Anika and Liz watch Star Trek: Starfleet Academy‘s “The Life of the Stars” and have a little cry. Featuring a special guest appearance by Bradley Whitford and Liz reads a brief excerpt from Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah.
- We got Star Trekked. We got Our Towned. They got us RIGHT in the feels.
- The women that time forgot
- How much agency has Tarima had in her recovery? It seems like not much!
- Did Liz totally misread the Tarima allegory? Banshees and mental illness and maybe you can spend so much time looking for the allegory that you miss the story?
- “Stealth trauma counselling” isn’t the MOST unethical use of psychology in Star Trek, but we have raised our eyebrows!
- At no point did we think Sam would die, but ALSO we were on the edge of our seats through this entire plotline
- “Not holding Sam’s hand felt like a war crime.”
- Us a few weeks ago: “Sam’s makers feel like an allegory for helicopter parents.” This week: helicopter parents fail to build resilience in their children
- The Tarima-Caleb-Genesis love triangle is handled … really maturely? What if you were attracted to someone and simply chose not to do anything about it?
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 Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, “The Life of the Stars.”
And I’m sorry, Starfleet Academy has too many standout episodes for one season, they need to put some back, not use them all up at once. Guys, this show is too good.
Anika: I don’t know how I’m gonna actually get through talking about this episode. I was personally targeted by this episode, as I have never been personally targeted before. Oh, you were.
Liz: They came for you.
Anika: It was, I mean, it’s incredible. And I cried through the last, 20 minutes, the first time I watched it, and the second time I watched it, I think I cried through the last 40 minutes. I just kept crying.
Liz: Anika, it’s a 60-minute episode.
Anika: Yes. Because I was anticipating. I was like, oh, no, this leads to this. So, yes.
Liz: I watched it at the office. I had a dinner on Tuesday night, so I finished my work for the day, and then fired up my screener to kill the hour I had between the end of work and dinner. And then I rolled into my friend’s Lunar New Year dinner, red and puffy, and they’re like, are you okay? No, I got Star Trekked. I got Star Trekked real bad.
Anika: The second time, I was crying, and it ended, and I went up to… Bruno, my cat, was bothering my son, trying to get into the room he was not allowed to get into, and I had promised that once I was done watching Star Trek, I would come try to distract Bruno. And so I went upstairs, and I sat down, and Bruno got onto my lap, and he was being his wonderful self-purring and cuddling with me, and I just kept sobbing to the point where my son stuck his head out and was like, are you okay? So when we say we got Star Trekked…
Liz: Oh, they got us good.
I went home from my dinner, and I opened up Wikipedia and read the full summary for Our Town because I’ve never read the play. And then I had a little cry, and then the next day I found the play online and read, I would say, large chunks of it and had a little cry.
And yeah, that’s cathartic. This is a great episode, but it’s really standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of using a great play to jump off of.
Anika: Theatre kids ate. And we deserve.
Liz: You deserve. And this is not really the point, but I love that Tilly, who is a scientist, is also teaching this humanities course. Because we’ve talked about, you know, STEM versus humanities and it’s a really false dichotomy, and there’s so much of value to be gained from studying both. This felt like a love letter, not just to Our Town specifically, but to theatre, to art, to everything that comes from human creativity. And also a love letter to life and grief and finality.
Anika: And a liberal arts agenda.
Liz: Yes, the liberal arts agenda is so strong.
Anika: In the best way.
Liz: Oh yeah, yeah.
Anika: I loved when she said, theater is statecraft, statecraft is theater. I was like, oh, preach girl, keep at it. So yes, I mean, I don’t even know where to begin. But I feel like I need to explain my personal connection to Our Town.
Liz: Please.
Anika: Just in case I start crying. Okay. So I’ve been in Our Town three times. All three times I played the character of Rebecca Gibbs, which is George’s younger sister.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: Most of my theatrical career is playing children. When I was a child and into my 20s. But the second time that I played Rebecca was at Wesleyan University where my father taught. He directed the play and it was a tribute performance, raising money for a scholarship in my mother’s name.
Liz: Oh.
Anika: Not quite a year after she died. Emily and George were played by Wesleyan students and all of the other roles were played by community members who knew my mother, or all three of my brothers and some of our friends were all in the show together. Everything, the costumes, the hair, the makeup, the music, everything was donated and chosen. Everybody was somehow related to either my mother or my family. And the stage manager was played by Bradley Whitford.
Liz: What?!
Anika: Because he was my father’s student at Wesleyan. So this was in 1990. So it was nine years before he was in The West Wing and nine years after he graduated from Wesleyan.
Liz: That is a degree of separation that I wasn’t prepared for.
Anika: He was our professional actor. And so we had to follow a bunch of Equity rules in order for him to participate. It was not an Equity production, but we still had to follow some rules for him to be there.
Liz: No, that makes sense.
Anika: I call it the closest I have to being in a professional theater production, even though it was literally for charity and no one was paid, including Bradley Whitford. He also did this as a gift to my father and my family.
Liz: I mean, what a mensch. That’s extraordinary.
Anika: And there is a line in the, I think it’s definitely the first season. President Bartlett says something like, you were supposed to take my daughter out for malted shakes, not bring her to a bar. And Josh says, malted shakes, what is this, Our Town? And I was like, that was for me.
Liz: It was for you. That’s amazing.
Anika: Yeah, that was specific. And then President Bartlett says he played the stage manager. So, anyway.
Liz: I’m like, of course he did, yeah, yeah.
Anika: When I say that this was personally targeted to me, that they put a spotlight on me in my little New England town and the entire, the beauty of both grieving and living a small life. Yeah, that’s profound for me.
Liz: Yes. I don’t have a connection with Our Town. It’s not really like a standard play in Australia. I think you would only study it if you’re doing American literature or American theater. But I did check and in 2021, there were two separate productions of it at opposite ends of the country. And the one in Perth, every character with a job, the actor playing them had the same job. So the stage manager was played by a stage manager and the Doctor is played by a doctor. And it was a whole thing. And it feels like a play that’s built for communities and as much for community theater as for professional productions.
Anika: Yes. My daughter was also in it in high school. And it was a beautiful performance. This is also such a wonderful play for this age group. It’s in this episode, in the, the reasons that it’s so good for young adults to read it is that they are striving and trying to figure themselves out and rebelling against all of the boxes that they’re being handed. And the play says, you know, you just, just you have to live. That’s the point. However, that works out for you and it’s valid and it’s worth it and it’s beautiful.
