A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Okay so you know how I’ve been saying that Discovery is the show that’s about connection? I think that is a testament to how consistent they have been about their themes and it’s one of the reasons I like this show so much. I think Discovery finally “got” a big element of early TNG that is widely misunderstood. It’s uncontested fan-lore that Gene didn’t believe humans of the future would have interpersonal conflict, and that is why the first season of TNG is so weird and stilted before he got too old to intervene and they could start writing stories about characters being dicks to each other again. I think this is a misunderstanding; it’s not that Gene opposed interpersonal conflict so much as that he opposed the idea that people in the future – at least the ones qualified for serving on a starship – would be as emotionally immature as the cheap dramatics that modern TV thrives on, because it’s easy and fun to drive a plot for an hour over a misunderstanding that could be resolved in ten seconds if people would just talk about their feelings rather than be dicks to each other. The classic example is that Gene famously objected to a second season episode because he didn’t think a 24th century child would be sad that his mother died. Yeah. I think it would be more accurate to say that Gene objected to the idea of a story whose driving through-line is that no one on the ship including the therapist has any idea how to help a child deal with his mother having died except by dithering about how confused they are that he can’t just buck up and get over it.

Anyway, “Jinaal” reflects the possibility that the Discovery writers lacked my confidence in the clarity with which they have conveyed their themes. Because Jesus Christ does this episode want to hit you over the head with it.

This episode really feels like two B-plots stitched together. Either one would have strengthened a stronger A-plot, but together, it’s a step down from the first two weeks. I like plot B a lot, and I’m sure it could have been slotted in at some other point in the season. It’s just not a good yang to this particular A-plot’s yin. Saru and T’rina have a fight, and they act like mature adults and settle things and reconnect and are stronger for it. It is noteworthy first and foremost for how fucking rare that is in television. T’rina’s secretary is basically a jerk with Strong Stonn Energy, and he takes Saru aside and advises him that the Romulans are fine with it, but marrying a filthy off-worlder might torpedo T’rina’s political career with the Vulcan Fox News crowd, so he gets nervous and tries to protect her by suggesting they keep their engagement low-key rather than the formal announcement she’s planning. And instead of T’rina becoming insecure and thinking that he’s got cold feet, she instantly realizes what this is (StonnTNG, to his credit, floated this with her first. To his discredit, when she told him to fuck off, he went behind her back to her boyfriend), and only takes offense that he would jump to the conclusion that she needed his protection. And instead of getting defensive and feeling threatened by this… Saru realizes his mistake, apologizes, and explains how his own anxieties were triggered by the thought of their relationship hurting T’rina’s career. And they are both fine after this exchange and have learned to understand and support each other better. Also, T’rina points out, as both Stonn2 and Saru missed, that a secret engagement coming out would play way the fuck worse with the MVGA crowd.

I have very little to say about it, but I love it to pieces. Connection!

Meanwhile, back on Discovery, Reno! Reno appears briefly in this episode for the purpose of calling Stamets “Space Dad”. The rest of us have been calling him that for a couple of years now, but of course it would be Reno who makes it canonical. She calls Stamets out for being exactly as obtuse as he always is about seeing that Adira is about to dump their boyfriend. We’re at Trill to find the next piece of the puzzle box, and Adira gets some good scenes with Grey, where they confess that this LDR thing isn’t really working, and…. They break up but will remain friends. Given their youth, you’d obviously forgive a big blow-out, but Grey and Adira handle it with maturity. They still clearly love each other, but the trans android ghost alien and the teen enby with the 800-year-old grub in their belly have decided that their relationship is no longer romantic in nature. They honestly seem to be having an easier time of it than Michael and Book, who are doing okay, but are clearly uncomfortable around each other.

Two points here I want to nerd on a bit:

1. It is a jaw-dropping missed opportunity that Hugh interacts with Grey so little. I’m not sure they’ve ever had a scene together since Grey came back to life. You’d think “One time I died but then someone grew me a new body and used space magic to stuff my soul into it” is the sort of thing two dudes might bond over.
2. Adira says that 800 years is unusually old for a Trill – not outside the realm of possibility, but unlikely. And I think the implication at the end of the episode is that Bix is going off to die now that Jinaal’s duty has been fulfilled. One of Tal’s former hosts wears a Picard-era uniform, meaning that Adira’s own symbiote is at least 800 years old itself. They may well be contemporaries. And it might be a contrivance for Tal to know Bix, but apparently only about 50 new symbiotes come up for implantation in a year, so it actually seems really likely that if 800 is near the top end of the symbiote lifespan, Tal and Bix probably went to school together, which makes this feel like a missed opportunity to do something with Adira’s Trill heritage for once.

