Matt and Sean talk about making an unused species feel threatening. Does Star Trek Strange New Worlds use of the Gorn work out?
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We’re also taking a look at what happened in the world at the time of original broadcast. So we’re talking about strange new worlds, which means we’re talking about 2022 and that was just a couple of years ago, a couple of years ago. Wait a minute. Wasn’t it just last year? No. As you’re listening to this, it is now 2024.
Get a new calendar, reset your watches, get a cup of coffee, settled in. We’re about to talk about the Gorn. And who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And with me is my brother, Matt. He’s That Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech.
And it’s impact on our lives. Matt, how are you doing this fine early 2024?
Well, technically, Sean, it’s New Year’s Eve that we’re
recording this. So it’s still. I know that you didn’t have to tell them a lot. I’m a liar.
Cause we’re liars. Things are good. As we’ve talked about it on previous podcasts, we just recorded.
I have no concept of time right now. And I’m this next week, I’m getting back into the swing of things. And so I’ll actually start to know what day of the week it is again. So I’m looking forward to
that. Yeah. I, this morning got up and was thinking, Oh, I’m going to have a leisurely morning with a cup of coffee.
I’m going to wait a minute. What day is it? Oh my God. I have to record. So before we get into our discussion about Memento Mori, we like to dip into the mailbag and see what you ladies and gentlemen have been discussing in the comment section. So Matt, what have you found for us today? I’m not
going to get into all the comments around it, but, uh, In the previous episode, we talked about how Star Trek is woke, and we made a YouTube short out of that little 60 second clip of us talking about how Star Trek is woke.
And whoa, boy, that got a lot of views, and it got a lot of comments, um, a lot of debate, um, from both sides. People saying, yes, it is woke, and other people saying, what the hell is woke? That’s so stupid. It’s not woke. Um, very. Divisive things. I don’t want to go wading back into it again. I just want to kind of acknowledge.
We hear ya. Yeah. It’s a hot topic. We stepped into it with that one. But the main comments I want to bring up are from the last episode, 124, Ghosts of Illyria. We had a comment from AJ Chan, who wrote, I agree with Sean about the strong metaphor to racism during the pandemic. While sadly not the only racism that erupted in 2020, prejudice against the Asian community came To the surface, as a result of a virus, it was poignant that Christina Chong’s character was the one talking about being teased as a kid for her ancestry, which is something that many Asian Americans can relate to.
However, the show undercut the power of this metaphor by having La’an attack Una, even though I understand why they did that for the Una-La’an relationship. I thought it was a really interesting kind of point of view. Yeah. And how that was played out. I, of course, don’t have that background. It was really interesting to hear that kind of take on it.
Uh, then we also had a comment. All right, go ahead. I was going to
say, yeah, that’s, that’s a really, uh, great take on everything, including the inadvertent, like undermining of their own point. I, I appreciate all of that. Thank you, AJ.
Yeah. And to continue on the AJ Train, uh,
yeah, it’s AJ Chan, not AJ Train.
I know. I’m on the AJ train. He had another comment that said, yes, 2024 does sound like the future. Maybe it’s because of the DS9 episode, Past Tense, in which they go to the year 2024. In September, can you do a special Trek in Time and do DS9 Past tense. It’s not often real life catches up to Star Trek.
And then PaleGhost69 wrote, we’d need one in April 2024 too for Picard. And I wanted to bring this up because, you know, I’ve talked about this before, but like if we’re doing Star Trek in chronological order, you could make a very easy case for we should be doing these time travel episodes when they happen.
In the chronological order, or we stick to what was the original plan, which was the series, like where it originated from. Yeah. So even though DS9 is coming back to 2024. They were in the future to come back to 2024, so you wouldn’t necessarily watch it in 2024. But I do like the idea of watching that episode in the year it supposedly took place.
I think, you know, there’s no rules here because you and I are in charge. We can do whatever the heck we want. So if we decide that we want to do that, I think that’s an interesting, I think that’s maybe an interesting offline conversation. Before we started doing this podcast, I don’t know if you remember, I actually proposed that we do things in, like, Universal chronological order, which would have been figuring out the order of the time travel episodes.
And you were like, nope, that’s too confusing. Like you were like, absolutely that. Because if we were to do that, we should have already talked about the time travel back to World War II. We should have talked about, Next Generation, where they, uh, went back and met Samuel Clemens. Like there’s so many episodes that we’ve missed out.
