adamkotsko

Like basically every current Star Trek fan, I love the character of Captain Pike as Anson Mount portrays him. I wonder, though, to what extent he is actually the same guy from "The Cage." If we had only that episode to work from (which the Discovery and SNW writers initially did), we would know that he is broody, that he struggles with the responsibility he bears for the lives of others, and that he is remarkably able to conjure up emotions like anger and hate on command. Does any of that fit with Pike as we know him now?

One way to answer this question would be to imagine a very literal remake of the original pilot recast with the current actors. Everyone else would basically make sense, but I think seeing the current Pike act out his scenes would be jarring and even a little upsetting.

I'm sure we can come up with in-universe explanations -- he was having a particularly bad day, he's grown as a person, etc., etc. -- but it does seem like the current-day writers are departing pretty abruptly from the ostensible basis for the character. What do you think?

One of the biggest difficulties of most episodic dramas, including the various Star Trek series, is that putting main characters in danger is seldom believable. It's such a common syndrome that it's even a pop culture trope: plot armor. Watching the early second-season episode "Unnatural Selection," in which Dr. Pulaski is infected with a rapid-aging syndrome, I wonder if the writers are counting on the viewers not believing Dr. Pulaski has plot armor.

After all, she is a recent addition and she is not even listed on the main credits, instead being designated as a "guest star." More fatally still, the episode supplies fresh background about the character and especially her desire to serve with Picard -- and every viewer of a reality TV show knows that once a contestant gets backstory and calls their family on camera, they're probably going home that episode. Perhaps they even expect viewers to remember that they did really kill a main character, Tasha Yar. Maybe this will just be the season of rotating-door Chief Medical Officers, much like season one had a different Chief Engineer every time it came up.

I'm especially interested to hear from people who remember watching it when it first aired, but everyone who watches an episode is watching it for the first time. Did you think Dr. Pulaski could really die?

Like most of us, I am greatly enjoying Strange New Worlds. One of the small benefits of the series, in my mind, is that it has finally broken one of the strangest of fan habits -- the insistence on literalism for TOS visuals, especially on things like ship designs and controls. Is there anyone still holding out for a "refit" of the beautiful SNW Enterprise so that it "really" looks like a set from the late 1960s? The updated look is a big part of what makes the TOS world seem relevant and alive for contemporary viewers, instead of just a nostalgia trip (as it was in the tribute episodes that showed TOS sets within a TNG/DS9 context).

Given that they have made the biggest remaining move of recasting Kirk, the idea of continuing past SNW into Kirk's Five-Year Mission seems unavoidable. Given that Paramount seems to be contracting their streaming footprint, it is admittedly unlikely that anything like this would ever get made. But something like the Kelvin Timeline tie-in comics where they redo TOS stories and intersperse them with new ones could actually be a good format -- reintroducing new viewers to classic stories while retrospectively granting more cohesion to TOS.

Obviously there would be drawbacks to redoing the old episodes. Fans would howl at any changes to the scripts, and of course there would be questions about whether any of this was worth anyone's time or talents. And maybe it wouldn't be! But redoing the most stone-cold classics of TOS in a more modern style could literally be the only way some new fans would engage with those stories. Young people are very intolerant of entertainment that seems old or outdated. Looking back at my childhood, I never liked TOS in large part simply because it looked too old and the acting style felt weird. If we really think that these stories are classics that deserve to endure for the long haul, a remake could be a way to inject new life into them.

What do you think? [UPDATE: You all have convinced me this is a bad idea. I will keep that in mind if I ever become head of Paramount.]

In season 3 of PICARD, there are two major plot points that strongly echo plots from the two current animated series. The struggle between Data and Lore for control of Data's body is very similar to Rutherford's struggle with his former self in Lower Decks s3e5, and the takeover of Starfleet by the Borg's virus is very similar to the takeover of Starfleet by the vengeful time-travelers' virus in Prodigy.

There is nothing wrong with reusing plots -- Star Trek has done it from time immemorial. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes they are redundant. They have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. In these cases, I believe that PICARD cheapens the original plots.

First, on Lower Decks, we had gradually been introduced to hints that there was something amiss about Rutherford's implants. Our curiosity naturally built over time, and the revelation that his memories had been overwritten to cover up his past self's malfeasance was at once surprising and organic. The resolution of the plot, where Rutherford doesn't want to let his past self disappear, shows us the best of the character we have come to love. Then the information we learn there serves the larger developing plot, culminating in the revelation of the automated fleet. The plot is well-paced and meaningful both to the individual character and the show's overall arc.

