Matt and Sean talk about Kirk's family legacy and the cost of meeting your heroes in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 8, "Orders of Magnitude." Sam and Jim Kirk learn the truth about their father's stalled career. Kirk pulls a bluff any poker player would love. Uhura earns her battlefield promotion. Sean puts it right up there with "Off Hour.”

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro
• 02:13 - Mailbag
• 09:22 - Episode Description
• 09:53 - This Time in History
• 11:53 - Episode Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about. Come on, really? You can do this. And you've been giving us puppets. Yeah, we had a similar conversation a couple weeks ago. We're gonna have it again. Yeah. Cats out of the bag. Welcome everybody, to Trek in Time. This is the podcast that takes a look at Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We're currently in the middle of our original series rewatch, but we've put that on pause as we've moved into strange new worlds. We like to take a look at new shows at the time of broadcast. So once we're done with Strange new Worlds Season 4, we'll return to the original series, finish that up and then move on to the movies and then next gen, and then continue the podcast for the next 20 odd years. Thank you.

Sean Ferrell: Who am I? Sean Ferrell: I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. Matter of fact, I have a horror novel coming out in April of 2027 in the fields we Thirst. Information about that in the description below. It's available for pre order. I hope you'll be interested in checking it out. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He's that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact in our lives. And Matt, what's impacting your life today? Matt Ferrell: What's impacting my life today? Sean, you won't believe this. I forgot to watch this episode until this morning. It's very fresh in my head and I, yeah, I'm very, I'm looking forward to talking about this one for sure.

Mailbag

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I've. I've worked it into my schedule that I watch the episodes on Wednesdays because when I do forget to watch it, I still have a day because there was a schedule a while ago where I would just watch it the morning of. And I was like, that'll be great. And there were a few too many times where I was just like, oiky coykey, I can't go to work. I gotta watch this episode. So. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, hoiky koiki is what I yell out when I realize that. So today we're going to be talking about orders of magnitude. This is the eighth episode of the fourth season of Strange New Worlds. It was Originally broadcast on September 10, 2026. We'll also be talking about what was going on in the world at the time of original broadcast. But before we get into that, we always like to visit the mailbag, see what you've had to say about previous episodes. Matt, what did you find for us this week? Matt Ferrell: We we have a bunch of ones from the episode off hour. The episode. We like this one. We liked it. Comments like from Happy Flappy Farm. Great episode. Totally agree. But it bothers me that Nurse Chapel wasn't wearing goggles or some kind of eye protection and gloves. My suspension of disbelief was pushed too far with that detail. I was gonna say sometimes there are little details in a show that you're watching and you're totally into the show, but there's something ridiculously small that just completely pulls you out. And I can completely understand that. Sean Ferrell: And that's always been the case with Star Tre. Whenever there's been any kind of scene where it's just like a doctor saying like we're going to have to do this surgery and it's really tricky. And then they cut to it and it's just McCoy with a pepper shaker going and it's just like, okay, how about adding like, could somebody bring me some scrubs? Just a little thing like that goes a long way.

Matt Ferrell: And then we had some more comments. There was a lot of people that seriously, they loved this episode. We had comments like Mark Loveless writing off hour was one of the best Star Trek episodes regardless of series. Amazing. This is what fans, true, deep fans of Star Trek want to see. Yes, Mark, agree 1,000%. And on that same note, we have Kevin Jelick who wrote in and said this was my favorite episode of the season. But I have liked all of the episodes, including the gimmick episodes, some more than others. Each of the stories had character development for at least one of the characters and move them along to where they need to be. And if you look past the way they show it and focus on how the character is evolving rather than getting caught up in the gimmick. I think episodes eight and 10, which we're talking about today, number eight, are also really strong episodes this season, so I hope you enjoy those as well. Spoiler I like this one a lot. Okay, last comment from Babarudra. I suggested a Stargate show months ago. Let's get this going. Just a comment on your editing. I'm reading this one because I feel this one it seems like you went further than usual in your silence removal. I don't feel like it was ever quite as jarring as it was today. And before I go on the rest of the comment, yes, Baba Rudra, I used a feature. We recorded this in Riverside and Riverside has some built in editing tools and I Decided to tick one of the boxes on the editing helper that was remove ums and uhs. I will never tick that box again because I was basically undoing the damage of that for most of the edit. So, yeah, things were cut a little too aggressively. So I won't be using that ever again.

Sean Ferrell: I wanted to mention to you that I ended up opening up, I think that episode just like I was on the page with our videos and that episode started playing and when I heard my voice, I was like, why do I sound like I'm talking so fast? It sounded a little sped up. Including and this. I mean, classic. Like I don't sound in a recording the way I sound in my head. I didn't. But I think my voice was a little higher than it actually is. I don't know that I sound as squeaky as I did.

Matt Ferrell: Okay. No, no, no. It was not sped up or anything like that. It was literally just like, you know, hey, have pauses in the way you talk. Those pauses were like just all gone. And it was just like there was like no breaths. It was just one sentence running into the next one. It's very aggressive. So I won't be doing that. So going on Bob Rouge's comment, I agree that this was a great episode. One thing I've considered about the gimmicky episodes in prior series, Star Trek has toyed with strange, weird themes to reach other parts of the family audience. Maybe the gimmicks were part of them trying to do that. As has been said in shorter seasons, it wastes episodes for those of us wanting the story to move forward. But they probably do want to expand who watches. You've mentioned in the past how very Doctor who this season has seemed. I have to take your word on that. I watched the Doctor who up until Peter Davidson. I think I watched an episode or two during David Tennant and was like, what the ever loving F was this? And refuse to watch more. But apparently many absolutely love the newer shows. Star Trek may touch on what we love or loved about Star Trek, but it'll probably eventually become a show. We ask what the ever loving F is this. I really like this comment from Bob Arudra because it does touch on something I think is important. Tastes change over time. People's tastes in the 1960s were very different from where they are today. So Star Trek has always evolved. Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, Voyager were of a theme and a style of that era that was very different from the original series and very different from what we're seeing today. So things have to evolve and change. So we can't, like, if you're, if you're a fan of the original series, you're going to hate the latest stuff because it's so radically different.

But we have to be a little more accepting of let them try things. But as we've talked about before, a lot of these things have that. We just wanted to do stuff that was fun for us and not taking Star Trek fans into account. And you can feel that jarring back and forth with episodes like we're about to talk about today. So I agree with Bobber Bridger though. It's a good point to keep in mind.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I think that is a very good point. And I also think that that's the tension in this podcast, which is we are trying to assess a thing that is very much of this moment and include the context of the moment in our assessment. And that's very, very hard to do. We have an easier time analyzing, I think the older programs and that will include like Next Gen and Deep Space Nine and Voyager because enough time has passed that we're going to really be able to look at them as historical documents. And looking back at the era that they were made in is also at a distance. And right now we're talking about these programs in a way that there's a trick to it. And as you said, yeah, you, the taste of the moment may be different and you and I may be those middle aged guys standing there saying who took my soup and changed the recipe? That's not right. And like, but the people who make soup are like, no, everybody likes tarragon. Now we gotta add tarragon to the soup. And so it's, it's a little bit of. I, I don't think you and I have tread into get off of my lawn territory yet. And I don't think our viewers and listeners are there either. But there is also the, the, the pullback I think that you and I are looking for, I know I'm looking for it is, it should still be Star Trek. In some of the episodes. Like in today's discussion, I think we're going to be saying like, yeah, you know what Star Trek is, but some of, some of the other ones, maybe you're not selling enough Trek in your adventure. So thank you everybody for those comments. We love getting them and we look forward to seeing what you have to say about this episode as well. So that noise you hear those lights you see flashing. No, it's not me falling in love. It's too Late for that. That's the read alert. It's time for Matt to read the Memory Alpha description.

Episode Description

Matt Ferrell: James Kirk is embroiled in politics of career advancement involving an admiral and Kirk's father.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: So as I mentioned at the top of the episode, this episode, episode eight of season four, directed by Sharon Lewis, written by Alan B. McElroy, originally broadcast on September 10, 2026. And if you're wondering what the world was like at the time of original broadcast, well, it's going to seem very familiar because it was what, three weeks ago? That's right. What were you singing along to, Matt? Why, yes, it was. Choosing Texas by Ella Langley. Take it away, Matt. I can't tell you how many times I've watched the video for Choosing Texas, but I can tell you how much I enjoy hearing my brother sing it. And at the movies, guess what, Matt? It's the last time you'll be able to say this was the number one film. That's right, Spider Man, Brand New Day was the number one film as it became one of the most successful movies ever to hit the box office. Doing something that I will be honest, I didn't think many movies would be able to do anymore. Hold that number one spot and make, holy cow, a lot of money. And on television, I won't belabor this. It's tricky to know what streaming numbers are because the companies that put out these products on television don't want to share. So instead, I'm looking at what's recently released and appearing to be popular according to Rotten Tomatoes. And this week, one of the top rated shows according to their statistics, both critically and with fans, is Netflix's east of Eden. This is a seven episode limited series adapted by Zoe Kazan. It's of John Steinbeck's 1952 novel. It premiered on October 1, 2026. It stars Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbott. It's a multi generational drama exploring themes of good and evil, free will and redemption. And in the news on the New York Times on this day in history, the top story, dueling court rulings leave Missouri's congressional races in chaos.

After losing in two courts and winning in another Missouri officials said they planned to forge ahead with using a congressional map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans. Oh, why would any of that matter? You wonder, Matt? Why would any of that matter? On now to our discussion about this episode, Orders of Magnitude. I feel like I've already kind of like let the cat out of the bag. So I'm going to invite you, Matt, to jump in on this one. What were your feelings overall about this one? And after you share that, what do you think was the biggest leverage point to make you feel that way?

Episode Discussion

Matt Ferrell: Overall, I thought this was a just dynamite episode, but I grew into it. Like, when it started, I had a little bit of a feeling of Ruh Roh because it was. You knew exactly where it was going to go. Because, you know, like, there's certain tropes that Star Trek deals with a lot, and this is one of them. Here comes an admiral that takes charge of the ship and is going to go flying off in the distance and it's going to clearly be not what he seems. So it was kind of like very obvious what it was going to be. But even though I had that kind of a feeling, I was still into it because I was like, oh, this is Star Trek. This is what I'm here for. Even if it's a trope, I know this is gonna be fine. And midway in, I was in John, I was so in, so deep into this episode, I was like, this is. It makes me angry again. They can do it. They know Star Trek and they know how to do good storytelling. And it's like, it doesn't have to be storytelling, Star Trek to be good storytelling. This was just good storytelling. It had the A plot and the B plot were tense and exciting and dissimilar themes around just the whole idea of following orders. Like, what does it mean to follow orders? What's ethical orders? What does it mean to be, can you disobey? Like, is it okay to disobey? And I kept flashing to, like, what we've been going through in modern life right now with the Democrats putting out those videos about you do not have to follow illegal orders. And then the big furor from the Republicans of like, how dare you say that? Which is like, what you care for illegal orders. You have a right to be able to say no. It's like this episode, is that so. It felt very of the moment for the type of story they were telling. It felt very current. It felt like it had something to say. And both plot lines were struggling with this from. In very different ways.

And it pushed things forward in such a Star Trek y way with the characters. Kirk. Sean Ferrell: Kirk. Matt Ferrell: Sean? Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Why does it feel like Star Trek? You don't get more Star Trek than dealing with Kirk and his father and his father's history and how Kirk is who he is and his brother and like the whole family relationship of who they are and how they. How they kind of see themselves in the Tapestry of Starfleet and as family and what that legacy means and how it informs who they see themselves as that father son relationship, and how both of them kind of hate their father for how absent he was. And then once they kind of understand his father's, their father's perspective, it changes everything. And I was just like, oh, this is, this is just dynamite stuff for, for Kirk to evolve into who we know he is. Like, especially when we. That previous episode where they showed how he screwed up so badly and it's haunting him here. He's making a choice to disobey orders, to do what's right and morally justified. And it's who he is. It's showing who he becomes as a captain. And for me, the whole thing at the end with that one line for me, where he rigged the phasers to make the ship explode. And the Admiral's like, he's got to be bluffing. He's got to be bluffing. At the very end, he looks at Ihura and goes, the security officer says, I was bluffing. And I was like, that's so Kirk. The writers know these characters so well, is that Kirk is a bluffer, he's a poker player, and he does that constantly. And here he is, he's doing it. It's so Star Trek, the whole thing. So you've got ethical dilemma, an ethical moral dilemma at Star Trek, and then there's action and tension and thrilling aspects wrapped around that ethical dilemma for people to talk about it, to be able to have action around it. To me, that's Star Trek and that's why it just like ticked all the boxes.

Sean Ferrell: I, I agree with everything you've just said and I can't agree enough with this episode. It just, it felt like it was operating at the level of is it presenting a moral dilemma in a way that allows for room for debate from both sides? Is it operating from a place where it's driving character? Is it driving character about these characters that are so beloved and well known in a way that feels true to those characters? Is it of the now and the past? Is it Star Trek? And is it also, for lack of a better phrasing, when Star Trek is good, it's good in the way that the best things are good. This, I think, is operating on all those levels where it's operating by raising questions about our current dilemma of leadership in this country, leadership around the world. You mentioned, you know, when is it okay to not follow orders? I would also say another theme here is how do you recognize the threat, how do you recognize the enemy? When is it okay to say, I know innocence will be hurt, but it's okay because in this moment the goal is more important than those innocents. This season has toyed with the phrase the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one or the few. It has played with that multiple times, including in a jokey moment in the puppet episode. Like that one didn't feel earned in this episode. I feel like this episode did a great job of earning all of its self referential moments while also being above all those moments. I think McElroy, who wrote this episode, did a terrific job of wrangling together all these different threads, including referencing back to some of the best of original Trek.

This episode hearkens back to time Travel episode where McCoy gets poisoned by that hypo spray because the medicine that they're using Mbenga uses on Kirk and that they end up he ends up using on the Admiral is The medicine that McCoy gets tainted with and ends up becoming paranoid and jumping through the time portal. So like, okay, they've referenced that episode. They also represent they referenced the episode with the planet killing doomsday machine because in that one you have a commodore who comes in and says, I'm commandeering the ship. I'm taking it out to fight this thing. And it is a game of patient waiting by Spock, waiting for the opportunity to invoke, taking command in exactly the way that this episode references. This episode references the Admiral invoking the rule that allows him to destroy all life on the planet. Kirk does that in an episode in the original series. So they're invoking the exact same order. 24 where it's this, oh boy, it's a heavy hitting order and you don't do it lightly. Kirk himself does that in original series episode. This episode invokes the the very nature of the relationship between Kirk and his son. In Star Trek 2 and Star Trek III, when you have Sam, his brother, say, now that you're a father, you get to understand that sometimes fathers aren't what we wish they were. And immediately I flashed forward to Kirk meeting his son and his son's response is like, you're not the man I wish I had in my life. It is so Trek this episode. From all the reasons you gave around moral dilemmas and being of the time and talking about heavy issues in a way that allows you to be entertained and also debate internally. One of the strengths of this, I think is the fact that again referencing older episodes, this episode references balance of terror in the very threat that they are chasing. This is the Romulans. They show the map where it is.

Here's the pursuit of this craft that we can't see. It is near Romulan space, in balance of terror. When again, a ship shows up. It's destroying colonies. We see in that episode Kirk doggedly go toe to toe with that commander, trying to hunt him down to get him to stop this from happening. And this episode, like all the Best of Strange New Worlds, where you and I have talked about them, about how it reframes some of the moments in the original series in ways that still feels Trek. As I was watching this one, I was like, this is now reframing his dogged pursuit because he is looking at this as I bear some responsibility. This is the ship that got away. I bear some responsibility for them doing what they've done more recently because I played a part in them escaping in the past. And I was just like, holy cow. And this admiral, the way he's playing all of this for. For personal gain, personal need. He. He ruined a man's career because he felt like he was owed that victory. He was owed that battle. And then Sam and Jim Kirk both discovered that their father was a man who did not make any of that personal and kept doing the job he found so important, even as his career permanently stalled out and he was given new assignment after new assignment after new assignment simply to keep him from returning home. So the Admiral, in an attempt to vindicate his own need about his career, effectively harmed another person's family. And now in this moment, he is saying, my family is so important that you should all let me do whatever I want to get revenge. It is an amazing. This is just like I was watching this and just like by the time. And I agree with you completely, at the very beginning of the episode, it took about 10 minutes for me to buy in. I found myself in the first 10 minutes being like, okay, I see what they're doing here. I don't know if it's going to work out.

And by the end of it, I was like, boy, did it work out. This was great. I loved it. I loved it, loved it.

Matt Ferrell: When I add one more thing where you were rattling off all the things that are like Trekkie to you, that are referencing something I want to add, Kobayashi Maru, with Kirk, not only is a pokey poker player and he bluffs. He doesn't believe in the no win scenario. What does he do in this episode? He bluffs, but he plays everybody and he drugs the admiral to get him to go over the top. He's not gonna let this happen by chance. He's not gonna let it. Like, maybe he won't push it too far. I'm going to put him in a scenario where he will have to go too far. I'm going to drug him. He's doing what he did for the Kobayashi Maru, where he cheated. He cheated to beat it. He's the only person that beat it. And he won because he cheated. And here he is essentially cheating. So he's. He's doing exactly what his character has always done, but it's in this new, unique, younger, more brash way of way he's doing it. And it's just. I just love it. I love the nuance they brought out of this. But I also want to circle over to Uhura. I love action Uhura. I love Take Charge Uhura. I love seeing her be super awesome and smart and competent, thinking 10 steps ahead where she's clearly even surprised her colleagues about the way she's like, I'm the communications officer, I can help you. Me, as a fan, I'm watching. I'm like, oh, she's going to try to double cross them. But how's she going to double cross them? I'm curious how she's going to do this. I thought it was really fun to see her doing this kind of against type. It didn't look like it was planned, like the way it was filmed and told. It was like she was just gonna do this. And the captain and everybody else was like, what is happening right now? I love that, that she was willing to take that risk and put herself into danger to do something, I don't know, heroic. Yeah.

So it's like, it was really cool to see how she played that off and how she fought her way out of it, but thought her way out of it as well. So I just. Yeah, I love the B storyline as well. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, the B storyline worked. I thought it was great that it was. At no point did they know that the Enterprise was gone. I thought that was great. It was just like, we are. We are stuck here. We don't know why they're not responding. Our deadline passed. I don't know why they're not showing up. They should have by now, but that means we have to get out of this. I loved that Hemmer was brought up by Uhura in talking with the Andorian and saying, like, I knew an Andorian and I learned a lot from him and I know this and puts it at his feet like you're not living with honor. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. And the entire turn of shocking everybody and then it turning into an action sequence. I was like, boy, they really figured out a balance here by giving us actiony storytelling as the B plot, giving us the full philosophical conundrum as the A plot falls right into a pattern that works so well for Trek. It's, you know, you get the best of both worlds, no pun intended.

Matt Ferrell: But the B plot is still dealing with that same theme of, for me, that I was finding around the following orders. What's an ethical order? It's like, here's Uhura disobeying what the captain had just said. We're gonna not give them anything. And she's just on her own going like, I will help you. Which makes it look like to her colleagues that she's about to sell out. And the whole debate between her and the Andorian around what's on her, and he throws it right back in her face. You're willing to give up everything, what you stand for to help your friends. It's like. Like, who are you to be lecturing me? And I thought that was a great back and forth between them. And it was dealing with the same kind of thematic point in a very different way. And I thought. I really enjoyed that.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, there was one element. There were two things about the Uhura storyline that stood out to me. One I really liked and one I didn't like. The one I didn't like was I never, in this season, bought into her mentorship of the Vulcan as being so important to her. It came across as a little bit like a little melodramatic and a little bit like, why does this feel like it's something from a high school TV show about high school students and somebody won't be their friend and. And she feels wounded and feels an ownership of this other person's life in a way that just didn't feel like it made any sense. I felt like the writing around that throughout the entire season felt weak. So having that come to an end in this episode, I didn't feel like the writing in this moment was great. But I was also relieved that, okay, that storyline is over. The thing I really liked was her battlefield promotion being taken, you know, without knowing that that was coming. Being given a very quiet moment where it's just like, I'm giving you this thing. Congratulations, you did a really great job. How that kind of feels like for her as a character, she started the series as The. I am literally fresh out of the Academy. I don't know what I'm going to do yet. And to have that. This episode, have that moment where she steps into the rank that we're accustomed to seeing her at in the original series, felt really, really good. Strangely, I saw a comment in Reddit which was about her as a character, and somebody was like, does it break anybody else's heart that canonically, Uhura has that original series episode where her mind gets wiped and she has to relearn being a person. And it's got the entire learning how to read with the help of the computer, the library computer and all of that. And I didn't respond on Reddit, but. And I didn't really read any of the responses that were on Reddit.

I just thought to myself, that's the beautiful thing about Headcanon is you can literally just be like, no, that didn't happen. That episode didn't happen. So, like, because when we hold on to canon and we say, like, oh, but they're ignoring the fact that Kirk said X, Y, or Z or Spock, and Kirk once referenced A, B, or C. Yeah, there's those moments of fan debate where you're like, okay, how are the. How are the creators dealing with that? But this. This moment for Uhura where, yeah, canonically that's supposed to happen, but that was just a bad moment in an episode that shouldn't have taken place. It was something that was happening in the 1960s that they were just like, yeah, we're going to do this to this character without any expectation that there would be 60 years later, fans like you and me saying, like, but how do we rectify that? She's technically not the same person. She's the same person. Uhura's great. They're doing a great job with her in this series. And it's by doing such a good job with her in this series, they are doing great. Respectful. And elevating of the character for the original series as well. It really is doing. It's sad to me that Nichelle Nichols is gone to not see what they've done with this character now because really. So good. So good. I also want to point out, Admiral, in this episode, I really like. I thought that they crafted out for one episode, they crafted out a character who reminded me of the Commodore from the Doomsday Machine episode where it's shows up, says, okay, I'm in charge, but you very quickly get a sense of who he is as a character. You get us, like, him walking in and everybody being like, this is the guy. This is our hero. This is the guy we all look up to. Kind of giving us a moment of, oh, this is how people in Next Generation talk about Kirk. Like, oh, Kirk. Like, he's like, he set.

He set the precedent that we all try to live up to. And here are these characters, including Kirk, saying, like, oh, you're the guy. And then to watch the simplicity of the cliche of never meet your heroes play out, it's a real simple thing to do. And it just plays so beautifully in this episode because this character, he's complex. He is. At moments, you can see he's a really good commander. He is in some ways, in moments, he is mentoring, he is patient. He says things to people like. Like, he. He reprimands Kirk for having debated him on the bridge. Now, that's a matter of captain style. Yeah, he does it in private. He doesn't call him out in public. I'm reminded of in the Next Gen episode when Jellico comes in and is given the captain seat. And nobody on the Enterprise can understand why. Why has Kirk. Why has Picard been reassigned? Where is Picard? What is happening? And Picard is off having his there are four lights moment. Jellico comes in and is just like, there are things about this that I don't like. I don't like a three rotation schedule. I prefer a four. I think that Troy should be wearing a uniform. I think there are things about this ship that are maybe a little sloppy, and I'm going to tighten them up. And people are just like, who does this guy think he is? He's just a different captain. By the end of that episode, you're left with the, oh, he leaves. And you're like, we're not supposed to hate him. And this guy has humanity written all over him.

And I really like the depth of this character. Matt Ferrell: Oh, I do, too. The one thing. I mean, obviously he's reflective of some of the things we're seeing in our society today. Yeah, maybe I'm reading into it. I don't think I am. But there is. But they don't present him in a mustache twirling. Oh, he's the baddie that you're just going to love to hate. It's a. He's a very complex human being that clearly has good sides to him, good aspects, and you can understand why he got to be a captain and all that kind of stuff. And even though there's this other thing that's swirling around him that's a he didn't earn his admiralship in the way we think he did. He's still a complex, likable, understandable character once you start to understand where he's coming from. So I really did like that they gave him depth and didn't just make him the evil Admiral that comes in and starts throwing things around.

Sean Ferrell: And I think it is likely that if he had gotten his way, if he had used the Enterprise to destroy the life on the planet, I think it is likely that within the context of the program, the events that led up to that would have been heavily debated within Starfleet about whether or not he made the right call. Because as they reveal, one of the reasons that he may have been given his admiralty is to get him out of command. Because people higher up were like, we needed a hero for this war. We got a hero out of him. To now judge him according to criteria that didn't help the war effort. Maybe we shouldn't do that. So let's just get him out of command and we'll put him into an admiral seat. The episode does a pretty good job of saying, history would have judged this guy. He would have been painted a little bit differently after doing what he wanted to do, and maybe even have borne the consequences of doing something that may have been deemed as illegal in that moment. So I think it leaves it up for debate. Like his. His actions are debatable. And the episode lets you know that his episodes are his. His actions are debatable. Without saying, like you said, he's not mustache twirling. They give you the mustache twirling villain in this one in a really nice way. In the Andorian on the planet who is clearly like, I'm going to steal your ship now. Thank you. Like, like all of that is played out as. It's like a balancing act in the episode to say, like, yeah, this is what pure villainy looks like. This is what complexity looks like. And what does complexity bear? Complexity bears the. All the things we talked about.

