Matt and Sean talk about what in the world is going on in this episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. They’ve got full on slap stick, rom-com comedy in this one … so how bad is it?
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So we’re currently talking about Strange New Worlds, which means we’re also talking about 2023. Not all that long ago, obviously. And you’re probably wondering, well, what’s the point of doing that? Well, it’s the format of the podcast, so get used to it. We’re just a handful of episodes, five episodes away. I know.
Am I right? From jumping back to the 60s. And then. Yes. Oh, then historical context will really start to make sense to you. So stop complaining. Who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some stuff for kids. Matt’s probably going to get sick of me doing this, but I’m going to hold it up yet again.
This is my advance copy of my next. Book. It’s coming out in June. It’s the Sinister Secrets of the Fabulous Nothings. It is book two of the Sinister Secrets series. It is a middle grade adventure book, but I think it would be enticing. Sorry, Siri is suddenly talking to me. I think it would be enticing to, uh, anybody who just likes adventure books and, uh, kind of a Harry Potter esque, uh, storyline.
Um, yeah. I’m inviting people to pick up a copy. An advance order would be terrific. Advance orders are a great way to support an author. So I would appreciate if anybody is interested in picking up this book, it doesn’t come out till June, but an advance order now would mean a lot. And also if you haven’t read the first book, The Sinister Secrets of Singe, that is available now already.
So I invite you to pick that up as well. It’s excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much. And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He is the guru and inquisitor behind the YouTube channel Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact in our lives. And Matt, how are you today?
I’m doing great. Should I do charades?
I’m open to it. You’re the one who was just like, no, I don’t want to play charades on a podcast. Nobody can see this.
Just for context for everybody, Sean started just by holding his hand up with three for like three syllables. And I was just like, or three words. And I was just like, dead silence.
Somebody’s in their car listening to this. It would just be the music just going into like nothing. And then me going, wait, what’s happening?
I still think that makes a good podcast. I don’t know why, but before we get into our conversation about this most recent episode, we always like to jump into the comments and see what you’ve been saying about the previous episode.
So Matt, what did you find for us today? Got a
bunch, got a bunch. Uh, so from 135 Among the Lotus Eaters, PaleGhost69 wrote, After watching the episode in this podcast, I’m still unsure who flies the ship. I wish there was a character who just told me what their job was. I would have liked to see more about how their society works instead of being a revenge
plot and manual labor.
I get that. I get that. I just love the, uh, I wish somebody would tell me what’s their job. Yeah.
Yeah. I like that too. It would have made a great first episode of the show for everybody on the ship to be, you know, Experiencing amnesia and then discovering who they are and walking around saying, I’m Spock.
I’m a science officer on this show. I’m Spock.
We have an episode, a response from AJ Chan who wrote, As we trek through time and the number one songs of the week, I would like to know if Matt really had been dancing to the number one song. I got to imagine Sean knows. We’ll get, we’ll get to Matt’s favorite song at some point. The only question is what week will it
be?
AJ, you’re going to be waiting a long time.
And then for the wrong guesses only for like what the next episode is going to be about, this one had to be laughing about today’s episode, which is charades. Dan Sims wrote charades. Ski trip and murder. A sequel to the 1960s movie with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Oh, if only it had been. Yeah. Here we go.
Yeah. I will let the cat out of the bag. Everybody’s probably at home or in their car or maybe trapped in a well listening to this and thinking, If Sean was opening with a game of charades, what was he going to charade? What was he going
to make? My pins and needles. It
was going to be, I hate this.
Yes, that noise in the background is the read alert, which can mean only one thing. It is time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. And for anybody who’s been enjoying the recent buzz in the past few weeks, after the movie, Madam Web. Came out and it’s trailer that famously had a line in it that made everybody do a what?
It even got a call out in the Oscars by John Mulaney. I am talking of course about the amazing line. He was in the Amazon with my mother researching spiders before she died. The first sentence of this Wikipedia description, Matt, reminds me of that line. So have at it.
Spock and Chapel are nearly killed when they encounter a portal created by a higher dimensional race.
The Kerkhovians, who heal Chapel but accidentally reconfigure Spock’s half human, half Vulcan physiology to that of a full blooded human. Well, well done
Wikipedia. One sentence, grammatically correct, commas in the right places, but still, about five separate ideas in there.
This happens as Spock is preparing for an engagement ritual with his fiancee T’Pring, and her bigoted parents, ooh,
calling them out, T’Pril and
Sevet.