None of this is true of the struggle between Data and Lore in PICARD. The continued existence of Data is sprung at us at random, arbitrarily contradicting the fact that he has been killed not once, but twice. The fact that he has been combined with Lore is equally arbitrary, serving little more than a desire to call back to a familiar character. The resolution of the conflict is clever, as Data uses Lore's negative tendencies against him, but in the larger story arc it only serves to solve a problem that the combination of Data and Lore caused in the first place. Overall, the plot serves to put Brent Spiner back on screen in two familiar roles, seemingly for its own sake.

Turning now to Prodigy's fleet takeover plot. Again, this idea was introduced very early on and gradually evolved into the key plot conflict in the show. When it was finally triggered, it spawned two attempted solutions, both of which embodied Star Trek ideals. In the first, non-Starfleet ships helped to disable the infected vessels, giving the lie to the Diviner's vision of Starfleet as a malign influence. In the second, hologram Janeway sacrifices herself to save the fleet, providing a satisfying end to her character's development as a fully sentient being while solving the problem of how to handle the awkward co-existence of real Janeway with her holodeck double. As with Lower Decks, everything seems to fit together well.

By contrast, the takeover of young Starfleet members by the Borg virus -- based on DNA supposedly slipped into Picard decades ago and leveraging Jack's telepathic mind control abilities -- comes way out of left field only in the second to last episode. When it comes to the resolution, they seem to sidestep the possibility of using Seven's Borg identity as part of a meaningful solution. Instead, the entire thing seems gerrymandered to make the use of an older generation of ship, namely the Enterprise-D, necessary to save the day. Where the tweens of Prodigy take their situation deadly seriously, Picard makes jokes about the carpet even as Starfleet self-destructs and Earth is on the brink of oblivion. The message, such as it is, seems to be that the TNG crew effectively is the "last generation" of the series finale's title -- the last generation that is able to achieve anything meaningful. All of Starfleet is threatened with extinction and an entire generation is traumatized by their participation in mass murder, all so we can get a glamor shot on the old bridge.

The fact that the undisputed best season of PICARD is so easily upstaged by animated cartoons in the execution of basically identical plot points seems to me to be a major lesson. I don't begrudge anyone their moment of nostalgia, but to me this comparison shows that the franchise needs to get past the legacy characters in order to tell a coherent and satisfying story at this point. And given that Prodigy has been abruptly cancelled and removed, it doesn't seem like it's a lesson anyone in charge is likely to learn anytime soon.

But what do you think?

There is something undeniably weird about the new Kirk that we're seeing in Strange New Worlds. He doesn't yet "feel" intuitively like Kirk to me, especially in the rom-com episode. But I do think his writing and, to a lesser extent, his performance show that the writers are thinking deeply about the character and what people have been missing about him. In a sense, SNW may be trying to counteract the phenomenon of Kirk drift, where pop culture stereotypes about the character's impulsive, womanizing ways makes it impossible to understand the person we actually see on screen.

What the first season finale shows us is a Kirk who is by the book, yet decisive and sure of himself. He does not disobey Pike, but he is not afraid to tell him he's wrong -- not based on gut feelings, but based on a sound tactical analysis that proves to be right. Compared to Picard, Kirk -- especially the movie Kirk -- may seem brash and prone to violate the rules, but TOS consistently shows us a captain who respects authority but is willing to push it up to the very limit to protect his crew and achieve his goals. It's interesting that the episode picks up on this aspect of the character as the one that creates an instant bond with Spock. It's not his emotional nature or his instincts or whatever else, it's his respectful yet firm leadership style -- a sharp contrast to Pike's tendency to leave his subordinates to their own devices.

In the romcom episode, the message is a little garbled by the fact that this is an alternate timeline Kirk, but I think it highlights the fact that (a) Kirk is not a compulsive womanizer by any means and (b) Kirk bonds sincerely with women who feel isolated by leadership or other burdens -- not in a predatory way, but in an empathetic way. In contrast to Chris Pine's layabout troublemaker who is constantly getting laid (at least in the first film), the Kirk from TOS is basically a lonely nerd. A charismatic one, to be sure, but still a lonely nerd. Even well into his second command, he's haunted by the guy who bullied him at the Academy! He is, if anything, sexually thwarted by his sense of duty and his "marriage" to the ship. Hence when he meets a woman with a similar predicament, they are drawn to each other. Everyone has a type! It's just a sad coincidence that he wound up meeting someone of his type virtually every episode in season 3.

