135: Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 2, episode 4 “Among the Lotus Eaters”

In today’s episode of Trek in Time, we’re going to talk about remembering who you are when you can’t remember who you are. That’s right, everybody. We’re talking about Star Trek, Strange New Worlds, Season Two, Episode Four, Among the Lotus Eaters. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological order, according to Stardate.

And we’re also taking a look at the way the world was at the time of original broadcast. 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, as always, is my brother, Matt. He’s the guru and inquisitor behind the YouTube channel Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

Matt, how are you doing today? I’m doing

great. I saw the movie Dune last night. Have you seen it?

I have not seen it yet. I am probably waiting until my son comes home for spring break at the end of the month and then he and I will go see it together. What did you think about it?

It’s, it’s good. It’s very, very, very good.

Um, I just have questions because it, uh, it leaves a lot unspoken. So if you don’t know the book and you don’t know, like the 1980s movie that’s by David Lynch or anything like that, there’s some stuff that make me go, what, what, what’s happening? So, so I’m curious, like, if you’re not familiar with the story, like your son, I’m curious What he’s going to take away from it after

seeing it.

Interesting. I’m looking forward to it. I think that the director, I think is one of my favorite directors working right now. He’s incredible. I think he’s really amazing. So I’m looking forward to part two. Before we get into the discussion about this most recent episode, we always like to dip into the mailbag and see what all of you have had to say about our previous episodes.

So Matt, what have you found for us this

week? There’s a few, uh, the first one, this, this, these are all from. The last episode, 134, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, were the Timey Wimey episode. Yes. Uh. We have a new commenter, Richard Gould BlueRaven wrote, I just binged the last eight podcasts and shows. I’m bursting with comment energy.

Will try to keep it short. No promises. I’ve had a few hours to think of a dozen things. No particular order. I thought it was one of the better, uh, back in time episodes, fewer glaring inconsistencies than the other series. It’s the grandfather paradox that you’re thinking of when we’re talking about all that stuff, which thank you for that.

I wanted Kirk to slam his insignia on the chessboard. The other guy picks it up, looks like, looks like it’s gold, bites it to taste it, see if it’s like gold. And Kirk in a loud Riker voice says, it is gold. I thought that was funny. Uh, you know, it’s a rom com when you get the quote, thorny insomnia scene, the woman sneaking out to do thorny things in the sleep to the sleeping man.

If you see it, go the other way. It’s direct to internet video. You shouldn’t watch at work. That’s right. I thought that was funny too. Then we had a bunch of comments because we, you and I had talked, you had at the end of the episode, so like, if you’re team Sean or team Matt, so we had a whole bunch of comments around who was team Sean and team Matt.

I have to say, Sean, there’s more team Sean than team Matt. Cosmology3 wrote, sorry, I just got to the call to go to the comments. I am team Sean, apparently. Haha. And then WildApps wrote, I’m with the less bald one with facial hair.

There you go. Which is. It’s ironic because that’s also how our mother refers to me.

You don’t know how funny that is. And then Jason Dumb wrote, I’m with Janeway regarding time travel. Team Matt, but the character building was nice. And then JCEggbert5 wrote, when I was talking about how it was frustrating that Kirk like knocked a guy out in the street, carjacked him, and it was driving like he was on cocaine.

He wrote, he was clearly on Kirkcaine. I’ll see myself out.

Yes, Egbert. The appropriate response to such a wonderful pun. Thank you for that. Love it. Yeah. That noise everybody can hear in the background. That, of course, is the read alert, which means it is time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description.

Matt, once again, copied and pasted, but unread. So good luck. So this is new to you too? It is. It’s always exciting for me. Because I know I don’t have to read it, so.

Pike upsets Batel by suggesting that their relationship has harmed her career. The Enterprise is sent to the planet Rigel VII, the site of an earlier unsuccessful mission.

Asteroids surrounding the planet emit radiation that makes people forget who they are. Pike, La’an, and M’Benga discover that Zac Nguyen, a yeoman presumed dead on the previous mission, has become a despotic ruler. He enforces a caste system where laborers lose their That’s not true. I dispute this. He enforces a caste system where laborers lose their memories every night, but he and his guards do not.