Ah, Spock’s, well, that’s not fair. Her father is not bigoted. Her father’s awesome,
but we’ll get, we’ll get
to that later.
Damn you, Wikipedia. He is a brow beaten Vulcan.
Yes, he is. Spock’s human mother, Amanda Grayson, boards Well, that’s not her name. Laura, is it? It is. Amanda Grayson. Yes. Boards the Enterprise to help Spock prepare.
Spock does not tell T’Pring of his condition. Hoping to not worry her and relies on the crew to help disguise himself as Vulcan and stall the ritual until a cure is found. Chapel convinces the Kerkhovians to return Spock to normal by confessing to them her feelings for him. Mmm, I have so much to say about that.
Spock is able to complete the ritual, which ends with him making a telepathic connection to his mother that shows him how difficult it is for a human to love a Vulcan. Spock reveals the ruse to call out to T’Pring’s bigotry. Offended that Spock hid his condition from her, T’Pring asks to take a break from the relationship.
Spock later admits to Chapel that he also has feelings for her, and they kiss.
Well, they do more than kiss, but we’ll leave it there. We’ll leave it to yada yada yada.
I was gonna say, the one bonus about this description really does highlight Clearly you hated this episode, but it really does highlight why you hated this episode.
I think just the summary alone really makes it pretty clear why a lot of people are not going to like this episode.
Well, episode number five, Charades, directed by Jordan Canning, written by Kathryn Lyn and Henry Alonso Myers, originally broadcast on July 13th, 2023. We have, as always, Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Melissa Navia, Rebecca Romijn, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, and Babs Olusanmokun on our regular cast.
We also have Mia Kirschner returning as Amanda Grayson. We have Gia Sandhu as T’Pring, Ellora Patnaik as T’Pril, Dan Jeannotte as Sam Kirk. And Michael Benyaer as Sevet July 13th, 2023. What was the world like at the time of original broadcast? Well, we’ve heard it from the comments. People are curious about Matt’s actual favorite song.
If I had to guess, we wouldn’t even get close until probably Next Generation. So, you all have a while. You all have a while to wait. But, this song is up there for Matt. It is as has been the case all season long for this season of Strange New Worlds, Last Night by Morgan Whelan. Yes, that’s right.
29 million more views this week and most of them, my brothers. And at the box office, the number one film. Well, I, if I had to guess what the number one film was at this point of the year, July, early July of 2023, I would not have guessed a movie that I didn’t even know existed earning 33 million. It is Insidious, The Red Door, the fifth installment, fifth.
Installment in the Insidious franchise. Original director James Wan of the Insidious movies served as producer, and this one was directed by the lead, who is, what’s his butt, from,
let me find him really quickly for you. Patrick
Wilson. A director who doesn’t want to be associated says like the, was it Alan Smithy? Yeah. This is Patrick Wilson.
Patrick Wilson, who is the lead of these movies, who at some point just like fully doubled down on, you know what, I can make these movies. And he’s been in movies, all these insidious films.
And he’s also been in that, what was the movie? Moon Fall Terrible Sci-Fi catastrophe movie about the moon falling into the earth. And he just like sits there and. cashes the paycheck. God bless him. God love him. Insidious Threaddoor, number one film of the week. And on television, we have so far talked about streaming shows like Suits, Bluey, NCIS, and Grey’s Anatomy.
If I said those out to you, if I went down the street and shouted those at people, they would probably identify quickly. Like, okay, we, yeah, those shows, we know about those shows. But the number five show, Cocomelon. On Netflix, I found myself, yes, Matthew is now making the same face that I made when I read this.
I felt like when I was putting these notes together this week, like I had fallen into a parallel world where movies like Insidious, The Red Door, and Cocomelon are wildly popular. Cocomelon has only 22 episodes. Let’s put that into context. 22 episodes, getting 36 million views. billion minutes viewed in 2023.
22 episodes. Above it, Grey’s Anatomy, 421 episodes. And below it, Big Bang Theory. That’s a spoiler for next week. 281 episodes. Cocomelon, 22 episodes, has 36 billion minutes viewed. What is Cocomelon? It is on Netflix, but it did not originate there. It originated on YouTube. It is. A YouTube channel owned by the British company Moonbug Entertainment and maintained by American company Treasure Studio.
