior position is constantly terrible. We have the Victorian insane asylum of Spock’s psychiatric hospital in season two of Discovery. We do have the wonderful bit where Amanda talks about his learning disability and I think that is actually one not-terrible depiction of a disability in Akiva Goldsman’s work. Or Goldsman adjacent ,because I don’t know who wrote that.
But it’s Spock’s mental health in season two. It’s Hugh and the XBs in season one of Picard. It’s Yvette Picard and it’s Agnes and the cure for clinical depression is to be literally assimilated.
And this whole thing where the worst possible thing that can happen to Pike is that he becomes disabled. It feels like the purpose of a disabled character in Goldsman’s work is to teach an able-bodied person an important lesson and then die. It happened with Hugh and it happens here with Hemmer and Uhura and I hate it.
Anika: That’s not good. In fact, it’s awful. It really ruins a great episode. And again, because I am a huge Aliens fan, as soon as Hemmer was hit with this stuff, I was like, he’s dead. I knew immediately how that was going to end. And I feel like that helped me in some ways because it wasn’t a surprise. So it didn’t hit me. I didn’t cry. It was a lot like when Kat Cornwell died because I knew I saw where that was going. And I turned to my Kat and I said, I know where this is going. It’s going to be bad. And then I literally turned off of Star Trek for months after that happened.
Liz: Yeah, I remember.
Anika: So it’s bad, because you become so invested in something and then to have the actual opposite effect. They wanted me to be sobbing and inspired by Hemmer. He was definitely supposed to be a very inspiring death because he goes out and he’s a hero. He gets the whole hero lighting and moment. And then he literally jumps off a cliff like he’s some kind of angel.
Liz: Just like Yvette Picard.
Anika: Exactly. And it’s really offensive because death isn’t beautiful. I don’t understand why I have to say this.
Liz: Yeah. Look, I’ve been a goth. I understand the appeal, but this is not a series for goths. And frankly, I would just be happy with disabled characters getting to live and thrive and have really fantastic disabled lives.
Which brings me to something. I was waiting to the end of the season before I called this out as a nitpick, but through the whole season, whenever we’ve seen Hemmer working, he is just using touch screens. And the thing is, that technology doesn’t work for blind people and no amount of telepathy in the world is going to turn a touch screen into something that works for you.
Anika: I’m sorry, I’m imagining his mental link with his iPad. That’s just not working for me. No, no.
Liz: My mother’s gentleman friend is blind and he uses an iPhone because iPhones have really good verbal interfaces and screen readers. And the lack of assistive technology for Hemmer was an early sign that he was going to be a very tokenistic character. I just assumed, foolishly, that this was a first season oversight that they would fix later.
And I know that the actor has said that he’s not done with Star Trek and people have taken that to mean that Hemmer is coming back. All he says is that he is coming back, nothing about the character. And who is to say they’re not going to keep on killing him?
Anika: I mean, look, I think I would be equally offended if Hemmer came back. At this point, because it’s so… Why would you tell that story if then you’re immediately going to reverse it? I’m very happy that Hugh Culber came back, but he shouldn’t have died in the first place. It doesn’t matter that he came back, because he shouldn’t have died in the first place.
Liz: And to me, I would bring Kat Cornwell back because her death had no impact whatsoever on the series, and didn’t represent anything for her as a character. Whereas with Hemmer, his end was built into him from the foundation. And, you know, Uhura’s, what is your purpose in life? conversation. And so despite the ableism, I think…
Anika: It’s good for Uhura. Good for Uhura’s story. Not necessarily good for Uhura.
Liz: But what I was going to say was, I have trouble comparing Hemmer’s death with Hugh Culber’s. Because with Hugh, it was a gay showrunner trying to tell a story that was meaningful to him and then realizing too late that he had not earned the trust of the audience to tell this story and pivoting really hard to fix it. Whereas this is an able-bodied writer disposing of a disabled character when he already has a long history of doing so with other disabled characters.
Anika: Yeah, it’s probably closer to the other Hugh.
Liz: Borg Hugh, yes.
Anika: Who has such an amazing story and starts a whole new story in that series and then dies for no reason. For cruelty.
Liz: Yeah, because Borg Hugh was representing AIDS patients right down to Jonathan Del Arco’s first audition. And so killing him and cruelly as an abomination is especially horrible. At least with Hemmer, it’s merely the old trope of the stoic disabled person giving themselves up to save the able-bodied. I hate it, but it’s driven by apathy rather than hatred.
Anika: So now I’m going to bring up the other thing that I noticed in this episode, or at least thinking about this episode, but it’s actually a through line throughout the entire season and I don’t understand it at all.
Liz: Go.
Anika: There is a weird theme going on in this season that is, you know, TLDR, children don’t have rights.
Liz: Yes, I saw your note about that and I thought that is so smart of you, not the writers.
Anika: I do not understand why that would be a theme, but it is very, it’s visible from the beginning with Child La’an and Child Spock and Child T’Pring, because you think about they were betrothed at age seven and had no choice in that matter and are now having to learn how to have a relationship.
And there’s obviously the First Servant and Rukiya and then even in the last episode, there’s that one kid, Pike meets the one kid who is going to die.
Liz: It’s as if children are plot devices and objects, not people. And this even goes to the Gorn children, the Gorn babies.
Anika: Gorn babies are the most extreme version, where they are not even treated as people by any definition of the term. They are monsters. They are animals. Even though we know they are sentient, they have space travel. They apparently have hatchery planets or whatever. So it’s like they corralled a bunch of other aliens into their planet to have their… That’s kind of horrible, but it means they’re smart. How is it that we are treating them as actual mindless monsters?
Liz: You think about Deep Space Nine, where they come into custody of a Jem’Hadar child and Odo tries to raise it. And we learn more about the Jem’Hadar. That child is treated as a person, and the Gorn are monsters.
