Anika and Liz are here, and we hunger for braincells! Unfortunately, before we can celebrate our favourite episode of the season so far, we have to talk about the Spock/La’an of it all…
- When Anika said she shipped Spock/La’an, she didn’t mean in canon!
- “I want to slut shame Spock, and not in an ironic way.”
- At this point it’s gonna look pretty bad if Spock DOESN’T hook up with Uhura
- This episode has literally the same ending as “Charades”
- AND NOW on to the rest of the episode, which was perfectly solid and did not deserve this
- The show within a show: Sanctuary Moon intensifies
- Brace yourself, Liz has nothing but praise for Anson Mount’s performance as TK Burrows
- Lucille Ball and Ida Lupino, honouring the women who worked behind the scenes in Hollywood
- Everyone was great, but Melissa Navia stole the whole show
- “It’s ‘Our Man Bashir’ and it’s ‘The Big Goodbye’, but just for a moment, it was ‘Far Beyond the Stars’.”
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. Today, we’re discussing the latest from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “A Space Adventure Hour.” Anika?
Anika: Yes?
Liz: A couple of weeks ago, you said that you were shipping La’an/Spock. Where did you get that monkey’s paw? And did you read the terms and conditions?
Anika: I mean, clearly not, because I am fully against it.
Liz: Oh my god. I want to slut-shame Spock so badly, and not even in an ironic way. I just think he needs to stop having sex. For the good of everyone.
Anika: 90% of this episode is so great, actually.
Liz: Yes!
Anika: I really love watching it. I enjoyed everything about all of this. But then it ends. I was even okay with the flirtation, because I was like, you know, if they’re building to something, they were not building to something, they were just, and then this happens now.
Liz: For no reason.
Anika: For no reason. At all. Out of nowhere.
Liz: Oh my gosh. We were going to record this last weekend, and then you were very busy, and I was still sick, so we decided to put it off. And I’m glad that we gave ourselves more time, because I really had nothing good to say about this episode last week. And that’s a shame, because I really love most of this episode. It is so clever, and it even says something brave about Star Trek, which I do not expect from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and I expect everyone will either not notice or be angry about it. So in a lot of respects…
Anika: So should I just go over how terrible Spock and La’an is, so that we can get it out of the way, and then move on to all the great stuff?
Liz: Yes, let’s do that, instead of leaving it to the end and leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, like this episode does.
Anika: So I have to start by saying I apologize. I listened to our episode where I said I was shipping it, and I was like, wait, no, I take it back. But the thing is that I didn’t mean for it to happen on the show, necessarily.
I was like, I ship it. I think that it’s a fun idea to play around with, but they’re not. They’re not playing around with it. Legitimately, this episode ends the same way as “Charades,” which is bad.
Liz: It feels like we’re at the halfway point of the series as a whole, and yet we’re speed running the weird season 7 relationship that comes out of nowhere and is never spoken of again. I say that as someone who really enjoyed Deanna and Worf.
Anika: I agree. Yeah, my chaos powers backfired because…
Liz: Oh, they did!
Anika: I was kidding. I was legitimately – when we got to the scene at the end. And again, I was okay with the flirtation because I thought it was just, oh, they’re going to explore La’an and Spock having feelings for each other. And if those are real or it’s just like leftover from their other relationships or stuff like that, you know, just being people who are similar and can understand each other.
I thought it was going to be cute and sweet and we shouldn’t really have a relationship because it’s the wrong, it’s not real. But no, it’s not real and they’re having a relationship.
Liz: It is ruinous to both characters, to be honest, because they are such intelligent people and this is so clearly a very bad idea. And it doesn’t feel like there’s any self-awareness. La’an is a tremendously self-aware character and it kind of bugs me that her quote unquote growth in terms of getting past her childhood trauma is that she’s just now treated like every other female character in this show.
Anika: Okay, so what I wrote here is that legitimately, Spock should not be in a relationship right now. It is very clear that Spock is not ready for a relationship, any kind of relationship.
And if La’an should be in a relationship, which is like a toss up, it should be a very low key no strings fling to just get it out of her system. And it is obvious that Spock is incapable of doing that. So it’s all just bad. Everything about this is bad.
And whatever Christine’s reaction is, and there’s four different scenarios I came up with, it will be bad. And it will make me angry. And I will be personally offended and hate it. That’s my assumption.
I have not watched the next episode because I was actually jealous of you for not having watched further when we were having the conversations. And so I was like, I’m not gonna watch it until I’m ready to record that episode. And so I don’t know what happens after this and whatever it is, I hate it.
Liz: It feels like it’s just a really forced, cheap love triangle setup. And the thing is that Spock has gone from love triangle to love triangle through this whole series. And it’s so heterosexual and rote and boring.
And you know, I am a terrible het shipper. I am migratory het fandom. If I see two people of different genders making eye contact and having some interesting interactions, I’m like, yeah, I’ll ship that. You give me two middle-aged people who have known each other for decades and have some kind of complicated relationship, I will be smushing them together like Barbie dolls in my heart for years to come.