Liz: I imagine there are a lot of Star Trek actors who have done productions of Our Town, but I first heard of the play because I read that it was Kate Mulgrew’s first professional acting job. And in fact, she was doing a regional repertory performance as Emily and then going back to New York and filming her first TV job at the same time. Peak Kate Mulgrew.
Her bios would say, and she played Emily in Our Town, and I gleaned from that this was something I was meant to understand. So it’s always linked with Kate Mulgrew in particular and Star Trek in general in my head. So this was really like, oh, OK, we’re coming full circle, but only for me specifically. I’m the only person who knows this.
Anika: Again, I think that the purpose is that it’s actually universal. And so we can have these really personal connections and these really sort of it seems sort of cosmic that you would have learned it from start learned of the play from Star Trek and then the play is in Star Trek. But that’s the whole purpose is that everything is related and all the little things that you gloss over count just as much.
Liz: And we’ve talked before about the links between Star Trek and theatrical productions. And your first encounter with Star Trek was through a theatrical production. And Star Trek as a franchise lends itself to these episodes where we just put some existing scripts in the hands of a bunch of talented actors and let them do their thing. And we learn something about the characters and we learn something about the play.
And I don’t know about you, but I really expected that the play they would end up doing would be Shakespeare because that’s Star Trek’s go-to. And I was so delighted that it was in fact a 20th century American play.
Anika: I live in New England and I feel like it takes place in New England and it’s about small town New England life. And so I feel like that’s why it’s done so often here. And it is sort of quintessentially American, even though there’s nothing like Stars and Stripes about it.
Liz: No, no, it’s American in the most positive way.
Anika: Yeah, it’s sort of Americana. I don’t know how it is viewed outside of my world view of, well, that’s about us. But I, you know, Shakespeare is the reason that people do Shakespeare all the time is that it’s considered universal as well, you know, that it’s like, it’s not about the events, it’s about what you do with them.
And so I will be interested to see how many people who maybe aren’t theatre kids or from New England or America. But you know, it’s not like it’s, it was in The West Wing, so it’s not like, it is mainstream.
Liz: I feel like it represents a really funny thing in that it’s popular culture, but it’s elevated popular culture. It’s not quote unquote high culture like Shakespeare, but they’re not coming out and doing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark or whatever the Spider-Man Broadway musical was.
Anika: Right.
Liz: We’re not doing Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Anika: Can you imagine?
Liz: Very easily.
Anika: That’s what Darem wanted to do. Darem wanted to do Andrew Lloyd Webber really badly.
Liz: I firmly believe that Tilly has a lot of feelings about the Phantom of the Opera and no one is allowed to know. Not even Michael is allowed to know because it is deeply embarrassing.
Anika: Oh my goodness. I’m glad that they did get some Klingon opera in there though.
Liz: Oh, yeah.
Anika: Yeah. That is, of course, also the- I’m not going to say fear, but I was like, oh no, what if we do Klingon opera? So I’m glad that that was rewarded with a shout out to it.
Liz: I also like Sam’s passing reference to Klingon musical theater, which I assume is the more populist version of Klingon opera.
Anika: Right.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: I want to write something meta, if not a fic, about all of the choices everyone makes against their will. Because we only get to see those two, but everybody else, they had that assignment. And I can imagine some of them rebelling against it, but you know Genesis took it very seriously, and so did Darem, even though he hated it. I love now thinking about that, and you know, headcannoning what each person picked as their play.
Liz: Oh yeah, because you just know Caleb’s choice was absolutely bonkers, completely unfeasible for a student classroom production, but also wild, like 28th century neopunk anti-theatre. He thinks he’s being a rebel, and Tilly’s like, oh my god, I love that, that’s so great. That’s her second choice.
Anika: Incredible. Also, I wanted to congratulate you for blowing the Tilly whistle. Oh yeah. And bringing her into the very next episode. And also being completely correct about her working with the third years, and you know, taking a week off from her time with the third years to come and bring these students into the theatre.
Liz: The theatre.
Anika: Good job.
Liz: Honestly, I guessed the eighth episode because I am assuming that nine and, nine will be setting up the finale and ten will not see the introduction of a character who’s new to the audience. So eight felt like a- seven or eight felt like the sweet spot, and we had seen seven and she wasn’t there. So it was purely a process of elimination.
And then I was thinking about the older group of cadets from the soft launch in Star Trek: Discovery, and that they would not yet be graduated, so she must be with them. So, yeah, I love being right though. I’m so happy. A
nd I love that she is who Nahle calls in as the quote unquote big gun, because Tilly is perfect for this. She was introduced as a cadet, and she had gone through so much before she even completed her studies at the Academy. You know, she talks about, don’t be the captain that tears down, be the captain that lifts up. She’s had a lot of captains in her time, some better than others. So, yeah, she is perfect for this. She knows of what she speaks.
Although I would say, I think that Lorca was a captain that lifted up his crew. It’s just like a question of what precisely he was lifting them up to do. He was empowering them, but maybe not in a good way, question mark?
Anika: Question mark.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Empowering them so he could use them.
Liz: Yeah. This is the year we will cover Season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery. I feel it in my bones.
Anika: Just in time for the 10th anniversary.
Liz: Oh God, I’m so old.
Anika: Anyway, when I say this episode is a gift, every single second of this episode is a gift. We haven’t even gotten into the whole Sam part, which is a whole other amazingness.
Liz: Oh my God.
Anika: But before we do, the scene between Tilly, Jet and Nahle, where they’re drinking something hard.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: With a proof. Oh my goodness.
Liz: And just being women who are friends and colleagues and who have a lot in common, but who are also very different and literally just hanging out. I needed that. I really needed that.
Anika: Just the amount of respect in that room, all three ways.
Liz: Yes. Yes. It was extraordinary.
Anika: There was this whole project that Jarrah in Women at Warp did on Star Trek and the Bechdel test.
Liz: Oh yeah. It was pre-Discovery, wasn’t it?
Anika: Yes. And you know, Star Trek struggled. I see it all in the 90s. So, you know, that’s why the Bechdel test exists. But this scene felt like a celebration of how far we have come in the world, where we have these three women just talking about, you know, no men, just lives. And it was just like this freeing moment. It was just beautiful to me. And also trauma, but, you know, we acknowledge that these traumas happened. And when they were, when they said Starfleet at the same time, is what saved them from all of their dramas. That’s what Starfleet is to me.