I was thinking about this note of yours, about children not having rights, for the last couple of days and it struck me. We’ve talked about how Voyager is the most family-friendly, the most kid-friendly of the Star Treks. Not just because there’s a kid character, although that’s part of it. I think the thing is that Star Trek in the 90s, particularly when Michael Piller was in charge, was very conscious of being a family drama that people would watch with their children. And I think in some cases that really held it back from telling good stories. But they were conscious that they had an audience that was diverse in age.
Whereas Strange New Worlds in particular, because it’s also quite sexually graphic compared with Discovery and Picard, is not a Star Trek for children at all. And so there’s not even a thought of taking the young audience into account because they don’t want to have a young audience. But the thing is, I don’t have children. I don’t spend a lot of time with children. And yet I am aware that children are people.
Anika: I do have children, and I do spend a lot of time with children. And the worrying part is that this is also happening in society, that it is not actually unique to Star Trek, that children are losing rights all across this country. They’re being used as props for the adults to win and arguments against the other adults. And it’s really troubling to me. My brother wrote this book where he said that 12-year-olds should be allowed to drop out of school if they want to, instead of 18-year-olds and 16-year-olds, if you get your parents’ permission. And he got a lot of flack for that.
Liz: I mean, I disagree, but I assume he has a purpose for making this argument.
Anika: The idea is that people who are not learned are still worth something. And that they could learn a skill that might not be English lit. They might not read Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean that they’re dumb. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have something to provide. They maybe need a different kind of school.
And so I think that why he wrote this book is because we are barrelling towards the opposite. We are saying not only do you have to go to school, you don’t have to stay in school, you also then have to go to college, and you have to sell your soul in order to do it. And you have to know exactly what you want to do when you are nine and going into middle school, because otherwise you’ve ruined your life.
Liz: But also you have to survive the school shooters and drill endlessly, and please save us from climate change.
Anika: And also you’re not allowed to learn what you want to learn. You have to be taught these things, that these three people who go to church every Sunday have decided is the acceptable things for you to learn. In Florida, which Florida is like a trash fire now in terms of education, 100% across the board. But the most recent thing I read about Florida is that they are not allowing teachers to have classroom libraries because they can’t make sure that those teachers are giving the right books. And so they just aren’t allowed to give any books at all.
Liz: And it’s not just not trusting teachers, it’s also not trusting students. Because certainly when I was a kid and I grew up in a very conservative family, so I would read books that had messages that my parents would not approve of, and I would go, oh, that’s wrong. I’m reading it, but I’m reading it critically and I know it’s wrong.
Anika: That’s my entire argument about Twilight. It was super popular with 14-year-old girls. Let the 14-year-old girls read the book and it is not going to ruin their lives. They are not going to decide that they want to live that. They are smart enough to understand the difference between fiction and reality. There are actually no vampires.
Liz: And also stuff that you enjoy in a fictional romance is not going to be appealing in a real life one.
Anika: Thank you. Please thank you. None of the ships that I ship are healthy or good or the kind of relationship that I would want to have.
Liz: This is getting into a wider discussion, but as children have been deprived of rights and independence, we also see younger adults depriving themselves of those rights. And you see it in fandom where it’s like, “I’m a 23-year-old minor. How dare you write this fic and post it where I can see it.” And it’s really complicated and it’s depressing. And it is sad that Star Trek is playing into this by depersonalizing children. And it is again only Strange New Worlds. We certainly don’t see this with Discovery, where do we have children in Discovery aside from…
Anika: Adira is the closest, I’d say.
Liz: Adira, who is very young, and Book’s late nephew. And that is a series that killed a child. And we didn’t hate it because Book did everything in his power, which was limited, to save him, and had to watch the planet be destroyed. It really is like a good version of the end of “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach.” And then Book spends the entire season grieving and blaming himself and seeking justice.
Anika: And trying to fix it. Yes. Trying to do something about it. He literally makes it his life’s purpose to make sure that never happens again. Whereas Pike literally just wanders away from the planet and is sad about his own life for multiple episodes.
Liz: This is because Book is a better person than Pike.
Anika: I mean, Book is definitely a better person than Pike, but…
Liz: Most people are better people than Pike.
Anika: Jumping ahead just to the end, not the very end of “A Quality of Mercy,” but to the before he comes back from the future end of “A Quality of Mercy,” where the Romulan commander says, you know, I’ve accepted my fate. And then the camera comes in close on Pike and he’s like, oh, I have to accept my fate. That was the lesson of this entire season.
And then it gets driven home because the whole Spock thing happens and then his future self is like, Spock’s the most important person in the universe and he’s the only one who can save Romulan souls. And so therefore you can’t do this. And the thing is that by accepting his fate, Pike also accepts the fate of that kid at the beginning of the episode. That kid is going to die. So yeah, maybe the goods of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but also why did we have to meet this child in order to learn that you’re going to sacrifice him?
Liz: Also, if Pike simply ensures that child and the others he can’t save is assigned somewhere else that day, does that mean those kids are going to go on to murder Spock? Pike says that there is no change he can make where everyone is saved, but I just don’t believe that.
Anika: I don’t believe that. I think that Pike is just wrong.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Why are we listening to future Pike? The same with why are we listening to future Janeway? Why do we listen to these people? There’s clearly something wrong with them.
Liz: This should be a Lower Decks episode. Anytime your captain comes back from the future to teach you a lesson, you should just put them in a cupboard and ignore them.
Oh, I only have one more thing to say about “All Those Who Wander,” and it’s that I don’t feel like the Hemmer-Uhura relationship was sold enough to justify Hemmer’s death or its effect on Uhura.
Anika: Because they were only in one other episode together.
Liz: Well, there’s also their first interaction where she’s really ableist and he calls her out, but again, disabled people don’t just exist to teach able-bodied people lessons. And I like their relationship. I love that Uhura had a mentor who is not a comms officer. And yet, I just wanted to see more of it. I wanted more Hemmer. Killing Hemmer was a mistake because he was great.
