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Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x08 "Under the Cloak of War"
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I liked it, but two things went a bit too far.
The bio-bed acting up was just too silly of an issue to bring up. I mean this is starfleets flagship with the best of the best on board and M'Benga keeps working on this bio-bed, never fully fixing it? Sounds weird.
Second, they are making this whole keeping a person buffered in a transporter thing way too useful. Like the only downside seems to be that if you get a malfunction you may need to "delete" the person. I remember some episode of another series, was it Rikers clone in TNG? Where they were worried about integrity of the pattern, since it was stored so long. Did not seem to be a problem for his daughter though. Don't like how this is so trivialized, it would solve so many problems if this could be done "professionally".
Actually made an account because of this comment. At times like this, I'm grateful my government mandates literature courses for fourteen year olds. The biobed is symbolic. Most obviously of the doctor's mental state. And it's not subtle. The episode explores the duality of M'Benga. The doctor and the soldier. The biobed heals people. After seeing Rah, M'Benga's PTSD is triggered hard. Intense anxiety, struggling to breathe. You see him clutch what is presumably a medical tool. The next scene you see him in, he's trying to repair biobed-2. At the end of the scene he reaches for the tool again once he learns that he'll be dining with Rah. He spars with Rah, then has another attack in the shower.
At the culmination of the episode, you see M'Benga with a case containing his effects, notably a dagger. Rah in the scene ostensibly represents healing, and the doctor doesn't reach for that this time. He reaches for the D'k tahg. The biobed is offline; he's not a doctor, he's the Butcher of J'Gal.
[And just as an aside, millennia ago, doctors and surgeons were quite separate. It's in the hippocratic oath. Doctors don't do surgery. Butchers actually would do surgery; they're skilled with knives, cleavers the removal of tissues and such. It's one of the reasons Kirk teases Dr. McCoy with the nickname sawbones; saying he doesn't know anything of medicine but butchery. So, for M'Benga, whether surgeon or soldier: butcher.]
So the final lines. You see M'Benga with another case, he puts the tool away.
Then you see the power flicker as the screen displays "!SYSTEM ALARM!". And he's talking about himself. Rah enters sickbay→ the biobed breaks→ Rah is killed→ the biobed is repaired. Rah enters sickbay→ the doctor breaks→ the doctor kills Rah→ the doctor is healed (but in truth not). The story is told through flashbacks because he's having flashbacks. "I told myself I don't want to go home different. My family deserves better. I see now that's impossible."
The biobed is him. Him is the biobed.
Also, shit breaks. I don't care how advanced, how much effort, how much money. Shit gonna break. Shit not gonna be replaced. How often did turbolifts break on the -D? Did they throw out the lift system and replace it? Nope. Regular maintenance. Some are just offline for repairs. So it goes.
Personal attacks are out of line.
Excellent post, absolutely right about symobolism
You raise some good points but your condescending intro was seriously unnecessary and uncalled for.
Sure it could be symbolic. It could also be just a bio-bed. If its used as a metaphor it is a terrible one in my opinion, seeing as this is an advanced future with massive technological advancement. Why out of all people on this ship is it M'Benga doing this, never succeeding, but at no time an actual engineer, you know, like someone with 1000+ years experience, is asked to fix it? I get it that its part of his character that he is handy, but still this is medical equipment, its essential, it needs to work 100%. How would this not be escalated to relevant personel? This is not the war times depicted in the flashbacks, they have resource to do this. Also quite some time has passed since the Gorn attack.
I rather agree with one of the other posters who said its a setup for something to come.
So, thanks for your comment but seriously work on your attitude if you consider posting more than just this one comment.
Re: the transporters.
Patterns in the buffer usually degrade over time - The TNG Technical Manual says patterns can last about seven minutes before degradation begins. Obviously, Scotty was able to extend this dramatically, though with only a 50% success rate.
They did touch on this in SNW season one, when M'Benga said he had to rematerialize his daughter periodically. However, the timeframe, while not specified, seemed a helluva lot longer than seven minutes.