The away team lose their memories and become laborers. Hearing a legend that their memories are stored in Nguyen’s castle, Pike fights his way inside, defeats Nguyen, and learns that the castle itself blocks the radiation. The crew of the enterprise also lose their memories, but pilot Erica Ortegas learns what her job is.

this is awful, learns what her job is from the ship’s computer and instinctively navigates away from the asteroids. The away team recover their memories and return to the enterprise. They pull the main asteroid out of orbit ridding Rigel VII of the radiation and restoring the laborer’s memories. Pike apologizes to Batel and they resume their relationship.

That is, I have so many issues with this, but the one that was really, was really tripping me up was the, that Nguyen instituted. This caste system, which we’ll be talking about, he didn’t, it’s in the episode, it’s been there for a long time. He just took control of the situation. He didn’t create it.

Yeah.

He became the warlord as a result of having advanced technology. He didn’t create the caste system that was in place. There’s also, I just like the opening line of this, Pike upsets Batel by suggesting that their relationship has harmed her career. And it leaves it at that, which presents the idea, if you haven’t seen this episode, that Pike has the audacity to say.

My being a part of your life is hurting your career. She gets upset. There’s no indication of any kind of fallout. It doesn’t say, and therefore they break up. And therefore she says, I never want to see you again. And therefore he feels guilty. It doesn’t include any of that. So it’s just like, Oh, he upset her.

Big deal. Episode number four, Among the Lotus Eaters, originally broadcast on July 6th, 2023, directed by Eduardo Sanchez, written by Kirsten Baer and Davey Perez. We have, as always, The main cast, Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Melissa Navia, Rebecca Romijn, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, and Babs Olusanmokun.

We also have Reed Birney as Luq on the planet, and Luq is the older gentleman who basically recognizes the struggling with the forgetting, and he comes forward to lend them aid. There’s also David Huynh. As Zach Nguyen and Melanie Scrofano is reprising her role of Captain Batel. She has been in the series off and on going back to the first season and has had a lot more appearances in this season as she was the lead attorney in the case against Una Chin-riley in her In her, um, case brought forward as a result of her Illyrian background, we’ve also seen her in a number of date moments, basically, with Pike.

And they’ve planted the seed up to this point that their timing of their relationship adds a lot of complication. And now at the beginning of this episode, they add the extra wrinkle of her career being impacted by her associations with Pike at the time of original broadcast in early July of 2023.

Well, I’m sure most of you remember that you enjoyed the song last night by Morgan Whalen. I don’t remember that because I’ve never heard the song before, but almost 30 million downloads tell me that I. I’m the exception. And at the movies, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had earned 60 million dollars on its way to being the number one film of the week.

And on television, we’ve been looking at the top streamed programs. We’ve talked about Suits, which is a surprising reprise of a show that was off the air by the time we’d reached 2023, but it earned a 57 billion minutes viewed in that year, followed by Bluey, the children’s program, and NCIS, a program with a robust 443 episodes, allowing it to reach the number three spot.

And now here we come with another show with an impressive number of episodes, Grey’s Anatomy, with 421 episodes. So it trails in episode number, which may be the only reason why NCIS has more views. Grey’s Anatomy, of course, is the story of a naked man named Grey with everybody studying how his body is put together.

I joke, of course, it’s a doctor program. And in the news on this date in history on the New York Times headlines were articles about a ruling that put social media at the crossroads of disinformation and free speech. Basically the question of do online media platforms bear responsibility for the things said on those platforms?

Questions that will haunt sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. You name it. There was also an article about the Russian front in Ukraine and the impact on the psychology of the Russian soldiers there. And also the growth of efforts to turn space exploration into a business and an investigation into TikTok.

And it’s involvement in the possible disappearance of a Chinese dissident. So looking at this episode, we will start at the beginning. I think most appropriately we’re talking about the aforementioned dinner scene in which Batel and Pike are attempting to have a dinner. It keeps getting interrupted by business, including a call that is upsetting to Batel.

She’s been passed over for the role of Commodore. And it is in direct result, it is a direct result of the loss of the legal case that she was the head of against Una Chin-Riley. And so the fallout of her relationship with Pike is affecting her career. And then Pike points this out to her and suggests, in an attempt to effectively save her from him, perhaps they should back off from their relationship, upsetting her deeply, causing her to leave.

I’m curious, Matt, the episode as a whole wrestles with the idea of being true to your truest self. The memory loss aspects of how the asteroid impacts people is described as affecting factual knowledge. Information knowledge, not instinctive, truest self performance. So we have the pilot of the Enterprise is able to pilot the Enterprise, even though she doesn’t know who she is, or Pike instinctively has the desire to get back to the one who gave him the necklace because of the connection that he feels to that person, even though he can’t remember who it is.