This is boring.
Anika: It just feels very much like they are going out of their way to be like, Spock is not just heterosexual. He’s the most heterosexual to ever be heterosexual in Star Trek. It’s just really disturbing.
Liz: It definitely feels like someone at Paramount heard that Spock is a queer icon and said, we need a series that puts an end to that.
Anika: Yes.
Liz: In terms of character choices, this is so bad that in 20 years, we’re going to need another prequel to fix what Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did to Spock.
Anika: I’m so mad. I’m so mad.
Liz: I’m also angry for La’an because this is such a bad choice. “Oh, Spock is so emotionally available.” It diminishes her character as well. And because she’s the woman and she’s not the legacy character and she’s a woman of color, she’s the one who’s really going to get the blowback.
Anika: Yeah, that’s the thing.
Liz: Spock is a slut and he needs to have more respect and more ethics in how he treats his partners. And La’an just needs to make better choices.
Anika: Again, I don’t see how La’an survives this series as a person who is remembered. Just like the chance that she is timey-wimeyed has gone up exponentially in if she’s happy, she’s now Spock’s ex.
Liz: It feels like in season 14 of ER, where Neela is freshly widowed, but the show just keeps putting her into a series of ever more complicated love triangles, and she is totally passive and just goes along with all of them. And it feels like this is happening because the show has literally forgotten any other way to write a character.
Anika: Right.
Liz: Yeah. You don’t want to show in its third season, with less than 30 episodes behind it, to be giving season 13 of ER.
SPEAKER_3: That’s such a good way of putting it.
Anika: Oh, my goodness. And again, because we’re going to get to the positive stuff soon, because we’re at the end of this, and it’s just really, it’s horrible that this time bomb of a mess takes over and it’s how the episode ends. Because the episode is really good and it deserves better. Spock deserves better, La’an deserves better. And we deserve better.
Liz: I don’t know that Spock deserves better. Spock deserves to go to Vulcan and do his Kohlinar and never come back.
Anika: You’ve become a Spock hater the way you’re a Pike hater.
Liz: You’ve talked about how Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has made you love Spock. It made me hate Spock.
Anika: That’s why I’m horrifically angry about it, because I don’t love Spock anymore. It’s only four episodes and I’m like, okay, I was wrong. I don’t understand what happened to that they would do this.
And if I’ve given up then imagine the people who don’t accept him as Spock in the first place. I just, I don’t want it. I don’t want the discourse.
Liz: I need to make a pilgrimage to Leonard Nimoy’s grave to offer apologies to his work that it is being besmirched like this. I never want to hear anyone ever call Star Trek: Discovery a soap opera again.
Anika: Seriously.
Liz: Do you know how many love interests Michael had over five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery? She had two. They did not overlap one little bit. Someone on Tumblr pointed out this week that, according to Vulcan law, Spock has not actually broken up with T’Pring. So he is technically now three-timing her.
Anika: It’s offensive actually. We started this series with him confirming that he had sex with T’Pring. And somehow we’ve gone downhill from that.
Liz: Yeah. The way men in this show treat their female love interests, it makes me side-eye M’Benga for being married four times, frankly.
And that, to me, means that he is bad at casual relationships. And so if La’an hooked up with M’Benga and she thought it was a casual thing and he was like, oh, I don’t really do casual, that would actually be interesting because we would learn something new about his character. And that is a story that hasn’t been told before.
I’m sorry, but AO3 is unfortunately full of stories about Spock in love triangles. Most of them involve Jim Kirk.
Anika: Right.
Liz: This isn’t even failing in an original way. It’s just heterosexual.
Anika: It feels very much like we’re never going to see M’Benga in a relationship. And we’re just told that he has all of this baggage in relationships.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: He’s never going to get a love interest.
Liz: I was actually surprised that in the holodeck fantasy, Christ, the holodeck fantasy of this episode, he is paired with Jess Bush, which is great. Totally into it. Their 1960s persona as a couple, really there for it.
I would also say that Spock/La’an being canon is a real win for the Spock/Uhura shippers, because this is going to make it look really bad if he doesn’t hook up with Uhura before the series ends.
Anika: Yeah.
Liz: I’m not saying Spock’s dick is racist, but what if Spock’s dick is racist?
Anika: I’m so upset that that is a statement on our podcast.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Not because you said it, but because this happened. And you’re right. And the thing is, they’re going to blame it on the fans. They’re going to say, well, we did Spock’s relationships and people didn’t like either of them, and so we decided to stop doing it for you. And I will drive up to Paramount and Skydance, or whatever it is, and punch David Ellison in the face myself.
Liz: There are so many reasons to do that, get in line.
The other thing is that I don’t want Spock to hook up with Uhura, because he is bad for women and he is bad for the characterization of the women who sleep with him. This man is a sexually transmitted disease that affects characterization.