When is it okay to follow an order? When is it not? How do you recognize the enemy? What do you do if the enemy is using the innocent as a shield? How do you recognize your moral responsibility to maybe let the bad guy go simply because you need to be the good guy? Somebody needs to be the good guy. Somebody needs to stand up. And sometimes that means making the hard decision not to act, as opposed to damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. So I think this episode does all of that so well. We've talked about this in previous episodes. I don't want to go back and relitigate the boy. They can do this. Why don't they do it all the time? Like, we've talked about it and we've talked about it, and I think that this episode and our analysis of it feels like we've said all of that already. So I would just say, like, this is one of those episodes of Strange New Worlds that I would happily rewatch. And I would happily rewatch. I'm going to be visiting Matt over this weekend and maybe I can convince him that we watch this episode on his giant television screen, which is literally the size of a wall. Like this. This, to me, felt like a fun episode to rewatch and to rewatch again, like all of the best ones, because this one for me was right up there with, with off hour. Like, boy, when they, when they hit, when they get a hit, they knock it out of the park. Yeah, they do such a great job. So viewers, listeners, do agree with us. I hope you do, but if you don't, we'd love to hear why. Like, let us know in the comments. Even those of you who might say like, ah, this one didn't do it for me because of these reasons, jump into the comments. Let us know. As always, liking subscribing, sharing with your friends, commenting. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime Show.

You can click the Join button there. Not only does it allow you to throw coins at our heads, but but it also makes you an Ensign, which means you'll be signed up for our spinoff podcast, out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about the gimmick episode that finally lands in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 7, "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass." Trelane traps the crew inside a soap opera, and only Pike knows something is wrong. Matt calls it a breath of fresh air after the puppets. Sean gives it a C plus and pitches the second draft he wishes they'd made.

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro
• 02:34 - Mailbag
• 05:12 - Episode Description
• 05:45 - This Time in History
• 07:51 - Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're going to talk about what to do when you've already made your point. Do you want to keep belaboring it? Do you want to keep going over and over and over it again? Do you want to really, like, if you've made your point, do you want to go find a really big stick and just like beat that dead horse? Like, when you've made your point, what do you do after you've made your point? That's what we're going to talk about today on Trek in Time. Welcome everybody, to Trek in Time. This is of course, the podcast that takes a look at Star Trek in chronological stardate order. Normally we watch all of Star Trek, as I just said, in chronological stardate order. But when new programs are made available, like Strange New Worlds, we're putting a pause on that rewatch. We're going to watch season four of Strange New Worlds right now and then we're going to jump back into the chronological viewing, which will mean the last, I think, five episodes of the original series. And from there jump into the movies. Next Generation, Deep Space nine. And then 17 years from now, they'll probably make more new stuff. So we'll still be making episodes. But anyway, you're going to watch us age in real time. We're also going to talk about the world at the time original broadcast. So for today's episode, we're going to be talking about, well, basically current events. Today's episode, like Chronatons through the Hourglass, directed by Anna Dacoza, written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wilkoff. This episode dropped on September 3, 2026. So we're going to talk about that date in history, even though we can probably all look back at the calendar and remember exactly what we were doing. I know I can and I know my co host can. But first, who am I and who is my co host? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror.

As a matter of fact, I have a new horror novel coming out in April of 2027. My God, how did we reach 2027? Yeah, that sounds remarkable. It's called in the Fields We Thirst. It's a horror novel set in World War I. I hope people will be interested in checking that out. I will be releasing more information as it becomes available. It is available for pre order now if you're interested. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a Look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, that's a lot of words out of my face. How are you today? Matt Ferrell: I'm doing just fine. Excited. Excited to talk about this episode. Sean, got many thoughts. I'm sure you do too, as you made it very clear in the opening of the episode how you feel. Did you pick up on a theme? Sean Ferrell: We'll talk about that. Matt Ferrell: Pick up on a theme there, Sean. Sean Ferrell: Picked up on a theme. Well, before we get into that discussion, we always like to visit the mailbag, hear what you've had to say about our previous episodes. There's been some weird timey wimey stuff over the past. It's been a couple of months of timey wimey stuff. Not quite sure what it is about our recording schedule that keeps hitting these gaps where we're talking, but you haven't watched the new episode yet, so we don't have comments. But because we didn't have comments last week or the week before, I think we should have comments now. What have you found for us this week, Matt? Matt Ferrell: We got comments. This was from episode 242, the Off Hour, the puppet episode. Sean Ferrell: Boy. Okay, I'm looking forward to this.

Mailbag

Matt Ferrell: So yeah, it was pretty universal. One of the first comments I wanted to highlight was from RH1962 hello. And in the scheme of the season, I could not watch another gimmick episode. There were a lot of comments along those lines, Sean. Yeah, and then there was Scudrew, who kind of like built on that by saying this episode was a waste of airtime and funding for the show. Like Matt says, on its own it was funny and clever and fun, but in the context of this season and series, it was just dumb. Having it all be a dream at the end just made it essentially pointless for me. It's like the clip show at the end of season two of Next Generation, Shades of Gray. I really love the Orions in this though, and I'm glad that we are seeing more and more about them. If that wasn't all made up by Spock's brain as well. Because was that a dream or was that real? And then finally also, why did everyone get their own puppet except Pelia? She looked exactly the same as she always does with a little tongue out emoji. Well done, Scooteroo. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, well done, Scooteroo. Yeah, agree with both, both of those very much. Matt Ferrell: And Pale Ghost 69 wrote, on the bright side, the episode has brought back a running bit that we dropped since Enterprise ended. Sean Ferrell: Rewrite Star Trek, sadly. Yeah, it's something that Matt and I don't clamor to do, but we sometimes fall into that trap. And yeah, this episode, this season of strange new worlds, sadly, has invited quite a bit of that.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. And finally, wrong answers only. Mark Loveless about the episode plot of off hour. The crew gets some highly needed time off and decides to form a dance troupe and perform a dance. They use every single 90s sitcom cliche as plot points. However, at the end of the episode, Yahura wakes up because it was all a dream. She relays this dream to Chapel and Chapel responds with, well, at least everyone wasn't puppets. Sean Ferrell: I mean, Mark, sadly, in this season, that could be an episode. Yeah, okay. Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I know. Sean Ferrell: Thank you everybody for those comments. We really do appreciate it. Make sure to keep them coming. And now those flashing lights. You see the, the coughing you hear? No, that's an alert. It's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Memory Alpha description. As I've mentioned before, Memory Alpha cuts right to the chase. No fluff, no fuss. Matt Ferrell: Trelane renders Pike's World into the style of ancient soap operas, providing a therapeutic framework for reflection and self examination. Sean Ferrell: That's right folks, you heard it here first. Soap operas, finally. Matt Ferrell: So you've been claiming. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, you've been asking, you've been demanding. Well, they finally supplied it on September 3, 2026. And what was the world like at the time of that broadcast? Well, Matt, as always, I don't have to tell you what you were listening to and learning to sing by heart as well as the original artist. That's right, it was Ariana Grande's hate that I made you love me. Take it away. Matt, as always, if you close your eyes, you'd swear it was Ariana. Matt, any guesses, what was the number one box office film in the United States this week of September 3, 2026? Matt Ferrell: Probably Spider Man.

Today’s Discussion

Sean Ferrell: As a matter of fact, it was Spider man, which continued its march to becoming one of the most profitable movies that's ever been made. Brand New Day was still in the number one spot. And on television. I said it before, I'll say it again. They make finding out what's the most popular streaming show extremely difficult to find. So instead I'm just looking at, well, what sorts of programs released around now that are turning out to be popular? Well right now, one of the more popular new releases, it's season 13 of American Horror Story. The 13th season of this anthology television series for focuses on a character who suffers From. You guessed it. Let me try and say this word completely. Suffers from triskedekophobia. Triskaidekaphobia. I believe that's the pronunciation of want to guess, Matt, what's that? The fear of. Matt Ferrell: No idea. Sean Ferrell: The number 13. So a little meta humor where the character is beset upon by eerie residents in a building who are characters from the previous 12 seasons of the series. So having a little meta fun. And in the news on this Day in History, Sept. 3, 2026, front page of the New York Times included this article. The Trump administration begins blitz to find elusive voter fraud ahead of midterms. It is an ongoing pursuit of the supposed election shenanigans that took place in 2020 and 2024. Yeah. Yes, that's right. They're claiming that there were election shenanigans in an election that they won. You figure it out. So on now to our discussion about this week's episode. Like chronatons through an hourglass. Matt, question for you. Were you conscious of the title of the episode before you watched it? Matt Ferrell: Not when I. Not when I watched it.

Sean Ferrell: Okay. I was. And my immediate assumption was gimmick episode, where it's going to be a soap opera. I. I think I will let a certain cat out of a certain bag, and I will release said cat by asking you a question. Do you think we. We have already had a punching bag. I mean, for lack of a better metaphor, I said I was gonna let a cat out of the bag. I feel like we have been beating the crap out of a bag full of cats for weeks now as we keep going back to the gimmick episodes aren't really landing. And I think it was last week. We talked about another episode that did land well. And one of the things that came up in our discussion was if you are effectively making fan fiction, you're doing something which is potentially leaning more into the fun, gimmicky premise as opposed to something that's moving the needle on character development. Do you think that this episode, which I fully label as a gimmick episode and fully say not. If this was a rewatch, you know, suggestion for the season, this would be an episode that I would say, skip it. But do you think that this one actually moved the needle on character development a little bit? Because it doesn't feel like it did what the puppet episode did. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that. How this episode landed for you overall before we talk about any particular.

Matt Ferrell: This is 100% a gimmick episode. But unlike the Other gimmick episodes. This one still felt very Star Trek to me. It still had characters at the centerpiece. It still had some character development. Maybe not as fully fleshed out as the last episode, but it was there. There was character development happening. So for me, I think you're much. Just from your tone, sounds like you're really sour on this one. For me, I thought this episode was fine. It was fine, like middle of the road. Because what this episode reminded me of, Sean, was pick any Q episode from Next Generation. I am not a merry man. You know what I mean? It was the Robin Hood episode. It's like that was a goofball, weird Q episode that is charming and fun and it's very Star Trek. And this one is charming and fun and still feels very Star Trek. I agree with you from your opening, it beats a dead horse with the gimmick. The let's just have fun with the soap opera aspect of it with very little character development for a good 10 minutes where I'm like, can you. Could you get moving forward, please? Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: And it starts to move forward again and I'm like, here we go. Okay, here you go, guys. You're getting your traction. It's like wheels spinning out in a car. And it was a smoke billowing out for about 10 minutes and then finally the car started to slowly move forward. And I was like, thank you. Thank you. You're moving forward again. Good, good. Keep going. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: So that's kind of my high level overview of this episode.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. I land in similar terrain. I'm not. I'm not overly sour on it. I do think, like a. If this makes any sense, it's a good bad episode. It's an episode that you could say, like we've had with the original series in our rewatch as we entered season three. I said, these episodes are not great, but I'm amazed at how many of my favorite scenes are from some of these episodes. And I felt like this one was hitting that territory where the problems with it. And this is a weird thing about this episode in particular, it feels like some of the gimmick episodes have suffered from start to finish from one major failing they don't talk about. There's no character depth whatsoever. And it's just like, plot, plot, plot, or they wiped it all away with a dream and none of it was real. Like, one big symptom is the problem of the episode. This one suffers from a lot of little conflicting problems. Like, it feels like they reveal the solution to the dilemma in the first act. They tell us right away, oh yeah, the only way to get out of here is to actually play through the soap opera scenarios. So then we know that's, that's what they have to do. They have to play through the scenarios. They tell us right away, Trillion is just like head scratchy. I don't know why you're the only one who's not affected by my having snapped my fingers and made this reality. So. So you're gonna have to go along with the ride. And I'm like, why are they revealing these elements this way so early in the episode? Instead of using it like catnip to get us to like, get into the episode and say, like, why is he the only one who's not affected by this thing? Okay, we have this soap opera scenario the moment they've revealed, ah, Captain pike, you are the only one who is legitimately facing a challenge.

Anytime they cut away to anybody else, it feels like wasted energy because all it is then is we're supposed to enjoy the camera trickery, we're supposed to enjoy the cameo of a well known soap opera actress. We're supposed to enjoy the fuzzy focus. We're supposed to like, they, they change the aspect ratio on the screen. So it's like all these little things that are supposed to make it look and feel like a soap opera or. Well, that's not enough when I know that the only character who's legitimately facing a challenge is Captain Pike. And then despite the fact that they released too much information at the beginning, they've withheld way too much information until the end in the form of, oh, it's about his relationship to a daughter figure. And he had that entire lived experience from that one episode where it was him and his love partner having the life they would never have together. And it goes back to the same sort of alternate history we've seen from some great Trek episodes. So hearkening back to that, I was like, that's great. What a great thing to hearken back to. To hearken back to a relationship to the, the episode centered so much about his relationship to the woman he loved that the daughter who was a part of that was kind of a secondary consideration. She was just part of the set dressing to a large degree in the background behind that. To foreground that daughter in this way was really, I, I was surprised by it. I was thrilled that that's where they were headed with it. And I thought by the end of it, like, they really, they did move a needle here. They had a really nice. And for that actor, for Anson Mount to have that moment where he does go to the therapist. We've never seen the Counselor on the ship, so now they've endorsed that. That actress who's the soap opera actress is legitimately a character on the ship. I liked that. I liked him going in.

I liked him breaking down. I liked him going through grief. There is a whole. A whole world of storytelling around that. And it just felt like, wow, you. You had all of that, and you kept all of that so bottled up, so withheld till the third act, that we couldn't be ready for it to really appreciate how that could hit us, because we spent so much time in the middle of this episode in scenes where pike wasn't on screen, and we knew nobody else is going through any of the challenge of having to play this part. And then it felt to me, at least a little bit of a cheat to say, but everybody remembered what had happened so that everybody was going to have to then process it. I'm like, why? Why aren't we getting the processing? Because what if this episode had been, like, you mentioned, the Q episodes, the Merry Men episode, where it's the Robin Hood fantasy? We don't know how anybody's going to get. We don't know how they're going to get through that. We don't know how they're going to solve that problem to escape this fantasy in this, we're told right out of the gate how they're going to escape it. But then we don't see any of the fallout of what it means to them beyond very brief glimpses. And I. And I found myself, like, here we are. I've just walked right into rewriting the episode. What if this episode was half as long get us to that point where pike is able to get through that moment of, like, this is about somebody who I legitimately do think was a daughter. They escape that reality, and then he finds out that everybody around him also went through things that they now have to process. And there has to be some sort of processing that's individualized amongst all these different crew members.

So that this, the third act, maybe like, two thirds of the episode being this soap opera fantasy with the captain having to pretend to get through it just because, like, I gotta save my crew. And then once he saves the crew, he and everybody else is like, but these are real feelings. And it could have, like, landed, I think, in a. In a stronger way, it could have been this. As opposed to some of the other gimmick episodes, I do think there was an episode here to tell a good story. Whereas some of the other ones, I was like, okay, the puppet should have been maybe a YouTube extra. But this feels like, oh, they could have landed something. It could have been back up into the. Yeah, I'd rewatch that notch as opposed to the. Well, I watched it, but I don't know if I'd revisit it. Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I agree with you on, on that. But I'm starting to question what, how I interpreted the episode. Because I recall them saying that whole thing about him. The reason he was out, they thought was because he had something he was just trying to work on on his own. But I didn't think that that was as clear cut as your making it sound. Because everybody's storylines as gimmicky and over the top and soap opera as they were, there were actual conflicts that they were working through. So Trelane, when he did his thing, he concocted these crazy amplified versions of what these people actually were dealing with. My favorite one of these was the Doctor. Which one? I just gotta say, I just loved the fact that every time he kept doing the takes where he would look off camera and. And Hanson Mount would be going like, what are you looking? What are you looking at? Sean Ferrell: Yeah, the humor in this one was landing perfectly.

Matt Ferrell: There was that one scene with. So it's him and Ortegus in like the dining area, in the bar area. And as she's talking to him, he says this thing about I don't feel connected to Starfleet anymore. And it's in this, it's in the soap opera. He's saying this. That is him he's talking about. I think I'm gonna leave in the previous episode. So this is where I'm like. I think I interpreted it a little different than you did. It didn't seem as black and white to me where they were. You're the only person on the ship going through something. It's more of a. His is probably so profound that something is snapping him out of it where everybody else is going through stuff and they are dealing with these things in a soap opera way. And that's what I was talking about, about the car spinning out. In the beginning, it was all fluff. It was all that, oh, look at us shoot this episode with a different lighting and oh, look at the. The goofy looking off camera and the soap opera zoom ins and all that kind of stuff where there was no meat on the bones. It was just doing the soap opera gimmick. But once we start to get about halfway into the episode, they started doing things like the Doctor saying, I don't feel like I'm connected to Starfleet anymore. And the thing with Spock on that ship, there were moments like that, too, that the subtext of what was going on was actually the relationship beneath it, even though it was this crazy, over the top storyline. So halfway in, you started to get the glimpses of what you're talking about, of like, oh, God, there's an actual episode here. This stuff should have been at the end of Act 1, not at the beginning of Act 3. And then for Anson Mallets, for the Captain's thing with the daughter, I thought it would have been stronger if. When they were in the room. I love the scene. I just love the scene where she said, you're my father.

And he kept trying to leave and going, nope, I don't want a part of this. That whole scene was really fricking funny. It was really well done. Anson Mount's fantastic. He's one of my favorite actors on TV right now. He's just so good. But in that scene, they could have started to drop the hints of, like, when she says, I'm your daughter, his reaction could have been like, I'm not dealing with this to a. What did you say? Like, because he's. Yeah, he is struggling with his daughter from this second life. And they could have started to drop the hints of. This is his struggle. His daughter, his daughter, his daughter. But they didn't drop it until literally, he walks in the room and there she is. And I was like, wait, why didn't you drop better hints about his struggle until now? Sean Ferrell: This is part of the problem, I think, with the episode. It goes back to what I said of. Of them struggling with both overshare and underreveal at the same time. There was a line where he says, I didn't. I don't have a daughter. And he says it with a challenged voice. He looks like he's getting ready to cry, and his voice cracks a little bit and he seems emotional, but it's not made clear enough in that moment. And to clarify something, I think there's a little bit of a miscommunication in how I presented things. What I was trying to say was this. Pike is the only one with free will in the episode. Matt Ferrell: Yes, he.

Sean Ferrell: He's. He and everybody else are going through real challenges. And Trelane makes a point of saying, I don't know why. You are the only one who is able to operate in a way outside the reality that I constructed. So I did Understand that everybody's revelations were true to their characters, but they didn't have any choice but to do what they were doing in the way that they were doing it. As opposed to pike, who had the ability to say, I'm going to try and leave the room. The fact that he wasn't able to leave the room and kept snapping back was, you know, a demonstration of. He was looking around and saying this doesn't make any sense, whereas everybody else was simply playing their part. But it was as Trelane makes the point of saying. The entire point of this was you carry around all these things but you don't talk about them. But you'd probably feel better if you did. So why don't we just surface everything? It is a meta ness to the episode where it's trying to hearken to why do we watch fictional stories about people dealing with hardship, this episode dealing with grief. Like hey, that landed with me in a very strong way right now, in a very real way. And I was like, I'm like, okay, this is landing for me in a really interesting way and a really compelling way. I go back to Next Generation in the episode where in order to defeat Sherlock Holmes, Geordi makes the misstate in the holodeck to create an opponent who could defeat Data as opposed to an opponent who could defeat Sherlock Holmes. And as a result the computer inadvertently creates an artificial intelligence that is a self aware hologram, which at the end of the episode there is a reference to perhaps we're all, what if all of us were simply ideas in a black box sitting on a shelf in somebody's room.

And of course this coming out of the voice, out of the mouth of a character in a television program, which is literally characters inside a box sitting on a shelf in your room. I as teen watching that was just like, wow, mind explosion. This is great. And I think this one was going for something similar in the. You are sitting and watching people have catharsis because you yourself need catharsis. But like real people, you don't just wear it on your sleeve. So. So all the artificialness plays a part in processing. Yeah, I get it. And like melodrama exists for a reason. If melodrama didn't play a part, we wouldn't have it anywhere. But it, we have it all over the place. Soap operas have been on television for 60 odd years and like, despite the fact that we're going through such a transition of what television looks like in what they are calling the golden age of television right now, there are still soap operas that are telling the exact same storylines that they've been telling for four decades because they play a purpose. And I don't know, this is going to be a side, you know, sidetrack. But, Matt, were you aware of any of John Oliver's I want to be in soap operas thing that he.

I've seen. Matt Ferrell: I've actually seen the episodes that he's in. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I watched. I watched the clips, the highlight clips of him being on those programs, and it's like, yeah, they look just like they did back in the late 80s when I was in high school and going to college, and I had friends in college who watched these soap operas, and they look identical. And if you go back all the way to them being black and white, they still look the same. It's the same sort of storyline of here comes this episode of Star Trek where you've got all this stuff brought to the front. And I'm like, there is an episode here I could have really dug if it felt like they'd use the time just a little bit differently because it felt a little bit too much like treading water for the first 30 minutes. And then like, okay, now we're getting to the point. And here we go. I want to enjoy the meat as opposed to just the. The crispy skin. I want to get to like, yeah, give me the meat. Matt Ferrell: I think you and I are very close to the same page, but I think I definitely am a little more liking the episode than you did. Sean Ferrell: For me. Matt Ferrell: Like, if I was looking at, like, how we've been beating the. Beating that. Punching that bag of cats, as you said, for the best. Sean Ferrell: I think we just created a new phrase. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Ferrell: For Next Generation, you have 26 episodes or whatever it was in a season, and you'd have the Best of Both Worlds episodes, and then you'd have Deanna Troy's moms on board, or they run into the Ferengi, or they have the Robin Hood and they're trying to get away from Q. The gimmicky, goofy episodes. And so many of those were, like, low tier for me on the spectrum of, like, top tier, bottom tier. And bottom tier was still. I enjoyed it. I still enjoyed it. And I will rewatch that episode of Robin Hood. Cause I just love Worf saying, I am not a merry man. Sean Ferrell: I love it. Matt Ferrell: So it's like, there are aspects of it I enjoy, but I recognize this is not their best stuff. This is middle of the road. Problem with Strange New Worlds is we have hit rock fricking bottom where we have some of the best Star Trek that's been made in decades to some of the worst TV that's out there. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And now they come in with what would traditionally be a Star Trek gimmick episode that. If this was the only one in the season, you and I would probably be glowing about the entire season. If this was, like, the low point, this would be like, oh, this reminds me of Next Generation. It's like, this is a really good season of Star Trek. But the fact that they have hit so low that this, to me is like, this was a breath of fresh air when it came out. And you're like, it could have been a better episode. And I'm like, I feel great that this was the episode because we've seen some real clunkers, and this was not a clunker. This was like. This was Danna Troy's mom being on board. So it's like, this is enjoyable. I don't know if I'd rewatch it, but I still. It still felt like Star Trek. It still felt like it belonged here. I think we're kind of having to readjust or recalibrate because of the episodes that we've been. The puppets. I mean, come on. The puppets. It's like that episode has just changed the scale on this season.

Sean Ferrell: It really. It really has. And. And to go back to, you know, what you were saying about the overall impact of the. Of the episode. I do. I do. I hear everything you're saying, and I do agree I'm. I'm landing a little bit lower on the scale. But everything I'm saying is in the line of, okay, if you were going to redo this episode, what do I think they could have done to improve it? Yeah, I wasn't gonna. I wasn't gonna go the same lengths with some of the other gimmick episodes because I don't think some of those were worth saving. Whereas this one, I'm leaning into some fixes because I'm like, there was a second draft that could have lifted some of these things. And I will also say this. Rhys Darby as the Trillane, the younger version of Trelane, who Proto Q. Them having played with that in the way that they have, I'm fine with it. I think it's like, there's an aspect to that that I'm just like, yeah, I like that. They've basically said he's our Q. Maybe he is Q, maybe he's a Q, but it doesn't really matter. He performs it well. Whereas, you know, John De Lancie leans into the. You wouldn't believe the things I know this version of the proto Trelane, where I think they've landed in an interesting characterization for him because the earlier Trelane was played as a kind of petulant man, because he was actually supposed to be childish and was, why won't you play with me? You should be having fun. You should be doing these things because this is what humanity is. And this version does to me seem like a slightly more learned version of that, where he's like, apparently in school he gets a B minus on his project. And I enjoy that for the comedic value of what it presents, but I also like it for the.