And it is, of course, Batel. I’m curious about the setup of that story. In this way, showing Pike and Batel, they’ve had this recurring theme within the show of their relationship as a romantic yet difficult relationship. I’m curious, did you feel like this was a nice jumping off point? Did you find it engaging and bring you into the story?

Or did you find it kind of coming out of left field? How did you feel about the first five, ten minutes of episode?

I liked it because it’s kind of to go back to discovery. Which, the storylines of Discovery were so tightly integrated. And one of the reasons when they came up with Star Trek Strange New Worlds was we’re going back episodic kind of a idea.

But yet, even though you’re episodic, doesn’t mean that you throw away the continuity. And so this, I actually really enjoyed the setup because it’s directly addressing something that happened just a couple of episodes ago, really great episode. We’re seeing the ramifications of what happened from that and how it’s actually Impacting the relationship, but that’s not the point of the episode.

The episode is episodic. It’s its own little standalone story. It’s just layering on top this emotional truth that’s supposed to be coming out of the episode. Because for me, my takeaway was it’s about memory loss. But it’s dealing with the whole idea of loss and regret and mistakes and the fact that those things shouldn’t be avoided, they make us who we are and we need to kind of embrace those things.

So here’s Pike basically making a mistake in the beginning by saying maybe we should take a distance from each other. And by the end, he’s realized how much a mistake that was because of his experience. But yet, the center 40 minutes of the episode, that doesn’t matter. It was just, it was just kind of like a kickoff point and it’s a wrap up, like a little bookend, but it gave it a nice kind of emotional truth to the entire episode.

So I

liked it. Yeah. I feel like the episode does an interesting job of, for me, feeling like a compelling and successful episode while also being Arguably only about 12 minutes long. The first six minutes and the last six minutes. are the episode. I think I’m impacting your career. You should be better. You’d be better off without me.

How dare you take my autonomy and my ability to make choices for myself away from me. You cad. I’m going to leave. She leaves. And then he goes back to her and is like, I made a big mistake. It was wrong of me to argue that I need to protect you from me. I realize now that both of us are With our eyes wide open looking at each other and recognizing, I really like the argument, there are so few people who know what our jobs are like that who else could we possibly be with other than somebody who understands it inside and out the way we both do.

So eyes wide open, let’s, could you forgive me? I found all of that, uh, emotionally resonant. I connected to it personally. And then the middle 40 minutes is effectively like they said, what if the movie Memento was about an entire society as opposed to just one guy? And I found it. While being maybe a little more metaphorical and a little more symbolic.

Um, I feel like you kind of have to interpret the way you do the episode where Picard goes to the planet with the alien captain who speaks in metaphor. Tarmac and Jalad at Tanagra. Yeah. Like if you try and dig into the deep logic of what is happening, it starts to fray and like, how, what is going on?

Like, like, okay. Like. It’s metaphor. It’s, it’s a drama. It’s Shakespearean almost in this, they are strangers cast upon a shore and they are looking at one another and saying, what do we do? And I think they did a really nice job with creating these lines between the characters where at first blush you think, Oh, they’re not going to be able to maintain their cohesion as a team.

And yet they do. They fall naturally into various relationships with each other. The second point about the show that I want to invite you to jump into, of the trio on the planet who are relating to each other, I know which connections I found really the most resonant. What were the moments between those three?

That stood out to you as like, Oh, this is really the important thing that we should be taking from this.

Oh, it was, it was M’Benga, the doctor. I just, for him, he, I don’t know, Sean, I find him the most compelling character. So it’s like, it’s anytime he’s on in the show is one of the primary things I kind of gravitate to him.

Uh, but I think the relationship with him La’an was really interesting of how, like how he brought up how the show for me was all about, Lost and mistakes in dealing with those and not trying to avoid them, just dealing with them. And here’s La’an, who has that horrible history with the Gorn. I’m sure she would love to forget that, but it kind of makes her who she is.

And then you got M’Benga, who’s got this post, like, stress from, The crazy crap that he did whenever he was some kind of, like, fighting soldier guy, and that’s the whole reason he’s on this mission, and he makes that comment of, like, it’s great being the ship’s doctor when you’re asked to go on a mission because you can fight well.