Liz: Yeah, yeah. It’s not a sanctuary in the sense of keeping you safe, because you’re never safe in Starfleet. But in terms of giving you a place to grow from what has happened to you. And we’ve joked about how everyone these days comes to Starfleet with a traumatic backstory. And frankly, if you don’t have one when you arrive, you will be assigned one very soon.
Anika: As soon as possible.
Liz: Yes. Sam and Darem and Genesis, you know. They had some teenage angst, but I wouldn’t say they had trauma until the Miyazaki. And I like that we had Episode 7, which was, you know, sort of a break and a refuge and palate cleanser. But despite all those shenanigans last week, these kids are still not okay.
And some light hijinks aren’t enough to help you overcome the trauma of being a hostage, of losing a classmate, of witnessing violence from the bridge, but not being able to directly help. All you can do is run your screens and run your programs, like help from a distance. And then there’s Tarima, who has to go through both sides at the same time.
Anika: The pacing really works for me because, yes, last episode was very light and sort of had nothing to do with anything, but I think that this episode had so much depth because we were able to have that breather.
Liz: To be honest, I feel like last week was too light, but that’s also my preference for more serialized storytelling. I don’t think they necessarily did anything wrong there. And I like that the Academy faculty are looking at these kids who’ve gone through a trauma and they’re actively taking steps to prevent it from becoming PTSD. The trauma is still fresh. PTSD is when that is still persisting some time later, as if it just happened.
Anika: So we’re gonna talk it out.
Liz: Not just talking, but it’s giving them a space to act up and express themselves and say the things that they feel like no one wants to hear and that they feel like they can’t say.
Anika: Yes. And I loved Tarima’s absolute rejection of it from the beginning because she is in this impossible position where not only is she the ghost girl and has all of this traumatic weight that she has to carry around, just switching schools.
Liz: Yeah. It doesn’t seem like she’s had a lot of agency. We don’t know if she had any say in whether she got a new implant. She doesn’t seem to have had a choice about moving to the academy.
And then the Doctor is telling her you need to study science. And it’s like, I don’t think she’s really into science. She kind of seems like a jock. So everyone is pushing her back into a box, and it’s only a marginally different box from what she was in before.
And I do kind of wonder if maybe I misread her story. I thought that Tarima’s arc was about finding her voice and learning to not need the neural inhibitor. I posted to my newsletter about her powers the other week, and my friend Ellie popped up to go, hey, Liz, Tarima’s a banshee. And I was like, I am so dumb. It was like on the tip of my finger. I knew there was like a mythological figure that I was forgetting and I just couldn’t place it. She’s a banshee.
And a banshee for those of you who didn’t spend your adolescence reading Irish mythology because you were cool, is an Irish figure of mythology who is a woman or a young girl, often with streaming dark or red hair, whose – she screams, and her scream is a harbinger of death. And if you hear her, someone in your life is going to die. She is not the person who kills them, but she’s the figure that lets you know that death is coming. There’s a lot of feminist thought about the banshee mythology and reclaiming it and whatever. But Tarima is a banshee and I thought her story was about reclaiming that.
And now I’m wondering if it’s actually a different metaphor. And this is about mental illness and finding the right treatment and learning to be a functional and healthy adult who is adapting to this condition like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or something that can be treated. But it’s hard to find the right treatment. And often when you’re trying a new drug regime, it can be very numbing. And Tarima seems very numb in this episode.
Anika: Right. She’s trying everything she can to feel something.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And that’s why she goes after Caleb so hard. And it’s why she pushes all of Tilly’s buttons. It’s why she closes herself off from everyone, but is also snippy and angry. And she’s protecting herself in two different ways. One, by closing the barriers. And then by pushing and pushing and pushing, whatever is going to happen, at least she feels like she’s in control. If she is pushing everything and everyone away, then at least that’s a decision that she made. Like you said, she’s not getting to make any decisions.
Liz: Yes. I’m a little more open-minded about where I think Tarima’s story is going to go at this point. And I also think that what does it mean is a question that you can really tie yourself up in knots trying to see the allegory. And maybe this is just a girl with an inconvenient superpower. It is both that deep and not that deep.
Anika: Right. It can be a metaphor for any version of growing up.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Because it’s difficult. Yes, it’s difficult to find a mental health diagnosis. And as you were describing, I was thinking, or really any chronic pain.
Liz: Absolutely.
Anika: There are many medical diagnoses that are barely even diagnoses and that we just don’t really fully understand anything about and we’re still figuring it all out. And that’s really hard for the person who’s going through the symptoms. Yeah.
Liz: And I think I’ve been looking at Tarima’s condition as something that can be cured and maybe it’s just a disability.
Anika: Right. This series seems to be very focused on showing the different ways that we can accommodate disabilities and just different types of people.
Liz: Yeah. No, that’s a really good point. I will say I love Tarima’s Academy dress. She has a different uniform to everyone else. It’s so cute.
Anika: I love it. This is, again, where she’s so annoyed that everyone’s staring at her and that she stands out, and she’s also wearing a completely different dress, but a different dress, pointedly standing out.
Liz: It is very adolescent. And I think we’ve talked about Caleb and Darem sort of having this state of arrested development, but I think that might be true for Tarima as well, because we know she was a youth activist and all of that, but she was also very sheltered, and maybe has had fewer opportunities to act out than the others.
Now I want to see Tarima and Darem hang out. I feel like they’d be buds. We’ve seen Tarima and Genesis, and that’s great, and I love it, but Tarima and Darem as the meanest kids you love.
Anika: Darem is the one, so he yells at students in the atrium at the very beginning of the episode, and that’s when Nahle decides that she has to bring Tilly in, because they’re like, oh, the stresses are still here, and we have to acknowledge them and handle them. And I just really liked that it was Darem acting out in this really aggressive way, which is totally in character. It was like, remember that this is Darem, was kind of, you know, because last episode we were talking about how he has a different personality at home and away, and sort of his softer side came out last episode, and he was sympathetic, like we are pointedly supposed to be sympathetic to him last episode.
And I liked that he was back to being full asshole this episode, but still a part of the team and the group, and jumping in with the play at the end, and, you know, he’s been assimilated into the clique. But what Jay-Den said that nobody really likes Darem is probably still true.
Liz: Yeah, he seems to have people who follow him around, but are they following him because they like him, or because they think there’s some social cachet to being in his orbit?