Jinaal himself is a fun character. A bit whimsical in the “Deranged old wizard” sort of way. It’s easy to, like Michael, be upset that he’s playing games with the fate of the galaxy, but it’s an archetypal character for this kind of quest, what with the handing out of life lessons and the subtle tests of worthiness.

I have a little bit of a hard time with the reveal that Trill is home to a race of large invisible predators who spit exploding harpoons.

Oh, and there’s a C-plot about Rayner failing to connect with the crew? It doesn’t add much right now because there’s no comeuppance. He gets told off by Tilly, but he hasn’t had any hint of a come-to-Sisko moment where he learns the value of friendship. I assume that’s coming, but it’s an anticlimax this week, adding so little to the plot I nearly forgot to mention it. It just reinforces the sense that this episode is insecure about the audience “getting it”. So we have a whole subplot where Rayner fails to recognize the importance of connecting with his crew, enough that you kinda want Tilly to summon up an educational music video of Rebecca Romijn singing Gilbert and Sullivan. I was kind of hoping he would at least have a little moment of connection with Stamets, the only person who’s as annoyed as Rayner is about being pulled away from work.

I am glad we did not have to watch Chiana and D’argo murder their way through the Trill security forces, because I find Guardian Z’s claim that they are up to the challenge of defending against two plucky outlaws sus given that Guardian Z apparently did not question being asked to force a Federation ship on a Red Directive to answer a riddle about a poem. Or that Chiana just sneaks into a religious ceremony at the end of the episode to casually stick a tracking device on Adira.

I should be upset about the ease with which two random space-criminals are totally owning Starfleet at every single turn, but if this were any other space franchise, they’d probably be the heroes. I don’t know. I’m conflicted about this. It’s weird. We have this long tradition on the one hand. Discovery bested the Klingon Empire, the Terran Empire, Control, the Emerald Chain, and shamed godlike extragalactic aliens into playing nice. Now they are getting their asses kicked at every turn by a couple of Space-Punks. It’s just weird seeing the “A couple of plucky space punks can outmaneuver the galactic government” trope from the viewpoint where the galactic government are the heroes. I hope this doesn’t end with those two shooting a proton torpedo into the exhaust port of Federation HQ.

You know, I rather liked Michael’s breakthrough last week that “twin moons” referred not to a planet with two moons, but a planet where two of its moons moved were in sync. This week, Michael and Saru will talk knowledgably about fine details of Romulan culture while in the middle of a desperate fight for their lives.

I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense that they might have a detailed understanding of Romulan poetical styles and a callback to the Picard Season 1 trivia about Romulan houses having a fake back-door. I mean, I say it out loud and it is, indeed, weird that they would have these facts ready to hand, and I feel like the scene would have been easier to take if they’d had to call up Discovery and have Zora do a google search instead. But at the same time, Michael is legally a citizen of the Romulan homeworld and her mom is an adopted Romulan, and Saru is shortly going to be the first gentleman of the Romulan homeworld, so if any of the regulars are justified in knowing stuff about Romulan culture, it’s these two. Yet it once again brings home the fact that Discovery stopped being a show about twenty-third century people a long time ago. From Michael’s perspective three years ago, no one even knew what Romulans look like, and now she can just casually recognize that a poem fails to match the traditional structure of a particular Romulan form.

Like I was saying last week, this is why I think Paramount is justified in ending the show. Discovery has become “Just Star Trek but in the 32nd Century” now (I have even worked out that by now, Discovery has some 32nd century natives on board in addition to Adira. There’s a Bajoran bridge officer and a Ferengi bartender and either a second Saurian or they’ve redone Linus’s makeup), while Strange New Worlds is “Just Star Trek but in the 23rd century”. And I think this is also making it a hard sell to greenlight Star Trek Legacy, because right now, it seems like that would just be “Just Star Trek but in the 25th Century”. They don’t need three different versions of “Just Star Trek, but with slightly different visual motifs to indicate what year it is.” On the other hand, they’ve got “Star Trek as a Comedy” and “Star Trek but for Kids” (Admittedly, also cancelled) and they’re coming out with “Star Trek But Grimdark” and “Star Trek But At College”, which are a much bigger departure from the core Trek “Just dudes having adventures in space” concept, and thus justify their existence more. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of the concepts; it’s that we don’t need three minor variations on the same show. Well, at least, normal people don’t; I eat this shit up.