It specializes in 3D animation videos of both traditional nursery rhymes and their own original children’s songs. As of February 2024, Cocomelon is the third most subscribed and second most viewed channel on YouTube. It is a baby Einstein for today. It is You put it on in the background, you put your kid in their little seat in front of the television, and then you as a parent go into the other room and probably snort cocaine.
I don’t know. Um, and in the news on this day in July, 2023. Headlines included Biden bracing NATO for a long conflict with Russia, making a cold war parallel. There was also an article about the GOP’s far right seeking to use the defense bill that was working its way through Congress as a means to defund the Ukrainian war effort.
And there was also research that had been shared to help cool a hot planet, the whitest of white coats. And this is something that Matt and I talked about. A year ago, when this news hit, scientists at Purdue University creating a white paint that when applied can reduce the surface temperature on the roof and cool the building beneath it.
So it is literally so highly reflective, it is Reflecting back most of the energy of natural sunlight. Pretty remarkable stuff. On now to our discussion about this week’s episode. Uh, we’ve talked about, you know, the headlines, Ukrainian war effort, the pro Ukrainian side of it, the let’s pull out of this Ukrainian war side of it.
The. debate around NATO, ongoing investigations in previous weeks that we’ve talked about, um, inflation numbers and all of that. My question to you, Matt, is do you think that all of that heavy, heavy stuff led to the creation of this nightmare of an episode?
Tell me how you really feel about this episode.
Yes, this had a huge impact on this episode, for sure. 100%.
Okay. I am, of course, using hyperbole. Uh.
Wait, wait. Before you get into why you hate it, can I just say one thing? Yes. I
didn’t. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t like it. I was gonna say. I was gonna say. I didn’t like it. Yes. I didn’t hate it. Yes. I was going to say, I understand that not everybody’s going to feel about this the way I did. So I’ve already used hyperbole to reveal a number of times how much I dislike this episode.
So I will let you respond. Uh, to a couple of questions that I had. My first, I literally have talking points in our notes. When Matt and I record these, we have a, a shared Google doc that we, that we can both look at from either side. And my first talking point is what is happening?
I’m seeing, I’m seeing the meme GIF from close. Was it a, it’s not Close Encounters, it’s a, what’s the Spielberg movie with the girl, the teenage daughter on the street. Poltergeist. Poltergeist. Poltergeist. Poltergeist.
Yelling.
What is happening? Yeah. I picture that’s you for this episode.
Yeah. For me, the meme that I go to for that phrase is actually from the show New Girl in which Josh Gad appeared as the character Bearclaw.
And there’s a scene in which he drops in a bathroom stall down to his knees, puts his hands in the air above him, looks at the sky and screams out, what is happening? And that’s my question to you. What do you think? Their goal was with this episode, this episode was
pure comic relief. It was meant to be a breather episode.
It’s a bottle episode. There’s no real massive special effects. So this would be a time saver, a cost saver, all that kind of stuff. And every Star Trek series does these every single one. There are episodes from Next Generation, my favorite. series that have numerous episodes that I hate that are like this.
Uh,
but they’re there to
save money and they’re there to, you know, have a, have a little levity, have a little fun. Um, so it’s like, to me, this, I don’t hate it because it’s like, it’s expected. Star Trek does this. The one thing about this one, is that the soap opera ness, soap opera ness of it
is a little
dialed up compared to what the other shows do when they do these kind of episodes.
So that might rub people the wrong way. But this to me just seems like it’s just like a, an after dinner mint. You know what I mean? It’s like a, it’s a palate cleanser before they
move on with the other stuff. I find myself wishing that it actually made my palate feel cleaner. Cause my palate felt
dirtier somehow.
There
is some really funny stuff like there
were two moments. There were two moments that I laughed out loud. Pike is fantastic. Pike is fantastic in this episode. That’s the, that’s the thing. One of my notes on this is that I felt bad for the character, for the actors because they are doing some heavy, heavy lifting of some things that just felt like they were falling flat.
And in some cases, I found some things incredibly dated and insulting. And I had a problem with that.
Let’s relate this to, there’s a Next Generation episode I would relate this directly to. Mm hmm. Worf, when his parents come aboard the ship, there’s an episode where it’s all about family and Worf is all embarrassed because his parents are there.
It’s just a goofball, weird freaking episode that’s just all about family relations. That’s all it’s about. And that’s exactly what this is. It’s all about family relations. We’re seeing T’Pring, how she relates to her family. We’re seeing how Spock kind of reconnects with his mother in a whole
new way.
So it’s like all of that stuff.