The way they're doing it gives me a little bit of license as a viewer to, how am I going to interpret this? Am I supposed to interpret that literally a Q like entity is being given grades in a school? Or can you play with the idea of, yeah, in. In a human's perspective? The only way to interpret how the Q or Q like entities would be interacting with each other in these ways would be to boil it down to touch points that we could comprehend. So it's ridiculous to say he's in school and got a grade, but it is, like, in a cunous aspect. It's like, there's no other way to interpret this. Like, how do you convey this through story other than giving you, as a viewer, touch points to be able to hook into? So I'm like, it's funny to me, and it's also really smart. And apparently Rhys Darby said in an interview that they shot a bunch of fake commercials, that whenever they went to a commercial break, they actually shot a bunch of commercials that he wasn't sure if they were going to use any of them. One was included at the end of the credits.

I don't know if you saw that, Matt. Matt Ferrell: I did not.

Sean Ferrell: I'll have to go back and read that. There's one at the end of the credits where he is presented with a box of cereal. And he said, the way they did it, none of them were scripted. They just gave him objects. And they were like, create a commercial for this. So he just spontaneously would create an ad for a thing. So he creates this ad for cereal by holding up the box and talking about why it's good and why you should buy it. So I found myself after I read that, I was just like, more of that would have been. More of that would have been fun. Like that. Like giving. Giving more of the keenest to it and giving more of if this app. If this season was about us having fun as the makers of the show, then maybe a way to do that would have been to legitimately show us some more AD Libby sort of stuff that could have demonstrated the funness of it. And you have evoked some of the Next Generation tropes that. Where they would lean into this is a much lighter episode. I fully believe that there are moments during the filming of a season, especially when it used to be 26 or so episodes per season, where there would just be mental and physical exhaustion after doing a truly challenging episode where the actors, the directors, everybody would need, like, we need a gimme episode where it's a bottle episode. They're going to stay on the ship the entire time. We're going to have a limited number of the crew. Like, one of my favorite episodes is so clearly a bottle episode, where it's Picard is on the ship and everybody else leaves, and then a bunch of people jump on board the ship to steal it. And it's just Picard up against these other people. And it's like, yeah, you got nobody else on this ship except for these other actors and. And Patrick Stewart. And so it's clear that, like, everybody else had the week off.

Like, they were off shooting other shit, and they're just like, we're exhausted, so we're doing these things. And he's. He's carrying the weight this week because it's just him and these other guys. I'm fine with that. I understand that. But when you do that kind of thing, like you said, with only 10 episodes, maybe the way into that is to legitimately show fun as opposed to what this has strangely felt like, which is a lot of work to not have us have fun with you. Like, the amount of work it feels like it went into, like, the puppet episode looks like it took a lot of work to make. And then at the end of it, I was like, but am I enjoying this? It feels like. I mean, within the episode itself, they said, I'd give it a B minus. I'd give this a B minus. I would give it a C plus, B minus. It was. It was watchable and it was fine. Like I said, I don't know that I'd rewatch it, except when I go back to the abbaditas that have a scene that I really like. I liked everything that Anson Mount was doing. You made a super cut of just his scenes. I'd rewatch that probably be between 15 and 20 minutes long. And it ends with a truly wonderful piece of acting as he is saying, I didn't have a daughter, but I am mourning the daughter I lost. What a powerful moment that was. I really loved it. So yeah, yeah, Viewers, Listeners, jump into the comments. What did you think about this one? Do you agree that there were those nuggets that made it fun and enjoyable to watch, but the rest of it didn't really hold together? Or did you find that the entire soap opera setting really kind of helped you connect with an episode in a way that was deeper than what I feel like I did, and maybe closer to what Matt did, or maybe even more than Matt did? Let us know in the comments.

As always, liking subscribing, commenting, sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. We appreciate that support. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime Show. Click the join button there. It allows you to throw coins at our heads. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of beating the absolute crap out of this bag full of cats. Let's make that a phrase, everybody. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about one of the best Star Trek episodes in years in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 6, "Off-Hour." A disaster hits the Enterprise in real time, and every crew member fights to save the ship. After a season of gimmick episodes, this one leaves them with a hard question. If the show can do this, why doesn't it do it every week?

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 01:46: Feedback
• 03:56: Episode Description
• 05:08: This Time in History
• 10:06: Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're going to talk about what to do when things start going too fast. Don't know what that feels like. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we normally do that, but lately we haven't been because, well, when a new show drops, we like to drop into that new show. So we're currently watching season four of Strange New Worlds. We will be returning to the original series in just a few weeks after we finish the Strange New Worlds watch. And then once we're past that. Yep, the movies. And then guess what? Next Generation. And I know somebody who's very excited about that. Yes, it's my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. I am Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I wrote some science fiction. I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a new horror novel coming out in April of 2027. In the fields We Thirst. I hope you'll be interested in checking that out. It is available for pre order now. So what are you waiting for? Close this video and go order that book now. Don't close the video, but please do pre order the book. Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing pretty well. I'm ready for the weekend, Sean. Or maybe I'm not.

Sean Ferrell: Maybe, maybe.

Matt Ferrell: We'll see.

Sean Ferrell: We'll figure that out at a later date. Thank you everybody for joining us. As you may have noticed, we have fallen a little bit behind. We are. We wanted to originally watch these basically in real time and then, well, life showed up, slapped us both in the face and then moved on. And so we're playing a little bit of catch up. But I am very excited about today's episode, Episode six of season four, off hour. We'll be getting into that in a few minutes, but before we do, we always like to visit the mailbag, see what you've had to say about our previous episodes. So, Matt, what did you find for us this week?

Feedback

Matt Ferrell: Well, because of the timey-wimey-ness of how we're releasing these, there's no new comments this week, but there is one as a recent. It's a recent comment from an older episode that somebody dropped Scooteroo. He's dropped comments before, but Scooteroo left a comment on the Paradise Syndrome, which is from the original series, the one where they went to that planet and it was the American Indians that just for some reason hadn't evolved at all. They were still American Indians like they were hundreds of years ago.

Anyway. Scooteroo wrote Matt, when you were talking about why haven't the native Indians evolved? I wanted to point out to an episode of Stargate SG1 where they meet a similar people, but they have advanced enough to use advanced technology and it's a good counter to the way that this episode has handled it. I also really appreciate the B plot with the asteroid and showing how all you need is a small deflection from far out for it to totally miss the planet. Great use of realistic physics in my opinion. Also, when are you two going to do a full watch through of the Stargate franchise and put it up on YouTube as well? Ha. I have mentioned to you before, I'm a huge Stargate fan. I've watched all the series. I love them all. You've only really watched Universe, but I have wanted you to watch SG1 for the longest time. And, and I love this comment because my wife and I are currently right now rewatching all of Stargate SG1. Like we're not doing a podcast, but we're basically doing the same thing, the two of us. And I just watched this episode about the American Indians on this other planet that are fully evolved and they've got some rudimentary technologies and they're pretty sophisticated and it's one of the funniest episodes. I think SG1 has some of the best hard sci fi concepts they tackle for the first, I don't know, four or five seasons before it kind of gets a little weird. But you need to watch it, Sean. You need to watch it.

Sean Ferrell: Well, I. At some point in the future maybe I will, but I can almost guarantee that I will not be part of a podcast for it. So hope you won't be too disappointed. I know you said that and I accepted it, tongue in cheek. So thank you for that comment. And now those lights you see, those alarms you hear. Yes, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Memory Alpha description. The thing I like about Memory Alpha mat is is sometimes I use the IMDb description, sometimes it's the Wikipedia description. I feel like those are all. I don't know, there's a certain attitude that goes into those descriptions that feels like it's meant to be public, user friendly. But Memory Alpha, well, Memory Alpha knows that it's nerds talking to nerds and so let's just cut to the chase. So take it away, Matt.

Episode Description

Matt Ferrell: Disaster Strikes enterprise resulting in a crisis to be solved by different groups of individuals collaborating in the space of an hour.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: Yes, it is a specific description for this episode, even though it sounds like basically a description of episodic television. This episode, Off Hour was originally released on August 27, 2026. It is directed by Dan Liu and was written by Bill Wolkoff. My brain, My brain, My brain. She's tired. So we like to take a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we're talking about August 27, 2026. And Matt, I know it was a big day for you and I know that on big days you like to sing big songs. So do you want to take a guess as to what big song you were singing on this day? That's right. You were singing Ella Langley's Choosing Texas Again. Take it away, Matt.

Matt Ferrell: Good.

Sean Ferrell: And at the box office there's a little game Matt and I like to play, which is Matt guesses correctly the movie that was the number one box office that week, August 27, 2026. What do you think the number one movie was, Matt?

Matt Ferrell: Spider Man.

Sean Ferrell: That's right, it was Spider Man Brand new day. And on television? Television, television, television. Rankings of television. I said this last week, I'll say it again. It's really hard to measure what is a number one program. Back when Matt and I were growing up, back last century, because we're 20th century kids. Nielsen's used to like it was public information shows would proudly were the number one program this week and all that sort of thing. Nobody does that anymore. Now Nielsen numbers are all kept quiet. I think that there's my, my understanding, my feeling is that the industry doesn't share numbers because they feel like the numbers of the contemporary setting are embarrassing when you compare it to older numbers like Mash's series finale remains, I believe, the most watched television show ever. And I don't think current television industry wants to admit that. Yeah, a show in 1982 was the most watched program ever. The viewership of shows today is paltry compared to what used to be. So when you go looking to see what was the number one show on August 27, 2026, I simply can't find that information. It's opaque. So instead what I'm doing is I'm looking at what shows are popular at the time of our recordings. So right now, amongst the most popular shows, the number one rated show according to Rotten Tomatoes is currently Lanterns, which is getting very high marks from both critics and from viewers. We've talked about that previously. A more recent show that has just entered the highly acclaimed programs that are streaming at this time is Neagly, which is part of the Jack Reacher universe. It is on Amazon Prime. It just came out. It is a spin off from Reacher, starring Maria Sten as Francis Neagly, a Chicago private investigator and former military protege of Reacher.

All eight episodes of season one dropped September 16, 2026, following the Reacher season finale for season four. And in the news, here we are in what is it now, late 2026. So yes, the newspapers are going to be full of stories like Facebook settling with 47 states in online addiction cases. So a massive, massive settlement. There's also ongoing headlines around Trump getting pushback and the changes that are going on as some of the people who are pushing back against him now are previously allies as what looks like the coalition that supported him all these years is beginning to show signs of fracture. But the headline that I wanted to talk about from this day in history, August 27, 2026, the headline that stood out to me as most important to me and I think most important to a lot of people who enjoy movies and television shows was this one. Tim Curry, star of Rocky Horror and much more, dies at 80. The actor's gift for garish eccentricity was indelibly appropriate for the outlandish cross dressing mad scientist Frank N. Furter. Yes, his passing affected me because he is a part of some of my favorite programming as I was growing up and that includes the miniseries for it, the first Stephen King adaptation of the of the novel by Stephen King. I was watching that on VCR in college when a roommate of mine walked into the room, sat down and 30 seconds later when Pennywise appeared on the screen, stood up and left. Later on I would discover that that friend of mine experienced a lifelong phobia of clowns. So yeah, when he sat down and realized clowns were going to be eating children, it wasn't his cup of tea. Also the movie clue. I mean, come on.

When asked in an interview for an upcoming documentary, was there ever anybody that he had worked with the love that had gotten away? He responded deadpan, Miss Piggy, and then commented further, once you've gone pork, you never go back. So on now to our discussion of this episode off hour Matt we've had. I want to preface our conversation by picking up some threads of our most recent episode where we talked about a dissatisfaction with gimmick episodes, the over reliance on gimmick episodes, and we speculated about some of the causes of this gimmick heavy season and you said at one point last week, it feels like the people making the program were just like, well, let's do what feels fun. And we in the audience just don't seem to be having as much fun. After you said that, I came across two different articles. One was an interview with Rebecca Romijn, and one was an interview with Alex Kurtzman. They were not together in these interviews. They were completely separate from each other, but both of them effectively said, yeah, this season we decided to do anything that we thought would be fun. So first of all, hat tip to you for reading those tea leaves and getting it so accurate. And then for myself, I just wanted to throw in this comment before we move on to the discussion about the the new episode. It occurred to me after our discussion that if you are making a program and you're doing things within an existing fan base, but you're leaning heavily into, but we're going to do what we think is fun, you're effectively making fan fiction. And fan fiction is fine. Fan fiction has its place. Fan fiction can lead to really great things and has in the past and will continue to be an important part of keeping fandoms alive. But you can't do that and then expect the fandom to follow you like a Pied Piper.

Today’s Discussion

And that's where I find myself landing with a lot of the episodes this season. So when I was preparing to watch this episode, as I had not yet seen off hour, I was happy to receive a message from you on my phone that said, hey, this one isn't a gimmick episode. And I thought, well, that's good news. So I sat down to watch it, and I found myself similar to the Griffin Incident episode. I. I found myself thinking, if I could collectively shake the shoulders of the people making this show and say, if you can do this, they appear to be able to. They appear to be able to do this at will. And yet, yes, they keep doing that instead. And I find myself just like, are you. Are you kidding me? Like the Griffin incident. As I'm watching this one, I found myself thinking, is it just me, or is this already one of my favorite Trek episodes? Of any Trek? Because I found myself, again, like the Griffin Incident. How many storylines are in this episode? At least three. Any one of which could be considered an A plot. Any one of which, in a different era of Star Trek, would have been the only major storyline, and anything else would have been a very brief secondary thing. This one has three major plot lines, all of which alternate with competing as this is the one that's really at the heart of this. They all connect in critical ways. So they inform each other, but they don't distract from each other. You forget you're watching something. That's. What is it? 44 minutes long. And at the end of it I'm like, they moved all of this through character. It was all characterization. Last week you and I spoke about when you lean in a gimmick and you. The gimmick exists without the characters having to be involved. You don't actually have a story. And this is the solution to that. In this one, you end up with Spock climbing on the outside of the ship and frying himself to the point where you.

He cannot speak, but he can mind meld. You end up with the doctor and the nurse having a full blown. They look like they are never going to speak to each other again. At a certain point in the beginning of this so that you can build this sequence of bridge building and understanding and compassion and empathy for one another. That ends up turning the question of how is Nurse Chapel still on this ship in the original series, given what she's demonstrating so far? And it becomes a major character turn for her. And you're watching Scotty go through paraxisms of I so desperately want to do things and to make this ship work. Why won't the ship help me being convinced? No, you gotta have faith in the ship because she's on your side. To the point where we get our first reference of Miracle Worker. We get him putting his hand on the side of the vessel. The visual effects of showing a light bloom behind his head is so on the nose. But I loved it. I found myself by the end of this.

Just like if you can do this, what have you.

Matt Ferrell: What.

Sean Ferrell: Why are we. What's the point of the Muppet episode if you could do this? And I'm not asking for every episode to be this. I understand you're making a program and you want to have fun when you're doing it. And I do get it. But you only got 10 episodes. You only got 10. You only had 10.

Matt Ferrell: This is why I said to you in the last episode when we talked about it. Star Trek Strange New Worlds is one of my favorite Star Trek series at this point. But start this season is making me question that feeling because it's been so bad overall. But it's got episodes like this, which is just. It's like the reminder of oh yeah. The team that makes this show. Not only are the actors top notch and the money is on the screen and the special effects are like big blockbuster movie quality. Cinematography is always really good. Then you've got the writing, which they're capable of. Top notch, like a list, like skill at writing episodes on display right here, this, this episode, when it started and the timer came up, I was like, oh, God, is this the 24 gimmick? Like they're just doing an episode of 24. Yeah, they were. They totally were. Didn't matter. That wasn't the gimmick. It was not a gimmick. It was just full on amazing storytelling with a plot that's just like, holy crap, this is tense. And you're in it because it's the characters. You're with the characters. You're living the characters and you're worried about them. And the Doctors basically cut in half. What the. How do you come back from this? Oh, it's competent people being competent, doing things that they're really good at to save each other. This is why I love Star Trek. And so this is like ticking all the boxes that Matt looks for when he's watching an episode of Star Trek. I'm like, got it, got it, got it, got it. I was loving this episode and. And by the end, I was like almost screaming at the screen, screw you guys. You're capable of this. You're capable of the Griffin incident and you give us fricking puppets. What is wrong with you? I understand. I said it last week. It feels like they're doing it because they just want to have fun.

It's like, well, then you're making an entire season for yourself and not for me, not for Sean, not for the millions of fans that might be wanting to watch this. Screw you guys. You guys have fumbled the ball so badly. I don't think they recognize how badly they fumbled the ball when they're capable of this. Because Sean, my God, this is one of the episodes that I will put up there with one of the best Star Trek episodes of any of the series. Yeah, it's like for me, There Are Four Lights is one of my favorites. Inner Light with Picard, Data on trial of if he's human, Measure of a Man. I love that episode.

Sean Ferrell: Best of Both Worlds one and two. Homecoming. There are so many good episodes. Yeah, this is up there with them. Yeah, this is up there with them. When you get to the sequence when the things start to fall from the ceiling and the glass shatters, just sitting on the floor and they're all looking around, the gravity plating is malfunctioning and things are going to get bad. And her leg bone comes jetting out the side of her calf, and she's still climbing to hit that button, and she is screaming. And I was like, you're the same actress who said in that interview, we wanted to have fun. So we were doing whatever we wanted to do that was fun. And I'm just like, this episode, you are literally a screaming hero. And you missed the point that the puppets wasn't going to be fun for anybody. If that's as much as the puppets were like, there is a good puppet episode, that wasn't it. It just feels like when they leaned into the fun, they thought the fun was enough. So as long as it was fun, it was going to be okay. But this is a demonstration. Like, I question, did they not have fun making an episode that was going to be this compelling? Did the actor playing Dr. M’Benga and the actress playing Nurse Chapel not recognize when they were shooting those scenes? This is going to be incredible. Like, did they not have fun shooting those scenes and telling that part of the story? Like, I've known actors, I've known. I've known people, like, the challenging stuff has a fun to it. It's fun. I write. I write horror, and I write this novel of mine and reached a point at a certain scene where I kind of turned my own stomach as I was working on this scene. And I was like, do I actually put this in the book? Because this is kind of like, this is putting something there that I'm not sure, like, a lot of people are gonna like.

But the challenge of that and thinking about that, that was fun for me as a writer. I was like. I was like. But, oh, really? I'm pushed. This character has suddenly turned a corner. I didn't expect. The challenge can be the reward, not the fun. So I find myself with this one, like some. I just keep. I basically have reached a point where all I want to do with you is recount cool scenes. There are so many cool scenes in this show.

Matt Ferrell: Let's break it up by the storylines, because the one I want to start with is the Scotty storyline. Because this is the episode that felt to me of the show strange new worlds, saying, this is how Scotty became Scotty. This episode right now. This is how he becomes the miracle worker. And this is the episode I wish they'd been. They've kind of done this in previous episodes with Pelia and Scotty because she was the teacher, she was brutal on him. He was always trying to basically get her approval, but was never matching what she was asking for. And they've kind of been hinting at this, but in this episode specifically, they came right out and Pelia is Yoda. She's freaking Yoda with Luke Skywalker. She's in a different room talking to him over comms and basically giving him. Not cryptic advice, but she's telling stories and she's giving him allegories and things like that to have him come to the conclusions on his own. And it's like, holy crap, she's a great teacher. You're watching her teach. You're watching Yoda teach Luke, you're watching Pelia teach Scotty. And you're seeing Scotty making the connections that turns him into a freaking miracle worker. And so for me, I was just like eating that up so much. I just loved that entire storyline because it was like, yes, more of this, please. And then you to just jump to the other storyline with Spock. We get a little bit of that with Spock in this. It's not to the same level, but it's like Spock is so willing to sacrifice and kill himself to save everybody. Star Trek 2 says hello. Here he is. Whoever's going out there, they're probably going to die. Spock's like, send me out, I'll go out. He goes out and does it. And like, he's barfing up green blood, not able to speak at the end. This is the Spock we know from the movies. Movie Spock. This is amazing Spock. This is the Spock I love.

And so for me, this show was just doing such a good job of doing that. And then with Christine Chapel and her plotline, like you said, how did she get to where she is? Because they've been showing her as one foot out the door. This kind of like footloose and fancy free, just kind of likes to escape. Doesn't like too much challenge. And here she is, we find her turning point of where she plants her flag and says, no, this is my home. And it's also, I just love whenever they make, they show how brilliant she is. Because the original series, 1960s, she hands McCoy.

Sean Ferrell: She hands McCoy surgery instruments. I also like the Chapel M’Benga storyline. I really liked that they were like, well, this other doctor who at one point was going to be the chief, chief of surgery. Like, they bring in this guy who's got this kind of like. I thought they were hinting like McCoy was suddenly going to show up. I was pleased that it wasn't. It was, you know, this other gentleman who shows up and he's and he's like, you cut your losses and you move to the other people you can help. And her commitment to helping somebody is something that is demonstrated in the original series with Christine Chapel, particularly when it comes to Spock. And we see that in the original series, the whole toying with their relationship to one another and her commitment to him and helping him. We see that with M’Benga, and we can realize, like, oh, her depth of character moves beyond. She's the one with a crush on Spock. It's. They've created a full character here, which is. Which is terrific. I thought they did a terrific turn with the pilot and having her in charge. She's got the con through a good portion of this because you get that moment of every panel is electrified. I love that Pike has a look on his face. I gotta do this. And I can't help but think some of the beautiful subtext of that scene is he's like, I know this won't kill me.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, yes. That was going through my head, too. It's like, he knows this is not how he dies.

Sean Ferrell: Give us a season where he knows he can do anything. Give us a season where he's willing to take those risks. And when people say, you're flying so fast and loose, how are you getting away with all this? And only one person knows is. Is because I know I'm not gonna die. Like, imagine the season of people around him saying, does he have a death wish? Like, think of an alternate season of this show where the crew begins to question, does our captain have a death wish? Why does he play things so close to the edge with a confidence? Like, he knows he's just gonna be able to do whatever he wants. And the reason is because he's like, I know I don't die yet. I know I'm not in trouble yet. And if I'm gonna get to that moment in the future, I know I can get there with all these people with me. Like, there's a kind of. Like, there was an opportunity for a story around that in which. What if there's an episode in which he's wrong? What if he loses somebody in an episode? And he was like, because I knew I could make it there, I assumed everybody I cared about could. And now I've screwed that up and I hurt somebody I loved. Like, that could have been an amazing episode. Instead, we. The gimmicky things were there. The Muppets were there. Like, that moment for me when he gets that look on his face and he turns to her and he says, you've got the comm. And then goes and electrocutes himself and is just down on the floor. The next time you see him, he's face down on the floor. And I'm just like. And she does a great job. I thought it was wonderful because Uhura is trying to do what she can, and she's sitting at the comm and she is without hesitation communicating through the one line. I just mean that she's good. She's got that ship wide thing and she's good at it, and she's communicating with everybody, and she's communicating with the first officer.

And I was just like, there's like, you called it. This is competence porn. This is people doing their jobs well, and it's great. And it really like.

Matt Ferrell: It.

Sean Ferrell: It gets you. It gets you fired up. It gets you ready for, like, this is what we need. This is what we want to watch. We want to watch people say, like, we're all in danger, but we've got each other. And that's what this felt like, as opposed to, we're not really all in danger because we're all just kind of having fun and we're gonna be fine because none of these feel like stakes.

Matt Ferrell: The thing that this went through my mind. Now I know I'm just gonna tell you what went through my mind. I know this is not the case. I knew it. When I was thinking it, I was like, my God, is this the episode where they put Pike in the wheelchair? Like, yeah, because so much stuff was going wrong and people were dying and, like, getting cut in half and then the bone sticking out of the leg. And I was like, the whole, like, everybody's getting sealed into engineering. I was like, is the. Is Pike gonna do something where he. This is where it happens. Is this. Is this where it happens? But it's only episode six, so it can't be that because there's still more episodes to go. And I. We don't even know if they're gonna deal with that in this season. We don't even know if they're gonna deal with it full stop. So it's kind of like, I hope they do because I believe this is the last season of the show. So I'm hoping.

Sean Ferrell: No, there is a season five. There's a season five. It's not a full season. It's like a. It's like a truncated season. My understanding is, like, part of the leaning into, like, we wanted to have fun is because they were going to be like, we're shooting 16 episodes and I'm thinking like, there's a part of them that maybe forgot that not all the episodes would be like, it wasn't one season. So I'm like, were they all in the mindset of like, oh, we're making 16 and less than half of them are goofy? Because next season is going to be like, I think it's maybe six episodes, but it's going to be like, it's probably going to be six heavy hitting episodes leading to a big finale. So, okay, like, like there, there are, I think, like big picture contextual reasons as to why the mindset maybe wasn't quite where it could have been. In order to bring the, the best to the forefront and to go back to what you've said, yeah, the show is right up there. It's right up there. And then they have so many missteps that it's like, usually programming gets through. Like season one is usually uneven in a show. And you end up with that like, well, they'll iron out the kinks in season two and then they, if they do, you're like, oh, they're on the right trajectory. And then by the time you get to seasons three and four, you're like, wow, they're firing on all cylinders. And then you start to have the downward slide. And in the new era of how television produced with only 10 episodes or so per season, you say, well, they're not even shooting for the moon. It used to be if you made four seasons of a show, you had more than a hundred episodes. And that was the goal for syndication. Like, let's get through four seasons and we'll have that hundred and then we can make bank on syndication. That's no longer the case.