It’s like, he was, that’s the reason he was there, not because he was a doctor, because he’s a good fighter. And so it’s like, he’s got this history that he’s trying to deal with. He’d probably love to forget that and just be himself, but it’s like, it’s interesting. They’re storylines, how emotionally resonant they are just on the planet.

So you have Pike’s emotional story, bookending everything, and you have their emotional story on the planet that’s kind of keeping you going on the planet, which I thought was really cool.

You also have within the planet storyline, effectively the entire way team each has their own version of PTSD. Pike has the PTSD of the last time they were to this planet.

I, we haven’t even touched on that aspect. I love the setup of this. I love that they are going back to Rigel VII, which preceded the original pilot. This is where they barely made it out. And this is where in the confusion of the pilot, when we watched it and it’s like, Does Spock have a bandage in his neck?

Is that guy wearing a thing on his arm? Like what is going, why are they hurt? And it turns out it’s because of a too subtle reference to Rigel VII killed a bunch of us and we barely made it away and we’re on our way to, to a star base to heal up and here going back. So I loved that setup of going back there.

I loved the fact that there’s a crewman that they didn’t know was still there. And the fallout of that coming right back and slapping Pike. I thought that Anson Mount’s acting in this episode is tremendous. When he faces off against Nguyen for the first time and the sorrow he feels, I left a man behind.

That is the only thing I care about as captain. And I did it. I left a man behind because he was in that panic to get the remaining people off planet as fast as he could. We were going to lose Spock if we didn’t get him back to the ship. So all of that feels raw. And you see that in his face, the PTSD that he has from that previous mission.

M’Benga’s entire thing, when his Mind is gone. And he says, I don’t know any of you people. And he is clearly sitting in a place of panic about what he will have to do to defend himself. And then you mentioned L’Anne would love to forget the Gorn, but clearly the instincts for survival is the one thing that she’s held into because she punches Pike right out of the gate.

The moment he tries to interact with her and when it comes down to the conflict between them and the guards, she’s using a friggin sledgehammer against a guy. Nearly takes his head off. I mean like that sequence I thought was magnificently done. You end up with these three people and saying, Oh, if only I could forget the hurt.

And they can’t. When it comes to remembering who they are, who they are is built on a foundation of the struggle to survive and overcome Difficulty. And I think that that is a powerful metaphor. It is one that I think is worth debating though. The question of like, is that inherently true about all people?

But in this circumstance, we are given three people who’ve been through horrible trauma and that trauma is keeping them moving towards survival. And that, I think, is, is important to recognize. I agree with you. La’an and M’Benga, the relationship between the two of them, I really love the flashback sequence at the beginning of the previously on Star Trek, The Strange New Worlds.

We are reminded of the fact that he has reached out to her. We are not reminded directly of the fact that she has gone through, and in the previous episode, was the romantic rom com storyline, along with Kirk, Where it was entirely about, can she let go of the shield she keeps up? And in this one, she’s forced to let go of the details that are broader there.

She’s no longer operating from a, everybody looks at me in a certain way because of who I am. She’s not exhibiting that, but she still has the shields up. But with M’Benga and her, even with their mind partially wiped, that strength of their bond begins to be more evident as the episode goes on. I really loved by the end of it, him holding on to her and saying like, hold on, we will come back for you.

And her trust in them in that moment without having the, any real thing to set that trust upon other than instinct. There’s an instinct of trust between them, which is keeping them together as a team.

I also enjoyed this subtle little, they’ve never really explained it, but M’Benga’s little like I see you thing that he does.

Yeah. It’s almost like saying, I see you and I love you to, to people. He does that and he does it to her and she does it to him. I thought, Oh, that’s sweet. And I really enjoyed that. They’ve never explained what that is, where it came from. It’s like, you know, Carol Burnett doing the ear tug. Um, the end of every episode, cause it’s a love note to her mother.

Um, I, I enjoy that. It’s just the subtle touches that the show does to really kind of strengthen those emotional bonds between the characters and kind of, you know, Tugs at those little heartstrings. It’s it’s I liked it.

That was great. There’s also the dramatic aspects of the caste system. So let’s talk a little bit about that.

What we’re seeing in the form of what the people on the planet accept as their lived experience. We have those who live within the larger castle. And it is something about the ore that the castle is incorporated with that protects people on the inside from the memory loss. The Wikipedia summary, I agree with you, misidentifies the caste system as having been imposed by Nguyen.