The only other thing that I have to say about this horrible ending is that I was so confused about this and where it came from. And I think I might have been on board if they’d given us a slow burn of a full season or more.
Anika: That’s what I’m saying!
Liz: I could have been persuaded.
Anika: There was the potential for a really interesting treatise on relationships. But that they just skipped to the end.
And again, I don’t mean it’s like what happened in “Charades.” It is literally exactly the same thing that happened in “Charades,” which means that will he have learned something so that he’ll wait till the, you know, it’s too early to start planning the wedding?
It’s so upsetting to me because it legitimately makes all of the women interchangeable in Spock’s eyes and Spock is the face of Star Trek. Let’s be honest.
Liz: Yes, yes. It’s so out of character for both of them that I went on a really embarrassing deep dive this week to find out if Christina Chong and Ethan Peck are dating, because that’s the only way that I think this could have seemed like a good idea to the writers. And it’s not a good idea because if your actors are dating, you never want to put them in a romantic situation on screen because the chemistry never translates.
However, I can’t find any evidence and I’m not going to pry any further than like public Instagram posts. They seem to be good friends, and nothing else is none of my business, and either way, it’s bad writing.
Let’s talk about the more important things. Did we see Paul Wesley’s penis in the cold open?
Anika: I have to admit I wasn’t looking. So when you had the screenshots, I wasn’t looking.
Liz: It was just right there.
Anika: That’s not what I paid attention to on screen. I’m sorry. Now I feel like I’ve offended Paul Wesley in some way.
Liz: Look, I think I’m offending everyone. I just have questions. I loved everything about The Last Frontier or The Final Frontier, or whatever this fake show was called.
In the Apple TV series Murderbot, there is the show within a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which is a very brightly colored, badly acted soap opera of a space opera. And in the very first episode, my flatmate was like, “oh, this is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Every episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds looks like this to me.” And then we got to this cold open and I was like, oh, oh, Sanctuary Moon intensifies.
Anika: That’s amazing. So I, I’m rewatching CSI sort of haphazardly, not in order. And I mentioned to you that we should do the CSI episode where they go to a Star Trek invention and solve a murder. You know, it’s obviously not a real Star Trek convention. It’s like a, you know, a Galaxy Quest version. And the next day I watched this episode. And I was like, people are going to say that this is a play on Galaxy Quest, but they’re wrong. It’s a play on the CSI version because it really, really is.
Liz: And there’s even a murder mystery.
Anika: And so it was, it was really delightful to me. That’s when my chaos powers work.
Liz: We should do an episode where we watch as many fake Star Treks as we can.
Anika: Yes.
Liz: You know, that Black Mirror one. And I guess we can watch an episode of The Orville if we absolutely have to and Galaxy Quest and the Sanctuary Moon super cut and all of that.
Anika: Delightful.
Liz: And none of them, none of them will have a Shatner impression as good as Paul Wesley.
Anika: I was going to say, I loved this cold open. Paul Wesley’s Shatner impression was amazing. It was perfect. “The Juris-diction,” I can’t handle how good it was. I was like, he is so committed to the bit. All of them, every single actor in this, in the holodeck and in the holodeck show within a show, are so committed to what’s happening. I just love it so much.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is good at this. And the actors are really good at playing different versions of their characters. I really enjoy when they go off and do these crazy things.
Liz: Same, and I feel like unlike the other ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds puts on fun costumes episodes’, this one does tell us something about the characters and the universe and the story. And it’s great.
Anika: Everything about La’an, other than the Spockness of it all is, I love learning more about what she likes and who she was as a child without the trauma. And I love how she figures it out. Everything with Spock was great until the end.
Liz: You know, in “The Big Goodbye,” which obviously this episode riffs on a lot, it’s Picard’s first time using a holodeck and it’s kind of a little bit embarrassing to see the captain dressing up and playing a role playing game. And then he calls a meeting with his staff to talk about how great his new video game is, which honestly, now I’m an adult is very relatable.
Anika: I mean, honestly, I love it. I love Picard as a big nerd. Every time Picard is a big nerd about things, it’s actually very entertaining to me.
Liz: I know. And I love seeing La’an get to play that note because she’s never let herself play these games before. And so yeah, that she loves this sort of pulpy 1960s mystery series, which by the way, I would absolutely read. I love crime fiction. I love private detectives. If you give me a series set in 1960s television, I am so there. Give me the Amelia series for real.
Anika: Right. I mean, so, okay. Obviously they set it in the 60s for Star Trek reasons, but I actually, I had to pause and give them a little round of applause because I’m that person who keeps complaining that they never get past the Depression era in Star Trek. And I’m just like, there were books after that. If you’re gonna make up a whole mystery series, you know, there’s no real reason that it can’t be set in the 21st. It could be in our future, but I understand why they don’t do that. And again, I really like the 60s part of it, but I was like, yay, you got to the 60s, guys. Good job. And that’s like almost the 90s.
