122: Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 1, episode 1

In this episode of Trek in Time, we’re going to be talking about something, something boldly, boldly, something, something. That’s right. We’ve jumped up, we’ve jumped series again. We started off in Enterprise. We moved on to Discovery. Discovery does this bold new thing, which spoiler alert involves jumping 900 years into the future.

So what’s a podcast that’s watching Star Trek in chronological order to do? Well, move on to the next series. Here we are, episode one, Strange New Worlds, also titled Strange New Worlds. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we’re watching all of Star Trek in chronological order, and we’re also taking a look at what the world was like at the time of original broadcast.

As I just mentioned, we’re now in Strange New Worlds, which means we’re in 2022, which was just last year. Holy cow. Yeah. Star Trek is about to lap us. We started off with way back in Enterprise. It was The 2000s, barely, and now suddenly, here comes Star Trek, it’s about to pass us. How’s that going to work out for us?

I don’t know.

Who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids, including the Sinister Secrets of Singe, which came out in June of this last year, and book two of the series is going to be coming out probably in June of next year. And with me, as always, is my brother, Matt.

He is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. So we have the sci fi fiction, we’ve got the high tech living, and you put those things together, and what do you get? Star Trek? Yay!

Before we get into this episode discussing strange new worlds, we’d like to revisit. Previous comments or earlier comments on earlier episodes. So Matt, what have you found in the comments for us this week?

There were a few themes that came up in the last episode, which was 121, where we recapped what we thought of Discovery.

Uh, there was one from Mr. Pokemon 327 and he wrote, were you guys going to watch the short Treks? And I completely forgot about the short Treks. I don’t know if Sean knew about the short Treks, but they created short, like little five minutes, seven minute videos, uh, leading up to each season of Discovery. So it’s like, we kinda skipped over those.

Um, I’ve watched them, they’re, they’re pretty cool. Um, what, have any thoughts on that, Sean?

I, I think watching them, I mean, going back and watching ones that would have linked into things we’ve already talked about would be, yeah. Yeah, I don’t know how we would incorporate that. Uh, and this kind of ties into a bigger concern that has been raised by other commenters and most recently by our mother, who was like, what are you going to do when you hit a point where you’ve watched all of what currently exists?

And then they release new episodes that fall into gaps that you’ve already passed. Our plan has always been Strange New Worlds. It’s going to be the perfect example. We will probably catch up to where Strange New Worlds is, and then have to jump to the next series, which of course is the original series.

And then another season of Strange New Worlds will be released. Our plan is to move forward until we can’t do any more of a certain thing, continue to move forward, and then if new material is dropped, loop back. And talk about it then. I don’t know if there would be interest, if everybody would be interested in us watching all of the short treks that took place in Discovery and having an episode where we talk about it.

If you’re interested in that kind of thing, jump into the comments and let us know. But I think moving forward, we can keep an eye. on what’s available in the short treks. And if something seems to fit in with what we’re going to be talking about, it’d be very easy for us to drop that in. It would be similar to what our plan is, if I remember correctly, around the original animated series.

We talked about incorporating those episodes of the animated series into our commentary around the shows of the actual original broadcast series. So yeah, we could do something similar with, with short treks as well. So let us know if you’d be interested in seeing that drop in the comments.

Uh, another comment was from, uh, let’s see, Wayouts123.

You commented that maybe we needed more episodes to get to know the crew. I counter with the fact that Strange New Worlds and LD, wait, what’s LD? Lower Decks. Lower Decks. Good. Okay. Duh. Have 10 episodes each and we know more about them than in five years of Discovery. Yes. That is my big complaint about Discovery, is they took shortcuts left and right, and it was not effective storytelling, uh, for character development.

Yeah. I agree. We know more about the characters and what we’re about to watch in fewer episodes than we got

in Discovery. Yeah. Thank you, Wayouts. I think that’s a very good comment because it gives an opportunity to highlight something that I’ve been thinking about. The reason that I, I think I in particular ask for more episodes, more than Matt does.

But the reason I ask for that is because I’m not asking for them to get rid of what they have. But you’re absolutely right, Wayoutz, that one of the solutions wouldn’t be to add more episodes, but just to have done a better job of incorporating additional characters and a larger picture of the crew. I think that Strange New Worlds, as you mentioned in your comments, this first episode is going to do a great job of doing exactly that.