So if you're like, okay, we're getting to season three or four, you should still be firing on all cylinders with really good ideas and compelling storylines. So to have this season feel this uneven, it's really kind of like, like you said, it puts you in a position of like, do I need to rethink where this show stands? But I feel like for me, I've landed in a place of no, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to put this show in a slot based on how good it could be.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: When it was firing at all cylinders. And I, and I think in terms of like, that puts it into sort of strange company. Not just with Star Trek, but with other shows, it puts it into a kind of like Stargate universe is one of those things. Where I'm just like, wow, it really kind of punched above its weight, given it didn't get that many seasons. It's just. But it really told good storyline. And Farscape is another one that I keep thinking about of, like. Farscape could be wildly uneven, but when it was good, it was great. And when it was fun, it was. It was hysterically fun. It was just like, are you. They're doing what now? Like, and doing some really wackadoo stuff. And it was full of puppets. And it was just. But it was. When it worked, it worked great. But it could be kind of like a wild ride. And I find myself surprised to say, like, is Strange New Worlds one of those shows that, like, yeah, you maybe don't rewatch every episode? Maybe, Yeah, a rewatch of Strange New Worlds is maybe a tight 20 episodes as opposed to watching all four or five seasons, because, yeah, maybe that's all you need to get the episodes that they really were like, we're telling a story here. So kind of a surprising place to land. So, viewers, listeners, what did you think about this one? Do you agree with us that this one rose to a level that you maybe weren't expecting, given some of the other ones we've been watching? Or are you like, Matt, Sean, you're absolutely bonkers. This was terrible. I love the puppets. I wish there were more like that. We really do want to hear both opinions. Please share them in the comments. As always, liking, subscribing and commenting, sharing with your friends, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. We do appreciate all of those, but if you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.Show. Click the join button there. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of really, really being critical about a show that we really, really like. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Three of the first five episodes this season are gimmick episodes, and Matt has had enough. Matt and Sean talk about the puppet hour, and what a 10 episode season can afford, in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 5, "Level Five Transporter Accident." The puppets are beautifully built and the jokes land, but the dream reveal arrives in the final two minutes with no setup. So is this a charming lark? Or is it 45 of the season's 450 minutes spent on a sketch?

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:36 - Listener Feedback
• 06:14 - This Time in History
• 10:09 - Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about. Can you tell me how to get to somewhere where no one's gone before? That's right, everybody. We're talking about Level 5 Transporter Accident from Strange New Worlds. This is, of course, Trek in Time, the podcast that takes a look at all of Star Trek and chronological stardate order. We're putting a pause on that for the time being as we take a look at new episodes at the time that they come out, but we also take a look at what's going on in the world at the time of original broadcast. So when we're talking about the original series, we're talking about the 60s. When we get into Next Generation, we're going to be talking about the late 80s, but for now, we're talking about now. Okay, we'll get into that in a minute. First, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a new novel coming out in April of 2027. For those of you who are in the future, go look it up. For those of you who are present, go look it up. And pre order, pre orders help. It's called In the Fields We Thirst. It's a horror novel set in the heady fun days of World War I. Ah, yes, trench warfare. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you this somewhat balmy late summer day?

Matt Ferrell: Sean, I am tired, but I'm also excited to talk about this one. And, oh, boy, do. I'm sure you do, too. I've got thoughts.

Listener Feedback

Sean Ferrell: We'll get into that in a minute. What we always like to do, though, is before we get into conversations about the newest episode, we like to take a look at what you've had to say about previous episodes. So, Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week?

Matt Ferrell: There were definitely. There was definitely a theme because this was all up from the episode which was a Case of Chiaroscuro.

Sean Ferrell: Chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro.

Matt Ferrell: What you said. It was the one that was in black and white. And there was a lot of sentiment that kind of modeled after kind of what you and I had talked about of like there was good elements in it, but it was very gimmicky. But there was good elements in it. So first comment was from Scooteroo, who wrote this episode was fine, in my opinion, but it felt like the characters were on rails and had no agency on what they could do other than follow the path that Faux-Una had already laid out before them. The black and white effects in this were done amazingly well and look gorgeous, except for the Enterprise. You could tell that the sets and costumes on Enterprise were built with black and white in mind and each shift back to it should have went back to color. Showing that shields or range outside the system stopped the effect. I agree with this. I thought the black and white effects were also gorgeous. And the fun thing about black and white, when you look at black white movies, the costumes and the set designs and everything about them are designed for color tone because you don't have color but you have tone, which is shades of gray, how light it is, how dark it is. And so you're trying to create different contrasts to make things stand out from each other. So you might be picking colors and tones that you wouldn't if you had full color available to you because you'd be using the color itself to make things stand apart. You could definitely tell that they had put a lot of thought into how they were designing the costumes and sets for on the planet versus what we're used to seeing on the Enterprise. So I do. I do find that Scooteroo kind of nailed it on that one.

Sean Ferrell: It's an interesting way to look at the episode. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Next comment was from Paleghost69. What super bad event in quotes would cause Spock to withdraw into Vulcan philosophy and Pike to have a mental breakdown worth The Cage? Based on the events of Strange New Worlds, it's likely not just the knowledge of the upcoming explosion that disables him. I'm willing to bet that there's a significant trauma he is dealing with on top of the prophetic death which is leading to self destructive behavior. My theory is that La'an and Ortegas 50% chances on Pelia and the new Vulcan Girl too are going to end in a horrible way that breaks several members of the crew like Spock and Pike and M’Benga. There were several mentions on the characters being worshiped as quote war heroes from the lower decks crossover. And with them not appearing in the pilot it's easy tragedy points with zero retconning needed. While I do think they have the balls to kill off Erika, I think you guys are right on the La'an part. M'Benga not appearing in the original series that often could easily be explained away as trying to curing or caretaking for La'an. Edit. I just remembered There's a huge counterweight to the claim that writers don't have the balls. Hemmer. Yeah, I thought Paleghost bring up a good point with. I do like that there's a psychological trauma to Pike that we see in the future. And having some serious loss of people that he is affectionate towards does make sense that there might be characters that were attached to that they will kill off or seriously harm to give Pike extra weight in the decisions he makes that leads up to what ultimately happens to him. So I like that. I think it would be. I think it'd be very dramatic and it would be really good, strong storytelling to do. But based on the current season, Sean, I don't know if I think they will do that. Yeah.

Then we had this comment which is going to tie directly to today's conversation, which is from Jason Dumb. I enjoyed the episode. Seemed efficiently told for a relatively complicated plot. Gimmicky maybe, but still Star Trekkie. This would have fit great in a 26 episode season, but really feels like all the episodes this season are kind of gimmicky. Yeah, Jason, we'll be getting to that shortly.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, stay tuned.

Matt Ferrell: And finally, from Mark Loveless, wrong answers only. Plot of level 5 transporter accident. During a ship inventory at a Starfleet base, tons of extra and some illegal contraband is found on Level 5 storage aboard the Enterprise. Scotty insisted it wasn't him. Even though the transporter logs tell a story where this contraband was added to Level five by Scotty, he insisted that while it was him doing the transporting, that this was a malfunction that was causing it to end up where it ended up. He insisted it was an accident. After pike says maybe Spock should mind meld with Scotty, he finally fesses up and is put on latrine duty for a month. And the contraband? Liquor, mainly green and tribbles.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you everybody for your comments. We always enjoy reading them. Keep them coming. Now, those flashing lights and that sound you hear. Yes, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the. Which one is this Memory Alpha Description. Take it away, Matt.

Matt Ferrell: A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets. While Spike. Wrong show. While Spock fights to reclaim the ship. You know, Sean, eventually we'll learn to read.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: Yes, someday we're all. We're all pulling for you. This is of course number 35 of Strange New Worlds. This is the fifth of the fourth season level 5 transporter accident. Directed by Jordan Canning, written by Henry Alonzo Myers and Dana Horgan. Originally broadcast on August 20, 2026. And let's think back to the. Let's go back to the Wayback Machine, Matthew. And let's think back to August 20, 2026. It's so long ago. I know is what you're saying. I don't remember what we were all singing. Well, I think you do. Yes, it was Ella Langley singing Choosing Texas. Go ahead, Matt. Great. And at the movies, Matt, I'm going to let you take this one. What do you think people were lining up to see?

Matt Ferrell: Could it be Spider Man?

Sean Ferrell: It could be Spider Man Brand New Day was still the number one movie as it went on its way to rake in trillions upon trillions of dollars. And on television, you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find recently historical information around what people have been watching. Unless you subscribe to a service like Nielsen or there are a number of different curating websites that, like, I think, scrub the Internet for data and gather information about what people are watching. But it's all behind proprietary algorithms with logins and you have to pay for the service. So it is incredibly tricky to say, like, on this date two weeks ago, what were people watching? So instead of spending yet another hour trying to figure out what was the number one show on this date, instead I took a different tag, which is what shows are popular right now, date of recording. So this is not accurate as of the release date of this episode. This is accurate as of yesterday, I. E. The middle of September. So a month after the fact, very highly watched and currently in a top slot on Netflix is the Gentleman, which is a Guy Ritchie series. It is the story of an aristocratic Eddie inheriting the family estate and he discovers that it's home to a huge weed empire and his proprietors aren't going anywhere. So a little bit of a culture clash, I think, with a bunch, with a little bit of Breaking Bad thrown in for good measure. When I read this, I thought, well, ultimately this sounds very much like what is probably a dramatic take. It's Guy Ritchie. It stars Theo James, Kaya Scodelario and Joely Richardson. And I thought, well, this sounds like a dramatic take on a similar series which is a comedy. I don't know if you've heard of this one, Matt. It's Deli Boys. It's available on Hulu.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I've heard of it.

Sean Ferrell: It is the story of two brothers who, upon the death of their father, think they're going to inherit his corner bodega empire. And what they discover is that their father was actually a high level drug kingpin and the bodega empire is merely a cover for that operation. So they have not inherited the bodegas, they've inherited a criminal empire which they have to learn how to run with the help of their aunt and an uncle. And it's a full blown comedy. It's actually very good. So. So I do recommend it. And in the news on this date, August 20, 2026, from the New York Times, Trump fired the watchdogs. The replacements have a different mission. President Trump is installing his allies in the offices of inspector General which are meant to provide independent government oversight. Guess what they're not doing? Exercising independent government oversight. On now to our discussion about this episode, Level Five Transporter Accident. Matt, you've already. There's, there's some of a cat poking its head out of a bag that you're holding. Why don't you just let the cat out of the bag all the way? What did you think about this one?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean. Just when I think this show can't get any more gimmicky than it's been this season, they come out with puppets, the whole Muppet cast and crew. Fun. It's a fun lark, Sean. I would be more accepting of this gimmick if it was the only one of a 10 episode season. But we are now five episodes in five episodes and three of the five are squarely gimmick episodes. Three of the five and then the remaining two, you might be able to argue one of the two is still a gimmick.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: What are we doing here, Sean? I'm getting really frustrated with this season. This season seems to have taken a hard right turn at Doctor who town. And it seems like the showrunners. Alex Kurtzman just wants to make Doctor who. He's kind of. It feels like he's gone. You know what? I'm bored with Star Trek. I just want to do Doctor who. And it's kind of like for me, J.J. abrams coming in to do Trek. And it was like, you know what? Trek is great. But you know what I like more? I like Star Wars. Let's make Star Trek like Star Wars. This is what this feels like to me. It feels like for some reason this season has gone completely into bonkerstown with gimmicks and just trying to have a lark. And that's fine. Star Trek does this. It does it. But in the old Trek, it was 26 episodes or 25 episodes and you'd have five or six of these a season. So it might be like 5%, 10%, maybe 15% of your season here we're talking about the majority of the season is a gimmick or comedy, and I don't know what they're doing. This is so, for me, off the rails. If I looked at this episode on its own merits, I enjoyed it. I thought it was funny. It was charming, quirky, and I loved the. I loved the puppets. The puppets were incredibly well done. Like, it was so well executed for what it is. But my problem is what it is. It's like what. What in happened in the writer's room that they kept picking the topics like this that are gimmicky. And I. I want to kind of go off the rails a little bit and just do a really quick rewrite of. What would have made this more palatable to me was a Next Generation episode where something similar happens with Dr. Crusher. So in this episode with the Muppets, it's Spock. We find out at the very end, it's all a dream, man. None of this actually happened. It's all in Spock's head. But we don't find that out until the last literal, like, two minutes of the show.

We have Dr. Crusher end up in the warp bubble. She doesn't know she's in a warp bubble, and people just start vanishing across the ship. And the first. I remember watching that. It's like the first 10, 15 minutes is a X Filesy. What is going on here? This is really weird and creepy, and people keep disappearing around her. What is happening? And then they reveal it. 10 to 15 minutes into the episode, she's in a warp bubble, and you start to see the B plot line, which is the people in reality trying to help her get out of the warp bubble. And so then you have these two plot lines that are trying to converge. She's trying to get out of the warp bubble, and they're trying to get her out of the warp bubble is how you're seeing these two sides trying to achieve the same goal. They could have done this episode with the puppets with that in mind. First 10 minutes of the episode could have been, oh, my God, are they really saying they turn into puppets? And then 15 minutes in, it's like, no. Spock is, like, seriously damaged. He's in. He's on a bio bed. They're trying to help him out. They're trying to rescue him. There might be a thing like, you know, talk to him. He can hear you. Try to talk him out of this. Like, have some kind of like real world versus in his head. Real world in his head. And you could just still had the Muppets. You could have still had the funny jokes. You could have still had the humor, but it would have rooted it in reality for the majority of the episode, and it would have made it much more palatable to me to come out the other end. This was such a cheat. They tried to have a Keyser Soze moment at the end with the. It was on his head. It felt like the end of Newhart, where they wake up in bed and it's like the entire show was a dream. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. That is such a cop out.

They didn't drop hints through the episode that this is in his head. They didn't even try. They were just leaning into this being a joke. So I'm very frustrated because on its own, it's a fun lark, really well done. But in the scheme of the season, it's such, for me, a misfire.

Sean Ferrell: I loved it. I'm joking. I'm joking. No, I agree with. I agree with everything you just said. I love the idea of building the. Rebuilding the episode around what's happening in the external world. The whole process could have been in the dream. He's having this. It's very clear. He's having this reconnective moment with his fiance, and they set up effectively that he, by the end of this story, has emotionally reconnected to his fiance. But in the real world, that has not happened. So the bridge between the two stories that you've talked about could have been her in. In the dream with the puppets, he is in hot pursuit of getting out of this scenario without realizing it's a dream, maybe beginning to have the kind of Dr. Crusher awareness of, like, oh, I'm the one who's in trouble. I'm the one who's in a different place. He could have had that beginning, but couldn't make the leap out of what is effectively maybe a comatose state back into consciousness without somebody building a bridge with him. And that could be her through a mind meld. In the real world, she could have been coming forward and saying, like, they get the Enterprise as quickly as possible to a location where they can get her on board. And then at the same time, in the fantasy, he's doing the same thing with the puppet version of her, reconnecting with that version of her. He's doing a mind meld on his side, she's doing a mind meld on her side. And that's what builds the bridge to pull him out. That could have been a great story. And then both of them would have had in the real world the connective moment of there's still something here between us, which I don't know about you. I knew they had to do that at some point with her because we have to get to amok time where he is still betrothed to her. So all of this, this stuff, I understood the, the components that were at play here.

Your version of this would have been so much more. I agree with you completely. I would have forgiven so much of this episode if that was it. Because then the puppet stuff is an amusing flip side to true drama at this point. The puppets in this. This is full blown sitcom territory. This felt like. Yep, we've, we've mentioned this before. Could this been an, have been an animated adventure of Star Trek? I don't even think it's that good. This is a. If this had been, let me put it this way, this would have been my very top level favorite Sesame street or Muppet show sketch. If you had Peck playing Spock as the only human in the shot and you had all these puppets around him for sketch. 10 minute long sketch. This is brilliant for a full episode. By the time I got past the 10 minute mark, I was bored. And like you, I was frustrated. I'm like, what are they doing? How much money did they put into building these puppets so that we could discover that all of the characterization is lacking when all we have is these actors voices.

Do you want to know which of the puppets was the one that was for me, the best puppet.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, it's Pelia. It's gotta be Pelia.

Sean Ferrell: No, it is the navigator.

Matt Ferrell: Come on it.

Sean Ferrell: No, it's the navigator who doesn't speak. And all he does is hide behind the console. He hides behind the con. Yeah, through and all he does. His facial expressions are all he's doing. He's effectively. He is the best puppet because it's all acting provided through that. As far as like the creativity of the designs of the puppets, I agree. Pelia is up there. I also liked, I really liked Spock's fiance's puppet. I thought they did a great job of the characterization being built into her, but the rest of them, they felt interchangeable. They all felt generic to me. I understood the comedy. I didn't need it. I don't come to Trek for that level of comedy. I appreciated the comedy of the very final shot of Spock. Looking back at Little Ricky, the puppet. Little Ricky has to have been named as a tip of the hat to Desilu Studios, which is where Star Trek originated. So it would have been Lucille Ball's son. So, like, this is. Like this is a deep tip of the hat to Desilu Studios.

Sean Ferrell: But what are we supposed to take away from that? We have the horror episode recently, the griffin incident, which ended on such a wonderful, cryptic, La'an looking out the window at the Griffin, which is being towed away. And in the window you see the spirit of the. The woman that they had encountered on that ship. And it's this question of, like, what is that? What is going on there? The lingering question mark that will never be answered. And I really, really like that they do the same thing here with this puppet. What are we supposed to walk away from this episode with the idea that somehow Little Ricky is involved or that this is some deeper meaning? Or is that just a comedy gag? Because it's Spock staring at a puppet and the puppet's staring back at Spock. Like, I know it's meant to be the latter, but is it worth 45 minutes of a Trek episode when you only have 10 episodes to build this? And when I looked for information about the episodes, I dig into various sources. I look at Wikipedia, I look at IMDb, I look at Memory Alpha. And when I went to IMDb, I inadvertently caught an image of. They have a chart showing the viewer ratings for the season for the episodes. This one, at the time that I was looking at that, this one gets below a 5 out of 10. Like, other episodes that we talked about already were all at sevens and eights. I think the lowest one was maybe the first episode of the season, which was maybe or somewhere around a six. This is below a five. It didn't land. And I'm like, with everything. I mean, like, and to not, like, I don't want to sound like I'm beating a dead horse here. There was a way to do this, like you said, that could have been really entertaining, really compelling, compelling, fun and funny and smart. And instead, like this you mentioned, like, this is you.

Sean Ferrell: You mentioned that the way this was made was well done. Like, there was. They are using puppets where they've clearly CGI'd out the mechanisms for moving the puppets. We don't see any arm sticks. We don't get anything that, like, gives the tell of there's somebody below the camera doing these things. So they spent time and effort doing these things. But some of the things that they have doing that they have happening in order to sell the episode felt like it waters down Trek to a point where none of these characters. This goes back to something we've talked about before. None of this felt true to the characters. Now, of course, an easy answer there is, this is a dream, so of course it doesn't. They also, like, I appreciated the humor of they go into space and they're floating around and Pelia is like, how are we even talking right now? None of this makes any sense. Like, I get that that's a joke, but for me, the fact that Spock is in this environment having panic attacks and getting slapped by his fiance in order to snap him out of it, I'm like, none of that, none of that feels true to what you want these stories to be, because we've just had some episodes that have done some wonderful characterization work around these people. To hearken back to the episode where they go to the vacation planet and Spock doesn't realize it's actually Jim Kirk with him in the room. I walked away from that episode saying, like, those are some of my favorite Spock and Kirk moments. That's really, really an original and funny and smart way to say, here are these characters you know so well from the original series. Here's a key moment of them getting close. And then we get something like this where it's like, even in his own dream, he's not him. And I just found myself saying, like, this is what we're given. Okay, fine. You. You've spent 45 of your 450 minutes for the season.

You spent 45 of them doing this. I'm not impressed.

Matt Ferrell: I've got a conspiracy theory. No evidence to back this up. So this is just me spitballing here. It's my feels, my feelings after watching so much Star Trek and all of this. Is Alex Kurtzman still driving the bus here? His days are over. He basically got fired. His contract was not renewed. And I know producing a show like this, you've written the episodes, like, way back. Like it's, it's. Those episodes were probably being written before he got let go, but it's not that much ahead of when he got let go because they basically got let go as they were starting production of the season, from my understanding. So they probably saw the writing on the wall of what was happening because they were doing pitches for new Star Trek shows and they kept getting rejected. As you know, this is not the direction we want to take Star Trek. I feel like this is this team's last gasp. They knew this was it. This is the last bite at this apple. And they wanted to have fun. And so they. If this entire season to me feels like, what kind of episode did you want to ever make? It's like, I thought it'd be funny to do this. I think it'd be great to be on a dinosaur planet. I thought it'd be fun to, you know, like, it comes across as they're making these episodes more for themselves this season than the viewers, because this season feels like somebody hitting the wrong key every couple measures when trying to play a sonata or whatever on the piano. It doesn't feel like they're making these episodes for me as a Star Trek fan or you or anybody else that's watching the show. It feels more like they thought it'd be fun to make a Muppet episode.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like they were doing it for us. And to me, I don't think it's Kurtzman in the group trying to give a middle finger to CBS and Paramount at all. I just think it's. They were seeing this as this is our last shot to really have some fun. Let's go have some fun and go out on a high note for ourselves. And they've probably convinced themselves that they were doing this for the fans. And what's frustrating to me is they clearly know Star Trek. And if you know Star Trek as well as they seem to know Star Trek, how would they think this is? This is what we'd want for an entire 10 episode season? That's why I don't get my complaints always come back to the amount of episodes you have. It's not that they did this episode, it's that they chose to do this. Combined with the last one, combined with the dinosaur episode, it's like, it's. Why are you choosing to waste your time with so many of these gimmicks? This is not what Star Trek is. It's so frustrating. I feel like if I can see them, I'd be like, you guys are better than this. I know you're better than this. You're much more capable than this.

Sean Ferrell: And it's interesting because, like, I appreciate everything you just said. And you're comparing it to the original series where it was literally, this week we go to an Old west planet, next week we go to a gangster planet. The week after that we go to a Nazi planet. From a certain perspective, gimmick, gimmick, gimmick. But it was always rooted in character first. And this feels like they've removed character and said, we're just going to, like, throw these fun things because everybody loves fun. And the irony is the team that you're talking about stopping and saying, well, the handwriting might be on the wall. Let's have fun with the kinds of stories we wanted to tell. And what they end up doing is demonstrating that they shouldn't have been trusted to head the program. It's almost like it's an audition reel to say, the executives at Paramount were right to not let us do more because this is what we had in mind. And I'm like, I don't. I agree with you. I don't think if they were given another show, it would look like these things. They kind of shoot themselves in the foot to say, like, hey, how about a show where we do the first couple of years of Kirk and Spock on the Enterprise? How about we create a prequel series leading into the original series? And there was a lot of question marks of, are they going to do it? Are they going to. Are they going to let them do it? Kurtzman just did an interview recently where she said, nobody ever said yes. Nobody ever said no. I just think it's dead. I'm like, maybe they were waiting to see how well received this season was before they gave you a definitive answer. And the results, if they're being judged on these episodes, I'm like, it's no wonder you haven't gotten a yes at this point, because this is just. It breaks my heart. It really does break my heart.

Matt Ferrell: I've said it to you before that this. This show, Strange New Worlds, is one of my favorites of all the Star Treks. It really is. But this season is making me question that. It's like, I really like seasons one through. What was it, four? What are we in five or four right now? It's just like, why are they. Why are they trying to do this? The other thing that's bothering me, Sean, is the lack of attention to detail within the season of how they're doing the storytelling. They're hitting the. The broad marks like, they're hitting the check marks to make sure that the character arcs are happening where they need to go for the original series. But they're missing the marks of, like, you raised it. There's a bit of a contradiction in how they had Spock behave in this episode versus just literally two episodes ago. And for me, the horror episode and this episode are basically the same character arc for Spock, because in that episode, he hallucinates his fiance who talks him through things, but in that episode, he's like, you're not here. I know you're not here. This logic says you cannot be here. But he still has a conversation with her. He knows probably he's cutting his own ears off, but he's, you know, hallucinating it. But he's trying to fight it with that logic keep coming in. And in this episode, he never does that.

Sean Ferrell: No.

Matt Ferrell: It's like he's hallucinating Muppets.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And he's having panic attacks, but he never once says, is this actually happening? Logic says this can't happen. Physics says this can't happen. He never questioned it in that way. And I'm like, just two episodes ago or three episodes ago, you were doing exactly that. Why are you not doing it here? And that's what was driving me bonkers. Because it's like the, it felt like, it feels like each of these episodes this season are written in a silo. And it's like they, it feels like whoever wrote this episode versus that episode didn't talk.