The Tech Manual notwithstanding, on screen we’ve definitely seen longer than seven minutes, notably VOY: “Counterpoint” and DIS: “Stormy Weather”. I take it like I do the original Tech Manual’s statement that you can’t fire phasers at warp.
You're certainly right that there's some wiggle room, though "Counterpoint" has the advantage of having shown the pattern degradation occurring.
I love the TNG Technical Manual but anything onscreen has to trump it.
I’m much more fussed about rapid organ fabricators and dermal regenerators being a thing this early.
I think we’re going to have to buy into 23rd century technology being ahead of were we expect from TOS - but not necessarily ahead of some of the wild claims (and therapies) Bones had access to in the movies.
For all we know, 24th century transporters have an advantage over the 23rd century design but at the expense of superior pattern storage.
Or they don't, but 23rd century medicine isn't sophisticated enough to detect/understand the damage.
About the bed: There seems to be an ongoing sub-plot about random systems on the ship glitching out. I've seen speculation they're quietly setting up some kind of AI takeover issue later on. Note the odd shot the episode ends on, with the bed's info screen flickering again.
My take is the same as the other poster the biobed was metaphor for the doctors state of mind.....but happy to be wrong if it is system glitches and have seen suggestions it links to romulan time sabatours
Sounds feasible but reminds me of the DISCO control plot. I hope that is not returning.
There was the episode with Scotty in TNG (Relics) where there was indeed the problem of the pattern of the person who was in the buffer with him degrading, but that was over decades (2294-2369), while M'Bengas daughter was in the pattern buffer significantly less time. She was also rematerialised from time to time and it was noted that not doing so risked the integrity of the pattern, which contributed to the issue seen in the TNG episode.
@RootBeerGuy @startrek The transporter is essentially magic. If you think too long about it, you’ll wonder why, for example, *everyone* doesn’t “store their pattern”, and thus become effectively immortal. Or why a pattern can’t be materialized multiple times, to generate an army of clones.
I love Trek, but it’s much more space opera than hard sci-fi, and often the “sciencey” bits are purely for narrative convenience (see also “holodeck”).
Yep, particularly with the Riker clone, it seems like the safest way to do away missions would be to send down an instance of the crew rather than the actual crew. But then what would they do with all those extra red shirts?
David Brin’s book ‘Kiln People’ explores this idea.
The problem is, as we saw with Tom Riker, the duplicates have their own existence and experiences. Should they just be destroyed like Tuvix in order to restore the originals?
Transporters essentially destroy and recreate people anyway, you have to imagine it is already something that most folks in Starfleet have made peace with, somehow.
Tom Riker is proof that we’re just bags of meat, and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. The only difference is that instances copies have a divergence point in their experiences. The Bobiverse books explore similar ideas.
But it is hard to imagine those instances wouldn’t want to avoid getting merc’d Tuvix-style. The handwavium way you’d probably try to approach it would be some sort of memory reintegration. Not implausible in Star Trek
I thought it was played like pattern buffer storage is an m'benga special skill he is better at than his peers . It was not something she was taught at the academy
He’s a cleaner, a doctor, and also the best transporter tech in the business, better than folks operating teleporters a hundred years later.
M’Benga Sue
They should take the idea of "storing people in buffers" all the way to extreme and explore it like Black Mirror does. What does this mean if everyone had the opportunity to store people in buffers? Can everyone sign up for this service and instantly beam you into a buffer whenever you have an incurable diseases at the time? Is there a service to auto-beam you into the buffer if the ship is about to crash-land? Can richer people pay to have poorer people's buffer be deleted when you run out of buffer space? What happens if there is a glitch and people who are in the buffer experience 20 years in real-time?
I think there's so much potential for more exploration here. It would be cool to have Charlie Booker on a Star Trek episode, as he kinda did a fun/excellent/dark Star Trek Black Mirror episode too.