I don't think it's perfectly executed, at least in the pairing with La'an, but I do like that they're trying to refresh our perspective on the character and that they're doing it in a way that reminds us of all the traits from TOS that the pop culture parody of "Captain Kirk" leaves out. But what do you think?

As you may have heard, Paramount cancelled Prodigy, halting production on its almost-complete second season, and removed the show from its service. The primary reason to do this, other than to streamline their content in light of the service's upcoming merger with Showtime, was to generate a tax loss -- a disturbing trend among streaming services.

Placing the commercial question aside, this has implications for the franchise. If Prodigy has effectively been deleted from the historical record and is no longer available to watch, is it still canon? The last time something equivalent happened was when the original Animated Series was unavailable for decades, and it was largely not treated as canon by subsequent shows. Nowadays it is counted as official canon (which introduces some complications), but it's also widely available. The likelihood that they will tell a story in the future where this makes a difference is low, but it's still worth clarifying.

What do you think?

I recently rewatched the premier of Picard season 2 and was puzzled by one thing that doesn't seem to fit, even on rewatch -- why does the Jurati-Queen act so aggressively and fail so dramatically to communicate clearly? It makes sense if she were representing the regular Borg, but she's supposed to be the "nice" Borg! What gives?

I think we can solve this puzzle if we realize that Picard season 2 is structured like TAS "Yesteryear" -- a theory that I planned to write out here, without realizing that I already wrote the exact post years ago! Long story short, TAS "Yesteryear" is a unique situation in Star Trek time travel where the "wrong" result has to occur to motivate the "right" action -- basically, Spock has to fail to go back in time to rescue himself, in order to be alerted to the fact that he needs to do it in the first place.

Similarly, when the Jurati-Borg sees her former self on the bridge of the Stargazer, she realizes that she needs to scare Picard into self-destructing the ship -- so that Q will send them back and lead to her own creation. The "wrong" timeline is integral to the process of getting us to the "right" timeline. If she had acted more reasonably, she never would have existed in the first place!

What do you think?

It's never made much sense that the entire multi-species Federation would be subject to a strict ban on genetic engineering due to events on Earth that happened centuries before the Federation was even founded. The way they doubled down on that rationale in Una's trial only highlighted the absurdity -- especially when Admiral April claimed he would exclude Una to prevent genocide.

On the one hand, the writers may be trying to create a straw man out of a weird part of Star Trek lore so they can have a civil rights issue in Starfleet. And that's fine. From an in-universe perspective, though, I think we can discern another reason for the ban on genetic engineering -- the Klingon Augment Virus.

There was a ban on genetic engineering on United Earth, which is understandable given that it was much closer to the time of the Eugenics Wars. Why would that remain unchanged when more time passed, more species joined, and more humans lived in places without living reminders of the war? [NOTE: I have updated the paragraph up to this point to reflect @Value Subtracted's correction in comments.] The answer is presumably that they needed to reassure the Klingons that something like the Augment Virus would never happen again. Hence they instituted a blanket ban around that time -- perhaps in 2155, the year after the Klingon Augment Virus crisis and also, according to Michael Burnham, the year the Geneva Protocols on Biological Weapons were updated.

That bought the Federation over a century of peace, but after war broke out due to a paranoid faction of Klingons who thought humans would dilute Klingon purity and after peace was only secured through the most improbable means, they doubled down on the ban. Una's revelation provided a perfect opportunity to signal to the Klingons that they were serious about the ban -- hence why they would add the charges of sedition, perhaps. Ultimately, an infinitely long speech and the prospect of losing one of their best captains combined to make them find a loophole -- but not to invalidate the ban or call it into question. This Klingon context is why April, who we know is caught up in war planning of various kinds, is so passionate that the ban exists "to prevent genocide" -- he's not thinking of people like Una, he's thinking of the near-genocide they suffered at the hands of the Klingons.

This theory still doesn't paint the Federation in a positive light, since they have effectively invented a false propaganda story to defend a policy that has led to demonstrable harm. But it makes a little more sense, at least to me. What do you think?