Sean Ferrell: It feels like they were written in a silo. And then somebody came in and cherry picked moments to plant seeds about the connective lines between people like Spock and La'an have what felt like a stapled in scene of just like, our relationship is over now. Like, okay, that scene needed to happen. Did it have to happen like this feeling like it came in and out of the episode simply to, like you said, check a box. They have to break up. Check did that like, I, I'm, yeah, at this point, at this point, I retreat back to the place of I love this series. I want, I wanted it to live up to itself. And it feels like some of these gimmick episodes are not doing that. And I find myself in a place where we already know. Starfleet Academy has been canceled. Its first season overall was better than this season for strange new Worlds. And I find that surprising that a show of this caliber in its fourth season has taken such a weird. It's not even a step backwards. It's like they fell off the path and they're standing in a muddy gully and they just don't realize it. It feels a little bit like they think they're on the path, but they're just slopping through mud. Whereas Starfleet Academy felt like, oh, it's got the first season jitters, but by the end of the season, it was kind of like, okay, now it's punching above its weight in some ways, and that's really great. I find myself thinking like, I never would have guessed that the best Trek series that we'd be watching this year for this podcast would have been the first season of Starfleet Academy at this point, the third season of the original series, and this season of Strange New Worlds. This all feels a little bit less fun than I would have guessed at the beginning of the year.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, I agree. I want to point out, though, that Starfleet Academy is coming back for a second season, but it's being canceled.

Sean Ferrell: They know it's not coming back.

Matt Ferrell: I know there's not going to be a season three. Season two is the final season, and so I'm hopeful that they can make that season two land on a high note because they got the jitters out like you said, but it was by the end they found their footing. I'm hoping they can keep that going for season two, but given how this season of Strange New World is going, I am getting very nervous for season two of Starfleet Academy. I'm hoping they can kind of stay the course in that.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I agree with you. So, viewers, listeners, jump into the comments, let us know, did you land where we landed? That you thought that? Yeah, puppets are fine for a few minutes and for part of a story, but an entire episode focused entirely on them was maybe a little too much of a cute thing? Or did you find yourself loving this episode? And I'm very interested if any of our viewers and listeners, if you watch this with your family in particular, do you have younger kids?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Is this landing in a place where you and your family were just laughing along? Because it's full blown family entertainment. In which case Matt and I are just the old fogies and we should go back to our bedrooms and just eat soup. Let us know in the comments. As always, liking subscribing, sharing with your friends, commenting, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast and we do appreciate all of that. But if you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the join button there. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads and it will also sign you up as an ensign to our spin off podcast, Out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We're very hopeful that you'll be interested in checking that out. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about how Strange New Worlds keeps borrowing other genres in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 4, "A Case of Chiaroscuro." A musical, a horror hour, and now film noir shot in black and white. Matt calls it Andor filtered through Doctor Who, and he means that as a compliment and a complaint at once. Sean argues the story earns the style, from Una's con at the end to La'an's quiet unraveling in sickbay. Pike also climbs the captain rankings along the way. So is genre play the smartest tool this show has? Or is the peanut butter getting into the chocolate?

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 02:32: Today’s Episode & Mailbag
• 08:27: Episode Description
• 08:55: This Time in History
• 11:37: Episode Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about how to pronounce the word chiaroscuro. That's right, I said it properly. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time. This is the podcast that takes a look at all of Star Trek in chronological. Just patted myself in the back for saying chiaroscuro properly and then I couldn't get the word chronologically out. So it's been a long week, it's been a long month. It's been a long 2026. Let's just turn the corner. I propose this. We just. It's 2020. Happy New Year, everybody. Here we are, brand new Year. We turned the corner. Here's looking at you. So anyway, this is the podcast that takes a look at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we also take a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a book coming out. I was going to say next year, but we just made it 2027. So it's this year, everybody. In April of 2027, I will have a new book coming out. It's a horror novel entitled In the Fields We Thirst. I hope you'll be interested in checking it out. It's available for pre order now, so go to your favorite bookstore online or off and ask for it by name. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He has that map behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Today we're going to be talking about a Case of Chiaroscuro, the newest episode of Strange New Worlds. Normally we are hip deep in older episodes. We are almost done with our original series rewatch. We've already waded through. I mean, how many is it now, Matt? We went through Enterprise, a good portion of Discovery, all the previous seasons of Strange New Worlds, Starfleet Academy was in there and we're almost done with the original series episodes and then we're going to jump into the movies.

So looking forward to that and hope everybody will be interested in joining us for that. But first, Matt, I've just talked for quite a while and I've said chiaroscuro more in this recording than I have in the past, I'd say 54 years of my life. How are you?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing, I'm doing great. Once again, second episode in a row with the intro. That's been a wild ride.

Today’s Episode & Mailbag

Sean Ferrell: Buckle up everybody. We're in weird days. We're in weird days. Matt and I are holding on. We're holding onto each other. We're getting through stuff. We're doing okay. But give me an open mic and this is what you're going to get. Anyway, today we're going to be talking about a case of chiaroscuro. This is an episode that dropped on August 13, 2026, directed by Meera Menon, written by Skylar Ojeda and Dana Horgan. And we're going to be talking about that in a bit. But first, as always, we like to jump into the mailbag, see what you've said about previous episodes, just in case people are curious. Our regular viewers, our regular listeners. We have been caught in a pattern lately where occasionally there are mailbag comments and occasionally there are not. It does not mean that we didn't find anything of interest. It's just that our recording schedule has gotten a little. Somehow we get into these little loops where we're ahead of your viewership, so we don't actually have any new comments to visit. That's why you see these blanks. We cherish your comments and love reading them and sharing them and. And discussing them afterward. So please keep those comments going. Anyway, that was just a note to say, please don't interpret our silence as our not being interested. So take it away. Matt, what have you found for the mailbag this week?

Matt Ferrell: Well, from our last episode, the. The Griffin incident, we had some feedback that came in. You and I both really liked this episode, like, a lot, a lot. And this. There was a bunch of feedback. And there was a. There's three comments that were all of a theme, which were. It was pretty good. And I'm kind of summarizing here, but they all, in different ways, said it felt like it went on a little too long in the first third and then came to an abrupt end at the end. And it felt very jarring. And thinking about it, I totally get where they're coming from, because when I was watching it, I had that feeling when it wrapped up that I thought, wow, this wrapped up really fast. Like, they really wrapped it up fast. But what's funny to me is my reaction to that was, ah, feels like next generation. And I can't wait till we get to the next generation, because they do this over and over and over.

Sean Ferrell: It's very much in the DNA.

Matt Ferrell: So many episodes.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yes. Where it's just like they come to this conclusion that takes like three minutes. They spend like 40 minutes just building up, and then just three minutes of like, it's done. Okay. We're moving on. So for me it was, it was jarring in a kind of like, I don't know, nostalgic way, I guess. Because I want Next Generation.

Sean Ferrell: I can see that too. That's an interesting element of Next Gen. I think all the shows of that era of Trek, they like, Voyager did it. I know Deep Space Nine did it. It's an interesting element to keep an eye on from the perspective of. Is that an example of Trek being more interested in the debate around certain topics as opposed to landing on a conclusion for those topics? I don't know that that necessarily applies to the Griffin incident, which is such a horror issue that, you know, for me, I don't know that they've, you know, it's a demonstration of philosophy. Philosophy. Not landing on a decision. But it'll be interesting moving forward because some of the best episodes of Next Gen that revolve around a debate do have that. Well, we've said everything we have to say goodbye, everybody. And then they walk out the door before you realize like, wait a minute, the credits. How did that happen? Yeah, exactly.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. We also had a comment from Paleghost69 from 19 minutes into the episode when we were talking wrote on Spock and La'an's relationship into Spock's character change in the original series. You mean you guys haven't been picking up on the telegraph that La'an is going to die? Paleghost, no, I haven't been picking up on that. I have been picking up on something really bad is going to happen. But I'm not taking that as she's going to die. Cause the showrunners of this show don't feel like they're that ballsy they would kill off a well loved character like that. It feels like they will put her through the ringer, but she'll get a little something at the end that kind of like wraps it up in a nice way. That's my take. That's probably why I haven't been feeling like, oh, they're gonna kill her off. But it does feel like something really bad is about to happen. What do you think, Sean?

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I agree. There's a. There's definitely a fuse burning in the background. And there are from a writerly perspective. I think that there are a number of ways that it could play out. All of which could have the deep impact that you're talking about and could play a big role in saying, how are we jumping towards Spock becoming the Spock we know from the original Series death or not, I agree with you. Something. Something is ticking.

Matt Ferrell: And then we had a couple of wrong answers only and I couldn't make up in my mind which ones. I'm going to read them both. One from AJ Chan about human best friend. Parentheses clip show. Several crew members are flying a shuttle transporting a key diplomatic figure, the dog of the Federation President, when they encounter a storm and do an emergency landing on an asteroid. They pass the time by telling stories about dogs. Spock recalls the story about his pet Sekhet dying when he was a kid. La'an declines to tell the story, but the audience sees a flashback about her childhood dog running into the woods when the Gorn attacked her colony. Palia recalls being a guest on the NX01 when Porthos peed on the sacred tree and had to spend the night in Sickbay. The Enterprise finds them and the President's dog pees on Pike's leg. The end.

Sean Ferrell: I actually really like that.

Matt Ferrell: Me too. That's why I had to read it, because I was like, I kind of like this.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: The other one was Mark Loveless, and he's on a theme here from last time. Okay, plot of human best friend in part two of Stewie's Time Machine episode, the Griffin family dog Brian ends up on the Enterprise bonding over alcohol. Brian and Scotty end up becoming besties and even handled an Enterprise crisis together, solving it and preventing the ship from exploding. 3 out of 5 stars. And somewhat related to this, Paleghost69 left a comment saying about the episode the Griffin Incident. I enjoyed this, but I would have enjoyed Mark Lovelace's Famous Guy crossover even more, which I thought was just love it.

Sean Ferrell: That's a great response.

Matt Ferrell: Thank you, guys.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, thank you guys.

Matt Ferrell: That's terrific.

Sean Ferrell: So now, that noise you hear and those lights you see flashing, that's not a Family Guy crossover starting. It's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the, let's call it the Memory Base Alpha description. Take it away, Matt.

Episode Description

Matt Ferrell: Una is mistaken for a resistance leader and drawn into his struggle against Klingon occupation.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: That pretty much says it all, don't you think? Although it does leave one element of this episode curiously missing. And we'll talk about that, I'm sure, quite a bit when we get into the discussion. So what was the world like at the time of original broadcast? As I mentioned before, this one dropped on August 13, 2026. And what were we listening to? Well, Matt on Spotify, I think, you know, that you were listening to Drop Dead by Olivia Rodrigo. And you've been rehearsing. Take it away, Matt. Good. Thanks for that. And at the box office, our regular viewers and listeners will know that there's a certain point in our rewatches of older programs where I get a little punchy about the fact that it's, it's always the same movie because we used to have an era where a movie would hit number one and they would just stay there for weeks after weeks after weeks. We no longer live in that era because movie going is not viewed in the same way that it used to be. Well, buckle up, because I think we're going to be seeing this one for a while. That's right. The number one film remained Brand New Day, which originally released on July 31. But at this point in the month of August, it held onto the top spot. And spoiler alert, it will continue to do so and on television. Among the new programs that are getting top critical response, this one stood out to me. Yes, it's another superhero from another comic book, but from a competing studio, this is Lanterns, which is based on the DC characters of Green Lantern. This is an American superhero television series created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelot and Tom King. It's on HBO and it's based on the Green Lantern characters Hal Jordan and Jon Stewart. I really liked the fact that when they, they cast, first of all, Kyle Chandler, everybody loves Kyle Chandler. He is a good selection for Hal Jordan.

Aaron Pierre is in there as Jon Stewart and then Kelly McDonald is in there as well. The thing about this show that I find very compelling, and I say this as somebody who has not yet watched it, it's effectively True Detective through the lens of Green Lantern. I find that really compelling. It was a really smart choice. I really like what they got going on. So check that out.

Matt Ferrell: I've been watching it.

Sean Ferrell: It's really good. I am not surprised. I, I mean, when you look at Rotten Tomatoes, when I opened up Rotten Tomatoes and saw that the tomometer was at 92%, I'm like, oh, boy, the critics really lined up in support of that one. So. And in the news on this day in the middle of August, Homeland Security intensifies pursuit of non citizens on voter rolls. Immigrants who said they inadvertently registered to vote while obtaining or renewing driver's licenses are increasingly facing deportation under the Trump administration. On now to our discussion of this episode. Kind of a timely thing with that headline being about looking for people who don't belong. And then here comes an episode filmed in black and white. With a. Let's talk about the black and white nature of this one in just a moment. Matt, I'd like to get your thoughts on that right out of the gate. Heavy metaphors around Nazism, World War II, direct homages to Casablanca, the idea of film noir being played with in the filming of a black and white episode. And we've talked in the past couple of weeks about, well, if you have episodes that revolve around a certain gimmick, taking something off of the straightforward sci fi path of Star Trek, the straight and narrow episodes, and you do the gimmick episodes, but you only have 10 episodes in your season, every single one of those is 10% of your season leaning into a gimmick. We find ourselves now in another one where, yes, there's a very obvious gimmick. We loved the horror story episode and now we go into one that's an homage to film noir and it's filmed in black and white. This time around, when it comes to the gimmick, as opposed to the musical episode where there wasn't an in episode reason why they were all singing, or in the horror episode, there is an in episode explanation of why the horror experiences are taking place.

This one revolves around a very small little reference of it's because of the red band spectrum light emitted by the star nearby.

So everything is effectively just desaturated, color wise. Is that how it would work? Is that what the world would look like if you had that type of star nearby? It doesn't really matter. Hard sci fi people are going to look at that and probably say, oh, there's all sorts of reasons why that's baloney for me. I quickly fell into a place where the point of this is to tell a story in a certain way. They wanted to tell a story with a certain style and they wanted to underscore. They have a line right at the end of the episode. Not everything is so black and white. You know, they're. They're going for kind of a tongue in cheek response to their own episode in the episode to say we wanted to tell a story this way about this kind of thing. And I found myself by the end of the episode having come fully past the Am I distracted by the gimmick? Does the gimmick undermine the episode? Because those were questions that were running through my head at the beginning. I find myself thinking like, is this working as a storytelling device? Is this working for me as an audience member? Am I enjoying this? And by the end of the episode, I find myself largely Having pulled into the episode enough that I was no longer thinking in terms of, am I enjoying this? Is this a device that's working? That to me, told me that it did work. And I found myself thinking, interesting that that was the device they landed on to tell the story that they wanted to tell. And I found it to be right in the parlance of this podcast. This episode, for me, while being a. Let's throw back to the 1940s. Let's throw back to a black and white storytelling. Let's pay homage to old movies. This felt incredibly contemporary to me, very of the now, very of the political moment that we find ourselves in. And I found it working in that vein.

I found it working aesthetically as a thing that was pleasing to look at, because I thought the black and white filming, the cinematography of the episode, and I'd like you to talk about that as well, I thought it was so lovely to look at. They knew what they were like. You can tell when they shoot a scene with this kind of black and white expectation. You don't put the lights where you would put the lights otherwise. You don't put kliegs on people in certain ways to make sure the shadows are hitting the face the way you want them to. I found it lovely to look at. I found it compelling in its point, and I found it moving in its purpose. So it ended up being. This felt very Trek to me and right up to the final shot where it resaturates, but not into color, but into sepia. So it ends up being. Yes, the world is more sophisticated, but there's still layers between them and us as far as what the final moment looks like. So this is me kind of like opening the discussion about the episode with a. I really liked this in a very different way from the ones I've liked previous to this. Like the horror episode, which I thought stood out as like, this is one of the. This is one of the best tracks I've ever seen. I wouldn't put this one that high, but I do put it up there. As for metaphors to talk about what is the nature of evil and what is the nature of identity and how if we are not to be defined on what we are born as, but to be identified as what we do, this episode stands up and is better than the original series efforts at the Nazi episode. Like, this one gets it in a really interesting way for me at least. So what did.

Did you have similar questions in mind as you started the episode? Were you going through a similar internal debate at the beginning, did you find yourself falling into the storytelling and losing the debate, or did you find yourself just completely on the outside looking in for most of it?

Matt Ferrell: I'll answer that through the eyes of my wife. Sit down to start watching this episode. And the thumbnail comes up, black and white image of Una, the thumbnail. And her first words that she uttered was, oh, no, I don't know if I want to watch this. If it's like some kind of weird time travel. They're back in 1940s Germany. And I was like, oh, God. But I had an open mind. I don't mind those kind of episodes. I was totally fine to go into this, started watching it, and when they said, oh, we're going into a area with this infrared light and it's a black and white, first voice in my head was stupid. Just in the back of my mind, just, like, dumb. I was like, why would you go to this length to try to explain why you just wanted to make a film noir episode? You just wanted to make a film noir episode. Okay, that's fine. Come up with a stupid, sciencey reason for why everything's black and white. Fine. Okay, first five minutes, I completely forgot I was watching a black and white TV show. I just was like, oh, okay. This is well told. It's well rendered. It's interesting how things are going out. I got a little more distracted by the fact that she just happened to look like the resistance leader. It's like, come on, come on. The people that know her, know her and grew up with her and lived with her. It's like, wouldn't know that this alien that just wandered in just happens to look like her. It's like, come on. That, to me, was a bigger issue than the black and white explanation by a huge margin. But even then, I got pulled into the episode because it was an interesting exploration around fascism and what it, you know, personality and what do you stand for, all those kind of things that they were exploring. I thought we were doing really well. I got pulled into the episode. The Doctor's story was great.

Like, all of the stuff they were kind of fleshing out in the entire story, I thought was really well done. And by the end of the episode, like I said, black and white issue was not an issue for me. And then when they faded back into that sepia tone color at the end, I was like, oh, that's the only reason they did this. They just wanted to have an artsy, fartsy film noir episode where they could use the color to accentuate the point that they were trying to drive home. And for me, that didn't bother me, but I felt like that's kind of a hacky way to do it. It's so on the nose. Watch a show like Andor that deals with many of the same issues and a fascist state and all of this kind of similar themes. They just told a compelling story that by the end you're just like gutted by that show. This was kind of like taking Andor and making a Doctor who version of it, if that makes sense. It's just like a. The more light hearted way that these showrunners handle Star Trek is a very.

Sean Ferrell: They.

Matt Ferrell: I don't know. Every episode seems to be a. You can go back through the previous seasons too. Episodes tend to evoke. They wanted to make a episode around this style of movie or that style of show or this musical or like they're. They're having fun with genres and telling stories in different genres. And that's very Doctor who-y to me. Because Doctor who, he is kind of cartoonish and over the top and bombastic. And that seems to be why these two showrunners seem to love each other.

Sean Ferrell: Like.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, because they seem to be cut from the same cloth. They've kind of Doctor who ified Star Trek just a little bit. And I don't mind that because I love Doctor who, but I feel like, you know, like the. You got peanut butter in my chocolate. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. It's like, I think you're getting a little too much peanut butter on the chocolate here, folks. You might want to take some of that off. But that being said, if I was just talking about this episode only, I enjoyed it. It was not episode one for me at all. It was not the levels of episode two, which is the freakish horror storytelling that they did in there.

Sean Ferrell: That was so good.

Matt Ferrell: I thought this was like a good, solid Trek episode. It dealt with Trekkie topics, It dealt with Trekkie ethics and morality. It dealt with thorny issue. It didn't have a clear cut answer to some of it. It still remained in that shades of gray at the end, which is the going back to a sepia tone color. It's like there were aspects of this I thought they handled pretty well. I was just kind of disappointed by. I don't know. This is gonna sound like a real derogatory thing, like a grad school film project. You know what I mean?

Sean Ferrell: Like, there's like a. Yeah, it's like a. It felt a little. A little precious.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, that's a good word. It's very precious. Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's like.

Matt Ferrell: But I liked it.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I understand that approach. I mean, as you're describing all of your responses to it, I think that that is going to be a big part of my response to most of the next generations. We're stuck in the holodeck and we don't know how to get out. Episodes where the point of those is often very compelling and you have those moments of true. Like, I like some of those episodes I enjoy. Especially when you get to Barclay. This is the second episode of this podcast in a row where we've invoked his name. It's going to be fun to get to his episodes. When you get to the questions around, what is the point of this episode? And the point is to be able to have a bigger discussion, and this episode does that. So I think it falls into that same territory, and it kind of feels a little bit like I liked this one, I think, clearly more than you did. But I completely understand where you're coming from. So let's. Let's pull back from the overall tone of it, and you've already touched on a couple of the elements in the A storyline. I very quickly was just like, I know why they're doing this. I'm going to forgive them for saying, holy cow, do you look like an exact duplicate of this woman who just died?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: You can't have this episode be what it is without that happening. So, okay, even her Klingon boss and her best friend, resistance leader, both of them are just like, you're my friend, you're my underling. And like, okay, fine, you want to be able to have these moments.

Matt Ferrell: But here's. Here's what bothered me about that, though, Sean, is they could have very easily taken a different. They could have had their cake and eat it, too. Here. They could have had. The Klingon doesn't really recognize her because the Klingons not paying close attention to that kind of stuff.

Sean Ferrell: Maybe all humans look alike, but the friend.

Matt Ferrell: The friend behind the bar should have been immediately like, who are you? You like, you look frighteningly like my friend, but you are not her. Who are you? And then leaning into the, well, we should let you pretend to continue being her because you still might be able to help us. So he could have leaned into it, and if they had done that, it would have diffused a lot of my issue with the. She just happens to look not just a little like her, but she's so much like her that nobody understands that that's not her.

Sean Ferrell: It's like, right.

Matt Ferrell: So unbelievable. They could have just very easily addressed that.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. But I think that one of the things that works for the a plot that is really compelling. You have three big issues on the table all at once because you have three different characters who are responding to the exact same moment in very different ways. And I found myself thinking, wow, they really managed to kind of sandwich in a lot of stuff in one plot line. And each one got enough attention. Each one felt like it was properly framed and dealt with in interesting ways, led to interesting conclusions, had to do with character and plot. But none of it overwhelmed and none of it felt like it was given short shrift. You have Una Chin Riley with the. I know what it's like to have to pretend to be something you're not. And there, you know, there comes in a very contemporary through line of people who have to pretend to be normal in our current environment because outing yourself or being outed will be a legitimate threat to your safety. So that is handled, I thought, with a very interesting. And it drives the plot heavily in this episode. It's an interesting issue to deal with. The Doctor revealing that story that he tells. The backstory of, yeah, there were these loyalists outside the hospital who were keeping the patients from getting treated. And when I was done, none of the loyalists were alive. And it's this like, who is this doctor? Moment of like the lengths that he goes or something. Yeah, he's like James Bond and he. The lengths he goes to to make sure that Uhura is going to be safe. The tutelage he gives her about. Here's how you mask everything you're feeling. You have to make sure that you give yourself enough handholds so that you can safely navigate this cliff. And it's this fascinating, like, pick the name of a family member or something that is genuinely true so that you don't have that moment of, I forgot what name I came up with.

Telling her at the bar, order a drink, don't look. You've got to act like all of this is beneath you and you don't care. Like guiding her through this PTS inducing moment and doing it all with this kind of. I've done this so many times. And her response being, who are you? Like, how do. Like, how many different things have you done? And he's just like, eh, don't worry about it. That I thought was definitely handled wonderfully done. And then Uhura's storyline is compelling because here she is in an environment where there was no anticipation she was going to go into a situation where she might potentially be tortured in an environment where she would be interrogated. The way she goes through all of that, the way she tries to handle and take in what the doctors advised her to do. I thought it was deftly written that she lies about what she sees in the image, so that when she leans into her half truths and it reads as true, it confuses them as interrogators. She manages to deftly weave her way through all that in a way that I was just like, that's really great. This woman who is inclined to say, language is how I see the world. I know 31 words for bad, and this is worse than all of them. Like that idea. And then in this moment, she's able to parse the questions in a way, like, I see a tree. So that. That's a lie. Where are you from? A small village. True. And it's just, like, nicely handled. I was like, you go here. Or that's. That's terrific. The sandwiching of those. Any one of those could have been a through line for a plot where that would be the only one you talk about. And yet here they have these three characters bouncing off of each other in these ways that I found worked really well and gave each of them enough attention to feel like each one was satisfied. And that's, I think, part of what makes the energy of the episode keep lifting you back up.

You get maybe distracted by, like, okay, some of the stuff, like, she looks just like her. Okay. But then what they're doing with the conversations brings me back in again.