Liz: I mean, DS9 spent a lot of time in the 60s and the 50s with like “Far Beyond the Stars” and the whole Vic Fontaine casino holodeck thing. It’s just that I didn’t like any – obviously “Far Beyond the Stars” is amazing and I love it. But “Our Man Bashir” and the whole Vic Fontaine thing, Sisko himself has a speech about how it’s like recreating this incredibly terribly bigoted era, but not really interrogating it. And this episode certainly doesn’t interrogate the era.
And I actually think it’s a bit of a cheat that Uhura is in the role of the agent who is not based on a real person, as far as I can tell. But it’s interrogating Star Trek and it’s interrogating nostalgia. That doesn’t go as far as it could, but we’ll get to the TK Burrows role. And I have a lot to say about that guy.
Anika: Okay. So before we get into the specifics of the holodeck, I actually really enjoy the fact that they’re like, okay, we have to address the fact that the holodeck doesn’t exist in The Original Series. I mean, they don’t actually have to address that, but they decided they did.
And I was sort of entertained by the fact that they were like, this is a really cool thing that is definitely not ready for consumption. And so we have to put it away. I was like, only in the utopian future of Star Trek where money doesn’t exist, is that what would happen? But I liked it because it was consistent with its own reality, you know? So that was good.
Liz: I hate holodeck episodes. I was really annoyed that we had one. I think that it was as good as a holodeck episode can possibly be, which is low praise. But I liked that everyone was like, this technology can never, it’s not ready. It should never be used. It’s bad. I just wish the Federation had stuck with that. And then the holodeck was never used again. The end.
Anika: It was really delightful. I just really enjoyed the fact that they were like, “no. No, this is bad. “Because it is. I can count the many different ways that the holodeck is bad. And it’s all the same ways that the AI chatbots being your girlfriend and or therapist are bad. That’s just bad, guys. That is never gonna go well. It’s because we are not evolved enough as a species to be able to handle it. That’s just the reality of the situation.
Liz: Also, I think that we see over and over again in Star Trek that it is way too easy to accidentally make a sentient hologram. I think this is why in Star Trek: Discovery, we see holodecks, but we never see holographic people in the holodecks.
And the holographic people we do see are really clearly non-sentient. They’re not even as sophisticated as the Doctor. I like to think this is because in the early 25th century, a whole lot of people were realizing that they were complicit in a terrible crime against sentient life by creating it and then using it as a toy.
Anika: It is bad. And I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying for, you know, since I understood what a clone was, I’ve said that I’m against cloning and people are like, but you know, but this good reason and this good reason. I’m like, no, I would have to march in the streets for clone rights. And I don’t want to.
Liz: Yeah, because you’re going to be marching alongside the pro-life people and they’re not good company.
Anika: I just don’t want to deal with that. I would love to believe in the world where all of the bad things don’t happen, but we don’t live in that world. And we have to accept reality and say, the instant that we make sentient holograms or clones or androids, that becomes our slave race and we will be bad and we will mistreat them.
Liz: Right, right. I love all of the 1960s characters and I do love that the original sin of the holodeck is using the faces of real people for this playtime. That is built into it from the very beginning and it’s bad and should never have been used.
Anika: But since they used it…
Liz: Yeah, I really want to shout out, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, Anson Mount as TK Burrows is so good and weirdly attractive. And it troubles me very deeply, because he’s clearly modeled on Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry, two noted sex pests. Why is he attractive?
Anika: I mean, I’m going to say because he’s charismatic. And you can’t really even really be a sex pest without being charismatic.
Liz: No, that’s true.
Anika: That’s true. So I don’t feel badly about falling for it because that’s kind of their whole thing.
Liz: That’s true. And I checked Asimov’s biography to see if my recollection of the accusations against him were correct. And there’s one guy saying, “Oh, I introduced him to my girlfriend and instead of shaking her hand, he shook her breast.” And I’m like, and you thought that was funny. This man must have been tremendously charismatic.
And I think that’s true of Roddenberry as well. Honestly, the portrayal of the Roddenberry figure is so great to me and Anson Mount absolutely sold it. Your note that he should be in sketch comedy, A+.
Anika: Honestly, every time that he is not playing Captain Pike, straight Captain Pike, regular Captain Pike, I like him. I think his performance is really good. When he’s playing Pike, I’m sort of bored or annoyed or just don’t even notice.
But in the opportunities where he gets to play an exaggerated version of Captain Pike, he’s excellent. And in this, where he’s a completely different character who has nothing to do with Pike, but has a lot to do with Star Trek, it was just a really good performance. So I’m like, Anson Mount is wasted on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. He should be doing sketch comedy.
Liz: I feel like everyone looks at him and goes, oh yeah, that jawline, that hair, this guy is a heroic lead actor type. No, he’s absolutely not. He is meant to be these cringing, pathetic, sad little men. And I’m not going to say anything about how he behaves on Twitter, because that is how he behaves on Twitter. Anyway, the point is, I think Anson Mount’s skills are being misused.