In one episode, it does more with overall crew development than Discovery ever tried to do. Discovery, for better or worse, treated the crew the way that a TV show like Elementary treats the larger world. Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes modern day interpretation that was on CBS, had a handful of characters and you knew them all intimately.

And the larger world largely was just background. And I think they did the same thing on Discovery. It was, you’ve got your primary characters and then you’ve got everybody else. When you have a history of what Star Trek has, that doesn’t necessarily work, and I’ve been reminded of that in other ways from the original series, which is available on streaming, like Pluto.

I very often will put it on in the background while I’m doing other things, you know, household chores, washing the dishes, stuff like that. And Our conversations around this particular thing, how do you get to know the other crew members is because of our conversations has been in the back of my mind while I’m watching the original series.

So it’s a perspective on the original series that I’ve never watched it from before. And what is striking is the number of episodes early in the show. Where there was no Sulu, where there was no Chekhov, where somebody that we know just doesn’t appear, maybe because of scheduling, in some cases because they weren’t yet in the show.

Chekhov was a late add. He was not in the original show, that the, the first season, and he was added as a result of, uh, desires to hop onto the Davy Jones of the monkeys craze. It was, let’s get young viewers tuning in by making a character who looks like Davy Jones. That’s why Chekhov was wearing effectively a Beatles wig.

I think that there are lots of episodes of the original series where the way we get to know the characters, I think Discovery thought they were modeling it after that. Because there were scenes where it would be Sulu and Chekov having a conversation with each other and you get these little moments of the two of them kind of like bouncing off of each other and it’s kind of a funny conversation and it’s kind of charming.

In its simplicity. And I started thinking about a character like Chekhov. Like, what do we know about Chekhov? We know a lot about Chekhov because not only do we have the original series, we have years of movies. We have references, we have references to him in other series. There’s a reference in The Next Generation where they reveal that Chekhov eventually becomes the head of Starfleet Academy.

So we know these characters because of just the breadth of years as much as what happens on screen in the show. And I feel like. Somehow, the producers and the writers and everybody involved in Discovery kind of forgot that there were those charming little moments. There were those little introductory, somebody’s saying something and it’s, you’re starting to learn that character’s take on things because they get the opportunity to talk.

And you think about the first season of Discovery, everybody on that bridge, there’s a lot of looking, but there’s not a lot of names. And there’s not a lot of interaction and I, so thank you Wayouts for that, that comment. I, I agree with it that you don’t need 23 episodes per season in order to do that.

But my mistake was in saying, Oh, the way they could do it would be to add more episodes. But yes, they could have also just written them differently so that you could have had those moments. Having said all of that, that noise in the background as usual is the read alert, which means it is time for Matt to set his.

Phasers to what do you mean by that? And read the Wikipedia description. Good luck. All

right, here we go. In the 23rd century, Starfleet Admiral Robert April recalls Captain Christopher Pike of the Starship USS Enterprise from shore leave after Pike’s first officer, Una Chin-Riley . Did I say that right? Mm hmm.

Referred to as number one, goes missing during a first contact mission. Pike is reluctant to return to space and confides in Vulcan science officer Spock, who has just become engaged to, T’Pring. That he saw a vision of his own paralysis during their mission. With the USS Discovery. They travel to the planet Kiley 279, which is in a similar state to the 21st century Earth and on the brink of civil war.

They have reverse engineered a weapon from the Starship warp drives after witnessing the Discovery mission in nearby space. Pike and his crew rescue Number One from captivity and break Starfleet’s General Order One in interfering in the society to convince them not to use the weapon. They avoid repercussions because of the top secret nature of the Discovery mission, but Starfleet doubles down on the rule by renaming it to the Prime Directive.

Pike commits to his role and captains the Enterprise on a new five year mission of exploration. That’s a, I don’t know, Wikipedia always baffles me.

Not the worst description you’ve ever had to work your way through. A few little clunky moments, but all in all does a pretty good job at describing what is episode number one, Strange New Worlds of Strange New Worlds, directed by Akiva Goldsman. Teleplay by Akiva Goldsman. Story by Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet.

And the original broadcast day was May 5th, 2022. The cast that we will be talking about for many, many episodes to come include Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Melissa Navia, Rebecca Romijn, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, and Babs. And please, you’re going to have to give me a couple of tries on this.