Anika: Uhura fixes her station in multiple episodes. So it’s actually a great building up of why does Uhura have all this engineering knowledge? Oh, because of Hemmer. That’s great. But right, the fact is I have no idea how much time has gone by since the first episode and the last episode. It could be three weeks or it could be a year. I do not know. I don’t know how long she was there, but we only actually saw them interact in that one, in that, have that relationship in that one episode. And then again, in this episode, those are, that’s their times.
And yet at his funeral, she’s like, he was like my dad, which again, that’s great, but it is not earned as you said. And then my note, my other note about the funeral, Ortegas was Hemmer’s friend. Glad we learned that at his funeral.
Liz: Aside from the Gorn stuff, the worst parts of “All Those Who Wander” were the deaths because then we have Cadet Red Shirt and Lieutenant Dead Guy Walking. Duke. Yeah, yeah.
Anika: It was also like he was the butt of every joke until he died and then he died.
Liz: Anika, he was fat. He was an overweight Starfleet officer and they can only serve one purpose. A disabled character is here to teach an able-bodied person a lesson and a fat person is here to be the butt of the jokes.
Anika: Do we want to talk about Spock and Chapel and how they stole Spock and Uhura’s lighting and camera work?
Liz: Yes, I saw a GIF set which highlighted that the embrace between Chapel and Spock at the end of that episode is literally framing and gesture. It’s identical to Spock and Uhura in the first Star Trek movie after Vulcan is destroyed.
And I shared this thought with a friend of mine who really loves Quinto Spock, and she pointed out there is one difference, and that is that Quinto Spock is so gentle and tender when he touches Uhura, as if he knows that as a Vulcan he has terrible strength and he could harm her. And there’s none of that care with Peck Spock.
But either way, I think taking this moment with a black woman and giving it to a white woman in a plotline which involves basically an emotional affair where Spock is cheating on an Asian woman, the optics are bad.
Anika: I love Chapel and Spock, which is literally the opposite of TOS, where I hate Chapel and Spock. But I love Chapel and Spock, I loved them in this episode, but that was the first moment where I said, oh, Chapel is me, was when she says it’s good to get mad sometimes.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Because, not to be me, but that’s my main issue with the Jedi and the Vulcans, is that if you suppress something long enough, it eventually takes over, which happens in this episode. She, like me, is saying, sometimes allowing yourself to be angry when your anger is justified is acceptable, and you should let that happen. But he doesn’t actually learn that lesson here, because he lets it go in order to go after the evil Gorn monsters, and then he can’t get it back in control because he’s so upset at everything that happens, probably including letting his anger go at the evil Gorn monsters.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And she embraces him, and it’s an important scene, but he doesn’t like… In 2009, they have a relationship. And she is there, and she’s saying literally, let me take care of you because that’s what you need. And he does. He accepts that, and he says, yes, please, take care of me. And then she says, what do you need from me? And he says, I need you to keep doing your job now. You’ve taken care of me. Now we’re going to go do our job, and then we can come back to this. They have a healthy relationship.
He does none of that with Chapel. They have, like you say, their entire relationship is tainted by it being this weird she’s feelings for him, and he maybe has feelings for her, but he’s completely unavailable, and he’s not supposed to have feelings anyway, because he’s a Jedi. So, it’s all messed up, and none of that foundation that is in 2009 is there.
Liz: Which is amazing, because I think that’s the scene in 2009 where we learn about the Spock-Uhura relationship. Yes. But there’s so much more in the writing, and I cannot believe I’m praising the writing of that movie, and yet, my beef…
Anika: Don’t worry, I’m going to make fun of it when we get to the next episode.
Liz: My beef with Spock-Chapel here, is that I don’t love unrequited love stories, and we know, because we’ve seen TOS, that Spock is never going to return Chapel’s feelings, and in fact, is going to become less emotionally available. And so, I just want to say, Christine, cut your losses now, and don’t hang around for this guy. He doesn’t deserve you.
Anika: I have something about that in the next one, too, once we get to “A Quality of Mercy.” I have so much to say about “A Quality of Mercy.”
Liz: We’ve done a speed run of the other episodes. So, let’s talk about “Balance of Error.”
Anika: That’s really good. Good job.
Liz: I’m up to two puns this year. I’m really proud. Yeah, this was terrible.
Anika: Everything. I don’t have the visceral reaction I have to suffering, but I have very little positive say about this episode. I think that it misunderstands “Balance of Terror.” It misunderstands Spock and the Romulans. It misunderstands all of these characters. Like, every character is weirdly out of character. It misunderstands Jim Kirk. I do not understand what happened here. It just feels very lazy and completely off-center of what it was… I assume what it was trying to do.
Liz: I watched the Enterprise finale on Tuesday, and then “A Quality of Mercy” on Thursday, and they made a really good double set, because they’re both episodes where the current show and the current characters are pushed aside in favor of gimmicky nostalgia to the detriment, of not only the new characters, but the original work as well. And it’s just really depressing.
Anika: I hate what it does to the Romulans.
Liz: Yes, I hate what it does to the Romulans. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually really mad about how Kirk is written and played. Because the new guy, Paul Wesley, he’s no Chris Pine and he’s not even a William Shatner. And every time he tries to look like he’s doing some serious strategic planning, he looks like a ginger Kat who doesn’t have the brain cell. I would not insult Jorts that way, but I did get a Captain Jorts T Kirk vibe.
Anika: Okay, that’s pretty good because actual real Kirk is a Jorts.
Liz: Yes, I was just going to say Jorts and Jean are Kirk and Spock.
Anika: Yes, perfect. And this was not that. I called him discount Tom Paris.
Liz: Yeah, I can see that.