Anika: He looks like Pike, but his skills, his potential as an actor is wasted here, because Pike is not who he should be playing. And so it becomes very one note and rote for me, because of that.
Liz: Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. He has a lot more layers when he’s playing someone pathetic.
Anika: But I mean, he did so well. He was strung out.
Liz: Oh my God. He was so good.
Anika: It was like the end scene where they’re on set and he gets the phone call. And the difference between before and after the phone call, it’s so good. I’m just like, you’re really good at this. Stop trying to be Christopher Pike.
Liz: The Apple TV comedy Mythic Quest is about a video game studio. But in its second season, it has a flashback episode to the youth of F. Murray Abraham, who was like a washed up science fiction writer from the 60s who is now consulting on this video game and sexually harassing women.
And the performances, particularly Mount’s performance in this episode is giving Mythic Quest vibes in the most complimentary way. It is so good. I would watch a straight drama about the making of this fake Star Trek.
Anika: I know, right? They were great. Everything, they were all so good. It was really, really delightful.
Liz: I especially want to talk about Una as Sunny Lupino. She is very obviously Lucille Ball, producing a science fiction series with her ex-husband and all of that. But she’s also Ida Lupino, who I learned about from the podcast You Must Remember This.
Ida was a 1930s nepo baby, who was sort of pushed into acting by her family. And she didn’t really like it, but it paid the bills and she was quite good at it. By the 30s, she was doing quite well in Hollywood.
And then she got polio and was kind of like, I can’t spend my entire life skating by on my looks in a job that I’m not really passionate about. So when she recovered, she also became a writer and director and producer. And she produced and directed a lot of independent films in the 50s about taboo topics like rape.
And then in the 60s, she did a lot of television. She’s the only woman who directed an episode of The Twilight Zone. And she did a lot of TV westerns and TV cop shows and the shows that existed alongside Star Trek. So I love that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has given her a shout out through this character of Sunny Lupino.
Anika: Yeah, the character is all really smart. Because the thing is that you and I know the history of Lucille Ball and Star Trek. But it’s not mainstream knowledge or Star Trek fan. Regular, regular Star Trek fan.
Liz: So I think we discussed in our episode about Nana Visitor’s book that even in a lot of official histories of Star Trek, Ball’s involvement was really played down.
Anika: Right. So it’s really great to see that they’re finally coming around on this in print and now on screen. And I had never heard of Ida Lupino and I’m delighted that she gets a shout out, too.
Liz: I didn’t check who wrote this, but it feels like they’re passionate about film and television history in a way that I enjoy.
Anika: Which is great. That’s what you need for this kind of episode. If you want this episode to be more than just a holodeck-raunt, you know, I think it’s I think I just said ront, which was jaunt and romp at the same time. But I meant jaunt and or romp. Sorry about that. I’m tired.
Liz: No, no, I think you’re right that the best holodeck settings are the ones where someone behind the scenes is passionate about it. Tracy Tormé and Patrick Stewart loved old-timey noir 1940s gumshoe mysteries. The team on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine loved that mid-century spy stuff and that mid-century casino stuff. I think when Brandon Braga’s love of B movies and old science fiction is why we had Captain Proton. But no one was especially passionate about, say, Irish villages in the early 20th century, and only Jeri Taylor was passionate about the Bronte novel, whatever it was. And so that’s why those settings fizzled out.
Anika: Yeah, I agree. Okay. So I’m glad that you learned any of their names because I definitely didn’t. But Nurse Chapel—
Liz: Oh, they’re the only ones I know.
Anika: Nurse Chapel gets this great speech about how people only care about her when she’s in a relationship and they don’t pay attention to her otherwise. And I was like, girl, I approve of this meta message because it was so good because she literally said the line, is it wrong to want love and to be taken seriously in my career? And I was like, no, and you go. It was like Jess Bush and Christine Chapel yelling at people to leave her alone. And I was like, yes.
Liz: I need to know everything about this actress character, because she’s clearly Australian. And so how was she playing Hedda Gabler at 19? How did she come to be in America? That’s a really unusual path for the 60s. Give me everything. I need an in-universe biography of this Australian actress. I need to know how she returned to Sydney in the 1990s and ran the Sydney Theatre Company into the ground with her high concept ideas and the fact that only science fiction nerds were coming to their shows.
Anika: I’m just delighted by her. It was so good. And her relationship with M’Benga was like, OK, so the holodeck ships Chapel and M’Benga, and I approve. But also, he gets to be the sexy, cryptid type character. And that was fun. And I feel like M’Benga doesn’t get to be sexy. And he is so sexy. I don’t know how to describe to people that he is clearly the most attractive man in the show.