Yeah.
Right. That’s why I didn’t want to do it that way. Cause technically we would have been starting like in a hodgepodge of every series before we actually got to the series and we get really confused and really fast. Yes. But I can see there being a fun case to make for doing it in these cases. Cause I forgot about those episodes.
Cause it is funny that those episodes supposedly take place. Right now,
that is, that is interesting and maybe, yeah, let’s have a conversation offline about the logistics of that. And if anybody knows of any other episodes that would be in 2024, jump into the comments, let us know. That noise in the background is of course the Read alert, which means it’s time for Matt to take his best shot at reading the Wikipedia description of this episode.
This. I think it’s okay, but it’s very plot heavy, so. Okay.
Well, the Enterprise attempts to deliver a nuclear powered air filter. Sorry. Wow, we’re off the rails. That’s me. What? It’s a
worry off the rails. I know a nuclear powered air filter.
I
have an air filter in my bedroom. That’s just like a little fan, a little filter.
That’s like, it does a great job. Meanwhile, the Federation is like, we need some nuclear power in this thing.
That’s why I was laughing. Cause I have an air filter right in the next room. I was like, that’s not nuclear powered. Yeah. The Enterprise attempts to deliver a nuclear powered air filter to a Federation colony, but finds many of the colonists dead.
Security Chief La’an Noonien Singh helps evacuate the survivors and recognizes the situation as a Gorn trap. She was the only survivor of a Gorn attack in her childhood. A Gorn ship attacks and does significant damage to the Enterprise. M’Benga and Nurse Christine Uh, Chapel, resort to 21st century medicine to treat the wounded when their equipment goes offline.
The crew lure the Gorn ship into the atmosphere of a brown dwarf near a black hole, where both ships sensors and shields are useless. Spock figures out a way to track the Gorn ship, and they destroy it, but three more Gorn ships arrive. One is crushed by the pressure of the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, Spock mind melds with Noonien Singh to learn about the Gorn’s communication system, and they use this to, they use this to trick .
One ship to fire on another, Enterprise then warps around the black hole, temporarily disappearing and ejects the destabilizing air filter, here we all go again, making me laugh, which explodes and convinces, and convinces the remaining Gorn ship that Enterprise is destroyed. I had trouble getting through that, Sean.
Yes. As I mentioned, rather plot heavy, but this is episode number four, Memento Mori, directed by Dan Liu. Written by Davy Perez and Beau DeMayo and originally broadcast on May 26, 2022. As usual, our cast of characters are played by Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, who has a lot to do in this episode.
And I really like her work in this. Melissa Navia, Rebecca Romijn, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, and Babs Olusanmokun. The original air date was May 26, 2022. And the world at that time, Matt, you’ll remember, this is only like a year and a half ago. So I don’t have to remind you that you were singing Wait For You as loud as you could.
That of course is a song featuring Drake and Thames. Matt, why don’t you give us a few of the opening lines?
Great, and at the box office for the third week in a row, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was still number one, it added to its already impressive take and was still Sitting at the third week with 285 million already in the bank. On television streaming programs that were competing with shows like Strange New Worlds.
We’ve already talked about Stranger Things, Ozark, and Wednesday. These are all Netflix programs. So I hope you won’t be upset to find out that the fourth most streamed program in the U S at that time was Cobra Kai. That’s right. Another Netflix program with 50 episodes. It’s minutes viewed were 16. 7 billion.
So it’s quite a drop off from the number one show, which is at 52 billion stranger things. But that, that peak for that show is so enormous that any other show is going to be. in the middle of the pack where most of the programs from this point on are all roughly about the same impressive billions in the low teens so Cobra Kai a well loved and well received program based on a movie from our childhood in the 80s and so you knew this you
never loved You never loved Karate Kid like I did.
For some reason, Karate Kid hit me at just the right time and I love that movie. I watched this show and it is schlocky fun. Like it is, it’s not good TV, but it is a hell of a lot of
fun. And in the news from the New York Times, this episode aired just a day after the deadliest U. S. school shooting in A decade, this was the Uvalde, Texas school shooting.
So the New York Times was filled with articles about the shooting, about the targeting of children and about the police response. And the police response would be a point of debate and it continues to this day. Now we are a year and a half beyond this, and there is still a slow moving investigation by the attorney, uh, the district attorney.