One thing I’m really enjoying about this season is watching the kids go from being people who spend every day in proximity to one another to actually being a team and a family. You know, most of them are on the same sports team, okay, but that still doesn’t make them friends. Okay, well now they’ve been trauma bonded, but we still need to take that final step to choose one another. P
art of this episode is integrating Tarima into the group beyond her relationships with Ocam and Caleb, and letting her be more than Caleb’s girlfriend, because my one beef with this episode, actually I have another beef, and you probably know what it is, it’s Star Trek: Voyager related, but my beef with Tarima’s story is that she talks about how she had a life and how she had friends at the War College, but we never actually saw that.
Anika: Right.
Liz: We glimpsed it briefly, but we never got to see her life from her perspective, and I think that’s a failing.
Anika: Yeah, I don’t know where it would have gone, because again, the episodes are so, so it’s like, everything is so packed. All of these episodes are like an hour long already.
Liz: And yet, yeah.
Anika: You know how I was always saying that the reason that Star Trek: Picard is focused so heavily on Picard is because it’s in the title. So the reason that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is focusing so heavily on Starfleet Academy and not the War Colleges, it’s in the title.
Liz: In the title.
Anika: So I understand why that happened. But I agree with you that if we had had a sense of who those even what her experience was at the War College at all.
Liz: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t need her to be tight with D’zolo or whatever. She seemed to have a separate group of friends. But I guess I want to see her hanging out with Kyle, while Kyle is with Jay-Den or something. I just think we needed a fraction more. I’ve seen this on criticism on Tumblr a lot. Frankly, a lot of it is that people are shipping Darem/Caleb and resent Tarima for getting between them, quote unquote. But Tarima has been the girlfriend rather than a character in her own right.
Anika: I saw a poll on Tumblr that made me so sad because it was, it was just like, what is your number one Academy ship? Or, what are you shipping the hardest or something like that? And only one ship got zero percent and it was Caleb/Tarima. And I was like, I would have voted for you. I felt so badly, it’s like, oh.
Liz: I feel like fandom often shies away from the sort of designated OTP.
Anika: I think that people are contrary. We don’t want to be fed the romance.
Liz: We like a romance that feels like it’s evolving naturally out of who the characters are, like Paris/Torres, say.
Anika: I am also contrary, and so I saw that poll and I was like, I will ship it harder.
Liz: I also think this is fandom sort of doing that thing where they performatively dislike the most feminine cast member. Because-
Anika: Fully true. And I, look, this episode isn’t going to make that any less so, because she is cast as the-
Liz: The ghost girl.
Anika: Trad wife. In fairness, it was trad times. So it’s not what it is now. And also, Emily is the protagonist of that play. So everything revolves around Emily’s actualization, and George is the afterthought. So, please believe me when I say she’s not a trad wife, but I think that-
Liz: Not in the ideological sense.
Anika: Not in the 2026 sense, but maybe in the 1910 sense. But she is the love interest, and she is definitely the most feminine. Again, she has her own dress.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And she has the scenes. This was such a good episode for Tarima. The scenes with Sam, the scenes with Genesis, and the scenes with Tilly in front of the group. All of those, there is a very feminine, girly girl pushing against it, but it’s still there. That sense of it, in contrast to Sam, in contrast to Genesis, and in contrast to Tilly, she is the girl.
Liz: They’re all more direct. And I spent a year at an old girl’s school, and that was kind of the way we were encouraged to have conflict in an indirect, passive aggressive way, rather than just walking in and saying, hey, I’m having an issue with you. And that wasn’t the school’s agenda or anything. It was just, like, it’s 1993 and you’re a girl. So I think some of that socialization is at play here in terms of how Tarima is behaving. And that makes sense because Betazed is a super feminine culture.
Anika: Right.
Liz: And to clarify, I don’t think that this behavior is intrinsic to women, and I’ve seen hell of a lot of weird passive aggression from men and non-binary people. I just think that this is how girls are expected to behave.
Anika: It’s the tropes again. We’ve discussed in the past that the way that stories work is they present things that are familiar to you, that it’s going to say, this is how you’re supposed to feel about this thing. And all of her tropes are feminine coded.
Liz: Yes. And there’s also nothing wrong with that. Tarima needs to be more direct, but she’s not really doing anything hugely egregious.
Anika: She’s working on herself.
Liz: Yeah. She’s a teenage girl and she’s going through a hard time.
Anika: And people are making it harder for her.
Liz: Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve got to say, I don’t know if trauma counseling that they don’t know is trauma counseling is actually quite the most ethical approach. I understand to the purpose, but I don’t love it. But-
Anika: Can I just- I mean, obviously I loved the episode, but yeah, it reminds me and I’ve made the same argument that I’m not sure I really appreciate the Kobayashi Maru as a thing. I think that putting, forcing people into a stressed situation in order to stress them is not necessary, in a surprise way, in a tricky way. I don’t like that.
Liz: See, I don’t mind the Kobayashi Maru because I feel like there comes a point where everyone knows that it’s the no-win scenario and you go in to fail. That’s fine. It’s the psych test that we see Wesley take in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he walks into what seems to be a traumatic situation and has to choose who lives and who dies. And he doesn’t know it’s the test until after he thinks it’s real. That’s not cool, guys. That’s not cool.
I was reading an interview with Isa Briones yesterday, who’s on The Pitt. We loved her in Star Trek: Picard. We love her more in The Pitt. She’s great. But she was talking about how she goes through all this traumatic acting on The Pitt and there’s blood and there’s guts and all of that. And then she has to go home and tell her body that the trauma wasn’t real, because she knows she was acting, but her body is reacting to it as if it really happened.
Anika: That’s amazing. But so counterpoint to trauma therapy that you don’t know is trauma therapy being thrown at you. They are doing it through theater, which is kind of what you just said with Isa Briones.
Liz: Yeah, no, you’re right.
Anika: And yes, she knew she consented to it by taking the job, right? But it is a safe, like we said at the beginning, that it’s a safe space to have those feelings and to connect. And Tilly is really, she, I, this is everything to me. Stories are how we connect with each other and how we connect with ourselves.
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
Anika: And that has been a theme in a lot of Modern Trek.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And I feel like I need to go and watch earlier Trek to see if it was always there. And maybe that’s why I like it.
Liz: I think it was.
Anika: Or if it’s singular to Modern Trek.
Liz: No, I think you go back to something like “The Conscience of the King” in season one of the original series.
Anika: My favorite episode.
Liz: And it’s all about how can this monstrous man who killed so many people be so great in these Shakespearean roles because surely he’s a monster all the time. And so it’s just really interesting. And it’s like, Star Trek is really interested in these stories about reality and performance and story.