This week’s A-plot is Michael and Saru’s final mission together, doing some tomb raiding on a dead planet. For those keeping score, the Promelians were another long-dead one-off TNG race like the Progenitors, this one from the episode where Geordi has a fling with a holographic reconstruction of the Enterprise’s designer and it is super creepy and pervy because the writers wanted to do “Geordi is a nerd and this awkward with women” but had a great deal of contempt for nerds, so they wrote him as kind of an incel. An element of the Promelian characterization that has carried over is that while their technology was less advanced than 24th century Federation technology, they built things to last, which means Saru gets to whip out his Fuck-Off-Murder-Darts against some two-thousand-year-old automated defense drones. (Again, no recognition here Michael and Saru are roughly equally displaced from the time of the Promelians as from the present day of the series). It’s a lovely touch that Michael makes a point to order the Dots to go undo the tomb desecration done by Chiana and D’argo, who beat them to the clue, but overlooked the hidden fifth stanza.

While this is going on, there’s a couple of B-plots. We get some good material for Tilly and Adira as they puzzle out how to keep Saru and Michael alive. We introduce the incoming plot complication – Adira is thinking about dumping Grey. Turns out that they’ve never really spent any time apart before and Adira thinks they might actually like being by themself. Hell of a thing to come back from the dead and then get dumped though. Also, I’m once again struck by how little the fact that Adira is joined to a Trill symbiont has to do with their character. Awkward enby teen genius is a perfectly fine character (Adira is the least awful teen genius the franchise has ever given us), but if you’re going to toss in “Also has the memories of several lifetimes possibly including their ex-boyfriend and a Starfleet Admiral,” that should make some kind of impact, shouldn’t it?

We’ll get a chance for Adira to interact with their Trill side next week, though, what with the fifth verse pointing Discovery to Trill, I’m sure they’ll be a major part of the A-plot rather than just having a little side-plot to dump Grey. Right now, they get to interact with Rayner, via telepresence, because time and space and distance means nothing in the 32nd century. He doesn’t do much, this is just to establish his value so we buy it when Michael asks him to replace Saru. He has a lot to learn about how to connect to other people though.

Our other B-plot involved Book, who pulls out that Secret Courier Communications Mushroom from season 3 to see if Chiana and D’argo are willing to cash out. They are not. (Minor point here, Stamets refers to the Spore Lab as “Main Engineering”, because he serves the narrative role of the chief engineer in this show, even though technically he’s a scientist, because no one is going to believe Tig Notaro giving technical exposition. If she ever shows up.  Reno still counts as chief engineer, though, just in the TOS sense of “Mostly pipes up to be salty about how you’re mistreating her engines and tell you that she’s working on it,” rather than the TNG sense of “The nerd who solves your technical problems through technobabble.”

The big reveal that Chiana is the daughter of the previous Dread Pirate Roberts Booker Cleveland is kind of a jaw-dropping contrivance, but look, we need an angle for connection here. Chiana and D’argo have done some murdering, but not too much. I’m curious whether they both get to live or not. They might need to kill D’argo off to give Chiana an enemy she’d side with the Federation against.

But they’d better get on with it. There are not a lot of episodes left. We’ve got a solid and predictable structure of the rest of the season with the incredibly telegraphed revelation that the Terrible Secret of Space (future edition) is a key in six parts. I wonder which one will be The Power of Friendship.

Well okay. Didn’t mean to take three months off, but I found I really enjoyed not having the pressure of churning out a weekly article added to all the other fucking pressure I experience every moment of every day. It’s not that I don’t have things I could say – I’ve been mulling over a plot for an Admiral Pike Timeline version of Star Trek III-and-IV (The biggest part of the idea is the observation that if it’s Pike who steals the Enterprise to go to Genesis, he’d obviously recruit Pelia rather than Scotty to help him), and I’ve been trying for years to summon up the energy to finish off the War of the Worlds thing (I am just giving up on the two different 2019 versions because life is too short to force myself to keep watching either of them). But my family has way too the fuck much going on for me to handle, and since I can only cut things from my own personal schedule, reducing my cognitive load means that I have to do fewer “me” things. (Yes! I know this is somewhat pathological! But I can’t very well tell my wife to cut my daughter’s dance class for the benefit of no one but me; that’s not only selfish, but weird. It gets even more pathological when I realize that the 8 hours a day I spend at work is probably the best part of my day because I fully understand the requirements on my time and other things aren’t allowed to interrupt or supersede or double-book). So we are where we are.