Anika: He had none of the Kirk stuff and all of the obnoxious Tom Paris stuff. And I think Tom Paris goes on an arc and becomes a better human. And this was like the worst parts of Tom Paris.
Liz: Minus the womanizing.
Anika: Attempting to be charming, you know, attempting to be charming. It’s almost shocking to me that he didn’t hit on anybody.
Liz: That would have required a woman to have a substantial role in the story. And obviously that wasn’t going to happen. We didn’t even get a Janice Rand to stand beside Pike at the wedding and bring him coffee and moral support.
Anika: First of all, justice for Janice Rand. Second of all, the reason I’m shocked that Kirk doesn’t hit on anybody is because they misunderstand him so much. And that’s my main issue with Fanon Kirk, that everyone is sort of obsessed with it. He’s a womanizer. And it’s like, no, he isn’t. What part of actual Kirk is a womanizer?
Liz: And the thing is, Kirk in “Balance of Terror.” I was going to rewatch the episode, but I just read the transcript for the episode where we discussed it instead. Kirk is basically Pike in “Balance of Terror.” He’s cautious. He’s introspective. He’s deeply weighed down by the responsibility for all the lives that he has under his command and even for the Romulan lives. He is reluctant to act without Starfleet’s authority and at every step of the way, he is afraid he is going to start a war. That is not Kirk.
Anika: This guy is flippant and discount Tom Paris. I say this as someone who likes Tom Paris, but…
Liz: He certainly doesn’t make a good first impression.
Anika: Yeah, and he is also impulsive in a way that screws everything up. Whereas Jim Kirk is thoughtful and then does the thing. Everything that Kirk does, he is not impulsive. He is very sure of himself. He trusts his intuition, but he doesn’t just decide, I’m going to go do this crazy thing, except in this episode.
Liz: In Discovery’s “The War Without and the War Within,” Kat describes her Lorca as measured and reasonable. And we all go, really, Kat? Is that what you think? But that is also a description of actual canon James Kirk for the first two seasons. And I’m like, if they wanted this asshole warrior guy, Gary Mitchell is right there. Because we’ve talked about how Mitchell’s death is a catalyst for Kirk in that A, it’s the beginning of his real friendship with Spock, but also, in some ways, he takes on his late friend’s traits.
Anika: This is a good place to bring up that, again, I was watching, and I was really paying attention to Kirk the second time around because I wanted to, I just really disliked it the first time. And so I was like, how can I make this work for me? Now, he’s never going to be my Chris Pine. And the thing is that my Chris Pine Kirk totally is impulsive. And it’s why I love him.
Liz: But also, he had a completely different upbringing.
Anika: He had a completely different childhood. And so he’s reckless because he cares so much and he needs to fix everything. And he had, I get it. All of that makes sense for that Kirk.
Liz: Oh my God. Please write a fic about AOS Hemmer and Kirk.
Anika: Oh, that sounds fun. But this is supposed to be the Kirk that in “Balance of Terror,” McCoy says, don’t destroy Kirk. He has this big thing. I love that whole scene between Kirk and McCoy and Kirk is like, I don’t want to do this, but I have to do this. And McCoy is like, trust your measured self and think about it and be who you’re meant to be. And so what I came up with was, so this Kirk in this “Balance of Terror” is who Kirk is without Spock and McCoy? Is that what we’re saying? Is that where we’re going with this?
Liz: I can certainly see that. And maybe this is the Kirk who still has Gary Mitchell in his life being a bad influence. Although La’an is his first officer and I can’t actually imagine anyone La’an would hate more than Gary Mitchell.
Anika: Well, if Gary Mitchell was a Gorn.
Liz: Well, it’s just hard to appreciate anything good in this episode when I have to work so hard to reconcile what is happening on screen with “Balance of Terror,” an episode which I know quite well and like very much. “Balance of Terror” is probably my favorite season one episode of the original series. It’s in my top five for the series overall.
And “A Quality of Mercy” was just disappointing. And you and I are fan fiction writers. We are not intrinsically opposed to revisiting stories or telling the same story in a different way or dropping a different captain into a situation and seeing what happens. This is our bread and butter.
Anika: That’s one of my favorite things. I love echoes.
Okay, so I loved that La’an, Farragut La’an, looked like Una. I was like, whoa, you don’t look like La’an anymore. You look like Una. That’s cool. That was all she did in the entire episode. And it was very interesting to me.
Liz: Once again, we can’t have women in this episode. I think Jarrah from Women at Warp did her usual roundup of passing the Bechdel Test, and this episode failed.
Anika: So Spock sacrificed, that’s like Spock sacrificed early. He did his whole Wrath of Khan thing 20 years early. But he also, he’s in the torpedo tube, in the Jeffrey’s tube, like Kirk in Generations. It had even very similar, again, framing. And so there’s that. It’s like, there’s all these really interesting ways of nodding to other stories and seeing how things can be different and the same at the same time.
And yet, when the Romulan commander has the exact same lines to Pike, exactly what he says to Kirk, but in this one, then he is immediately blown up by the Romulans and they start a war. It’s like, wait, that’s not how it is, what? All of that was bad.
Liz: It’s like when you’re playing a video game and no matter what type of player character you are, the NPCs always interact with you the same way. And the Romulan commander was a much richer and more complex character than merely an NPC who delivers the right lines at the right time. It’s disappointing.
Anika: Okay, so now I’m going to bring in 2009 again as I promised.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And first, I just want to say when the Romulan commander and Pike first talk, he has the same lens where it’s like we could be friends. And it made me think of 2009 when they meet up with Nero and he says, I’m Christopher Pike of the Enterprise. And Nero comes on the screen and says, hello, Christopher.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: That’s my favorite thing. It’s so ridiculous. Everything about, everything about the whole movie really, especially Nero. It’s ridiculous. But I love how absurd that Romulan character is.