In that part of Texas, who is investigating with the help of the Texas Rangers, whether the police were negligent in their duty for having as many officers show up as they did, it was dozens of officers showed up who then waited outside for an hour while the shooter remained inside the building, chasing down children and teachers.
And now just, uh, I just think this is interesting and I’ll just share this information as kind of like big picture to help inform our conversation. I just want to talk a little bit about what we know about the Gorn. The Gorn are a species in Star Trek that I have always wished would be better utilized.
Uh, the first appearance of them is in the 1967 episode of the original series, Arena. And everybody will recall that that is the on the desert planet battle in which Captain Kirk fights an unnamed Gorn who has been, the two of them brought to a planet by powerful aliens to duke it out on the planet instead of in space, where the lesson to be learned is once you can know your enemy face to face, perhaps you can find some sort of empathy with them.
And the depiction in that is one of an incredibly slow moving. Reptilian creature, obviously a person in a rubber suit, but it was 1960s. It was early Star Trek and I’m sorry. I love that episode. I can’t get, I can’t get past the, the way that the crew of the Enterprise is watching it all on their main screen.
The battle on the planet is broadcast to them like a TV show and. Watching Spock say, yes, yes, you’re going to make gunpowder now, Captain. Like I loved all of them. The Gorn then appeared in several Star Trek books. They also appeared in the animated series. They have the animated series in 1973, the Time Trap featured Gorn in it as well.
And then the next time we would see them in television is in an episode that Matt and I. Already talked about the Enterprise episode in a Mirror Darkly part two. This is the story where the mirror universe is involved and it involves not just mirror universe, but time travel. That is the episode where they discover that what is happening to the USS Defiant is that it is being stolen from the primary universe into the mirror universe, but also backward through time.
So it is a retconning explanation of why. The Terran Empire has the same sort of equipment as the main universe, when the Terran Empire has a history that is far more chaotic than the Federation. And in that episode, the stealing of the Defiant involved the Tholians. And the Gorn, and the Gorn were depicted in that through CGI, and we see Archer actually fight a Gorn, and in that depiction of the Gorn, the Gorn is a very fast moving, basically, it looks like when they made that episode, they were like, well, let’s Borrow the Velociraptors from Jurassic Park and so you end up with a Gorn that is a much more fast moving, much more clearly dangerous creature.
Uh, I think the only reason they didn’t have that level of movement in the original Gorn in the episode Arena would have been having a guy in a rubber suit do all of that would have looked ridiculous. So there’s something about let’s make the Gorn move very slowly that makes him more menacing. But now here we are in Memento Mori and we don’t get to see the Gorn at all.
And I will say it adds to a level of fear in this episode. I just wanted to know from your perspective, like there’s a number of different ways to talk about this episode, big picture, the use of the Gorn, the use of the Gorn in this way. How did it work for you? What did you think about it? Oh man, this
is the thing I love the most about this episode.
It was like the. And the best way to do it, never show them on camera, only talk about the horrific stuff that they’re doing, show what they’re doing, but it doesn’t matter what they look like or seeing them in person. It’s kind of like Jaws. It’s like the original Jaws. You don’t see the shark except for like a few minutes on camera.
Uh, and it makes it terrifying because it’s just this mysterious thing lurking in the background that’s going to come out and get you at some point. So it ratchets up the tension and the horror of it, especially when you have like La’an. Having these like, like PTSD kind of like moments where she’s like, God, we got to do something about this because this is the Gorn and she’s freaking out.
It’s like that just ratchets it up where if you saw them, it actually kind of undercuts that just a little bit. Yeah. So I’m glad they handled it the way they did. Not only did it save money on special effects, but it’s a, it’s effective storytelling.
I really liked it. Yeah. I, I completely agree with that.
It’s like Put a bunch of things into a blender and created the perfect cocktail. And it’s a little bit of aliens or predator, and it’s a little bit of Das Boot and you set it to puree. And what comes out is like. And up to this point, I’ve really enjoyed Strange New Worlds. This I think is the one that for me, I’m just like, Oh my God, they’re just knocking it out of the park.
Like, this is such a good episode. This as even just a standalone thing, you could show it to somebody who does not know any of these characters. Or the context of the story up to this point, the captain’s teaching moments with La’an and saying, you are acting number one, you need to provide hope. That is part of your job.