And where we are is, “Two new episodes of Discovery dropped last Thursday.” Kinda wish they’d push it back to Wednesday, honestly.

Where did we leave off with Discovery? Let’s see. Book’s doing community service for all the theft and piracy and war crimes and nearly inciting an intergalactic war. Tilly’s off running Starfleet Academy. Saru and T’rina are dating. Grey’s on Trill studying to be a Guardian. He’s an android now, but that doesn’t seem to be a big deal in the 32nd century. Peace has been made with Species 10-C, Earth and Ni’var are back in the Federation, the Emerald Chain has collapsed, all seems right with the universe. So let’s break that up.

First off, who’s missing? I saw Reno in the trailer, but she’s not in this episode. Bryce got written out near the end of last season to go work on a secret project for Kovitch. From the latest rumors about Section 31, it appears that Georgiou was sent back to the early 24th century, during the “Lost” era between TOS and TNG. Nilssen is absent with no explanation; Linus is working the Spore Drive console on the bridge.

The first good thing I’ll observe is that while this is still very much in the “Michael is the main character” mode, they seem to have decided that it’s time for her arc to move on. She’s confident in her role as captain of Discovery, and the show feels confident of her in that role. The angst over finding her place that directed the character for the first four seasons doesn’t put in an appearance in the season opener. Her only big angst just at the moment is that she officially breaks up with Book over that whole thing where he sided against her to run off with Tarka and committed war crimes and nearly started an intergalactic war. As previously mentioned.

For those of our other characters who deign to show up, we get a lot of new depth. Tilly is coming into her own as a character, and there’s a hint of budding romance with… A dude whose name I do not remember.

Saru’s been offered an ambassadorship, which will take him away from Starfleet (Last season, I think they said he was destined to eventually take command of the new Voyager once his term ended in Kelpien government, but it appears he just crystalized into Michael’s permanent XO instead), and he gets a character arc in this episode that leads him to take it, deciding that T’rina’s companionship is more than enough to fill the gap in his heart from leaving Discovery. And then she proposes to him, so even better. God those two are so cute together. They could so easily have done some kind of bullshit to imperil their relationship, but they didn’t; these are two very mature adults, and despite being romantically inexperienced, they can be open and honest with each other and themselves. Like, there’s a moment early in the episode where she tells him not to take her into account when deciding whether or not to quit Starfleet. And for a moment, he looks like he might be hurt. But instead of letting him feel that she’s unwilling to commit or doesn’t care, she explains herself, that she will be there for him and support him and is fully committed in either case, and she won’t be any less content with their relationship if he chooses to keep the job that involves a lot of travel.

Paul’s new trait is a concern about his own legacy. We saw hints of this from time to time – Lorca tempting him with the suggestion that his name would be remembered alongside Zefram Cochrane and Elon Musk (Some people like to imagine this was a hint of Lorca’s true nature, that he thought of Musk as one of history’s great engineering luminaries. But I think it’s just part of Trek’s longstanding tradition of future historians radically misreading people. See also Kirk’s history teacher who thought that the Nazis were pretty great aside from that one thing). But it wasn’t really a big deal like it is in this episode. While Discovery’s spore drive has been repaired since he burned it out last season, Tarka blowing up the new model and the fact that navigating the network can only be done by two known species, both of which are extinct has led to Starfleet deciding to shelve the project and focus on the Pathway drive instead (Which might be in production now? Rayner mentions not having one, but in a way that comes off like the rollout is already underway and he’s salty about how far down the queue he is). So Paul is feeling bummed about how history will remember him. It comes up again when he notices an allusion to Altan Soong in the serial number of a memory module from a dead seven-hundred-year-old Soong-type android antiquities dealer.