Matt Ferrell: These are characters you care about, and they're in situations that you're worried about them. And it's fun to see how they're evolving from these situations. Like the holy. Her thing. I just adored her plot. Her little plot line of what she went through and how she got through it. And the Doctor helping her, I thought was so perfect. The thing that kept me engaged and really like the episode at the end of it, even though I have these downsides to it, was what they're doing. The main ethical dilemma, which is because all of this comes back to, here are Starfleet officers all willing to break the rules. They're all breaking the rules. La’an on the ship is breaking rules on the ground. Una is breaking rules. And the Doctor's like, you do realize what you're doing right now? And he's completely okay to go along with her to break the rules, but he's just reminding her, you make sure you know what you're doing, because what you're doing gonna break the rules. My favorite Picard episodes are this. Them grappling with whether to break the, you know, the Prime Directive or to help the species at the. For sake of this other one. It's like those. Those moral dilemmas that Starfleet puts itself into because of its rules are what makes Star Trek so fun. And this one does that. So it allowed me to kind of forgive the. Oh, she looks just like the person. So stupid. I completely forgot about that and just wrote it off because I was in the moment of, oh, this is an interesting little morality play that they're kind of building out right here about what to do and how to handle it and the clever ways that Una ends up handling. The end sequence of just the way she tricks the guy and frames him as the bad guy so that they can all go scot free out the door. And I was like, you go Una. Like, that's a very close. I didn't see that coming at all. So it caught me by surprise.

So it's. Those elements of the storytelling were so strong that it made me forgive all the weak spots.

Sean Ferrell: I really liked the turn at the end there with Una as well. And it was one of those things where as soon as I realized what was happening, I was like, I should have seen it coming. But it's a sign of good writing. It's a sign of strong writing when you can use something that is effectively overused. That idea of planting the thing on the person so that the double cross works to your advantage. That's been done a thousand times before. But to get away with it, it's a little bit like you go up to that street magician. You know, it's Three Card Monty. You know that they're gonna do something to hide that queen, but they still get away with it. And you're entertained by that. And I found myself in that moment of just like you, you hid the queen. Good job, you got away with it. To switch to the B plot, La'an is doing her. It's again, still in the Chiaroscuro. So it's black and white. But now that story isn't Casablanca as much as it is a private eye who is beginning to question themselves. And so they've played with this. Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? Am I in over my head? Is there a problem? I liked the exploration of that with her. I felt like the previous episode they'd given her really short shrift where it was the. She just turns into this tough guy and she goes around and she beats people up and she makes the gang her gang. And like, okay, that was played for almost. It's a comedic element to the episode. And I'm like, they're not giving any really compelling teeth to the questions around, is she changing? And as we mentioned at the beginning, there's a fuse burning here we are seeing something change. I didn't expect the B plot to be the one that would explore her recognition of I don't know what's happening to me. And I thought they handled it really, really nicely, considering it was a B plot.

It was a little bit like, you know, I would have anticipated maybe more something along the lines of, like, Data's day. The episode which starts with Data writing a letter to the doctor who wanted to take him apart. The entire episode is Data is narrating what it's like to be Data. And by the end of it, we're seeing where has he grown, where has he not, and where are the edges of who he is as a thing and a person in the world? And that was the A plot. So here we have this, and it plays with similar terrain of the shifting understanding of herself and what she thinks is going on to the point where she goes to sickbay. I love the scene in sickbay where she reveals, like, I fully believed I had found a conspiracy. She wasn't wrong. So there's this kind of very nice bow, very quickly put into a B plot on something that is gonna have depth. And if they're doing it right, if they're doing it the way you and I think they're doing it, is gonna be extremely compelling and impactful moving forward. So I really thought the B plot was handled well.

How did you feel about what was going on with La’an and this?

Matt Ferrell: I agree with you. The previous episode, it was for laughs. And this episode was more time and depth to ratcheting up the tension around her character. Development of this tension of this ticking clock, I thought was really good of playing with her inability. Just like where she's starting to self doubt and think that she might be hallucinating or becoming overly paranoid. I thought it was a fantastic thing. The scene with Christine where Christine comes clean and is like, I erased it for a friend. And then there's almost a sense of kind of like relief on her for, oh, my God, I wasn't imagining this. But crap, now what do I do?

Sean Ferrell: Her duty is supposed to compel her to report this. Yeah, right.

Matt Ferrell: Which is the whole thing of, like, breaking the rules. Why are you breaking rules? Is there a good reason to break those rules? And here we got Christine breaking a rule. We got La'an breaking rules to protect Christine, you have the captain at the end who is basically saying, like, a wink and a nod to her. I'm here to help you. He's almost saying, I know kind of what happened here. Yeah, Like, I know you're covering something up.

Sean Ferrell: You found something that's gonna be fine.

Matt Ferrell: You can talk to me. So I thought, I thought that was neat to see him the way he did it was very artful the way he handled it. Which, by the way, Pike, he is getting up there in my mind as one of the best captains.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Like, most underrated captain would be a voyager. And then you've got, for me, Picard's number one. And then I think Cisco is right up there. Sorry, everybody. I think Kirk is not anywhere close to the top for me. But Pike, Pike is getting there mainly. I love how he is so unique in how he handles his team. He is like that family kind of centerpiece. And I love how he goes to the bridge and he'll go, okay, quick ideas. And then he expects his entire team to come in and start barking ideas. And then he picks the one that he thinks it's a good one, where Kirk is the one that's. He knows he's one of the smartest people in the room and he's the one that's playing 5D jest and trying to come out ahead. And Picard is that, you know, buttoned up, you know, by the numbers in command kind of guy. I just love how they're all so distinct from each other. And Pike's character and just the way he comes across, it's just. You love the man, which is making what's going to happen to him so tragic, is that he's this. It's working lovable captain. And it's, it's, it's setting him up for that tragic moment. Even better.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's going to be very compelling if they show us that.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: If they get to the moment where, like, here it is and they give us all this dramatic moment to build to that as a scene. It's going to be really, really compelling. I also want to say about the La'an storyline, nice little bow for the Scotty and the pilot to be like, they were eating Cuban sandwiches together. And La'an at the end to say, like, when he says, did you discover anything? She's like, did you know that Scotty and the pilot have become friends. Throwing that out there as like, that. I found that out. That's interesting.

Sean Ferrell: As an element of it. And the Vulcan who's in her first year out of the Academy and is serving alongside Uhura, having her come back in a moment like this, even if it's only to serve, like, you need to have a Communications officer on the Bridge, she needs somebody with that expertise to help her with a thing. Even if that's all that that character was there for in this moment. I thought it was a nicely done little nugget of a scene where this Vulcan is just like, you don't need to blow smoke up my butt. I mean, like, okay, if you're not capable. And seeing her kind of like twist a knife in a Vulcan ego, it's one of those things where I hearken back to the episode of Voyager where they give us the flashback of Tuvok when he served under Sulu. And you see the scene when Sulu says, if you're going to serve on my Bridge, you have to have a sense of humor. And don't tell me Vulcans don't have a sense of humor. I know better. It's evocative of that moment for me where it's like, yeah, Vulcans are going to Vulcan, but you can, you know, you can prod them in certain ways and get an emotional response and they're going to pretend it's not emotion, but it is. It's like you can needle them in the right ways to. To get what you need out of them. And I thought that that was a nice. A nice moment showing La'an also having that kind of, I can work with people in ways to get what I need. Because she's sophisticated and. And without putting too fine a point on it, she's kind of conniving. She's kind of manipulative.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: And who does that sound like? It sounds like Khan. It's just this kind of like, I'm gonna. I can out think you in getting what I need. And she demonstrates that a lot. It's an interesting character that they've crafted with getting there very subtly where I'm watching and I'm just like, oh, yeah, she's not. She's not a nice Starfleet officer. She is. She's got this darker edge to her and it's a little bit like, where is the. Where is the security officer's perspective come from? Sometimes people are good police and security because they think like the bad guy. And she has a certain amount of, if I was trying to get away with this, this is what I would do. And so she's able to find the dark corners because she's like, what I would do would be to do these things, and she finds the bad guys that way. And I really. I really like that. It's an interesting. It's very different from, like, the security officers who stand out in Trek tend to be. You get. You get Warf and you get Tuvok, and the two of them were very different from each other because Warf was. It's. I am military precision personified. And Tuvok, it's the pacifist logic applied to security procedures and protocols. But here comes completely other side of it, which is, oh, yeah, if I was trying to take over the ship, you'd have a hard time stopping me. And it's this.

Matt Ferrell: Which I could do.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, which I could do. I could take over the ship. So, yeah. So in the end, it sounds very much like I give it a slightly bigger or higher thumbs up than you do, but it sounds like we're both saying, like, this one works on the whole, and we both enjoyed it. So I'm curious, viewers and listeners, where do you land on that scale? Do you agree with me that this one worked in ways that was surprising to you, to a level where the enjoyment was more than just average? Or do you land in Matt's camp where you're like, it was fine because it was fine and it was well told, but at the end, it doesn't rank among the best. Let us know in the comments. Don't forget commenting, liking, subscribing, and sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast, and we do appreciate all that support. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to TrekinTime.Show. Click the join button there. That allows you to throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of ranting about the fact that it's still 2026. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean ask whether Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 3, "Human Best Friend" works better as a live-action Lower Decks episode. The shore leave setup gives Strange New Worlds room for drunk-planet chaos, La’an taking over a gang, Spock mind-melding with a plant, and Scotty and Ortegas turning into a buddy comedy. But with only 10 episodes in the season, they also question whether this much goofiness helps or hurts the larger story.

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 02:46: Today’s Episode
• 03:07: Episode Description
• 03:44: This Time in History
• 05:25: Today’s Discussion

• 0:00: Intro • 01:03: Viewer feedback • 03:32: Today's episode • 04:00: This time in history • 06:07: Episode discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In this episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about the Courtship of Eddie's father. More on that in a moment. Welcome everybody, to Trek in Time. This is the podcast that takes a look at Star Trek, all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. We are currently this close to the end of the original series. And once we finish the original series, believe it or not, yes, we're going to do the movies and we'll be moving on to Next Generation and then eventually weaving in Deep Space Nine and Voyager and well, by that time it'll be 2059. But we're taking a break from the original series right now because we're doing Strange New Worlds. Yes, we like to take a look at the brand new episodes of Star Trek that are dropping while we're doing our rewatch of old episodes. So thank you for joining us. Here we are still Strange New Worlds, Season four, Episode three, Human Best Friend. And who am I talking about when I say we. Well, talking about my human best friend. Yeah, that's right. It's my brother. It's Matt. He is the host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Sean Ferrell, Matt's brother. And I'm a writer. I wrote some sci fi, I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have. I keep saying to people when we open these episodes, more information about my book as it becomes available. Well, big news for me, big news for everybody here. You can pre order my book now. It is now available wherever you buy your book. So whether that's bookshop.org, which I love because it supports local bookstores or Amazon or Barnes and Noble, wherever you'd like to go, we'll have a link in the show notes. You can go pre order my next book, which is dropping in April of 2027. It's in the Fields We Thirst. It is a little horror novel I've been working on for most of my life. I hope everybody enjoys it. So I already mentioned Matt at the just a moment ago and I mentioned that we're going to be talking about the Courtship of Eddie's Father. Matt, first, how are you? And second, do you know what I'm talking about? Matt Ferrell: Well, first, that intro was a wild ride. Sean Ferrell: Yes, everybody was glued. Everybody was glued to the hood. Matt Ferrell: On the the second point, I do not get the reference to the Courtship of Eddie's father at all. I never watched that, so I don't know. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, if you don't know it, why don't you just listen to it a little bit right now under the hook section, just click that link and listen to the theme song from the Courtship of Eddie's Father. Matt Ferrell: Okay. I know this. Yes. Okay. My best friend Sean.

Today’s Episode

Sean Ferrell: It just seems to fit. It's. I want to see that theme song along with brief clip of that along with just an image of Spock and Kirk would make my heart grow three sizes, let's say. So today we're going to be talking about the third episode of the fourth season of Strange New Worlds. This is the 32nd episode of Strange New Worlds produced. It's the 33rd released. It's originally written by Kathryn Lyn and directed by Yana Gorskaya. This is an episode that originally dropped on August 6, 2026. Those flashing lights you see and those alarms you hear, it's not time for you to run out into the street screaming. Nope, it's the read alerts. Time for Matt to share with us the Wikipedia description. But this is not even a Wikipedia description. This is actually from the very valuable fandom website Memory Alpha, which is completely focused on Star Trek. So, Matt, jump into the Memory Alpha summary. Matt Ferrell: Shore leave on a pleasure planet turns dangerous when the crew's promised escape stops behaving like fun. Sean Ferrell: Not entirely grammatic, but it is a sentence. Matt Ferrell: Yes, I got tripped up there. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. This episode originally on August 6, 2026, what was the world like at the time of original broadcast? Well, Matt, I don't need to tell you this, but the number one song that everybody was rocking out to on Spotify. That's right, it was Into You by Ariana Grande. Take it away, Matt. Good. Sean Ferrell: And at the movies, Matt, you forecast this last week saying, hmm, the number one movie's not gonna stay Odyssey for long. And it certainly didn't. What? We will be talking about this one for a few weeks. That's right. Spider Man, Brand New Day took the number one spot and at this point has become one of the most successful movies ever to drop from Hollywood. Matt Ferrell: Good job, Spider Man. Ever. Ever. Yep.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: And on television on August 6, 2026, a new documentary dropped on HBO. This is a five episode true crime docu series about exotic reptile smuggling. It's created by the same team that created Tiger King. Yeah, it's Monsters of God. And just reading the sentence, this was by the same team as Tiger King. I had a whiplash flashback to the early days of the Pandemic when nobody was allowed to go outside. And everybody said, thank goodness we have this documentary about crazy people and large cats. And in the news on this day, August 6, 2026, the headline from the New York Times revolved around hacks on the US Water supply follow years of warnings and neglect. Federal and state officials are racing to address an assault on the nation's water supply that they believe is the work of Iranian hackers. That's right. We put a stick in a hornet's nest and then we were confused about what the hornets got angry on. Now to our discussion about Human Best Friend. Matt, do you you back when we watched the first episode of this season and you had already seen beyond that episode, so I had bemoaned like, oh no, I don't know if I like the tone that this first episode forecasts for the season. And you said, oh, well, you know, hold on, I've seen things. So you know, let's, let's give them some room to breathe. And then we talked about the second episode and I was like, holy cow. Like boy, did that turn into a better episode. And then we come to the third episode and I am genuinely, genuinely curious. Which side of that fence does this episode fall on for you?

Today’s Discussion

Matt Ferrell: I did not hate this episode, but I also didn't love this episode. I felt that sense of whiplash, of like, it feels like, you know, like they made one for themselves. They made one for us and then they made another one for themselves. And now I'm hoping number four is they come back to us again and make one for us. I have a feeling that might be what they're doing is because they're kind of like, it's a humorous one, lighthearted, super dark, scary and then lighthearted. I'm wondering if they're just trying to keep that balance going. Cause like you don't want the show to feel too dour, too dark, too dreary. So they're probably trying to bookend that horrific episode with two lighthearted ones. But yeah, this one was a little rough in the sense of if you don't like silly, goofy Star Trek episodes, you are going to hate this episode. But I'm going to defend it. Sean wouldn't defend it because every single Star Trek series has goofy ass episodes just like this. Every single one. Original series, Trouble of Tribbles. There's been numerous ones in the original series that both of us were like, what is going on here? They did it Next Generation multiple times. Was it. Commander Barclay says hello. There's been a bunch of them in Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Every single show has goofy episodes to lighten the mood. So I'm going to defend it on that count. In the sense of I thought this one, as far as goofy episodes are, I thought this was way better than episode one. Like, this is way better than the start of the season. I think this, I think that was a train wreck. This one I don't think is a train wreck. It's just kind of a. If you don't like the musicals, you're not going to like the musical episode. If you don't like goofy episodes, you're not going to like this. But I still felt like it felt Star Trek y. It just wasn't my cup of tea. Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: If that makes sense. There are going to be Star Trek fans that will like this episode and for them, I'm glad this exists. It's not for me. But David Foley, I'm very happy that David Foley was in this. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, Dave Foley, hats off to him. And as far as, like, goofy, goofy characters that have been portrayed by comedic actors, I think he's up there. As far as like instantly creating a character that I don't know how they would do it, but I would love it if it returned. Matt Ferrell: Yeah, me too. Sean Ferrell: There's. This is, this is Harry Mudd. I had no problem with Dave Foley showing up and just being like, oh, I didn't see you there. Actually, I did. Going from there, it set the tone perfectly. Matt Ferrell: And his character has a dark past. Like in the, in, at the end when he talks about, like, I didn't know he used to be like this. It was like, oh, he's got some kind of dark, sordid history. There's something there that could be a lot of fun. What if he came back and he's out of that planet and his dark side comes back out again, you know what I mean? Like, there could be something fun about that.

Sean Ferrell: They could do something like that. I have a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head. So much like the opening to this episode, I may not be fully coherent. So I hope people are willing to join me on this wild ride of how I'm going to describe my feelings about this episode. I've seen some chatter online, mainly on Reddit, where I've seen people discussing Star Trek in general, but this particular season in general, and not liking the tone of the season. I haven't read details, but I have seen people voice something similar to what you and I have said. When you only have 10 episodes in a season, you don't have a lot of episodes to squander on either weak scripts, which I would say was episode one, or goofball like this, when, I mean, this is now 10% of your season, and if you have another goofball now, you've got a 20% of your season. If you have another weak script now, there's 40% of your season has been either goofball or weak script. So it's like you don't have as much wiggle room. Having said that, this one does not, to me, suffer from the weak script issues of the first season at all. I felt like it was very tight. I felt like it was paced well. And every single set piece of this episode felt like it. It worked on its own terms. The karaoke to Klingon with Total Eclipse of the Heart, I thought that was great. I thought that was. I thought that was. I thought that was really original and more fun than if she had been singing simply Klingon opera and somebody had been like, she knows Klingon opera. That would have been funny. But it being Total Eclipse of the Heart, she's doing power ballads in Klingon because it's. And the way they phrase it as, like, total Klingon power ballad. The idea that there are Klingons who are listening to Klingon versions of these things made me laugh. That it kind of harkens back to the throwaway line where it's.

You haven't really understood Macbeth until you've heard it in the original Klingon. It's that kind of hearkening back to do the Klingons have their versions of our things that they hold onto for reasons that, yeah, a power ballad, okay. It kind of fits in with the mood of Klingon opera. I loved it. So that I thought was funny. But some of the things that they were doing did hearken back to a little bit of the feelings from episode one, in that it didn't always feel like these were the characters. It just felt like these were set pieces. Let's show somebody singing a power ballad in Klingon. It happens to be Number One. In no way referencing her as a person. I felt like the only people that genuinely felt like, okay, this is that person inebriated was Spock Spock. That was it. Everybody else felt like, interchangeably, like, let's do a crazy frat party drunk, including Scotty, which was unfortunate and very disappointing because we have an episode that revolves around Scotty being drunk. And this performance, the characterization and the writing on this did not feel like they had done any kind of double take on what Scotty, when he's drunk is like. It was depicted very much like he's kind of putting on the funny party hats. And we've seen the classic episode. They even harken back to it with, what is this? It's green. Okay. Like, you're aware of that moment of Star Trek history. You couldn't write and then direct this actor to portray Scotty in a way that was that kind of super committed to his duty that. That Scotty demonstrated, because he wasn't the kind of like, I'm going to put on a weird costume sort of thing. So the places that felt like they were tightly written and worked and were entertaining didn't always feel like they were of these characters. So for me, that was a weak spot.

I found myself thinking, I mean, you said at the beginning of your response, I'm going to defend it. I'm going to defend it, too, for at least having as much of the story. I wish it had focused on more in it at all, which was the. I wouldn't even call it the B storyline because they barely touch on it. But Spock's hallucinations of Kirk and sitting down in that room to talk to the hallucination, because clearly my mind wants to have this moment. And then it being revealed. This is actually Kirk. He's been there the whole time. The reveal being conveyed through him slapping Spock, I thought was great. Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: And the closing line of, are you going to hug me? Do you want me to? I thought that was fantastic. Give me. Give me just a little bit more of that. Give me just one scene, maybe montage style of Spock revealing details about himself. Scattershot. So that we know as deep fans. Okay. When Spock says, I told you everything, and Kirk is like, yeah, and it's all in the vault. That's a touching moment. Give us an earlier shot of him saying, like, I had a favorite pet who died because of something I did as a child. I did, like, have him dropping truth bombs on. I do not know if my father genuinely cares for me. Make it hard. And then that closing line will have even greater depth for people who don't know the history of the show in the way that other people like us do. So I was like. I was like, you had. You had a perfect moment to kind of wipe away some of the pushback that people had to the Mind Meld episode where people were saying, well, that's too cheap a shortcut. You've just cheapened their relationship, because you made it about this. And here was the opportunity to. They. They did do it. They had the like, no, this is about personal connection and sharing who you are. Not just having touched minds, but actually, like, connecting because you chose to. That's what their friendship is built on. Having this moment was really great, I thought, and I wanted more of that because I understood in a kind of Perfect Strangers kind of way that what they were going for with Scotty and Ortegas, and I can take or leave that. It didn't bother me, but it didn't rise the level of, oh, I'm really loving this back and forth. I'm loving the relationship they're developing between these two. Because I'm like, it's fine. It's just fine.

Matt Ferrell: This episode is the movie Dude, where's my car? Yeah, it's that movie. And so it's not so much the relationship. I mean, the relationship was a key aspect that they were telling between Ortegas and Scotty, but it was ancillary. It wasn't necessary. It was more just the plot, like a fetch quest in a video game of them just trying to find the mystery of where the hell the shuttle is so they can get back in time for that thing. It was just there for a loose thread to kind of string us along to have fun and just kind of be kind of like, oh, isn't that kind of cute? And that's how I felt about their relationship, where it's like, there's not much meat there. There's not much to it. But it was a nice way for them to kind of resolve the thing they had established in episode one. It's like, okay, they. They closed that loop. It's now closed. The two of them now understand each other. So on that regard, I thought that was interesting just for Scotty more than her, because Scotty goes off into the future and, of course, has relationships with Sulu, another pilot, and like, things like that. So it's kind of like. It's interesting to see how he's broadened his worldview because of Ortegas in this episode. So I thought that was kind of nice. I will push back on you, though, for the portrayal of him as a drunk, because I have made a note of this myself. I said the same thing in my notes of, like, this is not how I know Scotty as a drunk from the original series, but he's a young man. Think about, like, getting drunk when you're in college versus you get drunk with some friends after work when you're in your 30s. Sean Ferrell: Right.

Matt Ferrell: It's like, there's very different aspects. So the fact that he is a different kind of drunk here is fine for me. But it still comes back to. It didn't really enhance the characters. It didn't enhance anything to the storytelling. And then again, in defense of the show, they're not drunk. They're intoxicated from some kind of. It's like somebody taking ecstasy and combined with other hallucinogens. Sean Ferrell: And, yeah, they kept making the point. It's specific to everybody. I liked. I did like the fact that they were like, if you hold on. If you hold on to anger, it's going to do something else to you entirely. And so it was like. I liked the fact that they played with all of that, too, and they Matt Ferrell: kept talking about your journey. The whole, everybody's on their own journey, and it's like an acid trip, so everybody's gonna behave in very unique ways. So that kind of also explained to me why the captain was behaving in a way we've never seen him behave. Scotty is behaving in a way that we've never seen him behave. Because this is something completely different from just, like, getting drunk on, you know, Romulan ale or something like that. This is something completely different. Sean Ferrell: Yeah, good point.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. But for me, I'm with you. The B plot of Spock and Kirk was my favorite part of this entire episode. From the very first moment where they leave the room and Spock's hallucinating you, and I think I'm hallucinating you because I need a friend and I want to confide in somebody. He's doing all this stuff. And that scene, I was like, this is hysterical. He's hallucinating Kirk. And the second time he showed up, I was like, I think he's actually there because he kind of walked in from out of frame. Like, he was just waiting in, like, the. The side room, and then just walked out when those guys left. And then it made me realize, I think Kirk was doing it deliberately. He likes to be, like, mischievous and, like, screw with people and be kind of a prankster. And I think he was doing this deliberately to Spock and was never correcting him, saying, no, no, no, I'm actually here. He was letting Spock unload because he knew Spock needed to do that. And two, I may be able to have some fun with this. So I thought that was a great portrayal of Kirk as Kirk. It's a very Kirk thing to do in my mind, of being. Not being a dick, but Being, like, you know, playful.