To me, it feels very much like that episode. Uh, the stuff that to me was hitting a wrong note was the entire Chapel, you know, the way she’s trying to rescue Spock because he’s been made a hundred percent human. It was like that whole kind of thing, especially when she had to profess her love, all that kind of stuff was kind of like, Oh my God, just like eye roll kind of stuff.
But for the family relations, it just felt like that Worf episode to me. It was just kind of a You know, forgettable episode. You watch it. I don’t need to watch this again. Sad thing was, I’ve now seen this episode twice because I had to for the podcast. But I will never watch this episode again. What
I think is interesting, I find that comment very interesting and I’m interested from viewers.
Um, if you If you align with Matt on that, very, very, like, let’s, let’s have a conversation about the episode without talking about the episode. Let’s do that instead of going point for point around stuff. I think it’s interesting you compare it to the Next Generation episode because I I really love that episode.
And I love that episode in ranking the three stories that they talk about. There’s the Wesley connecting to his father because he’s now gotten basically a time capsule message. I find that moving, but it’s definitely the C storyline. I put several notches above that, the Worf and his family storyline. I like Worf’s parents meeting Guinan and her conversation with them, which is revealing about Worf’s nature.
It is Giving insight in various scenes of, we had this little boy that we wanted to care for, and we knew the circumstances were going to be so, so difficult because of his tragic backstory. And here he was this small boy who could stand up to much older kids on earth and was ostracized. And we had to figure out how to parent him through that.
And I find that. Really, really compelling. And then the A storyline, which is several notches above that, is Picard reconnecting with his brother. The relationship there is incredibly depicted.
That, that storyline, I agree with you. That part is like, bang on. The other two for me are forgettable.
See, that’s, but that’s what I’m saying, like, there’s, there’s rankings here, but what all three of them do is reveal something.
Ultimately unknown about a main character. We see Wesley’s connection to his father and we find out that his father, we see, we see his father for the first time. We have never been able to make this connection and we see. Wesley, as a character, wrestling with, I have been chasing goals and how much of them are me and how much of them are because of who my dad was.
Have I actually been chasing after my dad? It has a very touching ending in that regard. With Worf, we see this, the Guinan moment of when he looks out here, he’s not looking toward the Klingon Empire. He’s looking toward Earth. He’s looking to you for home. And we see Picard wrestling with the post Borg trauma of having become Locutus.
And that storyline, like I want to live in that storyline. It is so moving.
You know, that story, I agree with you. That, that storyline is like A+++++ Right. It was like the whole, but for me, the Worf and the Wesley stuff, it’s kind of like, I don’t know.
It just didn’t ring as,
didn’t ring that emotional bell.
Right. And in this episode, I don’t think any of the plot lines.
Hit the levels of the Picardian line. That’s what I was trying to get to. They don’t even get close. Yeah. That’s what I was trying to get to is that we have in this episode, none of our main characters are revealing anything that we don’t know.
There is no revelation. That puts this episode I disagree with that completely. Are you kidding? The whole thing with Amanda. We know about the difficulty because we know Spock. And we know from previous episodes not only of this with talking about Spock and the difficulty he has with his background.
We’re talking about main character revelations here. We’re not talking about his mother. We’re talking about him. Yeah, Spock had
the revelation of what his mother went through at the end. It was just like that, that to me was very emotional. But we’ve seen that. It was not on the level of that
episode.
We’ve seen that though in previous episodes. We’ve seen it between in Discovery. We’ve seen it between Amanda and Sarek. We’ve seen it between Spock, Amanda, and Sarek. We’ve seen it between Michael and Sarek and Amanda. We’ve seen this. None of this, like we’ve seen it in her relationship to Michael, it was revealed she resonated with Michael because being the only human in that environment was so difficult for her.
So we have seen aspects of this before, but ultimately Amanda is getting that kind of attention. She is getting that kind of resonance only at the end. And the rest of the episode felt like so much farce. It felt like a 1980s or early 90s rom com to me with such dated aspects around your mother in law is going to be difficult.
I’ve found that aspect really, really just hard to sit through. Seeing this woman presented as I, you know, like the idea of a Vulcan who might be bigoted against humans. Ok. That’s a . That’s an aspect that is a hard, a hard nugget to, to write around, but the way they’ve written around it is to make it a mother in law punching bag joke.