And so it was interesting to get those same vibes because he did seem to have this more personal relationship. It started me thinking about, okay, it is the same people who are making both things. And so what are the differences and what are the similarities?
And I realized that the one thing I defend Star Trek 2009 a lot, all the time, and I count it as one of my top tier Trek movies because most of them are bad. And yet the one thing that I really don’t like about it is how their solution to the problem is we’re going to just blow everybody up.
Spock and Kirk, they say, hey, Nero, we’re going to blow you guys up. And he’s like, I refuse to surrender. And they say, okay. And then they just blow him up. I don’t like that at all because that seems to be anathema to Kirk and Spock. That’s not what they do. But that’s what happens here too. So it’s apparently that’s how these, you know, Kirk and Spock are both on Ortegas’s side.
Liz: Yeah, I have no great reverence for Gene Roddenberry’s vision. But Gene Roddenberry’s vision was also DC Fontana’s vision and Gene Coon’s vision. And none of them would be on board with these characterizations.
And speaking of 2009 Star Trek, at the end of that movie Greenwood Pike is in a wheelchair. And then he’s killed in the next movie in Into Darkness. And I have always said it is complete bullshit that he cannot command a starship from a wheelchair. And that then he’s killed off so Kirk can survive. I’m pretty sure he dies saving Kirk’s life. And I wrote a whole fic where one of the elements was my rage. It was a Discovery fic, it was a Kat fic. But one of the elements in the background was my rage at that plot development.
And yet compared with the way Pike’s injuries are handled in Strange New Worlds, I’m suddenly really missing the less ableist days of Greenwood Pike.
Anika: Oh my goodness. I mean, I will, definitely Bruce Greenwood has rocketed back up into, he’s the best Pike. At the beginning of this series, I was wavering, but sorry.
Liz: Yeah, no.
Anika: You failed.
Liz: Greenwood Pike is where it’s at.
Anika: It’s Pike’s realization that it’s important for him to be disabled, so that Spock isn’t disabled slash dead.
Liz: Because as we know, a disabled Vulcan could not possibly negotiate peace with the Klingons.
Anika: It’s absurd. In Pike, 250 years from now, they should be able to fix him better and give him the ability. But the thing is that Stephen Hawking had the ability to talk to people for 40 years and changed the course of humanity or whatever. And that was now. That was 40 years ago. So there’s no reason for Pike…
Liz: I will have to double check this because I might need to cut it out if it’s wrong, but I think he even managed to cheat on his wife. And this brings us back to what we were saying in Season 2, that Pike’s fate is bad and has no place in modern canon. And really has had no place in modern canon since the 1980s.
Anika: I agree with you that it’s absurd that Pike has to give up the Enterprise because he’s in a wheelchair. But it’s also he’s not in a wheelchair in the second movie. Oh yeah.
Liz: I forgot about that. I have only seen Into Darkness once. I did not particularly care for it.
Anika: So it’s ridiculous for Pike. It is impossible for me to believe that Spock would not be able to be Spock from a wheelchair.
Liz: Look at Airiam.
Anika: He is a telepath.
Liz: Even if there is cognitive damage, the Vulcans are telepaths?
Anika: And the Vulcans canonically have the ability to go into a family member’s brain and fix it. So therefore, even if there was cognitive damage, his entire family could come together and try to do something about it.
Liz: It doesn’t even have to be a biological family member, because Janeway can do that for Tuvok.
Anika: So therefore, nothing, there is no… I refuse to accept that Spock couldn’t be Spock with horrific injuries.
Liz: I also think, and this is very cynical of me, but Spock’s injuries at the end of the episode are basically the worst we’ve ever seen in Star Trek. They are grotesque. And I am very sure that they were done that way so that the audience’s immediate thought would be it’s better that he just dies than having to live like that.
Anika: So not to bring in ER again.
Liz: We’re almost ready to start season 2.
Anika: But there are multiple episodes of ER where someone is horrifically burned and is going to die. There’s a 9% chance that they will even survive. And yet they spent the entire episode, and in some cases multiple episodes, trying to save that person’s life.
And even if they can’t save their life, they go out of their way to make sure that they get to see everybody that they love and that they get closure or whatever. And do all of this stuff. And it’s just, again, I don’t understand how in the future they wouldn’t… Chapel shouldn’t be sitting there crying about Spock.
Liz: No, she should have a whole army of nurses doing nurse stuff. I don’t think Chapel is very good at her job.
Anika: And she’s a biochemist. She’s a microbiologist. This is literally her thing, is to take cells from one part of you and put them somewhere else and make them work. That’s part of what she does. I am extremely upset about the entire, the whole thing that happens. I hate it. I am, again, decanonizing “The Menagerie.” And also, what even, what is this lesson that he’s supposed to learn? He’s supposed to learn that someone else’s life is more important than his life.
Liz: He’s a Starfleet captain. He should have that lesson.
Anika: He should already know that.
Liz: Also, this whole idea that only Spock can do these things, this was a problem with Picard, too. Akiva Goldsman really loves the great man theory of history. And with all due respect, I’m calling bullshit.
Anika: Okay, so here we’re going to get into my what happens with Chapel. If Spock dies. So in this reality, Spock dies, and Chapel goes to tell T’Pring, because she’s the only person who even thinks of it, because everyone else is grieving about Spock. And they bond over their sorrow. And then guess what? They go and help the Romulans. Chapel and T’Pring go and help the Romulans the way that Eliza Hamilton did everything that Alexander Hamilton was going to do.
Liz: Oh my god. I love that. But also, yes, Spock was one of the driving forces behind the Khitomer Accords with the Klingons, but he wasn’t the only one. For example, Sarek was there.
And with all due respect to the “Unification” two-parter, which I love far more than it deserves, but the Romulans never needed Vulcans to save them. The Romulans have always been on course to save themselves, and reunification can happen without Spock. People are saying that New Vulcan would not exist without Spock, and I don’t believe that.