So I’m not asking you to lie. I’m not asking you to blow smoke, but I am asking you to provide them with a lifeline to a positive end. So to keep them motivated, that was a great. moment. The PTSD aspects of La’an, her begging Spock to help her unlock what she knows is in her head. She’s like, there’s stuff here that I know I’ve forgotten, I’ve repressed, and I need your help in unearthing some of that because there might be something there that can help us.
I thought that was a great moment. The fact that it flipped on Spock. And she, in that moment, understands something about Spock that is supposed to be hidden from everybody else. And he has the moment where he’s like, I think we need to end this now. Like, all of these moments, for me, work. And the aspects of her, the horror of her and her brother in the Gorn environment.
And you know, like, oh, they used us as, they would plant their eggs in human victims. And then the young eat the humans. End. All of that, the horrific nature of all of that, the depiction of that being very like aliens or predator, where you just hear noises in the background, the hunting party coming, the two young people fleeing through dark, bloody catacombs is parallel.
With the Das Boot cat and mouse game taking place so that both of them are dealing with an unseen predator who is more powerful. The construction of this as like from a storytelling perspective, I can’t think of a way it could have been more perfect. In the big scale mirroring the small scale, the large scale fear and panic, the captain in this episode looks so human throughout in his reaction to the danger, to his leaping at brass rings for hope, to his relief to At finding out that he hasn’t lost more crewmen, his, the weight of loss in this one seems real and on him.
And this is a depiction of Pike that for several episodes now, we’ve seen him talk about, I know what I am going to do in the future. I’ve been given a glimpse of the future and I am saving people’s lives in the future. And I’m willing to stay on that path. And here we see. Why? Why he is that guy who will stay on that path?
Because in this we see the weight of every crewman lost. They give the numbers at one point. I believe it’s like four civilians and seven crew members have died during these attacks. And the idea of even losing two more people. is almost too much for him to bear. I think that that depiction is fantastic.
And that reminded me of the Captain and Das Boot where it’s this cat and mouse game of being pursued and wanting everybody on your crew to survive and not knowing if you can get out. Um, Well, there’s, there’s
a, there’s an aspect to Anson Mount’s performance that it’s one of those, he’s a, in my mind, he’s like a movie star, like his performance as this character is so above and beyond, uh, there’s that sense of desperation.
As you’re talking about, well, like, he’s losing all these people. He’s becoming clearly more desperate in what he’s doing, but yet he never loses, completely loses his cool. And he still stays very logical and trying to just outsmart the Gorn. But you can tell that desperation is like ratcheting it up over the entire course of the episode.
But at the same time, he never loses the sense of humor to this performance. And there’s a couple of great moments, like when they’re going into the gas cloud and you have, um, Ortiz, I can’t remember what she said, but it was this really snide remark of as they’re going into the gas cloud. And it’s this quick take of him looking at her with this look on his face of like, really?
Yeah. As they’re about to go into the gas cloud, these like unspoken moments of where you’re seeing their humanity come through. in their performances that again, I don’t want to keep bashing on it, but Discovery just doesn’t have that. It’s like this show does so much with so little where Discovery was trying to do too much
and just didn’t pull it off.
Yeah. Yeah. To compare it to Discovery, I think is, is appropriate. Um, in this moment, like sometimes it’s unfair to compare like this to the original series, like, well, you know, different eras, different storytelling. Techniques, different goals in what you’re doing, but this really does. We’ve only got four episodes in and having the pilot of the ship make those kinds of comments fit.
Whereas if they had tried to do that in Discovery, it would have been like, well, who is this person talking now? We’ve been given just enough of these secondary characters on the bridge that any of them adding in makes sense. The fact that La’an was portrayed as the acting first officer at the very beginning of the series.
So that we know that when she’s pulled up to that position again, and the captain turns to her and says, okay, you’re acting first officer. Do you agree? And she’s like, yeah, I’m ready. Like that doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s, it’s not surprising because we’ve been given just enough glimpses of the, of the pieces on the board that as they get moved around, we understand what’s happening.
That didn’t happen in Discovery in the same way. It was lots of reaction shots on Discovery where we were shown everybody being fearful or excited or whatever. Not even the names were provided. So in this, in this context where you have the pilot saying, What she’s saying in reaction to the stress of the situation and needing to be talked down at a certain point when Pike gives a kind of look at La’an.