Olusanmokun. Maybe you don’t need to give me a couple of tries. I seem to have hit it out of the park on the first try. May 5th, 2022. What was the world like? Well, Matt, I don’t have to tell you that you were screaming the lyrics to First Class by Jack Harlow. Do you want to give us a few bars? Great. And at the movie theaters, people were lining up for the second week to see The Bad Guys, pushing the movie past the 40 million mark.

The Bad Guys is a 2022 animated movie based on a children’s book series of the same name by Aaron Blaby. And it’s produced by DreamWorks and the film directed by Pierre Perifel, from a screenplay by Eaton Cohen, stars Sam Rockwell, Mark Maron, Awkwafina, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Richard Ayoade, Zazie Beetz, Alex Borstein, and Lilly Singh.

And it is the story of classic Villainous animals who, despite the fact that they are supposed to be the bad guys, like the big bad wolf, uh, they ended up being good guys. So if anybody has young children who. Enjoy animated features and a little bit of cartoonish villainy. Check it out. And on television, the most watched programming of 2022, we’ll do what we did for Discovery.

We’ll try and compare apples to apples and look at. Programming that was available as streaming shows. What were you laughing at?

Not to give it away, I’m looking at the top streaming shows. Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. Netflix all the way down. Yeah.

It’s a Netflix world. We just live in it. So, number one show of streaming services in 2022 was Netflix’s Stranger Things.

34 episodes total for the show with minutes viewed. I think this is an interesting measurement. Minutes viewed in the billions, 52 billion minutes. I think when you say it’s been. 50 billion years. We know. Oh, that’s round. That’s a round numbers. It’s a bunch of tens all together. When you say it’s 52 billion minutes, it starts to feel like, how, how do I, how do I interpret that?

Yeah. It’s a little mind bending. It’s weird. Yeah. It’s a little weird. And in the news, well, there were these headlines in the New York times on this day, May 5th, 2022. Leak heightens the perception of polarized Supreme Court. This would be when Justice Alito’s draft opinion on an upcoming court case was leaked, revealing his thinking around a specific case.

And there were concerns not only about what the arguments, the legal arguments were, but some of the rhetoric included in the draft. And as Alito and the entire Supreme Court pointed out, this was a draft. This was not supposed to be released. And it led to an investigation to try and figure out who the leaker was.

The leak was likely politically motivated trying to demonstrate that the court is polarized and that people at one end of the court are using spurious legal arguments to make decisions that they shouldn’t otherwise make. The court itself pointed to the leak as the polarizing account. So this is just part and parcel of.

What our political environment in the U. S. looks like today, and it’s not dissimilar to the political environment of a lot of places around the world where institutions within the government itself. Are pointing at other institutions as being inappropriately motivated by politics in order to gain an upper hand or to sway things in a way that the majority of people in that country would not like.

There was a follow up article on the same day in the New York Times. Once close allies, Roberts and Alito have taken divergent paths. Roberts being, of course, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And there is always a lot of examination in the History of the Supreme Court, and I remember this going back throughout my life, I remember when I became aware of the Supreme Court and news about the Supreme Court, I remember for decades now, examinations of, well, there is occasionally moments where two people who are politically aligned and very often walk in lockstep, diverge, there’s always been that kind of examination.

This has never been quite as important during an era where The current conservative Supreme Court has such a majority. In justices, that looking for gaps of light between them has become even more important and more of a focus. So this article was again, an examination of a political era in which people are so far to either end that looking for differences at each end is almost more important than looking at the differences between the two sides.

And finally, there was an article on the headlines about as Victory Day looms in Russia, guesswork grows over Putin’s Ukraine goals. This is of course, from 2022, Ukraine and the war in Ukraine is not over and Victory Day. Well, that was a bunch of rhetoric. That is. Around Putin’s efforts to present a Good News Everybody, Mission Accomplished, a la 2003’s banner behind President Bush when The mission was not fully accomplished.

And at this point, after more than a year and a half of continued fighting in Ukraine, what we’ve seen from Russia has largely been a constant change in what they claim the goalposts have always been trying to claim victories by moving what they said they were trying to accomplish. All of these to me are endemic of massive changes in our world from a.

World War II and then Cold War mentality to where we find ourselves now with polarization, with sometimes infighting, with government not trusting itself, with government sometimes destabilizing itself. The rise of fascism. The rise of fascism. The push of Political agendas that are about control, not about helping and surprise, surprise a TV show that was created in 2022.