Anika: I don’t believe it either.
Liz: T’Pol could come out of retirement and reunify Vulcan and Romulus. Tuvok could do it standing on his head. Vorik, not so much.
Anika: Yeah, that’s the thing, again, and I say this all the time in, like, what’s the word? We are living through something times. I’m going to call it difficult. I don’t think that’s the right quote, but we’re living in difficult times.
Liz: Challenging nightmarish. Nightmarish.
Anika: That’s good. And so you think about, what am I doing? What am I doing to try to make it less nightmarish? Because this is my opportunity. If I ever wanted to be a hero, to be a rebel, to do something for a cause, to save something, this is it, right? It doesn’t get any worse.
Liz: If you’ve ever wondered what you would do if you were in Nazi Germany, this is your chance to find out.
Anika: This is your chance. And the truth is that being the great man is not it. That is not how you affect anything. It is not how you save the world. Being an anonymous person who does stuff that they don’t get any credit for is how you do it. And so even if Spock is the figurehead or the leader or the hero who solves the Romulan problem and brings peace to Romulans and Vulcans, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a thousand other people that were there with him to do it to.
Liz: And we see that in “Unification.”
Anika: On both sides, including Romulans.
Liz: In “Unification”, there are young Romulans who have taught themselves Surak’s logic and are working on themselves even before they meet Spock to do more for Romulus and Vulcan. In fact, I think the main impact of Spock dying young is that we don’t get the Kelvin verse.
Anika: Yeah.
Liz: And the thing is, I just don’t understand why Pike can’t take his promotion and get that training job, and then, that morning he looks at the J-Class training ship and goes, I have a bad feeling about this, let’s run a diagnostic down to the smallest molecule today and do this training tomorrow. And they find the problem with the baffle plates and they save the ship and they save everyone and, then Pike just keeps living his life and being a guy and teaching people and history doesn’t change because history doesn’t pivot on the acts of one Starfleet captain. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.
Intellectually, I find it interesting that Pike is a massive Mary Sue and yet this is a story about him finding out he is not the chosen one, but in execution, I don’t love it.
Anika: I like that the… I don’t know. I think that there are very interesting things that could happen with the bones of this story. I just think that they went in… They just spent too much time literally recreating “Balance of Terror” shot for shot instead of looking at what would be different.
And also, I hate that in multiple episodes and also in other series, another new Trek series, people not fighting, not shooting first, people holding out a hand instead of a gun are somehow wrong.
Liz: Right. That was interesting in “The Vulcan Hello,” but we don’t need to keep doing it over and over again. And I guess this comes back to my brother’s point that this is Star Trek for Republicans.
Just to bring it back to Pike just quickly, last weekend by coincidence, I found a comic from 1994 when DC had the Star Trek license. And first, the comics of that era are so dense, like, an IDW comic would stretch this story out over three issues. But it’s basically, movie era Spock goes back to Talos IV to tell Pike, good news, the Federation has figured out how to fix you. Not Vina, just you.
And Pike is very tempted, but then he’s like, but I have my wife and we have our son, and we are literally rebuilding Talos. And we are helping the Talosians renew their culture. And yes, I’m disabled and this able body is basically an assistive device, but my disabled life has so much value. I’m not leaving it behind just for a cure.
And it was amazing. It’s 30 years old. The language around disability is would not fly today, but the story was so great. And Spock is such an asshole. It really captured that side of him. It was a perfect antidote to “A Quality of Mercy.”
Anika: Yeah. The way I mentioned my caps lock and my exclamation points. One of the caps lock was, I am begging you to hire a disability consultant.
Liz: Again.
Anika: Followed up with, seriously, do we have to crowdfund one? That’s where I’m at. Do we have to have a GoFundMe to buy the Star Trek producers a disability consultant? Because otherwise we’re just going to keep getting this.
Liz: And next weekend is San Diego Comic Con, and no one has responded to my call for someone to get up and ask Alex Kurtzman this question.
Do we have anything else to say about “A Quality of Mercy”?
Anika: Well, there’s the Una. Oh, yes.
Liz: Oh, yes. I forgot about Una, much like the writers.
Anika: Well, so did the show. My issue, we don’t know what’s going to happen because that’s second season. So I don’t have much to say about the Una problem other than that there is one, and also that this is what happened to Michael, this is what happened to Carol Freeman.
Liz: It’s really just exciting that now it’s a white woman facing cultural injustice. And that kind of ties in with the whole stuff about reproductive rights in the US, where it’s only a dystopia when it happens to white women.
I understand that Rebecca Romijn has family commitments in LA and she doesn’t want to move to Toronto, and that’s why she’s not in every episode, but I really think over the whole season they could have used her more thoughtfully, they could have maybe not forgotten for most of the season that she is an alien pretending to be human, and that impacts the way she looks at the world, and I’m curious to see where they go next season.
But I’m also scared. I’m worried that this is how they’re going to write Rebecca Romijn out, because Una is the only legacy character who isn’t safe, who can be killed off or removed or imprisoned for life. I would like to think that she’s in prison for 24 hours and then Ash Tyler turns up and goes, hey, would you like a job?
Anika: I would accept that.
Liz: I like the idea of Federation Intelligence actually being run by aliens in disguise.
Anika: That’s kind of great. I love it. I’m down with that, please. I want that to happen now because frankly, Una is too good for this show. So get her on a good one.
Liz: Also, other shows don’t seem to have this problem, but balancing an ensemble of this size with episodic writing and giving everyone a day in the spotlight is really not working for Strange New Worlds. Obviously, there’s the Ortegas problem, but as you’ve said, only Pike and in my opinion, Spock, have had a consistent amount of screen time and it’s really disappointing.