It just felt like, what is this? And then the saving grace for this, for me, came entirely out of Pike. Walking around in the background, making these hors d’oeuvres, and his comic timing is perfect, but the rest of the, the rest of this humorous setup is non existent. There’s not a So let me, let me re
I may have picked the wrong episode to compare this against.
The Nails on a Chalkboard, to me. is Troi’s mother. Every time she was on the show, chasing Picard around the ship, doing all those kind of things, there’s episodes, there’s numerous episodes with her, and it’s just to me, I, I can’t stand watching those. And I think that might be a better comparison to this episode because it sounds like it’s nails on a chalkboard for you with the farce.
I do not disagree with that. The farce in this episode is hard to watch. The mother in law punching bag With the,
the whipped husband. Yeah. Even though I laughed at a couple of moments, it was, it felt like something that was from the seventies and not something from today.
It felt very dated. It, it felt like the ropers, it felt like the ropers from three’s companies did not feel like something that should be in a current Star Trek program.
And I, and I like aspects of the logic. Like one of the things about a show like Star Trek is it is asking very usually for big leaps of faith from the audience. And there are different ways of earning that in any given episode. So you have like, oh, they go back in time. And I’m, I, in my mind, I was comparing this not to other programs.
I was comparing this to the very successful episode that we watched a few. Episodes ago about Christina Chong’s character going back in time with Kirk. And that was a rom com and that one I thought was wildly successful. And so in my mind, I kept comparing this to that and thinking, it’s really pretty remarkable that both of these feel like they’re set around a rom com.
setting and one manages to deftly weave Star Trek into it. We’re able to do a time travel storyline and never second guess the time travel stuff of it. But this one, the logic that everything follows is so non existent because it has to be a hand wave to logic to just get us to the Funny moment. And the funny moments are not worth that hand wave.
The aliens We do notice that every time
this happens on this series, it’s always been the T’Pring and Spock storyline. Because the last time they did something like this, it was the Freaky Friday episode, which is also one of those episodes that makes you go, uh, okay, here we go.
And the, the things that are being asked of these characters are in some cases straight up un Vulcan.
Like, there’s, they are shoehorning moments into the story that don’t fit within the confines of who these characters are supposed to be. That’s less problematic for me than just the lack of logic within the rules of the, why people would do what they’re doing in the first place. I did not understand why Spock would not immediately have told his mother, I’ve been humanized.
Oh, oh God, Sean. I don’t understand why, I don’t understand why the aliens would do to Spock what they did.
Yeah. So, like, I was watching this, my wife was half watching. She was in the kitchen, half watching, doing stuff around the room. And I’m watching that whole episode. And several times, like the, when Amanda beams on the ship and Spock comes in wearing the ski cap.
I kept saying out loud. Why the hell would he do this? Why the hell would he do this? He would just be like in there with his human ears talking to his mom about like, look what happened. He would not be hiding this from her. And then the flip side, when he’s walking T’Pring to her room, the reasoning they gave for why he wouldn’t do it, again, didn’t hold true.
He would have told her. He would not have done what he did. It’s one of those, um, like the, the whole slapstick, you know, Three’s Company things. It’s like if people just talked to each other, none of this would have happened. Yeah. You know what I mean? And so it’s like, it, it, it, it’s. It stretches believability with how much they stretch it, especially this one.
Um, but I think to kind of come full circle to the high level feeling of the episode, the reason that this one to me, it’s a forgettable episode. I’ll never watch it again. Unless I had to for another podcast down the road. It’s like, I will, I’ll never watch this one again. But I don’t hate it. It’s not nails on a chalkboard.
I think it’s part of the reason for that is I was able to kind of like in watching it kind of divorce in my mind typical Star Trek episodes we’ve been watching. And then this, it’s like, oh, we’re in a bottle episode. Let’s just, let’s just wash over me. And the part of the reason I, I kind of half enjoyed it.
was the humor, some of the humor, I thought was, I was belly laughing at Pike. Like there were things that he did in this episode. I actually backed it up and watched it a second time when the husband says, do you have, um, more of that food? And he just goes, And this points at him and turns around and goes to get more.
It is some of the funniest stuff that is, it’s so in character for him. Yeah. He, it’s just like, I wish the whole episode was just him preparing the food and doing the serving. It’s like, it was just so
funny. Um, so when they talk to the interdimensional. When they talk to the interment dimensional beings for the first time, and he goes, it’s like a
customer service rep.
Yeah. Yeah.