And I think this is a key point to make in the U S context. This is a TV show created after the events of January 6, 2020, where here we have. A show taking a look at the US political environment and really kind of using science fiction to deconstruct what does history make of where we are right now.

And this is something Star Trek has. Always done. And that’s, I think, one of the key things is to say like Star Trek and science fiction in general is about where we are, what we are living, and using the distance of time constructed within the storytelling to be able to re examine it. With a little bit of objectivity, you seem like you’ve got some things you want to jump in with.

Yeah. Here’s my fascination about this specific point. And I agree with you. This is like clear as day in this episode. And the start of the show is Star Trek did not talk about World War III and the near, uh, destruction of humanity. In this episode, this has been part of Star Trek lore going back a long time.

World War III, going to the brink of wiping everybody out,

uh, factions around the

world, the rise of fascism, and then also then the coming out of that better than you were before, but it’s like out of the cinders, like the phoenix coming out and it’s like then first contact and all that kind of stuff leads to Star Trek.

I find it fascinating. That’s been part of this. For so long, and then all of the stuff that leads to a World War III is happening right now. And it freaks me out a little bit because it feels very prescient, um, that they’ve been saying this for decades and using this as a, like a, uh, an example of what could happen in humanity.

And we’re watching us flirt with that this moment in time. It’s, it’s kind of, um, Frightening, I guess would be the best way to say it.

It’s also something I think that as we talk about that as an element of Star Trek that they’ve always had these, these, these key points, uh, you know, like the rise of fascism, that’s the Khan storyline.

That’s, you know, the, the augmented humans storyline is about people who rose up and said, I am simply better, therefore I should rule. Um, and the use of references casually in the original series of, well, that’s like when World War III took place. That was dropped in as kind of like a shocker for the original series because the viewers at that point were only 20 years away from World War II.

So the incorporation of that is not new in this episode. Everything that they’re showing is stuff that has been part of Star Trek lore. There is a pushback against modern Trek as being too woke. Which I find funny. I find it very amusing given what we know about the original series, why there were specific characters in the original series, why they depicted what they depicted, the way they depicted it in the original series.

Star Trek

has always been woke. Yes. It’s always been woke. That’s the whole point of Star Trek. Yes.

Uh, so having said all of that, like I, we’ve already kind of touched on one element of this episode, so I don’t think we need to belabor the point. They do a nice job of introducing. The background crew members, we see a lot of, of Captain Pike.

We get to see kind of a, not a reset button, but they kind of create an echo. of should I leave Starfleet? Do I want to be here? Do I feel like I should be doing this? Which hearkens back to the original pilot of the original series, which we’ve talked about before in the cage where that was a Pike who was burnt out.

We got to see that Pike move through discovery and become the kind of swaggering captain that we would anticipate in a Star Trek show and now here in his own show they’ve kind of re emerged that echo and they do it through His foreknowledge of where he is headed. He knows if I stay on this path, I’m going to end up crippled in a wheelchair.

It’s going to be a nightmare for me. I do not want that future, but do I have a choice? So that is an opportunity. Here, in this episode, to remind viewers of this, that’s who this character is. I like the idea that Star Trek has always done a good job of saying, here’s a character, he’s wrestling with these issues.

In this episode, he wrestles with the issue and then comes out on top. But just like real life, you don’t always solve that issue. You kind of like sink back into it. You kind of have to rediscover the wheel again and again, as an individual in life. I know that I go through that. It’s nice to see these things happening with characters like Spock.

Spock is constantly, what does it mean to be half Vulcan, half human? What does it mean to want to be ruled by logic but feel these intense emotions? Is there a moment where Spock is just like, Oh, I’m done now. That’s behind me. No. And here we have that moment with Pike. Um, I really like we, and I just real quickly want to say, we see a lot of Pike.

We see a lot of Spock and then we see a little bit of Uhura. I liked, I was stunned when Uhura, the first time watching the show, I was stunned by her emergence in the program. What did you think about the inclusion of her? And some of the other characters who are deeper background in the original series, but here have a more prominent role, like Nurse Chapel.

The inclusion of those characters I love. I was concerned about it originally when I heard who was going to be in the show and I had seen, like, she was going to be in it, and I was like, oh no, how’s that going to work? But I think they did a wonderful job because Even though Uhura has been there all along, she’s always been a very background y character.