Anika: Me too.
Liz: Yeah. Also, I want to say that surprise trauma therapy through theater therapy is not the worst or most unethical thing that Star Trek has ever done in terms of its approach to mental health. So, this is a nitpick, not a fatal flaw.
Anika: No, it is surprise, but it’s also like Tarima knew immediately.
Liz: Oh, look, I think they cottoned on pretty fast.
Anika: It was more forced than surprise.
Liz: Even there, I feel like if someone had gone to Chancellor Kelrec and gone, I really cannot do this right now, can I find some other solution?
Anika: Right.
Liz: Nahle would have accommodated them, but no one did. Tarima is passive aggressive and acting out because that’s what she needs and Tilly can sense it and everyone else is going along with it as best they can.
Anika: The confrontation with Tilly, we get to the point where Tilly says, what happened to you was awful and not your fault and saved lives. That was what Tarima needed to hear. And I don’t if they had started the conversation with that, she wouldn’t have heard it.
Liz: No, she would have taken it as a platitude. And it would have been I think you need to know Tarima before you can have that conversation with her. Tilly’s whole teaching career has been about reaching students who are difficult to reach.
Anika: I have to mention that Ocam starts, so Tarima is a problem from the beginning. And she’s like, I’m going to quit this class rather than continue. I don’t care if you give me a bad grade. And I don’t remember the exact dialogue or, but the gist was that he says, you know, I’ve been putting on a happy face and giving you as much space as possible and being a shoulder for you to cry on, but not push you in any way. And it’s exhausting and I can’t do it anymore. And you need to deal with this. Yeah. He said it in one sentence. So, but that was the subtext.
Liz: And that ties in with what he was doing to break the tension during the Miyazaki crisis. But also it’s a common sort of disabled slash able-bodied sibling dynamic, where the able-bodied sibling does fall into the role of not necessarily caregiver, but psychological support for their disabled sibling, without necessarily receiving the same level of care from their parents. The sibling relationship is important, but how much are their parents looking after that able-bodied sibling? And it’s easy to be overlooked. I think it’s called the glass sibling problem, but I could be misremembering. I just half read something about it. And I feel like that’s an interesting dynamic for the two of them.
Anika: Yes. I mean, I can’t be normal about Ocam and Ocam and Tarima, but the fact that Tilly casts him as the stage manager, who we later have explicit dialogue about how the stage manager is the one who is separate from the story.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: I was like, this is so smart. It’s such a well-written episode. Every single thing that happens into it feels like it happens for a reason.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: And when you put it all together, it’s a beautiful stained-glass window of something stunning. I love Ocam. I love his relationship with Tarima, and I love that he had that line. I love that everyone sort of looked to him when they were like, Oh, Tarima is coming. And he, you know, waved that she was already there.
And just every single thing that happens between them and around Ocam in this episode, I know that I’m biased and hyper about anything Ocam, but I really appreciated the fact that he was given that role. And so he ends up doing the narration and, you know, starting the whole story at the end that she ends. And it’s just, everything’s perfect about it.
Liz: I think one of the things that makes this series good is that you can pay close attention to a supporting character like Ocam and get something really rewarding out of it. No one is just there as an extra, although there is an extra in the theater class. And I’m like, were you even part of the Miyazaki? I don’t know what you’re doing here, but okay.
Anika: There were, I think, two people that never spoke, and I don’t know who they, well, it’s like, do we know their names? No. Do we know anything about these people? Why are they, I mean, they were there because it was like, hey, the characters that are in the opening credits are not the only characters in the show or at the Academy. But also, I was like, I feel, because they’re not in the end scene because they’re not important. They’re not a very different group.
Liz: Also, they’re having this class in the amphitheater that’s out in the open and people are walking past. And I’m like, I get that this is a bottle episode. And in fact, through the whole season, they’ve been very economical with their sets. And I like that. But why are we here? What’s happening, guys? I like that this episode is so good that my complaints are stuff like this. Because I literally only thought about it because I watched this episode so many times.
Anika: Okay, should we move over to the Sam storyline?
Liz: I just want to say that I agree with Tarima that it’s bullshit that Emily dies. I understand that’s literally the story, but I’m opposed to stories where the female protagonist dies at the end. Tarima, you are so valid. You are so valid.
Let’s talk about Sam.
Anika: Okay. I mean, credit to everyone for making Sam such an amazing character that the idea of losing Sam was traumatic.
Liz: Yes. At no point did I think she would be leaving the show. And yet I was on the edge of my seat.
Anika: I mean, I was like, okay, so they could do one of those horrible things where they reboot her and she’s a different person and we have to start over and.
Liz: I thought it was going to be like the end of “Projections,” the season two Star Trek: Voyager episode. It’s very early on where the Doctor runs out of memory and they have to wipe it and start again from scratch. That’s what I expected to happen. And I was like, I’m going to make so many jokes about how we’re ripping off the lesser Star Trek: Voyager episodes. We are riffing on the lesser Star Trek: Voyager episodes, but we’ll get to that.
But no, we had a different and more interesting solution. I have never watched “Projections” and actually been worried for the Doctor, and yet I was terrified for Sam. Not that she would die, but that she would be changed.
Anika: Yes. That we would lose something uniquely Sam. I mean, honestly, from the pilot, she has been such an amazing voice in the series.
Liz: Yes. I have read Alex Kurtzman saying that they completely changed their idea of Sam’s personality to match Kerrice Brooks because her audition was so unexpected. And now I’m fascinated to know what the original idea for Sam was like. Because I cannot imagine this show without that specific girl.
Anika: I cannot imagine anything else. She is so, I mean, all credit to Kerrice Brooks. She’s amazing in this role.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And brings so much to it and just creates such a multi-layered thing. Of course, everyone, everyone was mourning Sam. They were like, we can’t pay attention to this nonsense because we just care about Sam. We need to know what’s happening with her.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: And Genesis’ monologue about the toothbrush, I cannot. I just, the toothbrush thing is so, because it was like, you think it’s just a joke or a throwaway or like this silly thing that, oh, Sam accidentally dropped a toothbrush and then she gifted it and Tarima gets the cool present and Genesis, but then the toothbrush ends up being like this amazing metaphor for life. And I was just, I could not handle it.
Liz: I realized on my second watch through that Sam is a hologram. She would not normally drop something. She must have dropped the toothbrush because she was glitching.