That exchange, along with a couple of others, I think highlights why it’s probably okay for Discovery to end now. Paul thinks of Altan Soong as a legendary scientist from centuries in the past, just as Tilly and Michael think of Vellek and Picard as characters from the distant past. Fred is a “primitive” Synth, of a design that hasn’t been made in hundreds of years, and they’re impressed with him as a historical artifact himself (A historical artifact who is an antiquities dealer. That’s fun). But these are all things which post-date these characters by more than a century. And no one comments on that. No one comments on the weirdness of a crew from the mid twenty-third century investigating a secret from the late twenty-fourth century while in the thirty-second century. There’s no observation of the fact that Michael, Paul, Hugh, even Saru are culturally more similar to Vellek, Picard, and even Fred than they are to Kovitch, Rayner and Vance. Because after about the mid-point of season 3, the Discovery crew haven’t really acted like displaced refugees from the twenty-third century; they’ve fully integrated themselves into thirty-second century life. And that’s not a bad thing – a constant frustration when an Issekai sort of story goes on for a long time is the way the fish-out-of-water character can be compelled for the sake of the narrative to remain a weird and aloof fish-out-of-water who never adapts to their environment. But, as the pathway drive winning out over the spore drive reinforces, there’s not not much left to justify this show continuing as Star Trek: Discovery, rather than moving on to just be “A Star Trek Show Set in the Thirty-Second Century. Discovery itself is effectively a thirty-second century ship, the crew are effectively thirty-second century people. It doesn’t make all that much difference that they’ve got a novel propulsion system or that the captain is Spock’s sister or that the first officer is a Kelpien. Back in season 3, we still had the fact that they hadn’t lived through the Burn as something that set them apart – Discovery had become a show about the return of Those Old Scientists to bring a new enlightenment to a world that had been plunged into a sort of new dark age. But now, it’s just Star Trek in the 32nd Century. The 32nd Century setting is interesting, but there’s no real need to stay connected to the 23rd.

But anyway, what’s this season about?

Turns out they cribbed the plot wholesale from season 10 of Stargate SG-1. I mean, more or less. So way back in season 6 of TNG, there was this cool episode where Picard goes chasing around the galaxy on a very Indiana Jones-style adventure that culminates in everyone learning that a race of ancient and very smooth humanoids had evolved billions of years before any other life, and, being lonely, kickstarted evolution in the galaxy, and that is why so many planets gave rise to intelligent life that look like members of the Screen Actor’s Guild with prosthetic foreheads. And literally nothing ever came of this. But now, eight hundred years later, the notebook of one of the unnamed background Romulans from that episode has turned up, and they haven’t come all the way out and said it yet, but it’s pretty clear that he found the device the Precursors used in this kickstarting, and now Starfleet has to find it before it falls into the nebulously-defined “wrong hands”. (Okay, I say “nebulously”, but they namecheck the Breen and the Tholians. The Breen are the most boring and pointless antagonists in Trek history, and the Tholians, despite being a TOS one-off whose only particular trait was punctuality, have not really had enough said about them to give me an opinon).

Yeah, there was this whole thing in Stargate where they found the machine that their own precursor race used to reboot life after a plague wiped most of it out, and they had to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. I will add as a minor side-note here that there really shouldn’t be any precursor technology for them to find, because the whole reason the precursors encoded their message in DNA was that they knew there would be absolutely nothing left of their civilization by the time more spacefaring sentients evolved.

That’s our setup, and Michael is only very reluctantly read-in by blackmailing Doctor Kovitch. You’ll remember him from the last two seasons; he’s… Okay, still don’t know what his job is. He’s an expert on the mirror universe, in charge of Starfleet Academy, in charge of intelligence, he runs a secret project that Bryce got written out to join, he was in charge of the effort to figure out the 10-C, he was in charge of declaring Zora a legal person, and I think he’s also Hugh’s therapist? Let’s just say he’s the Federation’s Mycroft Holmes. Also he wears a 21st century suit and eyeglasses and he is played by David Cronenberg, and I love how insane this is, but it’s starting to get hard to handle.

I’m writing this in the break I’m taking between episodes one and two, so I assume at some point in the next hour or so, this season’s new add, Captain Rayner, will misplace his own ship and replace Saru as Michael’s number one. Rayner seems fun so far. He’s free-wheeling and goal-oriented and a bit reckless, willing to endanger others to accomplish his mission. He’s also apparently a Kellerun, a one-off species from DS9 who tried to off Bashir and O’Brien, but for entirely noble reasons. Fortunately, in the past eight hundred years, they have evolved past their penchant for big shoulder pads and man-buns. He seems like the sort of dude who needs to learn a season-long lesson in the importance of connecting with other people, trusting his teammates, and putting love and faith and trust above cold pragmatism, which, fortunately, is the main thematic arc Discovery characters take.