We’ve never really gotten to know her, and so this is where we can get to know her, which is really cool. There’s so much story to mine. Um, I thought it was a great addition seeing a very young character like that. Same thing with, uh, Nurse Chapel, because Nurse Chapel was even more background than Uhura.

Like, she was like almost wallpaper. Um, And they’ve made her this genius scientist that’s a nurse that like is crazy smart and they really flesh out her character in a really fun way. Um, also that dynamic between her and Spock, they have a lot of fun with that. So it’s like, there’s, there’s so much great stuff that they’re doing with these characters that we’ve only maybe seen it in an episode, like the doctor, you know what I mean?

Like he was all these great characters they can pull in. It, it

strikes that. Dr Mbenga is I think a terrific addition. And, and, and. It, and I love the fact that their inclusion raises some questions about what does it mean for them to be under Kirk’s captaincy later? They’re here as the confidants and closest companions of Pike, yet they’re not that for Kirk.

And it raises some interesting backstory, fan fiction y moments in my imagination of like, of why, why is Mbenga? You know, like he’s no longer Chief Surgeon on, on the Enterprise. Here comes Doc McCoy. So it’s like things like that. I’m just like, Oh, the fan fiction y fun of all of that. And, and the series as a whole has that fan fiction y fun feel to me, the energy of the creation of these characters.

I like, uh, I agree with you about Uhura. It’s great to see like them leaning into like, she’s a savant. She has that kind of linguistic savant that we saw in Enterprise, where pre Universal Translator, they needed that savant. Here, she is this kind of newer element of that, and it kind of highlights why would, in later episodes of the original series, there are times where Spock steps away from his science station and Uhura takes his place.

It’s like this is depicting her as a genius. She is, she’s able to do this kind of work.

I also have to compliment how they actually did the actual introductions of all these characters in the episode. Yeah. The writing was really top notch because it never felt clunky of like, a lot of shows pilots feel clunky because it’s like they suddenly turn and say something that would not be something that somebody would say naturally.

Right. It’s like, oh, they’re saying

this as an exposition. Oh, well, that’s like the time your son failed out of college and now he doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life. There’s

only one bit of clunky dialogue of exposition and it’s when Spock is talking to the captain in the captain’s quarters and is saying, are you okay, captain?

And then he has this extremely clunky, long, like four lines where he’s recapping the end of Discovery. And it was like, wow, that was bad. And that’s the only bad bit of exposition. All the other, like the introduction of a Uhura. It’s like the captain, the captain’s got that swagger. He’s very sarcastic.

And when he leans over to her and makes that snide, not a snide remark, he makes that joke at her about her being the savant and it kind of embarrasses her. It’s like it comes across so natural and real that you’re like, Oh, that’s awesome. Because it’s like a great line to drop because now we know Uhura as like, she’s known as being like the best of the best.

So it’s, it’s one of those. They’re really good at making it feel natural, except for that Spock

exposition. I also have to say, Rebecca Romijn, uh, it’s as if she was genetically crafted to take over this role. She couldn’t have been better casting. She has a presence that looks like Majel Roddenberry. She resembles Majel Roddenberry, but she also has the height and stature to simply look Like Majel Roddenberry did, which is, she was a tall woman.

She was, she was a presence. And so here, this, uh, Rebecca Romijn as, as this role, I love her stepping into this role. And right off the bat in this, we are shown a first contact situation, which goes south. And the reason it goes south, I think is fascinating. I love the fact that it ties into the end of Discovery the way it does.

The idea that. You don’t want to go to a planet and Spock’s little space map of these are all the planets that have warp. And here’s, we can go to any of these planets without hesitation, because they have warp. And yet this one doesn’t. And yet we read something as if it did. Why is that? And it being some scientists saw some weird readings in space and reverse engineered warp technology.

First of all, that’s just cool. That’s like, that’s just great sci fi of saying, what if you had a non warp technology? What if you had a non warp civilization that was able to detect a ship flying through space? Yeah, that’s great. That’s great sci fi. And the fact that they reversed engineered it to become a weapon feels very, I mean, we’re living in an era where we’ve just had one of the biggest hits in movie theaters, uh, this past year, Oppenheimer, a planet dealing with the kind of international strife that this one is depicted as.