Liz: I think Star Trek, going back to Star Trek: The Next Generation has had a problem with de-sexualizing Black men. In a way, obviously, there’s a problem with Black men being over-sexualized. But you have beautiful people like LeVar Burton and Avery Brooks and now Babs.
I’m actually very excited to see that the POV character on Academy, which just we learned today is a young Black man, because maybe, maybe he’ll get to have romance, possibly.
Anika: Maybe.
Liz: I know Babs is too old to play Jimi Hendrix, but I need that Jimi Hendrix biopic. And I love what it says about both his and Chapel’s characters or actor, personae, that they’re in this transgressive, interracial relationship and neither of them are American. So they’re just like, what are you going to do about it? But he’s a real artist. He really cares about the art. And I’m like, yes, I love you. Yes. We’ll listen to your terrible prog rock album.
Anika: It was so good. And then Melissa Navia, she got all the good lines. I was whooping for her.
Liz: I have done a total 180 on Melissa Navia because I remember last season, I was like, she’s not actually very good, is she? No. I saw a comment this week that she’s not good at acting. And I was like, who dares say that about my best friend, Melissa Navia? She has—
Anika: Her comic timing in this episode.
Liz: Oh my God. “I thought it was about capitalism.”
Anika: “ I thought it was about capitalism” was such an amazing background line that was perfectly delivered. And then, at the very beginning, in the cold open, I’m still laughing, I can’t actually handle it. She says, “I have only seen this once before,” dramatic pause, “in the war.” And I was like, I can’t believe they know that. I mean, clear, okay.
So this plus the, I’m the pilot, I fly in the ship in the season premiere, clearly they know that they screwed her over and they’re course correcting and thank God. So, so great job to both the writers and to Melissa Navia being – legitimately, her character was so funny. And she was like the straight man the entire time. And yeah, I was laughing always.
Liz: She was a straight man, but by the 1960s standards, she’s still coded as gay with her fringed cowboy jacket and her pants.
Anika: And they found that she wanted like a man’s job. Yeah.
Liz: I mean, at this point, I do think they’re playing with us and just tell us she’s queer. It cannot possibly come as a surprise to anyone by this point. Just be brave for once in your life. But I do actually think that the show within a show is better than Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is fair because so is The Original Series when it’s good.
Anika: And we haven’t even touched on Paul Wesley, he was doing his best Shatner, but then he was just a straight up annoying male actor.
Liz: “Oh, ratings.”
Anika: He’s just very multi-faceted and I approve.
Liz: Yes. I really do feel like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds needs to be canceled sooner than season five. But also I think most of the cast is great and I hope they go on to great things.
I saw a young Paul Wesley the other week in an episode of SVU, where he plays a teenage boy being abused by his dad. And he was so good. He was in his mid-twenties. He didn’t look like a teenage boy. I think this is just the story of Paul Wesley’s career. But he is surprisingly versatile for a man with such a boring face.
Anika: Right. He has the looks to be very typecast. But he’s really good at the weird stuff. And I was sitting here going, I can’t believe I’m standing up for the traditionally attractive white men. But someone let them be weird. I just think that everybody did amazing in this. When La’an said, “Detective Spock doesn’t watch television.”
Liz: “So he’s a communist.”
Anika: I was like, oh my gosh, they’re literally writing lines for me. It was so fun. I love the Paranoid 60s. I love, you know, it was a weird time, right? The 60s were a blatantly mainstream weird time. And we sometimes forget that Star Trek began there, you know?
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
Anika: It’s become so flashy and they have the best effects and they have the, you know, the cool costumes.
Liz: I just want to say there has never been a time when Star Trek did not have the best effects and best costumes. And there has never been a time where Star Trek was not a super expensive show.
Anika: Yeah, I agree with that. But because we’re looking at it from the lens of 2025, you forget that.
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
Anika: And so it just seems, I don’t know, look at the movies. I love the 2000, the Kelvin-verse movies. But if you look at the 2009 movie and then you look at the first season of TOS, I understand why people are like, this looks different.
Liz: Oh, yeah, yeah. I see a lot of people saying that the problem with Star Trek now is that it’s too expensive. And so I always want to push back on that. This has never been a low budget production. You go and watch Doctor Who from the same years as The Original Series. That’s a low budget production. They couldn’t even afford color cameras.
SPEAKER_3: Anyway.
Anika: So I’m just saying we’ve lost our weird core and color core.
Liz: Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
Anika: It’s not just that it was colorful and weird and goofy and fun. It was also the sixties. The sixties were all of those things, but also super political. And super revolutionary. And I think we have kept the aesthetic without the context.
Liz: I agree. And that you saying that made me realize the role that I wanted Uhura to play in this, which is just after Star Trek began production, Gene Coon realized that they have this amazing diverse future on the screen, but they don’t have any Black people working behind the scenes. And so he rang up the local chapter of the Black Panthers and asked if they had anyone who wanted to work in television. And they called around and wound up sending Malcolm X’s former secretary to work for Gene Coon. And she was like, I was not enthusiastic about working for a man whose surname was a slur, but he was great. I loved it. Gene Roddenberry was the problem. I wish that had been Uhura’s role, as this revolutionary and secretary.