Sean Ferrell: Well, I mean, I had to lean into that, to lean into everything you just said a little bit more. Kirk was there and was under the influence of that stuff as well. Yeah, exactly. And so it's heightening his tendencies toward that kind of mischievous nature. And you also referred back to, like, the planet is effective. The. The entire mode of this is it's about your journey. It's an acid trip. But for some people, it's also going to be more than that. It's the kind of like, Uhura is just in there having the best party she's ever been to, but other people are having emotional breakthroughs of different types. And I'm like, the episode we've just seen Kirk go through previous to this was him coming to terms with, I am so desperate not to be the man my father was. I think I have to walk away from my child so that I don't disappoint him. Where does he go after that? He goes to a place to unwind. And what does he do? His journey is to connect with Spock. It goes back to that being the point of him being there. So I like that a lot. And I do agree. You just have to watch an episode like the Corbomite Maneuver or any of the episodes where he gets the ship out of danger by basically faking it to. To a threatening alien, where he's just like, we've got this thing, and we're going to. We are ready to blow ourselves up, because that's what we do. We don't let our technology fall into the hands of anybody else. And everybody on the bridge looks at him like, what the hell are you doing? And he's just, like, winking and like, trust me, this is going to work. Like, that's. This is that moment of him. Yeah. He hears the doorbell go off. Spock goes to answer the door, and Kirk goes and hides behind a cabinet. And then when people leave, he steps back out because he just like, this is great. I get to hang out with Spock. Nobody else knows I'm here. It's just him and me.

And he legitimately likes Spock. He does like this guy. So he's like, yeah. The fact that part of my confusion about this episode, and, you know, you and I just talked about a bit about it, like, in order to get those connective moments that we just described, we have to know the show very deeply. We have to bring it to the show for the show. And yet the episode is called Human Best Friend. I'm like, is There a version of this script that started with all of this being inverted. And everybody in the background on the B plot is having this weird kind of like, where'd we leave our ship? And the main plot was that the Kirk Spock relationship. I can't help but think that, because the episode is titled about them, and it's just like, okay, why did you do that? Matt Ferrell: Otherwise, I will disagree with you on that. Sean Ferrell: From their perspective, the writer's perspective, it's Matt Ferrell: Ortega's and Scotty are now close friends. So they're close friends. And then you've got Spock and Kirk becoming best friends. It's one that. The title, I think, holds to multiple characters on the show. So I don't think it's. Sean Ferrell: But didn't Spock say, do I need a human best friend? I think Spock actually says that. Yeah. That's what, to me, ties it to the B plot more. Matt Ferrell: I don't disagree with you. I wish they had inverted it. I wish it had been more about. Especially after that last episode, I think. Wish it would have been great if it had been more about Spock and Kirk. And then you could have had Kirk having his own catharsis based on what had just happened. And so it's like you could have had some really nice character development and evolution there. And then the B plot is Scotty and Ortega's burying the hatchet.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. And that takes me back to what I had said before. I would have loved a moment where you had showing Spock dropping truth bombs about himself. And the other thing I wished for was if they're having this long conversation. Conversation where they're just sitting in a hotel room together just talking. Do we also get a moment where Kirk says, I'm so conflicted about what to do about my son. And just have him say just that. Have those nuggets in rapid fire showing this huge passage of time, the two of them having this long conversation. The other thing I don't want to lose at all from this episode is Spock mind melding with a plant and then seeing everybody as plants. I thought that that was just, like, absolutely unnecessarily funny. And I was on board for Ortega Matt Ferrell: with her cast going like this. And then it showed what he saw, and it was the little cactus with his arms up. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And him saying, my mind to your leaves. It was just like. It was ridiculous. It was over the top. It was cartoonish. This was effectively. I. I finished watching this episode, and then I was. I was going about my morning, getting some coffee. And I was just like, that was an outer decks episode, a lower decks episode. It was just like, yes, it was. And it worked because those episodes work. And I'm just like, yeah, there's Trek and then there's animated Trek. And animated Trek is. I full. I fully believe animated Trek should be considered as as much a part of the canon, as non animated. But it is a different flavor. It is a. It holds a different spot. And it felt like, to me, this episode felt like this was a lower decks episode where, you know, if this had all been animated, it wouldn't have been any different, and it might have actually fit the tone of the storytelling a little bit closer. You know, you started off by saying, I'm going to defend it. I feel like I'm defending it equally as much as you are, because I was like, I didn't feel like this was an episode that I would avoid in the future. Because no different than some of the original series episodes that we've been talking about from season three, where we're like, wow, these are some not good episodes. But there's still a moment that I remember from my childhood. There's a moment, a scene where I'm like, oh, yeah. But that critical moment always stood out to me as one of the coolest things about that character. And I feel like this episode did that with the Kirk Spock relationship, where I felt like, you got those moments where I walked away from this thinking, like, I will remember this episode because of the B plot. I'll remember some of those things. I'll remember the way Kirk slapped Spock. I'll remember the way Spock said, are you gonna hug me? Do you want me to? Like, you know, and.

And the kind of loving relationship that's already developed there, where Kirk is just like, you need a hug, Hugs him, and then Spock's hands reluctantly go up and accept the hug and reciprocate when they're in the hotel room. I was just like, that's. That's the beginning of the loving relationship that we hope to see. Matt Ferrell: So there's also the. I gotta bring up the Uhura thing because I thought her storyline, as thin as it was, as small as it was, I thought it was great. And it was perfect for her because her character in the original series sings in numerous episodes. There's an episode where she's singing in the cafeteria and everybody's enraptured with her. She's this beautiful woman that has charms and can charm a room. And here she is charming a room and having the best party that everybody wants to get into. And she's being very selective about who can come into her journey. And it's like she's so buttoned up and proper when she's on duty. And here she is in. Her journey is to let loose and just have fun, to finally release because she's never done that on the show. Sean Ferrell: She's been so wild together, bringing people together. Right. Matt Ferrell: So I thought her storyline, as small as it was, was very on point for her character. I don't know if you, you agree with that.

Sean Ferrell: I, I do. I think that there, I really liked the final shot of her where she turns around, she just yells, who wants to do shots? And it's just like, yeah, she's just, she's having a great moment for herself. La' an also was the other character I mentioned before. Spock felt like he was the one who was most consistent with, what are they like when they're inebriated? I felt like La'an's also made sense because they're, they're teasing out this, this element of her where she is feeling some sort of genetic urgency around power and strength and it's becoming, it's rising closer and closer to the surface. So for that to be hers, her journey in that moment, becoming, effectively taking over a gang in one fell, in one 60 second moment where she's just like, I convinced them to demand more of you to turn over the ship. And just like, now I need to get your shirt, otherwise they won't learn the lesson I'm trying to teach them. I was just like, okay, that, that worked. Uhura worked. Nobody really stood out as being problematic. It just sometimes stood out as being like, this is what, this is what you're going to show us. Because sometimes it just felt kind of generic. And then having the ticking clock. I understand why you need a ticking clock. Oh, my gosh. The peace talks have been moved up and here come the people. And I'm just like, if that's when, if those two warring factions were ready to have peace talks at the spur of a moment like that, why was it two weeks away? Like, yeah, yeah. I found myself thinking, okay, there's a goofiness to that. That just doesn't need to be there. You know, at a certain point, can't it just be, we're supposed to rendezvous with the ship, they will declare us as missing in action and wonder if we're in trouble. We have to find the shuttlecraft so that we can get back to the ship that could have been enough.

Because this episode is, at base, goofy. So give us a goofy reason. The whole ticking clock, the will there be peace? The offended dignitaries. We've seen that so many times on Star Trek, various Star Trek shows we're going to see it in. And I think there's at least a half dozen episodes of Next Generation where Picard is pulling the diplomatic fat out of the fire at the very end. And everybody's just like, whoa, it came close to being war until you sang that song. We're gonna see it again and again and again. We didn't need that in this one. And I also understand this. I say this as just a point of. If you're watching any program and there's something in the program that makes you stop and think, I am currently watching a program, then it's kind of. Matt Ferrell: It's kind of.

Sean Ferrell: It's not the kind of. You want to slide people into the storytelling so that they forget that they're consuming something that is being told to them. And then they come at the end, they're just like, wow. That was. That was. You know, the suspension of disbelief never was interrupted. And this episode kept reminding me, effectively, you're watching a sitcom in this world, in this moment, in this episode, nobody else is available to do anything for them other than our main characters. Not even Pelia, who is operating as the chief engineer of the ship. Scotty, this season. We've only seen her in a couple of scenes, but she is supposed to be the chief engineer of the ship. Scotty is working subservient to her. At no point did anybody say, can we go to find a comms unit and contact the Enterprise, because there's going to be an entire B squad that is going to be able to do everything we need to be able to do, including the diplomatic mission. Having a captain get back to the ship at the last minute to show up with a tattoo on his face, still inebriated, trying to fake his way through the diplomatic stuff. It's a sitcom and I get it. It was funny having him read his speech off of his fingers. He went into the tattoo shop and was just like, this is an important speech. I need it on my body. I got the joke of that. But within this episode, watching the episode, it just kind of like, was another element that pushed me out of it a little bit.

Matt Ferrell: You hit the nail on the head when you said this is like a lower decks episode. Yeah, it is. It felt very like a lower decks. It was humorous. Like, it had the same style of humor. The. The rapid jump in between the different scenes and the jokes and the delivery, it felt very lower decks, and I liked it for that. It just felt goofy. I know there's gonna be a lot of people, they're going to hate it because of that. Yeah, I'm still here defending it, saying, yeah, there's a. There's, there's a. There's some good. There's some good in here. There's some good.

Sean Ferrell: I think. I think it's one of those things where I'm reminded of, like, in thinking about the lower decks. The lower decks has an animation style that is similar to Family Guy, Rick and Morty, where the little aside comments where it's just like, well, like, does he have a phaser? Well, I think he took one quick cut to a person clearly without a phaser running for their lives. Like that kind of, you know, punchline to the setup of the jokes. I would have liked this episode if it had more of that. I would have liked it if they had been like, does anybody know where Spock is? Have we even seen him cut to him saying, like, I don't know if my father loves me. And Jim going, like, oh, that stings. Like, like, like having that kind of moment would have. Would have punched it up in the way that, like, okay, if you're going to be producing goofy, that feels sitcom-y, go full sitcom-y, like, make it function the way a sitcom does. And then you could have had, like, the pacing of it would have maybe benefited from speeding it up a little bit. And then as a viewer, I don't have time to think, like, wait a minute, don't they have an entire B command crew? Like, you literally have the captain and number one on this planet, which means you've got a. Other officers in command of the ship. So it's like, I had too much time to think. Effectively, they were trying to maybe have their cake and eat it too. Be a little too much like a standard Trek episode when they might have gotten away with more if they had just been like, let's throw stuff at them so quickly that they don't have time to think about whether it all adds up. And like, a lower decks episode gets away with. Yeah, there's nobody else on the ship who can do any of these things because these are our main characters. It's a sitcom. So having said, like, I will loop back one more time. Didn't hate this.

It just, yeah, like, it does make me say, like, wow, a little bit of emotional whiplash. Weak writing episode that left me feeling like one of the best Star Trek stories I think I've ever experienced followed by this. And I'm just like, are we going to be doing this all season? That's going to be. That's going to be exhausting. Matt Ferrell: We are. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Sean Ferrell: So, viewers, listeners, what did you think? I would love to hear from anybody who was like this was. I mean, either extreme. Matt said there are going to be people who hated this. Are you one of those people who hated this? Let us know. Are you one of the people who love this? Let us know. I want to hear from both extremes about this one because I feel very much like I'm landing right in the middle. So let us know what you thought about it. Next time we're going to be talking about the episode A Case of Chiaroscuro. Let us know in the comments. What do you think that means? And like me, did you need to look up the pronunciation online? Let us know in the comments. Commenting, liking, subscribing, those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And as always, if you would like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.Show. Click the join button there. It allows you to become a direct supporter and it will sign you up as an Ensign, which means you'll be signed up for our spin off program out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. As I mentioned before, my book available for pre order link below, please Pre-orders matter. So I thank you for your interest and your support if you decide to buy the book. And as always, thank you so much for your time watching or listening. We'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about the best horror Star Trek has ever filmed, in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 2, "The Griffin Incident." A derelict Federation ship, a baby crying down a dark hallway, and a crew that stops trusting its own eyes. Matt reaches for Solaris and The Thing, Sean reaches for Event Horizon, and they agree the landing sticks. Also in the mailbag: the Voth, dinosaurs, and one very wrong answer involving Peter Griffin.

Order Sean’s next book, “In the Fields We Thirst” here: https://undecided.link/in-the-fields-we-thirst

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 01:42: Mailbag
• 05:31: Episode Description & This Time in History
• 08:57: Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: Today on Trek in Time, we're talking about Boogie, boogie, boogie. That's right. We're talking about the Griffin incident. This is an episode of Strange New Worlds that dropped on July 30, 2026. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time. This is the podcast that takes a look at Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We also take a look at the world at the time of the original broadcast. Normally, we're talking about stuff that came out years ago, sometimes even decades ago. We're currently almost all the way through the original. We're partially like, I think we're five episodes away from being done with season three, which means that we're going to turn the corner and go into the motion pictures and then from there, Next Generation. But right now we're taking a break from the original series rewatch to talk about episodes that are dropping literally now by talking about Strange New Worlds. Today, we're going to be talking about episode two of season four, the Griffin Incident. Who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some horror, I write some sci fi. Those two things are going to come in handy today, I think. As a matter of fact, I have a book coming out in 2027, In the Fields We Thirst. It's a horror novel and I've written sci fi previously, so I feel like I'm prepped for this episode. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Doesn't have much horror, but it certainly has a lot of tech. How are you doing, Matt? Matt Ferrell: Doing good. I'm actually really excited for this one. Like one of my favorite movies of all time is the thing this episode. Sean, not to give it away, scratched an itch. I was very happy for it.

Mailbag

Sean Ferrell: Scratched an itch for me as well. So I'm looking forward to talking about it too. As usual, before we lean into the discussion about the new episode that we're going to talk about, we like to take a look at what you've had to say about previous episodes. So what have you found in the mailbag this week, Matt? Matt Ferrell: Well, there was a lot of feedback, Sean, on the. It was the first episode of this new Strange New World season. You and I, just a refresher. Did not like that first episode very much. You hated it more than I did and I did not like it. We had asked if people did like this, what did they like about it? There was a bunch of people that actually said, eh, it was not great, but I enjoyed it. There was a bunch of feedback around that. Some of the feedback we got was from, like, Happy Flappy Farm. We enjoyed the episode. We came into the new season without expectations other than seeing the cast again and being entertained. You bring up good points. We are watching ahead and understand the groundwork laid by the interactions between Erica and Scotty. My question is, what happens with Uhura and the Vulcan newbie? The new episode will blow your mind, Sean. No spoilers. I don't know how I will watch it again. Not my scene. I'll go watch Subspace Rhapsody instead. Okay. Sean Ferrell: Good teaser. Matt Ferrell: That's another one of our favorites. Then we had Babarudra. Not a bad episode, but I agree that so much more could have been done with it. The philosophical debate that was right in front of them, that could have been interesting. Swing and a miss on the whole. But there isn't a fifth planet. Yeah, no shite. But you know that there's an asteroid belt in your time and it isn't there now. Think, people. Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: This episode was lacking where many of the original series episodes were lacking. It felt like the writers were so preoccupied whether they could make a dinosaur episode that they didn't stop to think if they should have made it. Sean Ferrell: Well played. Matt Ferrell: And not to nitpick, too late. But how the f did they travel through time and wind up late years away? The Enterprise is not the Tardis. And Nerd alert. Unless the star system they were exploring in their modern time was in the same position in space that the Sol system was in during the Cretaceous period. But that seems more like a conversation for out of time. Sean Ferrell: That's. I mean, that's. All of that is true. Happy Flappy Farms is right. That. Yeah. If you go into this, it can be a fun episode and it's fine. Yeah. It just didn't land the right way with me or with you. Sounds like Babarudra landed in our camp, but a little closer, maybe to Happy Flappy. Like, there's no wrong response to this. Yeah. Thank you so much for all that feedback. That's terrific. Matt Ferrell: There's two more. Sean Ferrell: Yep. Matt Ferrell: One from PaleGhost69. It's short, it's sweet, and it had me laughing. You know what disappointed me most about this? They had the Voth backstory right there. Do you remember the Voth, Sean? Sean Ferrell: No, I don't remember the Vorth. Matt Ferrell: They were a dinosaur humanoid species from the Delta Quadrant that originally came from Earth, Right? Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: When he brought that up, I was like. I was laughing because I was like, I completely forgot about the Voth. And clearly the writers did too, because they had it right there Sean. And then finally, wrong answers only. Mark Loveless Plot of the Griffin Incident in an attempt to do another animated series crossover, Stewie ends up creating a time portal and his dad Peter Griffin pops onto the Enterprise. Likely to be considered one of the worst episodes from a Star Trek Strange New Worlds fan perspective. The episode is so widely viewed that ratings drastically increase, helping to secure Star Trek's continued growth. To which JCEgbert5 wrote. And Peter and Stewie are dressed up as Mercer and Malloy. Sean Ferrell: Given the Trekkie that Seth MacFarlane is, that could actually happen. Like he would be into that. And I can't say that I would be disappointed to see an episode in which that did happen. That could be pretty amazing. Thank you so much everybody for those thoughts. Mark, thank you for the wrong answers only. I look forward to the next one as well. But first, those flashing lights, those alarms you hear. Yes, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Memory Alpha description. Take it away, Matt.

Episode Description & This Time in History

Matt Ferrell: Spock, La'an and Kirk board a lost Federation ship where an old mystery becomes a survival crisis.

Sean Ferrell: That's right. This episode originally broadcast on July 30, 2026. What was the world like at the time of broadcast? Well, Matt, put on your Wayback Machine hat to go way back to last month where you will revisit the number one song. That's right, it's the Weeknd's Blinding Lights. Take it away, Matt. Good fun fact about blinding lights, Matt. This is. I think we just live in an era now where this is going to happen. I'm talking about the number one song. What do I mean by that? I'm relying on Spotify. It's basically like I rely on that only because I have a Spotify account. I could have picked some other streaming service and I simply look for what was the most streamed song on a given day. We are living in an interesting era. Those of us who grew up listening to the radio, you had no control over what was played on the radio. So they would say, here's the number one hit of the week. And it would be whatever was selling well, whatever was climbing the charts. We live in a new era where apparently a movie or a TV show that can have a song that suddenly catches fire and reinvigorates it brings music back from, in some cases, decades ago. There have been some songs that have been 40 years old that came back to climb the charts simply because they appeared in a TV show or movie. So Blinding Lights is one of those. This song is from 2019. I do not know what movie or TV show it appeared in that put it back into people's minds and brought it back to the number one spot on Spotify searches. But here it is a seven year old song. The number one song of July 30, 2026. And at the movies it was yet again Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey at the number one spot. This film has obviously had great, great success. It over a billion dollars. Having recently seen it in 70 millimeter here in New York City, I gotta say I can see why. I enjoyed it very much.

Matt, have you seen it yet? Matt Ferrell: Not yet. It's still on my list to see.

Sean Ferrell: It's quite a piece of art really, really do recommend it. And the number one streaming program on July 30, 2026 on Netflix, it's the Idaho College Murders. This is a three part true crime documentary series released on Netflix on July 29, 2026. This is of course the story of from a few years ago, a case of a man who killed some people who were Idaho State University students in their off campus housing. And in the news on this day, July 30, 2026, the number one story, the front page story of the New York times. Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment more than 100 times in bitter Senate hearing, Senator Rand Paul said the committee he leads would vote next week on whether to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress. This is the result of needing to look for somebody to blame for how we responded to the COVID pandemic in 2020. And Dr. Fauci is at the top of the list of people that certain people in Congress would like to blame for. I'm not even sure what.

Today's Discussion

Sean Ferrell: On now to our discussion about this episode, the Griffin incident. I know you've been excited to talk about it, but I just want to say a few things at the top and then I'll throw it to you very quickly. I think this is the best example of a perfect bottle episode. You don't add any sets and we've seen this so many times on the original series where strange. We just found a duplicate of the Enterprise and we're going to walk around on this ship and it's ghostly and it's weird. In fact, we talked about it an episode just recently where Kirk found himself in what looked like a completely empty Enterprise, only to realize it was an exact duplicate that had been made on a planet that was so overcrowded, that they were looking for disease in which to cull the overpopulated world. So this one is like that. It's a bottle episode. You end up with the opportunity to say, like, we're going to do these things.

We're not going to build new sets. We're going to have to use only a handful of our regular cast members. There's not going to be a lot of guest stars. You almost feel like this could have been shot in a weekend. What great results. Leaning into a thing that you and I stumbled into during our rewatch of Enterprise, where way back when we said, is Star Trek actually a horror show? Here we have an episode that week one did not care for the dinosaurs. I did not care for the lack of logic in the timey wimey ness. I did not care for what felt like characters being kind of daft about picking up on things that were very obvious and then beating the audience over the head with those details to make sure we wink, wink, got it. This episode, you mentioned the Thing a few minutes ago. For me, this is Event Horizon. This is. We've gone to a place. It's the creaky door. It's the haunted house. It's the thing that shouldn't be quite the way it is, and we can't figure out what it is. And what's that noise down the hallway for them to lean into things like a crying baby down a hall. Nothing creepier than a crying baby down a dark hallway. It's like those little touches of just classic haunted house storytelling. For me, this was an absolute home run. I loved this episode. So I throw it to you. You've been so excited about this. You watched it before I did. Well, before I did.

How did you hold onto your excitement about this one and not reveal to me, like, what it's about? Because I went into it without you having told me a thing, and I appreciated that. Matt Ferrell: I'm not a horror fan. Like, I don't go seeking out horror movies, but there are horror movies that kind of, like, go beyond the genre. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: You understand what I mean? Like, they're so good. It's like, even if you're not a horror fan, they're gonna resonate with you. And those are the kind of movies I love. Like, the thing you brought up, Event Horizon, which is a great example of this. But for me, in my notes when this episode was in, like, 10 minutes in, I wrote down, goddamn, this is Solaris. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: Have you ever seen that movie? Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: It's like, it's that movie, it's sunshine. It's that movie too. It's like slowly going insane in space and you're not sure you can believe what you're seeing anymore. And it's that horror trope. It's been done a dozen different times. Really good examples of it all over film. But this was executed so Chef's Kiss perfectly. I've never seen Star Trek do horror this well. This felt like any modern horror movie that we've seen over the past few years. And there's been some good ones that have been coming out recently. Whereas that shot down a hallway and it's really dark. You're looking at the main character in the foreground. But then a shadow moves. Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And it's like the shadow was there the entire time. Which means whatever that thing was, was there that whole time. And it just moved. And you can feel your hair is kind get extended on your arms and the back of your neck. It's like. It's that creepy horror that this episode did so well. And it got me so excited. And halfway into the episode, I was like, what are they going to do to screw this up? What are they going to do to screw this up? Because they've done such a great establishing of the horror and how the story was unfolding. And the thing that stuck with me, Sean, was they stuck the landing. In my opinion, they stuck the landing. It's like the whole episode, start to finish, it ended in a perfect place. And part of what resonated with me was you said it's a great bottle episode. Yes. And it did a great job with the character development of, like La'an in the entire story. Like, they've set up this thing where she's. Her augmentations. What she is might be coming to the surface in a way that she could potentially lose control. That's what she's terrified of. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: The fact she. She hit the dinosaur and didn't feel the pain. All that kind of stuff. I love how they're building that aspect of her fear over what she might be become or what she actually is. That was this entire episode. And it was just a beautiful exploration of a woman that feels like she's losing control of herself. Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: At the end she lost control of herself because she stabbed. She stabbed Kirk. She almost murdered somebody. I'm curious to see what they're going to do with her over the coming episodes because they're driving her into a really dark place. How is she going to grapple with what she did in this episode and everybody else in the episode's like, it wasn't your fault. It's gonna haunt her. Everything about this was just great character development. And it was also just beautiful horror storytelling. And the filmmaking was just top notch. The long shots that start to make you feel uncomfortable, this is lingering longer than it probably should, which means I'm supposed to be noticing something in the frame, what is going wrong. And then you hear the sound of the baby crying in the background. They did a wonderful job of playing with editing, timing and the sound effects and the shot angles and every character having their own unique insanity taking hold. Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Matt Ferrell: Like with Kirk and the baby, because he's haunted by the fact. And that's the other thing. It helps reframe Kirk's whole history for me because here you have David from the movies and he gets killed. His wife from Star Trek ii. It was like they're. They're not wife, but they're estranged. Yeah. And she wanted nothing. David to do nothing with him because he's so obsessed with his work. And so he was like this absent father. And you see Kirk not wanting to be an absent father and you see why he became one and it's just like, oh my God, the framing that it gave Kirk and how it fleshed that out was so beautiful. I just love that it didn't detract from any of the Star Trek movies or the original series. It made it even more powerful. And now I'm so excited to watch Star Trek ii. Sean. I'm so excited to watch him like, come in contact with his son again and like, remember this episode.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Awesome stuff. This reframes so many things and it does such a great job. And you've tied it through to the movies and there's other opportunities to tie some of this stuff to some of the other movies as well. I completely agree with the La'an stuff. This episode is such a good bottle episode because if they never picked up on any of these storylines again, it wouldn't be a problem. And if they do, it's not a problem. It is, you know, the best example of a bottle episode is like, it's self contained and continues an arc if it wants to. What will they do with La'an? That question comes to mind. And you're right. The depiction of the conversation she's having with the ghostly spirit that she's talking with and of course the connection she feels to this person. Just like I've been feeling similar things of like, concerns of like seeing a problem and not being able to identify the solution for It. And then it reaches that point of like, no, this is madness. And you're falling into the madness and finding herself. Blink, and she's in the alternate position. She's the attacker, not the defender. The stuff with Kirk, I agree with you completely. I loved all of that. I felt like it did a thing with David where it turns David into this. In order to not disappoint David, I have to abandon David when he talks to his brother, when he and Sam talk. And I loved those scenes. And they've done something neat with the actor who plays Sam. Over the first couple of seasons, Sam just looked like Sam, however that actor was gonna look. But they've brought them both into. Now they have the same haircut. It's like they figured out a way to, like, let's lean into the fact that Shatner played both of these roles in the TV series. When you see Sam is dead, he is Shatner with a mustache. So they did this great job with this guy and just saying, like, look at them.