Having absolutely you reverse engineer this massive energy release that civilization is going to say, Oh, massive energy release weapon, like it makes perfect sense. And so that takes us then immediately into the context of this plot. And I love for me how they constructed a world ending event that could comment upon our era.

And, could be about the captain. It was the ability to make the microcosm, do I want to be on this path? Do I want to make choices that I know could end, could lead to my own end? His willingness to say yes, his willingness to embrace that because he sees the opportunities to fix mistakes. is terrific. And at the same time, the, I think the way they handle with commentary about where we are, the use of images, the way they do it, I think.

is really masterful because I’m not saying it’s subtle. It is abundantly clear that what they’re saying is what path are we on? This is scary. That is obviously what they’re saying, but it’s also well told. And I think that those two things, that’s the, that’s the important balance.

There’s a line that Pike says in the, one of the closing scenes where he beams down into the conference room where they’re arguing the two sides of the planet are arguing.

And he goes in there and sheepish like, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. Yeah. And he goes, this whole thing. And one of the parts of his speech, and I wrote this down as this is the, this is the thesis statement of the showrunners. For the entire point of this show, not this episode, but the show, and it was when he said, I’m here to remind all of you about the possibility that’s before us.

The whole reason Star Trek’s exciting and the utopian ideal of like, look what humanity could become if we kind of put aside our differences is basically what it’s saying. Look, look, be more positive towards the future. And that’s what the show is basically saying. Our thesis statement is, let’s not forget what we could do if we joined together and we can do good things together because we’re in this world right now where everything is just so negative, so polarized.

I just love the fact that the show just came out and just like threw the gauntlet down and said, we’re going to have fun and we’re going to remind you about amazing fun possibilities. Yeah, and so it’s like a great thesis statement

for them. And I think too, it’s, as you point out, it’s a thesis statement for the series, and it’s the first Tar Star Trek show that we’ve talked about with in the context of this podcast that has done that.

I think the original series did it, but we haven’t reached the original series yet. Enterprise. Had specific episodes about specific elements that were very often about individual choices. Say something about gender, say something about sexual preference, say something about an individual’s experience of the world.

Enterprise did that more often. And then Discovery kind of pulled back from even doing that quite as much, and it became about relationships. And then I saw a lot of the commentary in our episodes about Discovery being, I don’t quite enjoy soap opera Trek, which Discovery leaned that direction a little bit more.

This one’s now leaning back and finding its bearing very close to what the original series did. We’re going to talk about world events. We’re going to talk about human history. We’re going to talk about. What it meant to be on earth at a time when we didn’t yet have the utopia. The utopia became almost like water to a fish in enterprise and almost the same in discovery of just like, it’s just there.

We got past our problems. We just, we did it. We got past it. This one is really sinking into that and really putting up a focus on what does it mean to say we survived Calamity? And the depiction of it, the images shown, half of which are literally just news footage. Yeah. And the other half are CGI creations showing Washington DC being blown off the map.

It’s always like when you go back to earth in the 24th century and they’re like, I’m going back to San Francisco where Starfleet headquarters is. Why is it in San Francisco? Well, it’s because Washington DC is simply gone. Gone.

Here we see it.

Oh, Washington DC, New York city. They are gone. That is. The imagery that we’re given, and I, and I agree, it is putting a flag for the series as far as where they’re headed in very strong, current context territory, which is bold.

But it also sounds like it’s really a heavy show by the way we’re describing it. And that’s the thing I love about it, again, about the reminding us a possibility. The show has fun. It is having fun. And the, the, the witty dialogue, it’s not just Pike, it’s across the board. They use humor to diffuse tense situations in such a great way.

Like there’s this scene where they make themselves look like the aliens and they’re working their way into the, the base and Spock’s is wearing off too fast. And there’s a point where he walks in and he says, Spock, how are you doing? And his response, and just this, Spock way is like, the pain is quite remarkable.

It’s like, you know, the fact that he did, he looks like Spock. He’s talking like normal Spock. But when he says the pain is quite remarkable, it’s hysterical when he says that because it’s like, wow, he must be suppressing a hell of a lot of pain. And then the next scene when he walks in, he’s like, I can’t take it anymore.

And grabs his head and screams at the top of his lungs

as he immediately reverts back to his original appearance. Yeah. It’s all of those elements. And. Anson Mount’s ability to give a smirk is, like, they need to put his smirk in the Smithsonian. I don’t know how they managed to do that, but he absolutely carries a, the swagger and captain’s charm that you want to see in the original, in an original series mold.