And it’s just like, this is the moment I’m talking about. This is where you need to reassure her and keep her on task because, uh, it’s a great moment. I love that moment where it is. The pilot is on the verge and it’s, it’s Ortegas is on the verge of breaking with orders in order to prepare weapons and fire in response to Pike saying like, hold, like, we’re just going to sit here and it takes La’an’s reminder of like, you know what you’re, you’ve been ordered to do, continue to do that.
We need to operate as a team and subtlety. In moments like that show the connective lines between the entire crew. Whereas Discovery was rested so heavily on the shoulders of one Michael Burnham, and it was just like, it only mattered what her reaction was. And I think that there’s, um, something in the origin of Discovery where it was.
Predicated upon the idea of this character was the cause of a war that maybe from the very beginning that the spotlight was so tightly focused on her, but they were not easily able to shake that off until like third season. Like when it finally began to be like, Oh, these other characters have names.
They, they have the potential for being a focus. They might pass away. And that was almost like a little too late for that series. Whereas this, they’ve recreated a lot of what the original series had, not in its first year, but I would say in its second, where you started knowing like, Oh, that’s Sulu, that’s Chekov
sometimes they go to the planet. Sometimes they get in trouble. Sometimes they’re the hero of the moment. And they’ve done a great job of recreating that here already. I’m wondering. Did you think that the depiction of the space battles in all of this, do you agree with me that it was evocative of Das Boot or were there other things that occurred to you as you were watching this where you’re like, Oh, this is, this is like that.
That’s one of
my favorite movies. So yeah, my mind was going straight there for this. And that’s actually one of the things I wanted to compliment the filmmaking for was part of the, one of the characters of the episode is the ship itself, because as they’re going into the gas cloud, the pressure, the sounds the ship is making are horrifying and scary and things that you’re not supposed to hear on a spaceship.
And so it’s, it’s adding a level of tension of how deep can they go and how, how much in danger are they on top of which I also love the layer of. The heat, like, it’s not just, it creates, it not just a, a, a sensory for like what you’re hearing, but also what you’re seeing because over the course of the episode, everybody be slowly becomes extremely sweaty.
And it was like just seeing the perspiration get worse and worse and worse on everybody. It’s like, it’s, it’s reminding you, the viewer of. It’s not just the pressure that could kill them, the heat is also, the life support, like all, every conceivable path of what keeps them alive is kind of being eroded away.
And that creates this tension that just grows throughout the entire episode. And that’s what Das Boot does, like Chef’s Kiss, it’s one of the best films ever made that regard of, by the end of the, it’s like, they’re still losing their oxygen and they’re, it’s the same thing. It’s like, they’re all becoming sweaty and they’re all becoming, it’s like, it’s confining in the sound, everything about it.
It amps up the tension, just like how I said that the Gorn is like Jaws, where you’re not seeing the Gorn, and they’re the big boogeyman, but the other boogeyman is the, the environment that’s slowly going to kill them if they’re not careful.
Added to that is also the storyline. There’s, there’s two secondary storylines.
And I would argue that this, this episode. is a great exemplar of the idea of storylines that are so tightly woven together that they all become a single identity. The overriding relationship between survival and the characters means it doesn’t matter that you have characters who are in medbay. Or the cargo bay or on the bridge dealing with specific nuances of the threat.
We’re dealing with the Gorn. You’re dealing with people bleeding. You’re dealing with the fact that you’re effectively sitting next to a time bomb, but it’s all one threat. And. So I, I wonder, did you find those secondary plot lines, the medical bay, the, I disagree with the synopsis from Wikipedia where it says they revert to 21st century medicine.
It’s older than that. I mean, that’s like, that’s somebody in the 21st century typing that and saying like, Oh, it’s like medicine today. They are showing people who are effectively never practiced the simplicity of sutures. Having to use sutures. That’s like going back to that’s 19th century medicine.
That’s not 21st century medicine and blood transfusions. So this is like, at one point, uh, Dr M’Benga says to Nurse Chappell, you’re a fan of studying, uh, what, what is, what is the archaic, archaic medicine? Yeah. Archaic medicine. And I immediately flash back to, I can’t help it. But Star Trek 4, when they go into a hospital and McCoy is walking past a woman who is moaning in a bed in the hallway and he says, what’s wrong with you, old mother?