Anika: Right, because that’s what everyone calls Uhura when they… Right! So it would have been a real… I love that Celia got to have the big speech about how great Star Trek is.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: But she didn’t have to be an agent to do that. I feel like they could have worked it out some way.
Liz: I suppose it does mean more coming from someone with the institutional power of an agent as opposed to a secretary.
Anika: But it’s also like she was still having to convince them because the truth was she didn’t have the power to make things happen.
Liz: That’s true. That’s true. She has the trappings, but no meaningful power.
Anika: That’s interesting. But I mean, I cried. I was like, oh, this is a bad Star Trek. And it was at that moment that I was like, oh, this… Because absolutely this is “Our Man Bashir” and it is “The Big Goodbye.” But in that moment, it was being “Far Beyond the Stars.” And I think that’s like the best compliment I could ever give anything in Star Trek or outside of Star Trek, is that for five seconds, I thought of the best episode ever.
Liz: This is the difference between you and me because you were on the verge of tears and going, oh, “Far Beyond the Stars,” yes. And I was writing down, “blowing smoke up Star Trek‘s arse.” And I actually think we’re both correct. I’m too cynical and you’re too idealistic. And we meet in the middle as this excellent podcast.
Anika: Nice. Put that on our business card.
Liz: Yeah. I do think that this episode needed a thesis statement about why Star Trek is important. And then it pivots into, is Gene Roddenberry bad for Star Trek? Which is again, a genuinely brave and smart thing for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds specifically to say, when it is so in thrall to the people who talk extensively about Gene’s vision.
Anika: Right. Right. I mean, I think it was hopeful in that moment.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Because it’s also, it’s like, you’re right that it’s subversive, but it’s also sort of saying, sure, Gene’s vision is great and all, whatever. We don’t have to dismiss it, but we can’t move forward if we are just beholden to it forever. You have to move past that. And I think that that’s like, oh my gosh, we have to learn that lesson really badly in all of media.
Liz: It’s so funny that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, of all Star Treks, is the one going, actually, we need to move beyond the great man theory of Star Trek.
Anika: Oh my goodness. It’s hilarious to me, as you say, that of all things, Star Trek‘s Strange New Worlds is like, maybe we don’t need a great man.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Because it is the most mainstream and the most beholden almost to Gene’s vision in a way that the others are not.
Liz: Also beholden to its leading man even as he’s like an anchor dragging them down, down, down into mediocrity.
Anika: Right. Or Spock, who is just making very bad decisions all the time.
Liz: It’s like a double anchor with Spock holding one end and Pike holding the other. You could make it a really cute sailor tattoo, but why would you get a tattoo to show that you don’t like it anyway?
Anika: Just be like, hey, I got this tattoo to show my dismissive attitude towards Strange New Worlds.
Liz: “Hey guys, I hate Anson Mount so much that I got his face tattooed on me, so I can show you how…” people might start asking questions. What if I got Anson Mount as Isaac Asimov? That would be really sexy. I think that would be really attractive to people.
Anyway, talk about our last topic, Scottie and Uhura. And I feel like I need to be really specific here after your monkey’s paw accident. When I say I ship it, I mean I enjoy their interactions, I like how they treat each other, and they’re a couple in Star Trek V, and it would be fun to see the seeds of that, the equivalent of a season 7 out of nowhere relationship being planted here when they’re young. I don’t actually want them to have a great big epic romance on screen.
Anika: You’re like, I have to be very clear.
Liz: Yeah, yeah, this is a Genie Wish situation.
Anika: It was so cute, actually.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Their entire relationship was adorable, and I think it should just be like that forever. That’s perfect. Let’s do that.
Liz: I know we complain about Star Trek being the franchise that invented het baiting, but that’s really all I want. I want my characters to be friends and to interact and to stand ridiculously close to each other and make eye contact. And maybe they hook up once or twice on shore leave or in the past, or they have some sort of unspoken love that they can’t explore because they’re professionals. And that’s all. Everything else is what Archive of Our Own is for. As a hardcore shipper, I don’t want my ships to be canon on screen.
Anika: Yeah. It’s so weird because I have been complaining about the lack of romance everywhere.
Liz: Monkey’s paw again.
Anika: And they’re all like, did you want this? And I was like, no, I did not want that. Why did that happen? So I legitimately believe in my chaos powers. My son has inherited my chaos powers and we cannot control them.
The whole point of chaos magic is that you can’t control it. And so sometimes I get things that are great, and sometimes I get things that are terrible. And I apologize to people who get dragged into that with me.
Liz: No, I completely understand. I’m the one who wrote a fic when I was 12 about Beverly having Picard’s baby and leaving to do her own things and raising the child on her own. So really, season three of Star Trek: Picard was my chaos powers and I’m sorry.