Anika: Glitch, exactly. It’s, oh, oh my gosh. Legitimately everything. And that’s, and that’s the sort of like Genesis, I feel like she probably felt some feelings about being gifted a toothbrush. You know, she would have given this to me anyway because she dropped mine. This isn’t a goodbye gift because it’s something that Sam would have done naturally. And yet she’s carrying it around in her bag.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: Because it means so much to her. Now I’m going to cry. I, I just, I was floored by the amount that I cared about Sam. And Sam made me care about the Doctor so much.
Liz: Oh my God. The Doctor is also floored about how much he cared about Sam. But I just need to sit him down and let me kick him in the shins a few times. Because we’ve known since basically his first interaction with Sam, that she wanted him to be her mentor and he could not leave the room fast enough. And that has been the whole dynamic. And I’ve been so angry at him.
And I understand that he’s had 800 years to lose everyone he loved. And his opening log says, I was here the whole time and nothing has changed. And, yeah, that’s really hard. But then he’s talking about how he lost his holographic daughter in season three of Star Trek: Voyager. And he has chosen to never love again. And you just pan across Holly Hunter’s face. And without words, she’s saying, skill issue, bro.
Anika: And she has that one moment where she doesn’t finish the sentence, but she says, if I had the chance, and the subtext is, if I got my kid back for an hour, I would be so happy. And in truth, she has taken on, she’s allowing herself to care about Caleb.
Liz: And all of her kids. Remember last year, last week, she tells Caleb – he’s like, you’re pretending I have a family. And she’s like, I’m pretending you all have a family. She gives so much. And it is totally in character that the Doctor would be ultimately very selfish and cowardly. I think this is actually a really good read of the character and really good writing. And I love that he is allowed to have this terrible flaw and that we’re actually acknowledging it for the first time. But also I want to kick him in the shins.
Anika: I just, I mean, oh my god. Okay, so I wrote in here, not holding her hand felt like a war crime.
Liz: Fact.
Anika: And Nahle looks so disappointed. She doesn’t say anything, but she just is so angry. She’s a supernova of disappointment.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: In response to that. And, yes, she was me on screen, you know, because it was just so painful that this one thing that Sam, who is facing her extinction, not even just her death, because she’s a program, not just the death of Sam, but the death of the potential for Sam. And if he can’t bring himself to give her this one thing that she needs, and she’s a child, I love really that this is what we get from the Doctor and that the Doctor goes through all of this. And I think that Robert Picardo actually does a phenomenal job at carrying all of the emotions. There’s so much pathos that I can be fully, yes, I want to kick him in the shins and punch him in the face too, but I also want to give him a hug.
Liz: Oh, yeah.
Anika: Because I completely understand where it’s coming from and what he’s dealing with.
Liz: Yeah. And I’ve seen real life, I’ve watched Star Trek: Voyager. I don’t think that losing his non-sentient holographic daughter was really what broke him, but I think it was the first loss and it was the first straw of the ones that ultimately broke the camel’s back.
Anika: Again, if you remember that they’re programs and you think about the way that programming works, the initial mistake or the initial glitch in the programming, everything cascades from there, right?
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: So if that was like, I have this feeling and then I have to clamp it down and say, no, I’m not going to have that feeling because I’m not supposed to feel things, right? Because I’m a programming, I’m a hologram, I’m the Doctor. I’m only supposed to have the basis of bedside manner and that’s it. That’s my… And so, of course, he cares about Seven, he cares about really all of Star Trek: Voyager, he cares about the kids in Star Trek: Prodigy. We have seen him care about people and even be distraught at the idea of their loss.
And then we can extrapolate that when he did finally lose them because they are ephemeral in comparison to him, then it was devastating. And I can imagine him, again, the programming being like, what was the first time that I felt that? That is the wound.
Liz: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Anika: Working it up in his weird processing mind. Oh my gosh. I love that. The resolution of she needs a childhood in order to learn resilience. Oh my gosh.
Liz: I talked about her makers as an allegory for helicopter parents back in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, quote unquote. But helicopter parents prevent children from learning resilience. They overprotect. And, okay, resilience is really overused. And hold on, I’m just going to reach out and grab a book. One second.
Anika: Okay, I’m going to cry.
Liz: Okay.
Anika: Okay.
Liz: Let me go back a couple of pages. Yes. Okay.
So this is from the novel Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah, who is a Palestinian-Australian author. This is at the end of the book.
‘She’d seen comments online celebrating the resilience of Palestinian children. It infuriated her, this fetishization of resilience. Be resilient over a paper cut or losing your barbie, not over dismembered classmates or shredded parents. She couldn’t bear the pontificating of those who expected superhuman resilience from occupied, bombed, and traumatized children.’
And we do hear about resilience a lot these days, and particularly in regards to children of color, from marginalized and violent backgrounds who are expected to endure and survive and be resilient through unspeakable things that no one of any age should have to go through.
But true resilience is about knowing that if you’re crying in your crib, an adult will come and hold you, that you’ll be fed and changed, that you are growing up in safety of adults who love you. And that’s what Sam didn’t have. And it turns out that maybe some people could program that, but not her makers. They needed to do it themselves and they couldn’t.
Anika: And the incredible thing, I think, is that if you extrapolate again, and if you blow it up to look at it from helicopter height, as it were.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: You realize that the Doctor never had a childhood.
Liz: No.
Anika: And so, of course, he went through 800 years of trauma and didn’t know how to handle it. And it’s only in this realization, is he able to say, oh, if I give this to her, then I’m really giving it to both of us. And we can both heal and we can both build resilience.
Liz: One of the most interesting threads in early Star Trek: Voyager is that Kes is technically older than the Doctor and she’s teaching him how to be a person.
Anika: Yes.
Liz: But yeah.
Anika: I can’t believe I’ve been crying about the Doctor.
Liz: No, I’m so angry. But he’s another character who’s broken childhood or lack of childhood has left him in a state of arrested development. And this is like a coming-of-age story for the adults as well.
Anika: Yes. It’s beautiful.
Liz: It’s amazing.
Anika: The care that was put into crafting this episode. I end the series as a whole, but I can’t every single thing I think about, when I watch it or when I’m discussing it, I just keep coming up with new things.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: That that happened or that I realize and I’m just amazed at all.
Liz: No. I remember reading Tawny Newsome talking about how Alex Kurtzman paid the writers while they were on strike out of his own money. And I think that the fact that they were not struggling materially through the strike really impacts the quality of the series.