And he’s, and she says, well, I’m waiting for transfusion because my kidneys are failed. And he says, this is the dark ages. He’s like, yeah, this is archaic, dark ages. This is medieval. And he gives her a pill and then walks away. And then you see her 10 minutes later being wheeled around with a team of doctors who can’t understand.
She’s yelling, doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney. Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney. Like that’s, that’s where we are in, in medical advancements. This is not just 21st century medicine. They are going back to a level of medicine where stitching people up. feels like curing people through prayer.
And yeah, it’s a, it’s a level of, of hands on medicine that they’re not accustomed to. And it’s pushed to its limits. When you see that Una Chin-Riley, the first officer has been, we’ve already had the episode where we’ve learned that she has a. Augmented background. So she’s more physically capable and stronger than your average human.
So her bleeding in the hallway and saying, I’m fine. Take those other people first. And then she comes into the room and collapses. Now we know she’s close to death, and she’s still in that moment, refuses a transfusion of plasma, it should go to somebody else. So we’re given that kind of ticking time bomb for her storyline.
How did you feel about the depiction of that within this larger story of making sure that there was another level of calamity for some of the crew members who are in sickbay and the difficulty that Chappell and M’Benga have with dealing with, with these things? Well,
I liked it. I don’t know if you felt that way, but it’s, it’s, um, I don’t want to sound like it’s piling on, but it’s like all of everything that’s happening on the ship.
It all relates back to that central point. It’s all about the Gorn. It’s like they’re trying to escape the Gorn. So you’re going deep into this gas giant, I mean, into the, the, what are they going into? They’re going into the nebula? Brown, brown giant. Yeah. Brown Giant. Of course, it’s like everything’s gonna start falling apart.
So of course it’s going to impact things like the med bay. And then of course, and that just adds another ratchet of tension of just like, holy crap, it can’t treat people that are getting injured from the ship basically starting to implode and the damage they’re taking. So it just adds another layer of the, they can’t keep doing this.
They have to get out of this. And if they get out of this, then they’re going to get caught by the Gorn. So it creates this wonderful kind of rock and hard place. They have to kind of. Chess matched their way out of to see if they can trick the gorn to get out. I thought it was a wonderful way to also expand the character development because by doing what they did, they got Una out of the first officer’s chair, which gives La’an the chance to step forward and we can see the character development of her becoming kind of more of a prominent officer on the bridge.
Yeah. So it was like, it was very, in my opinion, very clever writing of how they moved their characters, like chess pieces in the storytelling to kind of. Move all of the characters forward. So they moved Una forward by showing us how she puts everybody else above her own well being. They made it clear for La’an how she’s, needs to grow.
Cause she’s, she doesn’t want to lie to anybody. She doesn’t, and so she has to figure out. How she becomes a leader, how she inspires. So it was like, we’re seeing all these different aspects of all the different characters, especially with the doctor and the nurse. It’s like talking about the archaic medicine and how, you know, that’s one of her specialties that she likes to study this kind of stuff.
Now they get to put it to use. And it’s like, kind of, you’re seeing every character step forward in this one episode in a very clever way that never feels like. Uh, we’re back in the medbay. Boring! It’s like, I want to get back to the exciting stuff on the bridge. It’s like everything, everything is exciting.
Everything is, uh, really entrancing from just a storytelling perspective with the characters because we’re getting to know each one of them better and better and better and to kind of fall in love with this
crew. Yeah, I found myself thinking, like I mentioned before, it’s like they took Das Boot and mashed it up with Predator.
And then this is like a splash of mash where you end up with like, they’re in bad circumstances and have to do medicine the way they, they know they, they could do it better given different circumstances. But what they have is what they have right now. Um, yeah. And I thought it was very, uh, touchingly rendered, the fact that you have fewer scenes that go to the medbay, and you have fewer scenes that go to the cargo bay.
We’ll get to that in a moment, um, but they still manage to have just enough to make Those, those moments stand up as, as memorable. And, um, in the cargo bay, we have Uhura along with Hemmer who are initially, she, we have to remember, and this is, this is something I find the one part of Strange New Worlds that I trip over is Uhura is floating around the ship and it’s constantly like, oh yeah, she’s a cadet.
She’s a cadet. She is doing her tour of all the different stations because she, as a character, doesn’t yet know what her calling is. So, there’s all these opportunities for her to do different things in different places of the ship, which is great from a writing perspective. For me, as an old viewer who’s just like, Uhura’s Uhura.