He says, hi, he’s loops. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don’t, I don’t dismiss the well done humor and I don’t dismiss the well done performance of the humor. The Spock as a human. Chowing down on bacon for the first time. Um, why do I feel nauseous? Why do I feel queasy? The, there were moments of it that I was, I was laughing at, but I kept stumbling.
Like I couldn’t get past the bad. I’m not talking about bad Star Trek, just bad logic. Like you’re asked to believe that these interdimensional beings would, for whatever reason, decide to heal aliens that they met and would look at two aliens and say, we’ve never seen either of these before, but this one, which we are looking at, we’ve decided is now the template for the other one as well.
Like how does, what logic is that? Like, that, that’s the logic that leads, like, archaeologists to misidentify a Brontosaurus because they took the skull of a different dinosaur and put it on the neck of this one because they just didn’t know any better. And I’m like, interdimensional beings are not going to be able to look at an entity and say, This one’s damaged, and we can see the DNA in it, and we can manipulate it all the ways we want, and we can fix it the way it needs to be because of the way it currently is.
We can fix that. Instead, they’re like, we’re just going to use this other template for some reason. And it feels like that happens again and again, big scale and small scale in the episode. Yeah. Characters make choices to not reveal things so that there can be a comedic moment later. And there’s not enough comedy in Spock picking up a hot pot.
to make it worth it. There’s more here that would have been worth exploring. I kept thinking, what if this had just been a straight up, they want to have the ceremony, and his mother shows up, and her parents show up, and they have to perform this ritual, and you see how important it is to everybody involved, except for Spock, who is wrestling with what do I want.
And you get to see Amanda. Struggling with, why aren’t you taking this more seriously? And as his mother seeing through him, that to me would have been a much better episode of her taking him aside and saying, I don’t think you want to get married. What is happening? And having him have to say, you don’t understand and have that same revelation about how hard it was for her to be the only human on a Vulcan planet.
You could still have that happen, because you could still have the ceremony, you could still have the mind meld, you could still have all those things, and that would have been, that would have resonated in an emotional way, and you could have also had all the humor. Having Vulcan show up, and very flatly say, to Pike, this is not the cooking that we would want, and having the hurt puppy dog moments, you could still have those humorous elements, you could have various aspects of this episode still, In there, but the elements that just feel dated and somehow insulting, like.
Does the mother in law really need to be a bad guy? Does she need to be depicted as a joke in order for us to see the strain on the relationship? She could have been performing it. She could have been written and directed in a way that would have been much more Vulcan like. She didn’t come across as a Vulcan.
That’s the, that’s one of the big things. Like they weren’t operating within the confines of the world and universe they’re supposed to be in. And then you get the whole chapel thing. How is she not Vulcan to you? Everything she’s saying is clearly meant to hurt. She’s clearly operating from a place of, I am poking you.
I am poking you to try and get a rise out of you so I can prove that you are not all that. She’s doing that to everybody around her. She’s browbeaten her husband. She’s got her daughter on the ropes, and she does not like her future son in law. The other Vulcan, who is not a part of this, but is a part of the Chapel storyline, is equally portrayed as being kinda
smarmy towards Chapel like, he’s just like, I’m not going to let you come in here because this is my Vulcan playground as opposed to it being like we’re meant to feel like Chapel gets some kind of vindication on this bad guy who’s being mean to her. Whoa, you read that completely
different wrong from me. I mean, different, in a different way from me.
It was like, we’re supposed to take her He didn’t come across as smarmy. He came across as completely arrogant,
which is Well, that’s what I’m, that’s what I meant. I, I, smarmy is a, is a, is, I didn’t mean smarmy. I didn’t mean smarmy in a way that Okay.
But, but that’s the way they’ve been portrayed in Enterprise.
That’s the way they’ve always been portrayed. is that they have a little bit of an arrogance about them. Logic is the true way forward, all that kind of stuff. So it didn’t strike me. He just struck me as a super Vulcan dude, because he’s got this arrogance of like, here’s this human. Uh, she didn’t even do the writing well.
It’s like, she didn’t even meet the standards we would do for a standard Vulcan. So he was just kind of writing her off. It’s like, that felt very
Vulcan to me. It didn’t feel anything weird. I’m talking performance. I’m talking performance and director. I’m talking about choices.
No, but I am too. We’re talking about the same thing.
You and I, it just resonated with us in very different
ways. But I’m thinking about the JAG officer in the previous episode in the courtroom who is depicted very Vulcan like and is clearly intended to be depicted as he’s got some axe to grind. He is going after people. He is using this as an opportunity to do something.
