Its such a good way to write their whole dynamic! That its only when he’s missing a part of himself that he feels emotionally accessible to her, but the part of him that’s gone is part of who she loves as well. Its good, “nail the fundamentals” tragic romantic shit!
They’re also doing a really good job of playing out the long arc of T’Pring and Spock having genuine affection for each other to the point where we’re actually kind of going to be on T’Pring’s side when she finally reaches the conclusion of “Man, fuck that guy”
I absolutely love the Kerkhovians holy shit. They feel like they’ve fallen out of a slightly different genre of Sci Fi than Star Trek normally goes for, like something from a Revelation Space or a Culture novel.
That’s probably one of my favorite episodes of the series as a viewing experience, it was pretty entertaining. I don’t think I quite track…the message, though? In the span of about three minutes we get explicitly told that for Pike and Ortegas the memory loss could be revealing experience that identified the core of the self, while for their friend on the planet it was an obscuring experience that robbed him of things he didn’t know were important. You can explain away the difference with plot logic pretty easily, but thematically it’s a bit weird to juxtapose them right next to each other
Although it does remain very funny that they’re doing this much work to make us care about Sam Kirk, a character who’s fate is to die off screen to a brain parasite before the episode even starts. Sorry Sam.
I really really like Pelia as a character and a concept. I think its a very smart approach to immortality to have her be someone both used to and unresistant to change. The world happens. Time moves on. Over centuries kingdoms turn into empires turn into wastelands turn into spacefaring cooperatives and she’s not jaded nor stagnant, she just continues to grow and adapt and change as things change around her.
The more I think about this episode the more impressed I get. There’s so many small moments where they could have taken the easy, obvious choice and it would have been fine, and instead they were just a little more thoughtful and a little more creative and it shows.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who’s very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise…just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she’s one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
They could have had the Romulan agent just be a cold, ruthless assassin from the future who’s here to get the job done, and that would have been fine. Instead she’s this slightly unhinged woman, trapped out of time, stuck undercover on an alien world for thirty years on a mission that she’s not sure exists anymore and I love the way she starts losing it at the end, that she just wants to kill this kid and be done with it.
They could have cast Khan as a hot 20 something available in the Toronto area and had him to a Ricardo Montalbán impression and give us a tense standoff, and I would have been annoyed at that, but it probably would have been fine. Instead they show us an actual child, and remind is that Khan was a horrifying monster, but he was created by a world with monsters of its own, monsters who built a child in a laboratory and raised him in a basement, and suddenly its a piece of implied context made explicit that I didn’t even know I wanted.
And of course they could have just had Kirk agree to fix the timeline because its the right thing to do, or because he loves La`an, or because…honestly, because the plot has to happen, this is something that so many stories would just gloss over to keep the story moving. And instead we get one line, “Sam’s alive?” and my heart jumped to my throat a little bit and immediately we understand why he’s willing to go through with this.
I’m really really impressed with the writers on this episode.
Also it feels kind of significant that they finally dropped the word socialist on screen to describe the Federation? They’ve always danced around it before, but I’m glad they finally made it explicit, even in an off hand way. It helps make the Federation feel less “magical” and more like something that people who existed in history, connected to both the past and the future, had to actually build
It’s almost a throwaway line but I’m pretty sure she implies 21st century Romulans are interfering with Earth independently, and she’s running a parallel mission?
Okay there was a lot that worked for me in that episode. The amazing decision to have Pelia knowing nothing about engineering to being a veteran warp core engineer in 200 years. Going for child Khan and really leaning into the fucked up reality that these children were science experiments kept locked in basements for the first time in the franchise? The reminder that Toronto is actually pretty damn photogenic when it’s not shot on a CW budget.
And you know what? Paul Wesley doesn’t have Kirks voice, and the script still doesn’t quite sound right, but he’s got the Kirk delivery really nailed. He doesn’t sound like Shatner, but he sounds like Kirk
What you think “enhancement” means now is very different from what people might have said “enhancement” meant in the 60s which is very different from what they thought “enhancement” would have been in the 20s and is very different from what we might think it means in the 2050s. Homosexuality used to be a mental disorder, and it would have been an enhancement to “cure” it. There would have even been gay people who would have voluntarily taken that cure because of the distress society subjected them to, there are records of patients coming to medical professionals looking for treatment. I like the alternate solution to that problem we’re currently making progress towards, in which we accept and support that there are diverse ways for people to exist, and I do not trust that we have correctly figured out what things about human being are currently “wrong” and which things can be “improved”
If you want to make the argument that people should be able to modify themselves I 100% back that up. In fact I think that probably would have fixed my problems with this episode, if this is something more like a rite of passage that Ilyrian adolescents choose to undergo then the whole thing gets way less ethically messy because now you’re letting people make decisions about themselves that are socially influenced instead of having decisions made for them that are socially enforced. But I have really strong aversions to society deciding what types of bodies and minds even get to be born.