I don’t, I don’t think that that is what is happening at all. Nguyen makes the very clear statement at the beginning, this place will freak with your mind. It would, things will change. You will not remember things. You will not be who you are. So I could see Some kind of backstory of Nguyen going down, surviving, witnessing the departure of the away team that he was a part of, and then having access to maybe a shuttlecraft or something that was left behind that gives him access to weaponry and maybe even a replicator.

So he’s able to defend himself even while losing who he is. And having access to these weapons allows him to then gain a dominant position amongst a group, potentially a gang or a group of warriors, that he’s then able to lead some kind of storming of the castle. And then once he’s in the castle for a long enough period of time, who he was begins to return to him.

And with that, the anger, the bitterness, and everything that has clearly become the driving force of his personality. I believe That there’s a kind of almost inadvertent brainwashing that’s taken place because of what the radiation has done to him. So he’s effectively, I don’t see this as a nemesis storyline.

I see it almost like the tragedy of PTSD and getting lost in a kind of brain damage as a result of being stranded on this planet, the way he was and coming through to the place where he is, where he is. depicted by the end as he is defeated and weak already when he is defeated by pike physically he is on the ground quivering begging for his life this did not strike me as the they need to teach this villain a lesson it struck me as this is They’re all of their experiences writ large that any one of them left to themselves without support and help would end up in the same place.

And we see Pike teetering on that edge himself. What do you think about all

of that? I was gonna say, they, they show that exactly because Pike is going down the same path that he went down. He’s beating the living crap out of the guy saying, give me my memories back. He’s getting ready to kill the guy.

And it’s, it’s only when he’s, his memory started to kind of seep back in and he realized that he remembers. Who he is that he stops. And so you can totally imagine that that guy probably had a similar experience where he’s abandoned. He forgets who he is. He has access to these horrible weapons and he can kind of, he storms the castle because the people in the castle are controlling and manipulating us.

And I want my memories back. He goes in there, blows everybody up, takes control, and then remembers who he is and then has this horrible tragedy of like, what have I done? And then he even makes that comment to Pike of, I can’t go back. I overthrew this rule. I overthrew the castle. I overthrew the monarchy or whoever was here.

And I’ve gone too far. I can’t go back. That’s part of the reason why he’s hasn’t reached out for help. That’s why he’s basically trying to keep Pike under his thumb. Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s tragic, but I do like that Pike at the end throws it back on him saying, this is, you know, this is brings out who we are.

It’s like, you made the choices to do what you did. Like the guy could have very easily, once he remembered who he was, radioed for help. He could have tried to get out of the situation and very easily explained to him, I didn’t know what I was doing. Sorry. You know, but he, the fact he kept going, knowing what he had done is where he crossed the line and where Pike didn’t.

So it’s like, it’s interesting. It’s kind of, they showed us what two characters going down the same path, how they diverged at the end. So I thought that was interesting. We

also have a parallel storyline that while I found it enjoyable, I don’t know that it needs quite as much attention as what’s going on on the planet

and I’m talking of course about what’s going on on aboard the ship, where the ship is piloted into a position where without knowing This is one of those moments where Star Trek gets a little hand wavy as to like, why would a ship that recognizes there’s some mysterious radiation going on over here?

Let’s fly really close to the planet. Like, that’s a little like, would they really do that? But again, you kind of have to be like, okay, there’s a reason for all this. The ship is putting itself in danger and is flying close enough to the planet. They make the argument that the planet has something about it that, that changes sensor readings.

They can’t transport down. They have to go down by shuttlecraft. So you end up with the Enterprise caught in the belt of radiation and the crew aboard the ship is undergoing the same impact of the radiation. So the ship crew is forgetting who they are. And it starts off innocently enough with just one person here, one person there, but then soon enough entire stations are being abandoned because nobody can remember what they’re supposed to be doing.

I like the fact that Spock comes up with the idea of, let’s use these data pads so we remember who we are, and then it turns out that they forget how to read. So, They aren’t able, he looks at the pad and he’s like, I think this is supposed to tell me something, but I don’t know what it says. It’s clearly got his picture, but he can’t read it to say you’re the science officer aboard this ship.

What do you think about the scenario on the ship, the interaction between, it’s mainly about Ortegas and Spock as the dramatic tension. There’s some interesting stuff with Nurse Chapel as she begins to piece together what is happening. She recognizes it all. And Una Chin-Riley is trying to address the issue without being able to say, let’s get away from the planet.