And I know that they weren’t able to work on it in any way, not even privately during the strike. But I feel like this season has really benefited from having extra time to, even in their subconscious, consider the story that they’re telling. And this is a bottle episode. There are no new sets and the most notable special effect is the black and white filter.
Anika: The black and white, yeah. Yes, you’re right. It’s absolutely a bottle episode, which just adds to it, because there’s this containment of everything. We all feel like we’re being protected in the crib of Starfleet Academy as well, as we’re watching this. And then we can go out into the world and deal with it all. And I don’t know about you, but the world’s a lot to deal with right now.
Liz: Oh, I’ve noticed. I’ve noticed. And yet, like the bottle episode, it feels safe, but it also feels confining. And that’s Tarima’s feeling, that she’s been put back into this box and she doesn’t want to be there.
Anika: I love the way they played with the lighting. The black and white is so poignant. I was on Trek ranks and we were doing color, color, like amorphous color. It was like, however you wanted, like it was the concept of color. And I was like, if I was doing that episode again, this one would be there because the black and white and that the makers are still colorful.
Liz: Yes, yeah.
Anika: It was just really well done. And then I have to, the very end, the last shot with Nahle on the bridge alone. At first, Nahle on the bridge alone. Last episode, we got Caleb and Genesis on the bridge alone.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And because this is a ship, but it’s not an active ship except when it is, you know? The bridge crew doesn’t have to be there unless they have to be there, right?
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: And Nahle, as the stage manager, you know, the empty set that was distressed multiple times. And the bridge is the center of town.
Liz: And she, like the stage manager, exists out of time.
Anika: Everything. Yes. And then with the spotlight on just her shadow at the end and her silhouette, it was so theatrical, but also so personal and so magical. I don’t know. It was just like they were making a point to make it like the script of the show and the end of a play as opposed to the end of an episode of television.
But it felt like the end of “Far Beyond the Stars” where it’s like the story that you’re watching is the same as the story that’s being told in Europe. So which is again, the point of the play is like this is one person’s life. The purpose of us telling you about this one person who is not special in any way but is so beautiful and memorable and wonderful and that moved you is that you don’t have to do anything other than live your life to the fullest. And living your life to the fullest means being in the moment, being present when it’s happening. That’s it.
Liz: Which Nahle very aggressively does and the Doctor has not been right.
Anika: Right. I feel like Sam actually aggressively does too in her way. Sam finds so much joy in everything. Oh my god. Hopeful defiance. Can we adopt that? Please?
Liz: As our motive for 2026 and beyond?
Anika: Can we just hopeful defiant ourselves out of this terrible world that we’re in? Because, yes, I love the commentary, I guess, that hope is a verb. Hope is an action.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: That you have to defiantly hope in the face of all of this. If you can do that, then you’ll be able to do the rest of it.
Liz: I keep thinking about Tarima’s observation that Our Town is set right before World War I. We have the detail of, this kid’s really smart, he goes off to MIT and then he dies in France, fighting the war. But then, Our Town was published in the late 1930s, so the world is on the edge of another war, and now it’s 2026, and it feels like we’re on the edge of something cataclysmic.
Also, not to keep coming back to it, but Nus Braka has stolen a weapon, and so maybe this fictional universe is also on the edge of something cataclysmic. Just to bring it back to that. Hooray.
Let’s talk about shipping news.
Anika: Okay.
Liz: On that happy note.
Anika: On that note, on that happy note. Yeah, okay, so Caleb and Tarima, they’re very awkward.
Liz: Yes, so awkward. My children, come on.
Anika: So Caleb is trying, I feel like he too is sort of trying to be like, I’m here for you however you need me.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And he’s not great at it.
Liz: No.
Anika: He doesn’t-
Liz: Which, hard relate. I don’t know how to do that. Yep. Yep. Big mood.
Anika: And Tarima doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want to be placated. She doesn’t want to be, she just shuts him down a lot. But then she gets a little drunk and sort of aggressively goes after him and he shuts her down.
Liz: He’s consent guy.
Anika: Caleb, I don’t know where you learned it. Maybe we can say, hmm. Nahle? or how about Lura?
Liz: Maybe. Maybe they just have really good affirmative consent courses in alien prisons.
Anika: Yeah, maybe. Oh my gosh. That’s interesting. I mean, maybe, maybe, but someone-
Liz: It seems unlikely.
Anika: Someone taught him something. And maybe, you know, he’s roommates with Ocam and Darem. And honestly, I can imagine the three of them having a consent conversation.
Liz: So can I, but also we know that Caleb reads literally everything that he comes across. This could be something that he has encountered through fiction or non-fiction or, you know, whatever. He’s probably read a lot of criminal codes, and I imagine they generally have something to say about consent.
But also, he’s a basically good kid who has good instincts. He is naturally a gentleman.
Anika: I think that Caleb actually, and again, since we met him when he was eight, has had instincts. But yeah, I think that that was a good, I liked seeing that part of their relationship. That he is not gonna take advantage of her in any way, not, it’s, yeah.
Liz: As a couple, they have struggled with boundaries, but they both have good intentions.
Anika: I’m interested to see what happens next. I don’t know if she’s in the right place to be in a relationship, I’ll be honest.
Liz: No, I almost feel like we were talking last week about whether or not they were endgame. And at this point, I do feel like their relationship is coming to a natural end and she has to find a new place in the series. She can’t be the girlfriend anymore.
Anika: I think she just really needs to focus on herself.
Liz: Yeah. And that’s good. That’s good.
Anika: It’s great. Yeah. I want that for her.
Liz: Yeah. Which brings us to Caleb and Genesis, which I don’t think Caleb is really aware of, but obviously Tarima is an empath. And yeah, Tarima is aware that Genesis is interested in Caleb. I think she certainly feels away about it.
Anika: She says it to both of them, which is interesting. Yeah. That she’s feeling it. And I think this is also like a Betazoid trait, that they are default honest.
Liz: Oh, Lwaxana Troi would have said the same thing with less tact.
Anika: Yes. I think that it’s interesting. And yeah, I feel like Caleb, I think he’s completely oblivious. I think he does think that there’s a spark between them. But I think that he doesn’t think that it’s a threat to his relationship with Tarima necessarily.
Liz: I like that.
Anika: She has very clearly, she’s like, yeah, I’m into him, but you’re dating, so I’m not going to do anything about it.
Liz: As love triangles in YA go, I think that ‘we’re attracted to each other, but for various reasons, we are simply making the choice to not pursue that’, is a really good story to tell and one that doesn’t come up in fiction enough, even though it happens in real life literally all the time.