Splitting into separate cities is way more reminiscent of ghettos, which is extremely dark. I don’t think the show quite grapples with how monstrous this actually is, ignoring my concerns about the gene modification stuff as a metaphor, if we take it on face value as a signifier of marginalization this is not some cultural bias the Federation needs to work through, what’s described is borderline genocidal.
Which is insane. Its not my biggest problem with this episode but the revelation that the Federation has had like…violent pogroms against augments with children being arrested and what sounds like ghettos is incredibly bad? Its presented as an example of how “unfairly” augments have been treated, but that’s not unfair treatment, that’s borderline genocidal. It puts a way darker spin on the Federation than I think the writers were intending, like I don’t think even DS9 in its attempts to deconstruct utopia ever implied anything half as monstrous.
The danger is in what gets defined as a “defect”. I think we’d all be comfortable fixing congenital heart failure before birth, and I (hopefully) assume we’d all be very uncomfortable with “fixing autism”. There’s a big blurry area between those two things, and I think Trek has largely correctly tended on the conservative side.
But I like how this theory ties the timeline together in a way that makes a bit more sense, because the “risk of another Khan” is not, at this point, the most interesting problem with gene editing in Star Trek to me
The danger of letting parents choose modifications they think will serve their children in life is exactly what Bashir expresses in DS9: it gives parents, and society more generally, the power to determine what’s acceptably “normal” and flatten out anything that deviates. Geordi similarly expresses at least twice that he doesn’t want normal vision, that his blindness is not a defect that needs fixing and what’s utopian about the Federation he lives in is that his difference is accommodated and supported.
I’ve always really appreciated Star Trek’s hardline stance on this, because its a moral problem that I feel we’ve lost a little bit of sight of and is going to emerge again in the next few decades in real life. I think you could make a case for the Ilyrian environmental adaptation being different, but to do that you would have to explicitly place it against the real arguments against gene editing and work through them, and this episode went in a different direction.
It was trying to do that, but then doesn’t have the time or space to set up how the Federation is going to regard Ilyrians going forward, or if anything is going to change. Its like they settled on “gene modification” as the one discrimination they thought the Federation held onto in the future and slotted it in for story purposes, but without the space to actually deal with the reasons why its taboo. Ironically I think if they had made it about something closer to an actual religious practice and said “Discrimination still exists in the future, lets talk about it” this episode would have worked way better for me
What I can’t get out of my head this morning is actually Bashir’s plotline with his parents on DS9, because it captures what’s so insidious about even “benevolent” genetic modification. He’s not angry at them just because they broke the law, he’s angry at them because they decided they didn’t like who he was and chose to transform him into someone else, someone he feels is a different person. And this is actually the fundamental argument against a social program of gene management in real life; it allows society to police what types of bodies and what types of minds are “normal” and flattens species diversity and experience diversity in favor of whatever the norms say is “better”. The danger isn’t just the risk of Khan like supermen, its a moral argument against determining how people’s bodies and minds are going to develop before they can even consent, even before they’re born.
As strongly as I feel about this, I do think you could create a case for why what the Ilyrians do is meaningfully different, the “adapting to other planets rather than making them adapt to us” idea is interesting and complicated, but it felt extremely cursory in this ep
I think this episode was really good…if the issue of discrimination was over literally anything other than a social practice of genetic modification. Star Trek’s hardline stance on linking social genetic modification to eugenics is one of the things that I’ve really appreciated, especially as corrosive “thought experiments” about it have sort of entered back into the discourse. I don’t think you can practice genetic manipulation on a society wide level without it going very bad very fast. At least I don’t think humans can, and the episode doesn’t really make a case for why the Illyrians are better at it.
The core message of this episode is so important, especially at this current moment, and the right of people to self determination and to safety and security in their identities and differences is right at the heart of Star Trek, so I’m glad to see SNW continue to affirm it. But…just…there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or “fixing” populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more. This episode does not actually convince me that in the far future utopia of the Federation the dangers of genetic modification as a practice have been addressed, and in absence of that “It used to happen and its bad, but stuff is better now and can’t we relax a little” is a bit…hollow
I think you could fix this for me if you made it so that Illyrian genetic modification was something that members of their species voluntarily entered into in adolescence or early adulthood. Make it more of a practice that people voluntarily keep up and less of a program that their society runs and the whole thing works way better for me. That also makes the loose analogy to transgender people in our current time, and really just the right of bodily autonomy and self determination, way more coherent.
No its great. I love them bringing Sybok back so much. Its so stupid. Its the goofiest decision they could have possibly made and it embodies something I love about Star Trek, which is its refusal to throw away even the bad stuff. Every reminder that Star Trek V is canon keeps the franchise from getting too arrogant about itself.