Anika: Well, fun fact. One of my Law & Order discord friends says that season three of Star Trek: Picard doesn’t exist. Oh, I like that. It was a mass hallucination. So, you can live in that universe.
Liz: They just put a whole lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms in the replicator. Beckett is sorry. She thought it would be funny. She didn’t expect it to infect the whole fleet. Oops, her bad. She’s gonna get demoted again.
But the Scotty and Uhura of it. I really like that Uhura is now in a position to be sort of a mentor to Scotty, the way Hemmer was a mentor to her. Not literally, because he’s the engineer, but he respects her expertise and she shares it with him. And they sort of, they’re sort of on the same wavelength.
But also, Scotty is completely out of his depth and panicking. And then we understand why that this is actually, he doesn’t have a tragic backstory of childhood trauma. He has a tragic backstory of trauma four months ago.
Anika: Right, exactly. And apparently no one has helped him at all. Which is completely unsurprising on this ship. I’m not saying that that is a surprise. I’m just like, you know what? Someone should have done something. I said the same thing about Batel.
Liz: The whole thing in season two, where we were like, why isn’t La’an in Zoom therapy? Now La’an has had too much Zoom therapy and needs to leave some for everyone else.
Anika: It’s just, yeah, so. But Scotty, again, he’s so precious. I love new Scotty so much. I just.
Liz: He is delightful.
Anika: I want to keep him. He’s so, so wonderful. And I think that Uhura having an engineering friend, like the way he looks at her when she says, you know, I have this idea and explains it. And he just gets this expression of, oh, you’re a genius. You saved me. Thank you. It’s just such a genuine moment. And that’s, again, that’s all I want for them.
Liz: Yeah. And because it’s not intended as romantic, it actually comes across as more interestingly romantic than the La’an/Spock stuff. This is my beef with a lot of media. And I think it’s me as a person who just does not like romance as a genre on its own. Too much of that is off-putting to me. I know it’s very appealing to a lot of people. And that’s, there’s nothing wrong with romance as a genre. It’s just not my vibe. I like my romance to be in subplot form. I’m not really shipping them. I just like how they interact. It’s respectful.
Anika: It’s respectful. They’re friends.
Liz: Respectful of each other and the audience. Yeah, yeah.
Anika: And the thing is that she didn’t out him. They had this sort of trust happening.
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
Anika: I think that she would have intervened if it became like a real problem.
Liz: Oh, absolutely.
Anika: But if Pike was my captain, I would protect my friends too. I would be like, you know what? We don’t have to tell him until absolutely.
Liz: Because he’s not going to help. No, he’s just going to panic and we’re going to have to do all the work anyway. I’ve had bosses like Pike. It’s why I don’t like him.
Anyway, that’s everything I have to say about this episode. I am absolutely dreading watching Episode 5 later today.
Anika: I’m scared too. Because this is definitely of the four. This is the episode. This is the good one. I feel good about this episode. Even the Spock and La’an of it all, I can be like, well, that was just five minutes. And everything else was just so fun and so good.
Liz: It’s a real load-bearing five minutes.
Anika: And even actually, well, I mean, it was spread out, so.
Liz: I know, but it was deniable. I was able to spend a lot of this episode pretending that it wasn’t happening until I could no longer pretend, because their mouths were mashing together.
Anika: I mean, the whole tango thing was a bit much for me, but it’s fine. But again, the La’an…
Liz: I was like, lots of people danced the tango platonically.
Anika: I loved, again, La’an being on her little side quest and it being about this heroic character that she loved as a child. And all of that was just such great work for La’an.
Liz: Yes. And the other thing I loved is that she’s the only one of the characters on the holiday who doesn’t have perfect 1960s eye makeup. Her eye makeup is way too 2025 because La’an did it herself.
Anika: Right.
Liz: Also, her styling, it’s Carmen Sandiego, but her hair is Beverly in “The Big Goodbye.”
Anika: Yeah. A costumer hit it out of the park for everybody.
Liz: Oh, yeah.
Anika: Multiple amazing costumes on all of them. Absolutely.
Liz: Even the Gene Roddenberry cardigan. Amazing.
Anika: Amazing. Everything was good. Costuming, hair, makeup, all really, really good this episode. Yeah. Set design, everybody, production design, you guys. You’re really like, I love this. I love that stuff. That’s the fun parts of all the episodes is this, like that. So really, really good.
Liz: Yeah. It was well done on many levels. Just, you know, you know.
Anika: You know. Okay.
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Join us in a week when we will be discussing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3, Episode 5, “Through the Lens of Time.”
Liz: I saw that and I was like, La’an is definitely getting timey-wimey’d. But she won’t. It’ll be a time travel episode.
Anika: I mean, I thought of Molly O’Brien and got sad. So I don’t know. I don’t know which is worse. Maybe it’ll be a delightful episode. It’s possible.