Anika: Right. Exactly. Constantly.
Liz: Yeah. Because I spend a lot of time on Reddit, I know that people are very concerned with emotional affairs and you shouldn’t have friends of the opposite sex, which is always absolutely the sex you are attracted to and also the same as gender. I’m like, people are so much more messy and complicated and interesting than that, and Genesis and Caleb can be friends, and that’s fine.
Anika: They can be friends and they can, again, be into each other. They can be attracted to each other. They can imagine a scenario and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think I should talk about this because the concept of an emotional affair makes me crazy.
Liz: Oh, I know. Do you mean having friends?
Anika: Yeah. You’re going to have emotions about the people you care about.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: That’s normal. That’s healthy.
Liz: Putting all the emotional labor on one person who is your partner is really unhealthy.
Anika: Right.
Liz: Yeah. I’m not saying that you should go out and fall in love with people who aren’t your partner without being honest about it, but A, sometimes messy feelings happen and B, friendship and romance are different and just because you have romantic feelings for someone doesn’t mean that you’re going to step outside your relationship or betray your partner. Sometimes you just nurture those romantic feelings and wait for them to become friendship.
Anika: And that’s the thing is that you have choices. You can be like, I’m having these feelings about these two people, and I get to decide how I’m going to act on that. There’s many different ways that you can act on that. And one of them is absolutely, I will continue being in a relationship with person A and being in a relationship with person B that is friendship and just suppressing the attraction, but not in a unhealthy way, but in a, I acknowledge that this is true, and I’m going to move forward knowing that, but my friendship with them is more important than, you can figure it out.
Liz: My friendship with them, my relationship with my partner. Like you say, people have choices.
Anika: People have choices, and you can have conversations, and you can acknowledge feelings without it being the end of the world. And it’s like, frankly, it’s more healthy to have feelings for multiple people than to require yourself to only have feelings about one.
Liz: And sometimes having a crush is more fun than actually having a relationship with that person. And that’s fine. That’s fine.
Anika: That’s fine too.
Liz: The joy is in the anticipation of something you’re never going to pursue.
Anika: If Caleb and Tarima break up next episode, I don’t think that Caleb and Genesis are immediately going to start dating. I don’t think that either of them will do that.
Liz: Now we’ve put that out there, so they absolutely will.
Anika: Now they will.
Liz: I was about to say I trust them to make them a mature choice. I don’t. I absolutely don’t.
Anika: I will say, I can imagine they get into this dangerous situation and they have to have a confession slash kiss.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: And then they have to deal with it, and it’s like weird. That would be very normal to stories and television and especially young and old fiction.
Liz: And Star Trek.
Anika: So I can imagine that happening.
Liz: Yeah, no, that is peak Star Trek.
Anika: But I’m not fussed about any of the three of them. I think that they’re going to be okay. And it can be messy and that’s okay too.
Liz: Yeah. A level of mess is almost, you have to go through the messy phase of adolescent romance to come out as a mature adult.
Anika: Legitimately, if we are talking about the three of them.
Liz: Genesis and Tarima?
Anika: I am hardcore Genesis and Tarima. If only one coupling can happen here, I would very much like that one.
Liz: It would be very The Legend of Korra: Asami and Korra both date Mako, but then they end up together. And yeah, I wouldn’t be mad about that. I don’t think there’s enough there yet, but I can see the sparks.
Anika: The way, and again, it was Genesis being very respectful and reasonable and taking care of her.
Liz: Yeah.
Anika: There was no, I don’t know, there was no edge to the scene at all. Because it was very much Genesis allowing Tarima space to have her needs met.
Liz: Separate from shipping, I really like that both Genesis and Sam have welcomed Tarima into their space without making her their special project.
Anika: Oh my gosh, Tarima and Sam were adorable.
Liz: I know, I know, I know.
Anika: They’re not obvious friends, but Sam is just like everyone. You just, you can’t not love Sam. That’s, that’s just the way it is. And the fact that, so of all of the people who pushed Tarima in this episode, which is like everyone really is.
Liz: With very levels of success.
Anika: And Caleb and, and even her brother in their first scene together, Sam and Tarima, Tarima has that moment where she sighs for herself and turns around and was like, I’m sorry, I didn’t need to be like that. And it was just, it was just Sam is just magic.
Liz: Sam is also the only person outside of Caleb who was interacted with Tarima before, before now.
Anika: And Tarima explicitly says, you’re the first person who’s treating me like a person.
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
Anika: Instead of a storyline.
Liz: Yeah. There are a lot of Sam/Ocam shippers on Tumblr, and I’ve seen some meta about how he’s into her because as a hologram, he can’t read her. And I’m really into that, but it’s also true for Tarima, of course. And so she has someone in her life who is opaque to her. And I wonder if that’s stressful or restful. But it’s Sam, so it has to be restful because I guess Sam is not a restful personality. She is, as she says a lot, but she has no guile. She’s not hiding an agenda.
Anika: I loved how every single person was welcoming her back.
Liz: I know.
Anika: At the end of the episode. Oh my gosh. And in her bright yellow dress.
Liz: Yes.
Anika: I cannot. Everything was perfect about this episode. I will be holding it close to my heart forever. I can’t wait to watch it on the big screen of my big television instead of my tiny laptop, which is kind of glitchy, like Sam.
Liz: I am particularly cherishing this episode because I’m sure that episode 9 will lead into the finale. And I was thinking about how it’s going to go. And I’m going to posit the theory that Caleb is going to have some reason to go after Nus Braka himself. And so Nahle and everyone else has to go after him. Because I don’t see Nahle sending him or letting him go.
Anika: Our heroes have to go after. Yeah. And it’s going to be devastating. And let’s all be prepared for it to end on a cliffhanger.
Liz: Oh my god, how dare you put that out there.
Anika: Just saying, everyone start preparing now.
Liz: No, you are absolutely right. I’m going to be so mad. Although, Paul Giamatti said that he is not in season two. But also, do we trust him? I do not trust him.
Anika: I mean, I trust no one at this point. But as we all know, I ship Nus Braka with the airlock, so I’m up for that.
Liz: That’s very Laura Roslyn coded of you.
Anika: Just saying. All right.
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 some of our episodes. You can follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Blue Sky, all at antimatterpod and at Mastodon at antimatterpod@tenforward.social. We’re also on TikTok, I assume, also at Antimatter Pod.
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Liz: What a title.
Anika: What a title.