He’s got, there’s something else going on here. And that depiction worked in a way that I felt like these depictions did not. These were two dimensional cardboard cutout depictions, where we’re supposed to, we are supposed to be able to read the emotions of these characters in a way that does not work in the same way the more nuanced depictions of even back on Enterprise.
When the Vulcans were arrogant, they still had that tone of, we all look and sound the same. We all present ourselves as if we are doing this from a place of nothing but logic. And I didn’t get that from mother in law character. I did not get that from the head of the, of the fellowship. Program. It was a little bit more of a lean into mustache twirling.
So when they get their commumpance, we feel there’s been a vindication. So that’s what I responded to. I did not appreciate. The telegraphing of moments like that by making people instantly unlikable from that kind of cartoonish
depiction. That’s funny, because you and I completely see it a different way.
It’s like, to me, the portrayals on
Enterprise were just like this,
just like this. Like, there was no difference for many of the performance of Vulcans that we had on there. It was like, there was a lot of bubbling emotion under the surface for most of the performances of a lot of the characters where some of them just came across as a little like the despise for humanity was kind of dripping there.
And so it’s like, this felt no different to that, to me than that. So it kind of felt one, the same for the most part. Which is part of the reason why the, uh, science officer didn’t bother me. The mother, I agree with you, the mother, her, she came across as a very angry woman. And it’s like, that was kind of like, that’s not Vulcan.
She’s coming across as just an angry woman, just taking her bitterness out on everybody around her. Where the science guy just seemed, he just was like, that logic, arrogance. Stuff coming through. And yeah, it’s set up so that when he gets his comeuppance, you’re supposed to go, yeah, you go girl, when she puts him in his place.
That, that part didn’t bother me at all. Cause it’s like, it felt very in line with what we’ve seen over all the seasons of Enterprise.
Now we’ll jump to the elephant in the room, which is of course the final scene. In which it is, without, uh, putting too fine a point on it, it’s clear that they are about to have sex.
They kiss, Spock and Nurse Chapel kiss, and then classic rom com sex scene introduction where they just disappear out of the shot and we do not follow them. So we were supposed to connect the dots as they connect their dots. And to go one step back, the final scene between Spock and T’Pring, I, I take it as that is the moment we’re supposed to say, Oh, this is the tension between these two characters.
By the time we get to the original series, this is the, like, they have decided to take a step back because of this moment. I have mixed feelings about that just from a timeline perspective, because that implies that now the original series. Which is, I believe, five years forward in the future. Like, they don’t resolve any of this over a five year span.
I’m like, okay, um, that’s a really early point to put this difficulty into their relationship. Um, unless they’re just planning on saying, yeah, they never talk again until that episode. And he’s effectively conflict avoidant to the point where that many years ago goes by. It also puts then. A spin on the Chapel Spock relationship that I did not know that they would cross, which reframes so much of the original series that I wonder if it works.
I just wonder if it works. I guess that’s the end of my sentence. I guess I wonder if it works. I, I mean, from the point of reframing the original series and the way it does, the original series played with a, she is this longing in the background character who looks at him and this puts it into a very different context.
And I’m just wondering, how did you feel about the context that that closing scene of, oh, they are fully romantically engaged with one another. This is not a will they, won’t they? This is a they did, and we didn’t know it. How did you feel about like, how that connects to the original series? And is that even not even really necessary to think about?
Because this is a new show in a new world where we’re living in the 21st century. And here we are just watching this at home. Today. And why, why am I worried about what it does to the original series? What are your thoughts about that?
I’m split on that. A part of me has the attitude of it doesn’t matter.
It really doesn’t matter if it disconnects a little bit from the original series, who cares? But the flip side of it is I am really eager to get back to the original series and rewatch those episodes. One, because I want to rewatch them, but two, I’m really curious to see what my opinion of that show is with the new context from both discovery.
And, um, Strange New Worlds because this is retconning something, which is really gonna change the perception. So there’s gonna be a weight to every scene that Chapel’s in with Spock that was never there before. So I’m really eager to see, does it hold up? Does it not work? Does it like make it make the new show look bad?
Does it
make the old show better? Like I don’t know. So for me, I’m kind of excited to see those episodes again with this new context. Uh, so for me. I’m totally fine with them doing this, you know, having relationships among main characters on Star Trek. Again, nothing new, Troi and Worf say hello. So it’s like, this is something that’s been done before.