I think they either need a longer season or a different format or a smaller ensemble. But then, I just finished season 3 of the Umbrella Academy, and that is a very large ensemble and a short season, and yet everyone had their due. They introduced new characters and fleshed them out. Why does Star Trek…
Anika: That’s season 4 of Stranger Things as well.
Liz: Though they had very long episodes. I think they cheated.
Anika: They were cheating.
Liz: What was your favorite episode of this season?
Anika: So, my favorite episode was 90% of “All Those Who Wander”. But not all of “All Those Who Wander”.
Liz: That works really well because my favorite episode is “Memento Mori.” Give us Gorn stuff and three-dimensionalize the Gorn and we’ll be happy.
Anika: Right.
Liz: Least favorite?
Anika: It’s gotta be “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach” or whatever the actual title is. Also a bad title.
Liz: I will say, I remember we liked the title when we discussed that episode.
Anika: I like it as a title when I know what it is, but I don’t like it as referencing the episode.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: And I’ve now completely become unable to actually keep it all in mind. It’s no, “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” I could not tell you what happened to that episode. I will always remember the title.
Liz: That is McCoy’s romance episode.
Anika: Yes. His romance episode was someone who lives in a hollow planet. And may not be dying.
Liz: Oh, I forgot about that. My least favorite episode is “A Quality of Mercy.” “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach” is close on its tail, but I actually think “A Quality of Mercy” makes “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach” worse in that it proves your theory and fear that Pike’s sadness about the First Servant is actually his sadness about his own fate. It’s not all about you, Christopher.
Anika: He’s the worst. He’s so…
Liz: Archer is the worst, but at least Archer is not going around making everyone else’s suffering about himself. There’s a lot to be said for that.
Oh, speaking of stupid deaths, this is about Enterprise and the Enterprise finale, but I thought I would enjoy Trip’s death because he’s my least favorite character, but actually I think it is as stupid and pointless as Kat’s death. Both of them die because of OSHA violations.
Anika: Yes, they do. And also, you can sit there going, you could have done this and this to get out of this. This was unnecessary. It’s framed as a hero moment, and yet is not heroic. It’s just stupid.
Liz: So in that sense, they are even worse than him as death. Who is your favorite character?
Anika: It’s Chapel. Nurse Chapel is my favorite character.
Liz: I know that she’s not really new, but I think she’s so different from Majel Barrett’s character. I don’t know how to choose a favorite character because there’s Una and there’s La’an and there’s Chapel and there’s Uhura.
Anika: All good. I agree.
Liz: And M’Benga and Hemmer. So basically I have six favorite characters and everyone else is just… whatevs. Do we have to ask?
Anika: And least favorite?
Liz: Ortegas. Although Pike is getting close, and I have to say Sam Kirk is not far behind.
And I just want to flag that in the Gorn episode when Sam Kirk goes on his racist rampage against Spock and Pike is just… knock it off. And then the next episode where Ortegas is like, so we’re going to talk about the pointy-eared elephant in the room. In neither case does Pike rise to the very low level of keep your bigotry in your quarters.
Anika: Yeah.
Liz: He doesn’t even clear that bar.
Anika: Again, Pike is the worst. Pike, so it became very obvious in the final episode where he was even calling Uhura by her first name that Pike is like a bro captain where he just is very, you know, we’re all friends here and we all get to have family dinner together and there’s no hierarchy. And it’s just at a certain point, you step in and you tell people to stop bullying your officers.
Liz: Yes. It’s starting to give me vibes of ‘this workplace is a family’, which generally ends up meaning this workplace is going to exploit you.
Sort of related, but Pike serves meat at every single meal he cooks, except for his leftovers dinner with Captain Batel. For that alone, I side eye him. We know Spock is vegetarian. Humans can also be vegetarians. Not every meal has to have meat.
Anika: But he is a horseback riding cowboy. And so of course, he’s got his bacon.
Liz: Archer as the all-American captain is why I didn’t take to him at first. And now we’ve done it to Pike too.
Anika: Not to defend Archer.
Liz: I knew you were going to defend Archer.
Anika: But they have their dinner. Their officers’ dinners are a big part of Enterprise. And I find that charming. And yet we specifically see T’Pol’s meals are different. That they are vegetarian, that they are Vulcan. And they apologize when they have something that is weird to her. And they’re like, oh, they don’t make fun of her eating it. They learn something about it.
Liz: In the early episodes, they’re like, oh, you don’t eat with your hands? That’s weird. But they get over it. And it feels like Pike doesn’t even go that far.
Anika: And also talking about Sam Kirk and Spock and that moment, what really looked out to me with that moment was that he was pretty much using the same words that McCoy uses. And everybody loves the Spock and McCoy relationship. And we even have said that the difference between Pulaski making fun of Data is that there is a different level that it’s not bullying when McCoy does it.
But, I don’t know, when Sam Kirk did it, it was definitely bullying. It made me like McCoy less, because even though it’s very different and there’s time and there’s relationship and there’s nuance, but it just gave me a sour feeling towards that relationship because they use the same words.
Liz: McCoy gets away with a lot because DeForest Kelley is a better actor than most in any era. And yes, he’s charming. And he is able to convey that he does not actually think less of Spock.
Anika: Mean it. Yeah, I think that’s true. That’s what it is. It’s the subject.
Liz: And Spock teases him back. It is reciprocal. It’s not reciprocal with Sam. And it’s cruel and it’s complicated by the fact that Sam is a xenoanthropologist and frankly should know better. Could you imagine Michael Burnham going on a rant like this?
Anika: Right. Isn’t Sam Kirk on this mission to do Gorn research or something? Isn’t that his job?
Liz: Yeah, apparently.
Anika: Isn’t that what he should be doing? So why is he, instead of doing Gorn research, he’s yelling his fuck and misunderstanding the basics of Vulcan reality?
Liz: Maybe the reason the Federation doesn’t know anything about the Gorn is because Sam is not good at his job.