And I say that having enjoyed so many of the other captains from so many of the other series. Like they should each have their own approach. And here we have a little bit of a Kirkish swagger, but it’s an older and it’s a more, he’s accepting of his future. There’s a little bit of an acceptance of mortality that Kirk always ran away from.

Kirk’s like part of Kirk’s charm is just like, I got to continue to feel like I’ll never die. And here we have a captain who’s got that swagger, but is willing to say like, I know it’s not going to end well for me, but the work is too important. And I think that’s really powerful. So I think that for me, that, that kind of wraps this, this episode into a bow and I just want to tie it into something that I recently experienced, which I want to strongly recommend to all of our listeners and viewers is a film called Origin, which is an adaptation by Ava DuVernay of a book.

by a woman named Isabel Wilkerson. Her book was called Caste, and her book’s thesis was, there are ways that we treat ourselves, the way that humanity treats other people, where unfairness reigns, and that things that may not look the same on the face of them have similar structures. And the movie examines her concept by focusing in on three elements of her book, three historical moments, Nazi Germany, India’s caste system, and the U.

S. slave trade. And she, Isabel Wilkerson’s genius in her book is that she begins to see structures that sit behind all of these things where similar things are at work. So that on the surface where you say, Oh, there’s nothing about Nazi Germany that would have been similar to the caste system or to the slave trade in the U.

S. and yet she’s able to do that. And the movie is lovely because it is telling a nonfiction story. In dramatic narrative fashion, it is a fictionalization of Wilkerson’s journey in writing the book. So you’re watching an intimate narrative portrayal of Wilkerson as an individual, her relationships and loves in her life.

And you’re seeing the historical context of these moments, depictions of Nazi Germany, depictions of the India caste system, depictions of the U. S. slave trade. So it is one foot in a documentary, one foot in personal narrative. It is beautifully told, it is beautifully acted, it is beautifully directed. And it is effectively about, how do you get to that Star Trek utopia?

It is looking at the world with a lens of saying, there is treatment here that is based on things that don’t have to do with race, that don’t have to do with class. Those sometimes are symptoms of the deeper underlying use of a caste. approach to the world. And so for me in the audience, seeing this film, it was an early, uh, sharing of the film that I was, I had the opportunity to see.

I was very excited to be able to see it. And I walked out of the theater, suddenly connecting dots in all sorts of other ways. Between any immigrant community that goes into a place where they’re not expected or necessarily wanted. Anytime you see long term troubles, we’re seeing stuff in the Middle East right now.

I hearken back to early immigrant stories of Italians and Irish in the United States. The troubles in the UK between Ireland and England. All of these start to feel like they all plug into this thesis. So the movie is wonderful as a movie. It’s important as a concept. And I think it plugs into the Star Trek of it all that we share on this podcast.

And I would suggest you look for the movie, if you can. It will be in theaters in New York city for one week in December. It will be in selected cities in the early part of 2024. And if you’re not in a place where the movie will be shown, my fingers crossed, it will find a home on a streaming service where you’ll be able to find it in the future because it’s, it’s an important film.

It’s something that absolutely you should check out. So highest endorsement there. I want to see that. Before we end this episode, Matt, is there anything you want to talk about? What do you have coming up on your main channel? Oh, we’re kind of

at this point doing a kind of a year. We’re wrapping up our year because we’re getting ready for the holidays.

So we’re going to be taking a couple of weeks off, but we’ve got some interesting videos coming up on kind of revisiting hydrogen technologies. And we’re looking at different types of, um, uh, interesting wind turbines that are. Coming out right now. Uh, there’s one called Airloom that we’re working on a video about that is fascinating and makes you go, that can’t work.

Uh, so we’re kind of diving into that.

Sounds exciting. Next time we’re going to talk about the children of the comet, the second episode of strange new worlds. And before we get there, viewers, listeners jump into the comments, let us know what you think. And. If you’re interested in finding out more about my work, you can check out seanferrell.

com or just go to your local bookstore. All of my books are available anywhere you look for books. If you’d like to support the show, please consider reviewing us, tell your friends about us, and don’t forget to subscribe. And if you’d like to more directly support us, you can go to trekintime. show, click the become a supporter button.

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