Why is she not on the bridge? Why is she not at the comm station? And so having to remind myself, like, Oh yeah, it makes sense that she’s there. So she is with Hemmer doing her engineering rotation and helping him with this air filtering system, uh, which I wouldn’t even say it’s air filtering. It’s air purifying.
It’s like, you know, again, the Wikipedia writeup kind of misses the point a little bit. Like this is supposed to be an extremely sophisticated piece of equipment. This is not just getting dust outta the air where they needed, uh, uranium in there to, to make it work properly. Um, so there’s this catastrophic failure in the device.
It is failing and potentially going to explode. Uh, let that be a lesson to anybody who’s trying to decide a nuclear powered air filter. Hmm. So we end up with this one story is the one where it felt a little on the nose with like, I’d see exactly where you’re going with this. Like the idea of, okay, the, the engineer’s hands are hurt.
So Uhura has to be his hands and he doesn’t have sight. So he can’t say, see that blinking red light, you got to press that button. So. The setup of it felt a little on the nose for me, but the way it plays out I think is really carried by the performances of the two actors were given and the, and the writing of the dialogue.
It’s Hemmer’s initial response to her is very dismissive. And he says at one point, a line that stuck out as a problem for me at a certain level where he says, I don’t like the idea of teamwork. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. He’s the chief engineer on a ship. You can’t either. Yeah, he, he has a team of engineers.
He would have to be a leader of teams. And so for him to say that was really kind of like, okay, they’re kind of sticking that in there to add tension to the relationship. It wasn’t really necessary. I didn’t think it was like to make him sound like a bad leader is not a great idea. Effectively from that point on the playing off of the two of them and his growing admiration for her.
Uh, Intuitiveness and her, and her ability to sustain, um, she never gives into panic. And I think that those two qualities stand out for him. And then she is effectively in awe of his engineering prowess and his ability to diagnose and understand what’s going on without being in any way your typical Chief Engineer.
So the back and forth between the two of them and the growing admiration, this is not my favorite of the storylines, but I still agree with. Matt’s earlier statement of these all feel like they’re all part of the same, same storyline. And they don’t feel like, Oh God, back to the cargo bay. I’m like, I wanted there to continue to be evolution of that.
And of course it all comes back around where the device that they are trying to repair is still has a cascading failure. It is going to explode. And they managed to use that to their advantage by making it look like an explosion of the ship itself. The science. Fiction aspect of this is another one, another element where I really loved a lot of the stuff that was going on.
The descriptions of a brown dwarf, the involvement of the black hole, redshift, like all of these things felt like just enough science to add to the dilemma and the solution of the problem in a really compelling way. Um, and I also appreciated the fact that, and I love Star Trek too, but when they go into the nebula.
And we’re given the, Oh, our sensors are all going to be down. We’re not going to be able to see anything, but then we’re given a God’s eye perspective of the ships flying through the nebula clouds that we continue to see the proximity of the reliant versus the enterprise. And we’re able to see like, Oh, there’s passing each other in this cloud and they’re, they’re just missing each other.
The depiction here, I think is far more impactful. Because it’s done with a like, Oh, our sensors are going to be down. So we literally won’t know anything. And then when they figure out a way of creating a kind of sonar, it becomes. More tense than having zero, because now you can say like, Oh, we can see the ship that is pursuing us.
We have the nice moment of Pike using the Gorn’s relentless tactics against them by leading them into a place where the Gorn ship can’t survive. And then it gets ratcheted up again with, Oh, that wasn’t the last Gorn ship. So. Like you end up with layers and layers of all this. The last thing I wanted to talk about was the mind meld sequence, La’an and Spock.
What did you think about their relationship and how it seems to be? Spock’s relationship to most characters in this series is understandably at arm’s length and he is not a command officer like he was in the original series. So as first officer, his involvement with everybody. It’s unquestioned, but in this series, it is, he’s got a compartment that he’s supposed to stand in.
He’s supposed to remain over there. So when you have these back and forths with different people, people are willing to call him out in ways that they never would have in the original series. So here we have a couple of scenes in this where, do you ever speak in plain English? is said to him. It’s like the, the relationships here are very different.
What did you think about how this was all depicted and how it played out?
I, I liked it, but there’s an aspect of the Vulcan mind meld that feels like a storyteller cheat code because it’s kind of like an instant, these characters now know each other. Like it would take years to get to know a character like this, but a little mind meld and suddenly they know each other inside and out, which means they’re going to have a weird bond.