Speaking of, I assume we’re going to get some proper antagonists at some point. Because the ones they try to sell us on in “Red Directive” are just about the most obvious fake-outs I’ve seen. I am having a hard time remembering their names, so I will call them Chiana and D’argo because they absolutely seem to be a couple of Farscape characters who somehow ended up in the wrong show. They’re former couriers who’ve turned to roguery since the courier economy collapsed. They’re like the intermediate-level villains from a Tomb Raider story – the ones who are always competing with Lara or Indy or Nathan Drake to find the treasure, but for selfish rather than noble reasons. The sort who are destined to help the hero out like one time at the three-quarters mark in the story when they realize that the other bad guy is a literal Nazi who isn’t seeking the Spear of Longinus just for money but to resurrect Cthulhu or something. They’re violent, unscrupulous and don’t care who gets hurt, but they’re also fiercely and lovingly devoted to each other, in a way that may or may not be sexual. And as we know, in Discovery, if you have the capacity to love other people, you’re not exiting the show without some form of redemption. Also, what the hell kind of “wrong hands” are these two for the power of creation to fall into?

It’s a good episode, it’s a good setup. I think the landspeeder sequence went on too long. It was a good way to show how Rayner’s priorities were a problem – he blows up the Chiana and D’argo’s cave to stop them hiding, so they blow up the whole mountain so that Discovery and Antares have to beach themselves to block the resulting avalanche from wiping out the city of adorable poverty-stricken space-bedouins (and specifically the two adorable children whose landspeeder broke down outside of town directly in front of Michael.)

Charades or I am Curious (Yellow) or How I Meld Your Mother

See Also: Faces (VOY), Rascals (TNG), Stargate SG-1 “Divide and Conquer”, Doctor Who “Curse of the Black Spot”
Contains strange new world?: Yes!
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in this episode?: Peak SNW right here, baybee.

So the SAG-AFTRA strike is finally over which means I have to get off my ass and start writing about Star Trek again I guess. I was kind of enjoying not writing, to be frank, but I should probably try to do more creative stuff. Thinking about doing another Admiral Pike-verse fanfic.

The thing is, I don’t actually have all that much to say about the rest of the season of Strange New Worlds other than “It’s great. It’s really great.” This one provoked some mixed emotions from me.

I got to ask. I mean, probably not, right? But maybe? You’ve got aliens named Yellow and Blue and the resolution to the plot arc requires Christine to own up about whether or not her and Spock are fucking. Is this an easter egg referencing the 1967 Swedish erotic film series?

So the hijinks. I guess an SNW “thing” is “Vulcan Hijinks at the midpoint of the season”? They even played a riff on the TOS “shenanigans” leitmotif just before Spock drops an F-bomb. The basic outline is… Kind of shocking in that it feels like what would happen if Star Trek were a ’60s sitcom. It has strong I Love Lucy energy. Here’s what happens: Spock takes Nurse Chapel out to study a Weird Swirly Thing on a planet near Vulcan, and they get blown up. Fortunately, the swirly thing is owned by some godlike aliens, whose insurance covers the bill. Only when they found the shuttle full of two blown-up humanoids and 3/4 of the DNA they found was human, they figured the other quarter was a mistake, and put Spock back together a fully human. And they’ve only got a limited time to fix it before it becomes permanent for some reason! Okay, Good solid Star Trek plot so far. But incoming hijinks: Spock is scheduled to have the very important and awkward ritualistic dinner with his fiancee’s parents that very night! And T’Pring’s mom is a total bitch who already hates Spock for being a filthy half-breed and if she disapproves, the wedding will be off! And I mean, it would be terrible if Spock and T’Pring didn’t end up getting married! Also, Fred and Barney have their Water Buffalo meeting tonight! And Laura’s toe is stuck in the spigot! And Superintendent Chalmers will be here for dinner in 20 minutes!

So okay. There’s a lot going on here. It’s a funny plot. And it’s insightful too. One of the best things is that Spock doesn’t spend the episode being angry and feeling violated about having his DNA changed. It’s a nice change from the past few generations of Trek having people meet the weirdness of the universe first and foremost with annoyance. But more, the reason Spock isn’t upset is related to the reason he has such a hard time pretending to be Vulcan: it’s because his Vulcan upbringing has not prepared him for pretense. He knows how to act like a Vulcan, but not how to pretend to be a Vulcan. He doesn’t know how to be un-genuine (A skill he will, of course, learn as he grows older). He doesn’t keep trying to suppress his emotions when he’s a human, because suppressing emotions isn’t part of his understanding of humanity, so why would he?