She doesn’t make that step. But those pieces, I think, take a backseat to what is supposed to be the main tension on the ship, which is Ortegas doesn’t trust Spock. We have a tension there. She’s upset with him, angry with him. There have been a couple of episodes where we’ve seen her flare up at him and his reaction to things.

And it kind of comes to a head in this episode. What did you think about the dynamics there and the point of having that story?

Well, again, you have to narrow this down or it’s going to get unwieldy. So focusing on them made a lot of sense because again, there’s that tension that they’ve been building.

for episodes. It’s just like those little . It is not a focus of anything. It’s just like the little bickering that happens in one episode. Like you

said, she complains the Vulcan, but what’s great thiss are always gonna be you friends with other Vulcans. It’s little things where she’s got a bias that’s beginning to

show mocking how that, you remember that dinner scene where the two that Vulcans were talking and she’s making fun of what they’re saying to each other of la, you know?

Yeah. How they like each other so much. Yeah. And it turns out that they can’t stand each other and she’s not recognizing it. Right. This is a nice way to kind of wrap that up in a way. Because there’s that moment where she comes in and she’s just saying, I am Ortegas. I am the pilot. I can do this thing.

And she sits down and she’s about to fly the ship out. And Spock comes out from the back like, what are you doing? And she says, trust me. And he sits down and goes, okay. It was just this moment of like what Pike had said on the planet, it just brings out who we are. Yeah. And here’s the two of them. They do trust each other.

They do respect each other, but there’s emotions on the top of it that keep things kind of tense. And so when they’re basically all that stripped away, they do kind of come back together again. So I thought that was a nice way to kind of resolve that little mini story that’s been going over several episodes.

Yes, I also really appreciated that it didn’t, for Spock, turn into, he forgets who he is and then the Vulcan’s anger is unleashed. I appreciated that it was, he forgets who he is and clearly exhibits fear, but the fear is exhibited in a very Vulcan way. He is terrified. You can tell he is terrified, but he still speaks in completely calm, full sentences.

And just delivers. So it’s his instinct is one of maintaining that control. Everything comes back into line for him because that’s his primary instinct. He is, he is settling into who he is most and who he is most is the one who wants to make sure that the right levers are being pulled. And I don’t know which levers those are, but hopefully somebody will show up who will show me which levers and then I will help pull them.

That is who he is. So when Ortegas comes in with that, like, you can trust me. I’m the pilot of this ship. Yes, I trust you. Let’s do this. Well, he

also says, I feel that’s right. He says, I feel, which I thought was interesting. He’s doing that Vulcan delivery, but he says, I feel. And so I thought that was a nice little touch of his half human, half Vulcan ness.

Yes, it’s a nice touch. It’s a nice touch. Yeah. So we end up with, of course, the, the conclusion, the, the battle aboard the, uh, in the castle. Um, we have the revelation that Pike is throwing any consideration of the prime directive completely out the nearest airlock. And he’s just like, does this seem like natural evolution to you?

What’d you think about

that? I was going to say, can’t just call out that action sequence. Pretty badass. Pike walking through that room, basically dodging shots, shooting back. He’s just picking up, he picks up that platter off the table and just holds it in front of him. Yeah, like a badass. It’s like Captain America.

Yeah, it was, it was awesome. It’s like, I love that entire sequence. And the fact that he threw out the prime directive, like I said, it’s like he’s following the same emotional path that the other guy did, but he ends up being very Pike at the end of it. But it was awesome to see him just kind of like all bets are off with him and he’s a man of action.

There he is, pulling no punches. It was, I thought it was great for not only as a viewer, just an exciting little moment, but it was also, I thought, true to his character.

Yeah. It’s, it seems very built out of a recognition that not growing past your pain means A complete lack of growth, which is the metaphor of the heart of the episode, but writ large for this entire society.

He’s like, these people know they have hurt and they don’t know what it is, and therefore this society is just stagnant. They just get up. They literally depict it as what are their lives like? They hammer rocks or they saw wood. That’s it. So, it’s like

Well, Pike’s also referred to as the Boy Scout numerous times.

Yeah. And I thought his rage as he went in there, the whole platter shooting thing. He’s going in there with kind of like righteousness on his side. Like he’s going in there because it’s like, this is wrong. Like the people who are in here are stealing our memories and putting it in a box. I have to write this wrong.