So it did feel to me like a little bit of a cheat. Between La’an and Spock in that moment, especially when she starts going, You have a sister, and like, she’s like, understanding the whole thing that’s been hidden. Um, as a fan, I was enjoying it. But for me, this was actually one of the weaker parts of the episode.
So it’s like, I agree with you that the stuff on the cargo bay was also slightly weak, but here I thought this was probably a weaker aspect just because it felt like a cheat code to get these characters knowing each other. Um, but it was necessary because we needed to get this backstory of Her understanding the Gorn, trying to get her head wrapped around what tactics they should use.
But again, it felt a little shoehorned in there for me. Cause it was like, we, we wanted to, we wanted to basically have these two have that moment. So she can’t remember and he has to help her remember. It felt a little shoehorned to me, but, um, that may have just been my read of it or the moment I was watching it.
I felt that way the first time I saw it. And I felt that way again, this
time when I saw it. Yeah, it’s interesting as you say that, I, I don’t disagree with that and I enjoyed the episode as it was, but I wonder if it might not have been in some ways more useful for it to be more of a talking cure than a mind meld of what if she was revealing stuff through the episode about how the Gorn’s communication is like a telegraph like she could have said effectively like those of us who like one of the only reasons i was able to survive is because somebody taught me Like how to understand what they were saying.
And in saying that to Spock, might he on the ship when they were in the shuttle might not have said, I’m detecting patterns in the light. And that the two of them together could have figured out how to teach the universal translator how to understand the light signals instead of it being like, why are they scanning each other?
And then her. So, having, I need a mind meld, it could have been like, why are they scanning each other? And his saying like, you said something before about the patterns in their vocal speech. I think they’ve recreated that with light and the two of them could have taught the universal translator and been able to have the exact same moment.
I wonder though, if the writers felt like there was something critical in having Spock in this moment be revealed. That, to me, the way this was depicted, I couldn’t help but feel like at the end of the episode, like the, of the two points, Spock be revealed, or her backstory be revealed, it almost felt like the more important thing for the writers.
With Spock’s backstory being revealed and having that awkward moment. So I’m, I’m, and I will say this as far as viewing of Strange New Worlds, I think we’re just about where I don’t recall what’s coming. It’s like the episodes, like this one. I know I watched this one before, but I really don’t know if I watched because as these were coming out, we had begun to do this podcast.
And there was a point where I was just like, we’re going to get there anyway. So I’m going to hold off on watching Strange New Worlds until we actually get there. Now we’re here. So, uh, I’m finding myself like having questions about like, Oh, what is the lingering impact of this going to be? Because I genuinely don’t know.
So I’m looking forward to these upcoming episodes and seeing how that. That aspect of Spock and the revelation with La’an actually does play out. So, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to fully side with you like, Oh yeah, that might not have been the best use
of that. Well, not to say anything, to give anything away, but I know because I’ve watched all the episodes.
So, next time we’re going to be talking about Spock Amok, which clearly a play on The Amok Time episode of the original series, and we’re like, without even being able to say exactly what’s going to happen, something with love is going to happen, I’m sure. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you’d like to remind our listeners or viewers about?
What do you have coming up on the main channel? Well, we kind of took a
hiatus around the holidays. So there’s been a pause of a couple of weeks, uh, but an episode coming up right around the time this comes out, hopefully, is going to be one about Wind turbines for homes and residences. Um, cause that’s one that a lot of people are interested in.
So we kind of dove back into that to kind of look at what’s out there, what’s coming and if it’s might even be worth it or not. So that’s going to be coming
up. Sounds interesting. As for me, if you’re interested in finding out more about my books, you can check out seanferrell. com. You can also go directly to your bookstore or public library.
My books are available everywhere. My most recent is the Sinister Secrets of Singe, which is a middle grade sci fi adventure with robots and pirates and all sorts of good danger. And I hope you’ll be interested in checking that out. And later this year. 2024. Uh, sometime around June, my second book in that series will be coming out.
So I hope you’ll be interested in checking out the first and preparing for the second. And I’ll be talking about that more as we move deeper into the year. But as for now, thank you. Thank you so much. As for now, if you’d like to support the show, please do leave a review wherever it was. You found this, go back there, leave a review.
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