I love that he blows up at Sam for being a slob. This is part of a cute little montage where they recreate scenes from the cold open, showing how Human Spock reacts differently, to the discomfort of his colleagues. Spock doesn’t know how to deal with his human emotions particularly in that he does not know with how to express emotions in a healthy way. He’s used to dealing with Vulcan emotions: big, rampaging, primal emotions that have to be tackled and suppressed. What he’s not used to are slipper human emotions that you need to embrace and direct rather than suppress. It’s kind of lovely. And Amanda’s there! Amanda is wonderful as always, and I love how easily she just rolls with everything – a human woman living on Vulcan has to learn to just roll with things. And what’s her reaction? She has to teach her son how to lie. For a Vulcan, suppressing your emotions and acting stoic is genuine. For a human, it’s an affectation, and Spock has to learn how to perform a different thing than his truth.

Of course, when she beams aboard and Spock puts on a little Starfleet beanie to hide his ears, I could not help but be disappointed that we had the literally perfect moment to canonize the Emco Star Trek “Spock” helmet and they just passed it up.

T’Pring’s dad is great too. I mean, sort of. It’s a little uncomfortable to have this very dated stereotype of the domineering mother-in-law and the henpecked father-in-law. But it’s still kind of funny to watch this dude very clearly make the logical decision that that it would be irrational to disrupt domestic harmony without exceptional provocation.

But I don’t think we can avoid addressing the elephant in the room.

Leonard Nimoy was Jewish. And his lived experience of being a Jewish actor in the middle of the 20th century in America was an experience of being a kind of permanent-partial-outsider; having to put up with people making jokes about hook noses and secret world-ruling conspiracies and funny diets and modified penises. Of being never quite accepted, not allowed to join the best country clubs, always being slightly suspect. Of perpetually being a “funny foreigner” whose culture and cuisine were viewed as “odd” in the best of times. Of having his loyalties challenged. And that lived experience is a huge part of what he brought to the role of Spock. The modern Spock, whether it’s Quinto or Peck playing him, leans into portraying Spock as neurodiverse, but the original Spock was very much – and here’s that notion we addressed recently with Pelia coming up again (She’s not even in this episode! You start off saying Amanda and Pelia are old friends, then you bring back Amanda and you contrive an excuse for Pelia to not be around?) – a “Space Jew”. So we have a bit of a problem when we launch into the “Spock’s a human now!” montage.

Frankly, even if Spock weren’t deliberately and consciously constructed as a metaphor for the Jewish experience, it would be a little problematic to make one of your choices for depicting the explicit markers of “humanity” be “loves bacon”. It’s particularly bad in this context, but even in any context, you’re absolutely lowkey asserting that “All True Humans Love Bacon”, in a way that implies that vegetarians, Jews and Muslims are somehow not-quite-real-true-humans. In context, it takes the extra step of sending the message that Spock has been, in a sense, cured of his Jewishness. Yuck. Ew. Gross. No. (To make matters worse, I’m pretty sure T’Prell’s “Overbearing Mother-in-law” stereotype is also Jewish-coded. Maybe not deliberately, but that’s the trouble with ethnic stereotypes; they’re ground into the culture so deeply that you can evoke them without even noticing you’re doing it. You sort of sense T’Prell wanting to point out that T’Pring could just as easily have had an arranged marriage to a nice doctor without a shiksa mother.)

I think that scene is symptomatic of a significant misfire in the episode’s design. They were clearly trying to do something clever here: rather than contriving a reason for Spock to have to “learn to be human”, or go around lamenting the loss of his True Self, or being confounded about how to deal with these new urges and impulses, they did something new and more interesting. Spock just completely naturally adapts to his situation, because the thing Spock is not used to is faking it. He is completely earnest about his new feelings and impulses, up to and including an uncomfortable moment with La’an when he notices that he’s horny.

One really cool implication here is a reversal of what the popular Spock Lore would tell you: Spock does not spend his life holding his “human side” in check: he, like all Vulcans, spends his life holding his Vulcan side in check – the powerful, savage emotions. The reason Spock struggles is not because his human emotions are interfering with his Vulcan logic, but because the level of restraint needed to control his Vulcan emotions is pathological to his human side.