In my TNG season 1 rewatch, I finally got to the season finale, "The Neutral Zone." Though best known for Picard's utopian declarations to the cryogenically frozen people from the 90s about the post-scarcity future, it also centers on a tense confrontation with the Romulans. I noticed many parallels with the setup of the Discovery premier, "The Vulcan Hello" In both, our heroes confront a foe that has not been heard from in many years -- the Klingons for Discovery and the Romulans for "Neutral Zone." In both, they are befuddled by a cloaking device. And in both, there is a dispute about how to respond to the situation -- Burnham and Worf both insist that they must fire first or risk annihilation, and both are drawing on the experience of their parents being killed by the respective species. And I suspect that this parallel is intentional on the part of the writers, because of the crucial difference -- Worf is 100% wrong about the need to fire first, while the verdict is much more ambiguous for Burnhan. She agrees that she was wrong to attempt mutiny, but was she wrong to try a preemptive attack under the circumstances? We never know for sure, and even she never directly repents of her desire to strike first. By creating a parallel with a well-known TNG episode and then inserting a crucial difference, the writers are sending the signal that we are definitely not in the utopian TNG era.

But what do you think?

@[email protected] invited contributors from the old Daystrom to repost some favorites, so here is one of mine.

Throughout Star Trek, but especially in TOS and TNG, we are commonly asked to be very stressed out about our captain being overruled or displaced. Regardless of whether the replacement does a good job, it seems clear that we are supposed to resent him simply because he is not the usual captain we have come to know and love.

A particularly striking example of this is TOS "The Deadly Years," where Kirk is aging rapidly and apparently going senile. This seems like a clear case where Spock should step in -- but a good chunk of the episode is taken up with the procedings to relieve Kirk of command. In the end, the inexperienced starbase commander who replaces him turns out to be a disaster, and the ship is only saved when a cured Kirk is able to come in and be his usual decisive self.

The most gut-wrenching example, of course, is Captain Jellico, who arbitrarily changes everything, criticizes the way Troi dresses, won't let Riker do his job -- and regards it as a foregone conclusion that Picard is dead.

I have seen several comments to the effect that the crew's response to Jellico is a little childish, and I think that's a clue to what's going on with this common plot. Namely, I believe that the captain is put forward as a father figure and that the displacement plots are speaking to a cultural anxiety about divorce. The replacement captain is the step-dad who always appears to be an illegitimate usurper -- and in the end, we get the fantasy outcome that mom and dad get back together again.

This may seem far-fetched, but the earliest TOS episodes do a lot of work to establish Kirk as a father figure (most explicitly in "Charlie X") and the ship as his wife ("The Naked Time"). This is more subdued in TNG, where Picard is awkward with kids -- but Picard's emotional distance completely fits with the "traditional" image of the father. Surely "Captain Picard Day" is something like Father's Day for the Enterprise children! And more broadly, the backstory of many Enterprise crew members includes broken families, alienation from parents, dead parents or spouses -- all factors that lead them to identify the ship as their true family (and invite the misfits in the audience to do the same).

Over the years, of course, our culture became less and less stressed out about divorce as it became more routine -- and so those plots suggested themselves less and less. In DS9, it is far from a dominant theme. I haven't rewatched in a while, but I don't remember even a single plot that hinges on someone taking over for Sisko -- when the Dominion takes over the station, the emotional focus isn't Sisko's lost command, but the loss of the station itself. [ADDED: I wonder if the fact that Sisko is the only captain who is presented as a literal father somewhat undercuts his role as father-figure thematically.]

And Janeway's command is never seriously disputed. Of course, in-universe you can say it's because she's so far away from the admirals, but symbolically, she's the mom -- and in a typical divorce narrative, it's never a question of whether mom will remain in place. The one clear example I can think of where the crew rebels against her authority is "Prime Factors" -- and their main rationale is that they believe Janeway's judgment is clouded by her obvious attraction to the leader of the vacation planet. In other words, the kids get restless when it looks like mom might have a boyfriend.

The theme of the displaced captain comes back somewhat in Enterprise, but to me it feels different. The issue isn't Archer being replaced by a step-dad -- instead, the problem always centers on Archer's masculinity. In "Hatchery," he becomes overly maternal toward the Xindi Insectoid babies, which leads to a mutiny. Similarly, in "Bound," the Orion Slave Girls compromise Archer's judgment with their aggressive sexiness. Archer's either becoming a woman or being dominated by one -- which calls back to the early episodes, when it could sometimes be unclear whether he or T'Pol was really in charge. Archer represents not a father, so much as an emasculated human race ready to prove itself -- a more reactionary theme for a more reactionary time (the early 2000s).