Um, I think people are going to get most riled up because it’s messing with the original series. Um, but for me, I think it might work, but again, who cares if it doesn’t quite align to the original? It’s not going to destroy the original series. The original series is going to, it is what it is. You can love it and enjoy it.
This doesn’t make that any less good or
bad from whatever you think. Yeah. I think that’s where I land as well. No precious children involved in any of this. It is, they should, they should do what they need to do. And I think that my larger reaction to this entire episode is probably born out of, More of disappointment.
As I was watching the episode, I was just disappointed at how bad I felt like it was. And it ended up being in that moment where I’m seeing leaps of logic that just don’t make any sense. And it taints everything that follows after it. It’s hard for me to pull myself back up to a place of, I can enjoy this for what it is.
I can enjoy it within itself because it just The whole thing felt tanked and your ability to look at this and say, the humor here is lifting me up. So the humor here and the performances of these, these people in this circumstance is, is working for me. Um, I wasn’t able to get to that place, but I am curious from our viewers and listeners, which side of that do you land on?
Do you think that this is one that would be better skipped over entirely? Or do you think that there are nuggets in here that are worth looking at? And as far as the
One other thing. There’s, if you enjoy, if you, if you’re like me and you were able to kind of disconnect your brain and just enjoy this as like a standalone thing and just find the humorous moments humorful, like you, you get some laughs from Pike, you get some laughs from Spock.
I did like the way they portrayed the Spock stuff when he’s first, you know, he’s the Going through his emotional thing of like, Oh, he’s getting to enjoy emotions. And then it very quickly becomes very menacing the way he’s overdoing it with everybody. I thought it was pretty funny. And there was an extended scene on the Blu ray.
that was between him and Una in the lounge area. And she’s standing next to him and holds up a little dish of some kind of candy thing. And she takes one, puts one in her mouth. He goes, do you want one? He goes, what is that? He goes, Oh, it’s chewing gum. Chewing gum? Yeah. You just put it,
it freshens your
breath.
It’s a little minty. You just chew it. He’s like, okay. And so he takes one and puts it in and they’re chewing it together. And he’s like, Oh, He goes, oh, and like breathes out. He’s like, oh, that’s, that’s very refreshing. And he said, how is it with these? And he reaches down and picks up a peanut and chucks a peanut in his mouth.
And Una’s going, no, no, no, no, you never do nuts with gum. And he’s like, he starts chewing. He’s like, oh, oh, I can see why. He goes, maybe this will, maybe this will freshen he reaches down and pulls out a little, there’s a little dish of little tiny pickles. And he puts a pickle in his mouth and Una is just going, no, no, what are you doing?
And he puts it in and immediately just goes, I regret that. The scene ends. It was just like a, that in itself is funny. It was a funny moment. It’s like, if you can kind of, in your brain, disconnect the stupid accident that made this a reality, like the whole, oh, they made him wrong and all the other stuff, and you can just enjoy seeing the scene.
For what it is,
I think there’s some fun to be had. We’ll agree to disagree, I guess. Um, it’s not a great episode.
It’s not a great episode. I agree with you on that. We do agree on something.
So let us know in the comments, where do you land on that? And next time we’re going to be talking about Lost in Translation.
I’ll invite you all to jump into the comments. Once again, wrong answers only. What do you think that episode will be about? We’ve already heard, uh, That charades might’ve been about the Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn movie. I wonder if anybody will jump in with a more recent film that fits within the mold of Lost in Translation.
If only I could think of one. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you wanted to remind our viewers and listeners about that you have coming up on your main show?
Uh, I have an episode that is this week about comparing the Tesla solar roof to regular solar panels. And all the hype that came with the solar roof and we’re still not seeing it everywhere.
And why is that? Like, is it, is it actually as good as it says it is? Is going my route with solar panels the right direction? I compare my house to a friend’s house that has a solar roof and why we did what
we did. So check it out. As for me, as I mentioned earlier, my next book is coming out in June, The Sinister Secrets of the Fabulous Nothings.
And if you want to find out more about my other books, you can go to seanferrell. com. You can also go wherever it is you buy your books, including visiting your public library. My books are available everywhere. If you’d like to support the show, please consider leaving a review, subscribing, and sharing with your friends.
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In this episode, we’re gonna talk about
three, three
words or three syllables.
this is not good podcast. This is not a good stop. Stop. We’re not doing this. We’re not doing this .
Alright.