But the misfire here is that, in a sense, Spock was human already. They’re all human. This is Star Trek. Aliens aren’t aliens; they’re metaphors for one part of the human experience or another with a funny forehead. And so, we’re left with Spock “turning human” in a way that equates “human” with being cis-white-hetero-male-American. And not a vegan one.

Now, like I said, there’s a lot to enjoy here. I mean, when Chapel and company go back to meet the godlike aliens and are magically transported to a void with black tile floors and crinkly cellophane walls, that sort of thing is absolutely my bag. I love me a “magically transported to a black void surrounded by the title sequence from a ’60s British movie”. The Kerkovians are delightfully weird. Aloof, legalistic, and one gets the impression that the legalism is a kind of Karen-y kind: mostly an excuse to declare things not-their-problem. It’s a little much the way Chapel is still reluctant to admit her feelings even when it becomes clear that’s what Yellow needs to hear in order to give her standing to file a complaint. Boy it’s going to be uncomfortable if she immediately backtracks on this and becomes aloof and gives the impression that this is just a casual fling for her immediately.

Anyway, they sort everything, and there’s a cool bit where the Vulcans call up Christine to be dicks to her and she wistfully muses about having just traveled across dimensions to gain the medical knowledge of godlike aliens before telling the officious Vulcan to go fuck himself. Spock successfully mind-melds with his mother, because for some reason, part of this “Meet the in-laws” ceremony involves the mother-in-law watching the groom  mind meld with his mother. This bit I do not really understand. Now, the part of the ritual where you sit and listen to your in-laws complain about you, that makes perfect sense. Not sure why your mother-in-law needs to watch you mind meld with your mom though.

It’s wonderful development for Amanda, though, and the way they play the reveal is done well. First, Spock describes the memory they shared as just an ordinary scene from his childhood. Then, having finished the ceremony, T’Prell goes on to insult Spock’s mom. As you do. This might actually be the official origin story of “Talking smack about Spock’s momma is his berserk button.” We haven’t seen it happen earlier than this in his chronology. Only later do we get the reveal: the “ordinary” scene was the first time the other kids invited Spock to play. And through Amanda’s eyes, he realized that however bad he had it, his Vulcaninity being constantly challenged, Amanda had it worse. Spock was bullied, but there were times when he was accepted. He’s got a smokin’ hot girlfriend. He got accepted to the academy. He’s chief science officer on a flagship. But there’s never been any reward for Amanda. The other mothers never accepted him. And even Spock’s greatest accomplishments were colored with that, “It’s especially impressive given your shitty mom,” thing. It’s heartbreaking and wonderful. Sarek married Amanda, as we know, because he loved her. But no one’s ever really addressed why Amanda married Sarek, or what she gave up to do it.

Of course, Spock losing his cool, despite having been re-Vulcaned, and revealing the charade leads to T’Pring dumping his ass, and this is something I have some feelings about, at this stage in my own journey of self-discovery, and after what we saw back in Spock Amok last year. Because once again, they’re making me sympathetic to the lady who is gonna try to get out of an engagement by getting Spock to murder his boss.

Because, once again, it comes down to Spock’s insecurities. In his time of crisis, he basically got everyone on the ship working together to bail his ass out, but he was afraid to tell his girlfriend. And, I mean, he tried. But there was that anxious attachment, once again, that inner voice that told him that if he opened up to the person he cared about most about his insecurities, if he showed her weakness, she would reject him. She’s no T’Prell, but Spock still feels in his green heart that his relationship with her depends on maintaining a steadfast Vulcan appearance. And T’Pring is certainly not blameless here, but how in the world is a Vulcan woman – a woman who’s mother is T’Prell, no less – supposed to know how to make a man like Spock feel safe and secure in their relationship if he won’t open up to her?

…

Is what I would say, if the breakdown of Spock’s relationship with T’Pring were about the negative cycle stemming from Spock’s fearful-avoidant attachment style interfacing with T’Pring’s dismissive-avoidant attachment style. But at some level, where they’re really going with this is mostly just shuffling T’Pring out of the picture so that Spock and Christine can make out. Which, obviously, is step one in the path to her transition from the freewheeling mad scientist bisexual icon of Strange New Worlds to the flat character hopelessly pining for the unavailable Spock. Great. Cool. We’ll do that then.