Anika: Sam Kirk’s not good at his job is a valid theory.
Liz: Yes. What do you want in season two? A new show.
Anika: What I want in season two is for Una to actually have a plot, I guess. I don’t even, no, it doesn’t even have to be an arc, but I just want her to, I want to, I’m hoping that the fact that she’s been arrested means that we’re going to learn more about her and we’re going to have a discussion of all of her stuff.
Liz: That would be nice.
Anika: And I, I want, I want more T’Pring and Sybok and Stonn and T’Pring’s cool job.
Liz: Yes. And I guess Captain Angel can come too.
Anika: And also Una referred to Starfleet Recovery Assistance.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Which was, you know, a euphemism for therapy.
Liz: That sounds like a fancy word for Zoom therapy.
Anika: I was super into Starfleet Recovery Assistance. I want to know more of that.
Liz: Oh, I’ve just figured out what your answer to what Katrina Cornwell is doing right now will be.
What I want in season two is better plots for Una and plots for Chapel that don’t revolve around her love life in any way. And that let her spend time with characters other than Spock.
Anika: I guess I want to know instead we’re going to get Corby.
Liz: Oh, yeah, I know. And I would like Uhura to have plot lines about joy and life instead of grief and sadness and death.
Anika: I would like I would like I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I’m me, but I would really love there to be less trauma discussion because this makes sense to me because the thing is, they’re not doing it very well.
Everyone has a really traumatic, horrible backstory or future story, and we’re not going to discuss that in any way. We’re not going to actually see Starfleet Recovery Assistance. We’re just going to wave at it and say that happened. And for us, it bothers me that Uhura joined Starfleet because her parents died, and now she’s decided to stay in Starfleet because Hemmer died. That is not a great reason. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to make life choices when you have just been traumatized.
Liz: They should not have even accepted her application. They should have said go to university and come back in a few years when this is behind you.
But also she’s a linguist. She is so good at making connections with people. And Hemmer talks about it in his final scene. This is somehow pathological, which, footage not found. But that alone is a reason to join Starfleet. And the trauma thing, you know, we complained about how Discovery executed it, but Discovery‘s portrayal of trauma is light years ahead of Strange New Worlds. And overall, Strange New Worlds just feels like a step backwards.
Anika: I just think that they need, again, I just think they need, I think they need new eyes on this.
Liz: You’re right, they need a disability consultant. And I think they need someone to, you know, on old school Doctor Who, there was the script editor role. And sometimes he, because it was always a him, would write the scripts. But more often he was reading them and polishing and editing. That’s what they need.
And if the showrunner isn’t doing it, they need to get someone else to take that role. Because Goldsman seems quite good at practical day-to-day side of showrunning, but I don’t think he’s good at the creative side. And I think there is no shame in outsourcing the editorial side to someone who’s better at it.
Anika: I’ve said this many times in many fandoms that when people are successful, which New Trek has been successful, clearly. There are so many Trek’s right now. When someone is successful, people stop questioning them.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Or confronting them. And that is inevitably bad.
Liz: Someone needs to ask these questions. And yeah, it’s not as if there’s a lack of moving parts in modern Star Trek, but this part is getting a bit squeaky.
Anika, where is Katrina Cornwell right now?
Anika: She’s doing a Starfleet recovery assistance. She’s totally in charge of that. She’s like, I’ve been an Admiral. It was very stressful. I enjoyed it, but I need a break. So now I’m going to step back from the Admiralty and I’m going to take over a Starfleet recovery assistance.
Liz: But also she’s still an Admiral, and she’s using those powers to focus exclusively on…
Anika: She’s just not on the board. She doesn’t have to go to the Admiral meetings anymore. It’s the best of both worlds. All of the power, none of the responsibility.
Liz: Except the responsibility for Starfleet’s mental health, which is not nothing. Have you seen these people?
Anika: Well, that’s important. She has a different kind of responsibility. And she can’t do worse.
Liz: She really, really can’t.
I think that she is in a geothermal hot spring on a planet that looks an awful lot like Iceland. And she’s been in for a while, and she’s been thinking about getting out. And then she sees a shuttle overhead, and it comes into land. And out comes Admiral April. And he says, “It feels like all I do these days is pull people away from leave. But I have a job for you.” I don’t know what the job is, so stay tuned. Mostly I just like the hot spring bit.
Anika: I have to say, I really enjoy this part of our podcast now. When I get to it at the end, I’m always like, wow, those are really good ideas. That’s really fun.
Liz: I’ve actually been making little audiograms of them so that when we go on our break, which we’re about to do, not that we didn’t just have a break, but our planned break, we will have some content to share for all those people who for some reason don’t listen to the end. We should probably tell people that we are taking a break. Officially, not just, oh no, it’s the end of the season, but we have plans.
Anika: Great, so we’re taking a break for the month of August?
Liz: Yeah, I think that if we come back in early September, then we’re refreshed, we’ve had time to watch the episodes that we need to watch for our next episode, which is going to be exciting. I’ve been planning it for over a year. And yeah, we can take a holiday from Star Trek. No offense, Star Trek, but it’s been a lot.
Anika: Thank you for listening to Antimatter Pod. You can find our show notes at antimatterpod.com, including links to our social media, credits for our theme music, and transcripts of our episodes. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, all at antimatterpod.
If you like us, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you consume your podcasts. The more reviews, the easier it is for new listeners to find us and recommend us to your friends. They can take the month of August to catch up.
Liz: Particularly if your friend hasn’t really been all that keen on Strange New Worlds. I keep getting people coming up to me and being like, this is so space-tripping, I didn’t really care for Kirk. And I’m like, yes, it is.
Anika: We are taking a brief hiatus to recover from all the Trek. But we’ll be back in a month to talk about the greatest leader in Star Trek history, Kai Winn. Follow us online for updates.