So he’s kind of being the boy scout trying to help not just himself, but everybody. So he’s going in there, guns a blazing cause he’s doing the right thing. He’s being just. And so it’s like, I liked the fact that he’s still the boy scout in that moment. He’s still trying to help people in that moment.

Yeah. I also really liked that it was a myth. He was responding with the like, they’ve got our memories in a vault in there. That’s how this is working. And it is clearly mythology born out of how many generations of people on the surface of the planet not being able to retain information properly. And so the mythology that would evolve out of that making complete sense to these new visitors who are just like, Oh yeah, they’ve got our memories in the, in the castle, in a vault.

I got to go get them. That’s what I’ll do. So it all starts to like feel that underscores for me, The, the idea of the metaphor of the show, like we’re not supposed to like, does it logically make sense? How could the radiation do it? Like, no, like, and this is one of those episodes for me, I, I always fall into this with the episodes.

Anytime Star Trek has a really poetic title, I, I fall on the line. So you have a show called Among the Lotus Eaters and I’m like, all right, good. Like it’s about metaphor. It’s about like having these moments, which are supposed to be symbolic, somewhat Shakespearean, almost like they got washed upon an Island and there’s a wizard who’s calling the shots like that kind of storytelling.

I think, I think that Trek has always done that really well. And so for me, this works as an episode, despite the fact that it has that kind of poetic side to it instead of the hard science of it. What did you think about that?

I was going to say, I’m going to pull back a quote from Rian Johnson. Who wrote the movie and directed the movie Brick, he did some, one of the new Star Wars movies.

He did, uh, what was that movie with the detective that was like on Netflix? Um. Knives Out. Blank out the name of it. Knives Out. It’s like, he is a fantastic, he did Looper. And the reason I’m bringing this up is Looper. I listened to an interview with him talking about the time travel aspect of Looper. And he said, cause he, he basically pushed back and said, this isn’t science fiction.

Time travel is freaking fantasy. Nobody knows if time travel is possible. And so when people say, oh, time travel works this way, it’s like, does it? Nobody knows. It’s like, nobody knows how this works. So it really comes down to crafting the fantasy of just to make it science fiction y is you come up with a rule set and you obey that rule set.

And if you obey that rule set, then everything kind of comes together. And so in this episode, yeah, the radiation, the way it affects the memory, that doesn’t make logical sense, but it doesn’t have to. They made a rule set around how this radiation affects people’s synapses and screws things up. And they lived to those rules.

And so for that, I was completely bought in. It didn’t matter if it was scientifically plausible, that’s not the point. It’s, it’s science fiction fantasy. That’s what this was. And for me, that

was totally fine. Yeah. I’m totally on board with that. Having written a novel, Man in the Empty Suit, which is itself a time travel story, which Where I’ve had people send me emails saying, but how does it work?

What is the technology? How would, and I’m like, I don’t know. I didn’t write it to teach people how to time travel. I wrote it because I was writing about a character who was trying to figure out why he hated himself so much. So like my goal was that exact thing. It’s science fiction y. to tell the story about the guy.

Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. So next time we’re going to be talking about the episode charades. I invite everybody as always to jump into the comments and wrong answers only. What do you think that is going to be about? I think it’s going to be about a classic game of charades on the bridge of the enterprise.

Spock is gonna tell it’s a movie. It’s got three words. Sounds like.

Matt, what do you have coming up on your main channel? What should our viewers or listeners look forward to hearing about on Undecided?

Well, this week, by the time this is out, I have an episode about small hydro and a new kind of hydro turbine that has no blades on it. It’s kind of mind bending the way it works.

It’s kind of ingenious. And then, um, the ones coming up after this is kind of comparison, comparing, comparison, comparison. I’m making up words now. Uh, it’s comparing the Tesla solar roof to a regular roof, like solar panel system, like I’ve got, uh, cause I was curious about why it’s been around for so long.

Why are we not seeing more of it? And I have a friend that lives down in Connecticut. So I did a comparison between why he did what he did and why I did what I did. As an explanation for probably why we’re not seeing more of them. So check that one out.

As for me, if you’d like to compare us, my books to other books, you may have read, you can check out my website, seanferrell.

com, or you can just go directly to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever it is you buy your books or check them out at a local library. My books are available everywhere. And if you’d like to support the show, please consider leaving a review wherever it was. You found this. Don’t forget to subscribe and share it with your friends.

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