They look alike. They look like they could be brothers. And their conversations around, like, yeah, remember those little tchotchkes dad used to bring home? Remember how he thought it would, like, make up for his not being there? And I remember more about the excuses than I do times that I spent with him. It waking up James T. Kirk to the fact, like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do that to my kid. And I. So I will not. Did you interpret the final scene the way I did, which is he is calling Carol to talk to her about this, and she is never going to answer. Matt Ferrell: I didn't want to cry, but it was just like, oh, it was so tragic because, like, you knew this is exactly. He's trying to reach out and say, I want to change, but he's already. It's too late. She's already said, you're. I'm done. Sean Ferrell: You're out. Yeah, Spock. This show has done things with that character I never would have anticipated. Somebody very smart was in the writers room very early on in this series because they were like, if we're gonna have Spock in here, he has to have an arc. He has to have evolution. We can't just have Spock be the Spock from the series. And they've gone into this thing with him where at the end of last season, they established this kind of open relationship that he has with La’an. He's still engaged, but clearly he is not feeling in any way compelled to make that marriage happen. And he has this relationship with La’an. And he is, for all intents and purposes, acting very human. You know, from season two through three. And now him really like, kind of like, I've got this relationship. He acts very human around La'an.

Sean Ferrell: He's kind of jokey and he has a little smirk a lot of the time. In my head, I've lately been like, how are they going to build a bridge to the Spock we know from the original series? Who in the Spock, in the original series is very much a. I'm not quite interested in all this. There is the original pilot in which we see Spock smile. They did a great job of establishing that as like, well, here's that Spock, he is acting more human in the past. There are these changes that he's going to go through for this episode to be one which, as you mentioned, connects a dotted line to the movies in the form of David and Kirk's relationship with his son. For me, this drew a dotted line between the Spock, as we see all the way through the original series, the Spock who is trying to be more Vulcan, all the way to the motion picture in which we see Spock has been going through the process to completely excise his human emotional side. He is in. In the motion picture, he is trying to do away with it and has turned himself into such a cold, analytical machine that when he returns to the ship, everybody on the ship doesn't quite know why is Spock acting so weird. They are put off by the fact that he has been doing this. Uhura, for me, in this episode, like, she is a through line now to all of that is like, she's known Spock longer than Kirk has. So for me, I found myself watching this when he has been cutting off his own ears. And I'm thinking, like, Uhura is the one person on that ship who, when he shows up in the motion picture, she's going to be the one person who's just like, this isn't the Spock I was friends with. What has he done to himself? Who has he become? The compelling layers that they are putting in into a horror episode, as you said, this is the best horror they've ever done. I would also argue this is just straight up a good horror story.

You could show this to somebody who likes horror and say, like, do you want to watch some horror that's based in Star Trek? And I think they would enjoy this because not only is it creepy boogie woogie in the background, like, wait a minute, was that a shadow that just moved? Wait a minute. Was that a human figure in that silhouette in that doorway when it comes time to say, like, and we're now not going to pull punches, Pike cutting off his own fingers? Matt Ferrell: Yes. Sean Ferrell: I was like, I have. When I cook, I have a standing waking nightmare in my own head that is like, what would happen if I cut myself that badly? Like, I will be cutting something and think, oh, watch your fingers. And so we're watching this episode and I'm just like, oh, my God, they put it right on screen. And he is gleefully getting ready to cook a terrific meal and doesn't stop staring directly at Spock. I was like, this is. This is some heavy, heavy stuff they're putting into a TV series. Matt Ferrell: Spock getting strapped down and having his ears cut and all that stuff was graphic. It was horrific. It was like body horror. It was really unnerving to watch. And as it's happening in my head, I'm thinking, she's not really there. So is he doing this to himself? And at the end, when it comes out that he was doing to himself, I'm like, oh, dear God. Sean Ferrell: He's sitting there just sawing the horizon of it all. Yeah. Woo. Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: That was. It was like watching him do that and the screams and the reasoning behind it, it's all because it's pulled from him. So, like, I'm sitting there and she's like, you're almost perfect, except you have too much Vulcan in you. Let's get it out of here. This moment is why he's just like, you know what? I don't think I can be human. I think I need to be Vulcan. Brilliant. And then to go back to Kirk's brother, that death sequence again, did not back away from, like, what could we do? Oh, how about this? Showing his body floating through space, spinning end over end as the frozen parts of him that are now behind him, like, come on, like, what are you doing to us? Matt Ferrell: Yeah. If they had done this in the 1960s, that sequence, it would just been like the airlock. He goes flying off the airlock or the window breaks and he goes flying out. The thing. The fact that it was like, oh, there's gonna be a puncture hole. He's gonna get stuck to the puncture hole and then slowly get pulled out of it. That's like what you see in Event Horizon or Solaris or some other rated R sci fi horror movie. And here we are watching it on Paramount plus streaming. Like, this is Star Trek, which is supposed to be for, like, the whole family. I can't believe they're doing it around kids. I appreciate it.

Sean Ferrell: I like. The episode did not have a disclaimer at the beginning that I remember. No, it didn't say, like, no, some of this might not be appropriate for all viewers. Last week they had. It was dinosaurs, kids with a story that you and I talked about as this feels dumbed down to the point where it is almost like, let's make one for the kids and then this one follows it. And I'm just like, somebody. What was the decision making process there? Hey, kids, we know you like dinosaurs. Here's a bunch of dinosaurs. And it turns out they were on Earth the whole time. And now a man's intestines are going to get pulled out of his back through a hole in the side of the ship. Like, what? No, no, you can't do both those things. Matt Ferrell: Last week, that's why I said to you, like, you were concerned about this is setting the tone for the season. You were nervous about where this is going to go. And I said, I remember. Sean Ferrell: You were like, don't worry about it. Matt Ferrell: Don't worry. It's way better. Yeah, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: And to go into, you know, the question marks in the episode as far as, like, did I sit there and puzzle through the logic of who was actually on the ship and who wasn't and when did people get there and where were they actually and how did that all play out? I didn't bother doing that in the way that I did the previous episode. The logic, the tiny wimey ness, like, why are they where they are? Because this episode did something that the previous episode did not do. It was so well told, it didn't make me feel like I needed to figure out if the logic holds up. Whereas the first episode of the season felt like it had such gaps that it invited you to say, wait a minute, does this make any sense? It goes back to a truth for me in storytelling that if the telling is good enough, you can pretty much do what you want, even if somehow some lines don't fully connect. Because if the telling is that good people will get into the vehicle with you and ride wherever you want to take them. The wheels feel like they're wobbly and it's not getting them there in the right way. People are going to start saying, like, wait a minute, what am I in? What are we doing here? Is this working? And this episode, for me, like, I have a feeling if I went back and did rewatch it from just a perspective of like, okay, who is where? And does it all logically add up. I have a feeling it would, but I don't feel the compelling need to say, like, I'm going to go back and double check because I want to pick apart the loopholes. Like, I don't need to know if there are loopholes. The story is so well told. I'm just like, yeah, you're telling me this great stuff about these characters in a way that they could pick up some of these things. I imagine they will pick up stuff about Spock, they will pick up stuff about La'an, but we might not see another episode in which Kirk is talking about being a father. We don't necessarily need to. This may have been the one they knew they needed to put in here to say, yeah, everybody knows about David and everybody knows he's out there. And that was a part of the background between him and La'an originally where he was just like, I'm really attracted to you, but I got this thing. And now they've kind of like wrapped a bow around that for me where if they want to reopen it, I'm more than happy for them to, but I don't feel like they have to. And if they don't, I'm not going to be disappointed. Matt Ferrell: I got to agree with your assessment of you because you didn't question it. Is they. It was well told. We're gonna make a connection to a movie that's completely out in left field. But what's up, doc? That movie does the same thing. It's a wacky comedy, but the way they started out, it feels grounded in reality and just slowly ratchets up the insanity. So by the end of the movie, it's a full blown Warner Brothers cartoon style slapstick riding a bike down San Francisco streets into the, you know, inside of Chinese dragons. So if you watched just that scene, you'd be like, this movie looks stupid and insane, but because you went from the beginning to point, you were along for the ride and there were never huge gaps in what was happening for does this make any sense? Because the way it ratchet it up is so well told and thought out that it all cohesively works together. And that was this episode for me. They just did a fantastic job with it.

Sean Ferrell: Anything else we might say at this moment is going to be repeating accolades. So I've said everything I need to say other than like, at this point, anybody listening to this conversation, you must have watched this episode. But if you didn't, please go watch it. Please, please, please see it and please enjoy next time we're going to be coming back and talking about the August 6 episode, Human Best Friend. Please jump into the comments. Wrong answers only. What do you think that's about? And while you're down there leaving comments, let us know, what did you think about the Griffin incident? Do you agree with Matt and I that this is right up there with some of the better storytelling Star Trek has ever done? I will just put it up that high that I think this is one of my favorite all time Star Trek episodes. Now, do you think it's that good or did it not work for you? Or are you like Happy Flappy Farms who is just like, oh, I gotta get out of here and go watch the musical episode. Let us know in the comments. As always, your comments, your likes, your subscribes, all of those are great, easy ways for you to support the channel. If you'd like to support us more directly, go to TrekinTime.Show. Click the join button there. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads and it will sign you up as an Ensign, which means you will be signed up for our spin off show, Out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. We also would like to thank you for your patience. There have been some weird gaps lately. We've had some family stuff going on that we've been having to deal with and so there have been a few breaks and there will probably be some more breaks in the future. Please bear with us.

We're trying to get back to our regular recording schedule as soon as possible and we do appreciate you coming back despite the fact we've taken a couple of weeks off. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about a fun dinosaur romp that collapses by the halfway point in Star Trek SNW Season 4, Episode 1, "Valles Marineris." The T. Rex encounter works, Pelia's Doctor Who joke works, and then the plot logic falls apart. Nobody on the best crew in Starfleet asks the obvious question about the mysterious fifth planet. So does the season four premiere earn its time travel setup? Or does it hand wave away the only choice that mattered?

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 02:01: Feedback
• 04:47: Today’s Episode
• 05:17: This Time in History
• 07:30: Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about where everything started. No, I'm not talking about a Star Trek prequel. Talking about a prequel to. Well, we'll get into that. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time. This is the podcast that takes a look at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We are currently starting season four of Strange New Worlds, which means we've put a pause for the moment on our original series rewatch. We are almost done with the original series, and when we're done with this season of Strange New Worlds, we'll return to that, finish it up, and then move on to the movies, something that we are both looking forward to with great excitement. And who are we? I am Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a horror novel coming out in April of 2027. Wow. Does that sound like the future? It's called In the Fields We Thirst, more about that as we get closer to that date. I hope you'll be interested in checking it out. And with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you today?

Matt Ferrell: I'm doing okay, Sean. Yeah, all things considered.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, all things considered. Matt and I won't get into details, but hanging on by our fingernails, we will be okay. Yes, we will be okay. Today we're going to be talking about Valles Marineris, the first episode of the fourth season of Strange New Worlds. This episode, directed by Chris Fisher, teleplay by Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonzo Myers, originally broadcast on July 23, 2026. Yes, that is a couple of weeks ago. And yes, Matt and I intended. We really did intend to be recording these episodes as we were watching the show. Ladies and gentlemen, life gets in the way. We apologize. So we're going to be a couple of weeks behind the broadcast dates, but we hope you'll still join us for these conversations. Before we get into our conversation about this new episode, we always like to take a look at what you've had to say about our previous episodes. Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us?

Feedback

Matt Ferrell: Well, from the episode the Way to Eden, we had Rebecca Davis chiming in when this silly, terrible episode came on. Most of the time, I switched to another channel. Sometimes I would watch out of morbid curiosity. Yes, yes, Rebecca. And also AJ Chan wrote the premise of this podcast, Watch Star Trek in the context of when it aired is exemplified by this episode, Way to Eden. Can you capture the zeitgeist of 1969 better than hippies? No. But sadly, this episode was still a rough watch.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, AJ Chan. Yeah, it sure was. I also picked one from Mark Loveless. On the whole, hippies are bad elements, with them being portrayed like idiots that will always do the wrong thing. This was a very common theme in multiple shows at the time. Gilligans Island, Adam 12, Dragnet, and on and on. The fact that Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin all died seemed to make it real for what we referred to as the establishment. With the whole Manson family and Tate murders being the icing on the cake. It took a while for the smarter elements of the entire hippie movement to really come out and directly influence the overall culture in a more perceived positive way. I hadn't thought about, like, how so many of the shows at that time just made hippies look so stupid. It was a very common trope.

Sean Ferrell: I think it's leaning into a follow the dollars sort of attitude when it comes to advertising. Who is watching the program and who has the dollars that the advertisers care about? Of course it's going to be Middle America, so they're going to cater to middle America attitudes and push back on the counterculture movement. While cultural shift and things like the civil rights movement could be softly embraced in the form of who you put on your show. And you know, we've talked about that before with characters like Sulu and Uhura and Chekov being representative of civil rights and peace movement attitudes. The hippies are just waiting there for somebody to punch down. Because yes, they don't have.

Matt Ferrell: Punching down is right.

Sean Ferrell: They don't have the dollars. So like, who cares what they think? And you end up with an episode like this. So it's unfortunate.

Matt Ferrell: The last comment. I gotta call out my favorite comment of the bunch Sean from Dan Sims. Oh my. That's all he wrote.

Sean Ferrell: That pretty much says it all. Thank you so much.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it does.

Sean Ferrell: As always, we appreciate your comments and really look forward to seeing them on this one as we head into the new Star Trek. Those lights you see, those sounds you hear? Yes. It is time for Matt to tackle the. Nope, not Wikipedia description. This one's basically by me.

Today’s Episode

Matt Ferrell: The USS Enterprise is caught in a solar storm which sends them back 65 million years to the Cretaceous period on Earth, where crew members encounter dinosaurs and Captain Pike must choose between his principles and human history. Can't you have both, Sean? Can't you have both.

Sean Ferrell: Well, I think that this episode proves you can't. This episode originally broadcast on July 23, 2026. That's right. Just a couple of weeks ago. And what were you singing along to, Matt? Well, I think, you know, if you close your eyes and listen, that it was Choosing Texas by Ella Langley. Take it away, Matt. I don't know much about Ella Langley, but I do know this. My brother sounds just like her. The number one film at the time of original broadcast, Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey. This IMAX fever dream, this thing that's taken over film theaters. And I know one person who saw it in 4D and said the experience almost threw him out of his chair. So you've been warned. Have you seen this yet, Matt?

Matt Ferrell: Not yet.

Sean Ferrell: Are you planning on seeing it in the theater? I have not seen it yet, but I do want to see it.

Matt Ferrell: I really want to see it. I don't know if I'm able to make it to a theater to see it.

Sean Ferrell: That's the challenge. Although I do know this about Matt. He has a home theater, which is a room with a projection wall. The movie will look amazing in his home theater setup. Yeah. So I don't think Matt's too worried about it. And at the top of the streaming lists, a Netflix program. I Will Find You. I Will Found you is an American crime drama made for Netflix, Adapted from the 2023 novel of the same name by Harlan Coben, who served as executive producer. Coben is having a moment right now. There's. I forget how many, but there's at least a half dozen, I believe, Coban things available on Netflix alone. So apparently Netflix is really into Coban. The miniseries stars Sam Worthington, Brit Lauer, Mila Ventimiglia, and Aaron Richards. It premiered on June 18th in 2026. And in the news, the top story on this day from the New York Times with Saudi deal, Trump loosens nuclear standards for one close ally. Nuclear experts say it throws fuel on the smoldering fire of atomic prolife, creating a destabilizing situation that could raise the risk of nuclear war. I don't see how that's possible considering how well things are going in the Middle East. On now to our description and commentary on this new episode of Strange new Worlds Season 4. Matt, how have you been looking forward to the return of Strange New Worlds? I know we've been working our way through the original series, and we paused previously for season three. We had a lot of fun watching those episodes. And then we got back into the Original series. And we were still having fun with the original series. And then season three, where the budget has been severed and then severed again, and you can really see it, you can really feel it.

And I think we've both been bemoaning that the original series feels like the show that could have been so much better if only somebody had been in its corner pushing for it, fighting for it, and making sure that they had the ability to tell the stories that they have demonstrated in the first two seasons. And we'd been talking quite a bit in our rewatch of the original series about how Strange New Worlds was revising our interpretation of some of the stuff in the original series. So we're having a lot of fun with Strange New Worlds. We've been pausing a couple times in the original series. We've been really looking forward to getting to some good storytelling. Good storytelling. Excuse me. And then this episode shows up as the first of the fourth season. Did it satisfy your craving for. Yeah, this is Trek.

Matt Ferrell: The first half, yeah. Second half, no. I was. I was at the end, just to kind of give you my overall assessment was I was. I had fun with this episode, but there are parts of it that are so stupid, that are so dumb, that are so. What were you thinking? One, just even doing this. And then two, this is the first one for the season. I hope it gets better than this was my worry.

Sean Ferrell: I think you're being kind.

Matt Ferrell: Seriously, Sean. I had fun in the beginning. I thought it was fun. It was fun. It did not feel Star Trek y, but it was fun. Like, I was having fun with the Pelia’s, the conversation in the, like, the ready room. There was that Doctor who reference. I thought, oh, that's cute. Like, yeah. I think I was in a phone box at the time. And I was like, ah, Doctor who reference is kind of fun.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: But then the whole, like, the Scotty and the beeping of the con, you know, all that kind of stuff going on between the characters I thought was just fun. Just like real kind of, like little fun character tension going on there. And that fit the characters to me. It didn't. It felt very Scotty to be that way because it's his ship. You're not treating my ship well. I'm gonna do this to make you treat my ship better. I thought it was very Scotty. So, like, there were elements of the show that I was just like, oh, this is fun, this is fun. And then they got into, like, what's this thing called? Logic and storytelling? And it went out the window. And I was almost screaming at the screen. At one point I had to stop watching, but halfway through, I turned to my wife and I was like, why is nobody stating the obvious thing about this whole plot? There's no fifth planet. Like, the whole. We haven't even talked about the planets, but, like, yeah, there's a mysterious fifth planet, but this is. This is our solar system. Why is there a fifth planet and nobody's talking about. Maybe it's the fifth planet that explodes and kills the dinosaurs. And, like, it explains the whole thing. It was so kindergarten, obviously. And the fact that here are characters who are supposed to be the best of the best in Starfleet can't figure this out. And it's so. You know what I mean? That was just making me so angry. It reminded me by the end, it was not as bad for me as Star Trek 5. Star Trek 5 to me, does not exist. And when we have to watch it for this show, I blame you, Sean. I can't stand that movie. I saw it once in the theater and I vowed never to watch it again. So when I watch it second time, it's gonna be for this show. Going to the edge of space to meet God. Going to the edge of space to meet God. Dumbest, dumbest, Dumb, dumb, dumb.

And then there was Next Generation's episode where they tried to explain why everybody looks alike.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Where this one felt like that to me.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, exactly.

Sean Ferrell: This one felt like that to me because it literally ends with, it turns out their DNA is spread throughout the galaxy. And, like, why did you have to do that? Like, what? I understand where you're coming from with the elements that you liked at the beginning where you felt like you were having fun. All of that felt so light to me as to be practically non existent. I wasn't enjoying it because it didn't feel like it was in anything meaty. I don't know that it felt like it was of the characters to me, I don't think, like, the whole thing between Scotty and the pilot and the fact that they're setting up some kind of like, oh, they don't get along and that's supposed to be cute. Kind of like just kind of hand wave that away. It didn't feel organic to the show to me in particular, when she kept harping on things when she's on the planet and everybody's like, he can't hear you. We've said this before about some episodes of the original series. This felt like it could have been an animated episode. It could have been 30 minutes and it felt like, oh, they made one for kids. It just, it felt like somebody was like, you know what kids like Jurassic Park. Let's make a Jurassic park episode. You know, I find myself in, in watching Trek sometimes thinking one of the things that Star Trek can really do is be a tremendous ambassador for science in entertainment and really put forward a message of science matters and science is good and science can be fun and cool. Then at the end of this episode, it leaned into the kind of very outdated cartoonish representation of the dinosaur era with the flyover where as many dinosaurs as you can possibly imagine are crammed in practically shoulder to shoulder in a way that doesn't make sense. Like you go, if you go to Africa, you don't see lions standing next to zebras standing next to giraffes standing next to hippos.

Like you have to go to discrete areas to find all of those creatures. And even if you're looking for them, you might not find them. The depiction of this, and my wife happened to be there in the room during that and she was like, is this new? And I said, yes. And she said, then why aren't they showing a current representation of what scientists actually think dinosaurs look like? And I was like, that's a really good question. It felt like they were just relying on old style entertainment gimmicks as opposed to doing anything new. And then as you mentioned, the logic of the last half of the episode right down to the oh my God, should I save that planet? Should I stop the antimatter bomb? How is nobody saying the obvious? You got Spock right there. The episode could have if you're going to be. And here's the thing, I wrote a novel about time travel and time travel shenanigans. I like to think I did a good job with it. I like to think it's interesting. The story they told here struck me as a uninteresting. It didn't feel like it amounted to anything because how can you have anything but a foregone conclusion about what is going to happen? The interesting part, they completely hand wave away and give it short shrift afterward. Why not make the episode be a full like act of characters debating, do we have a moral obligation to protect ourselves via becoming a reality in the future? Or do we have a moral obligation in the moment to save lives that are here now? That could have been an incredible Is it morally okay to travel back in time to kill baby Hitler episode? The obligation as a storyteller is to bring something new and engaging out of the circumstances. Not just describe the circumstances.

They relied on nothing but the circumstances in this one.

Matt Ferrell: But that's exactly why by the end, the halfway point I got angry at the show was because they have this alien race that's the Martians, who are super advanced. They're like a full on space faring civilization. And you could have. It was like right there. It was right there, guys, right there. You can make a clear argument of maybe we should save them and damn ourselves. This is what Starfleet's about. Talk about self sacrifice. What could have been if they flourished because they were already on the way to doing that. It's like you could have had a very interesting debate happen around that never happened. Never came up once. It was just, oh, we gotta help them. It's like, well, the future. Let's have the Picard moment in the ready room debating with number one as to like what to do. It's like, where is that moment? It never happened. So by the halfway point it was just like it went from a light fluffy. I was having fun with the characters to oh come on, facepalming myself every five minutes of like, please stop, make this stop. It just. It was like two for me. It was two sides of a. I could have forgiven the fluffiness if it got meaty at the end. Yeah, but it never got meaty at the end. It just went off the rails completely. We're not doing the second episode today, but have you watched the second episode?

Sean Ferrell: I have not.

Matt Ferrell: Okay. What I will say I much more enjoyed episode two. So don't look at this as like, oh God, what are we in for? For eight episodes. Episode two, I thought was a much better episode. But we'll get into that in the next chat. But I just want to put that out here for anybody that's like, oh God, here we go again. Like, no, no, no, this is just a bad episode. And in the original series we've been going after bad episode after bad episode after bad episode. So it's like it happens.

Sean Ferrell: And previous seasons of strange new worlds have had clunkers. We had conversations last season where we were like, this one didn't land well. I think this is one that didn't land well. And perhaps they put it forward because it was. And here's where I was headed with my next comment. This is a well rendered episode. So like everything I'm saying about like the logic of the story and what they were trying to do with like, oh my gosh, like if they don't do this, then humanity will never exist. Like, eh, we've seen that a thousand times. But what they did do really well were things like the depiction of the away party encountering a T. Rex. I thought was, that was great, that was well done. I thought that the special effects around number one trying to like stun it by shooting it in its mouth, that was exciting. And the whole humor of her standing up behind it and going like, I got it. Like, that was that I enjoyed. And then I agree that they. The stuff I didn't like between Scotty and the pilot was between Scotty and the pilot. The other stuff I did enjoy, the leaning into Pelia where she's referencing the Doctor. Some of the most fun going down a rabbit hole to study your own navel sort of arguments I saw online was a Blue sky thread in which people were arguing, which doctor do you think she was the companion to? And I thought that that was a really fun little, you know, people making arguments. And the consensus seemed to be like, oh, she would have been a Tom Baker lady. Like, she would have been with Tom Baker. Which, like, really did warm my heart because I like to think of Carol Kane as somebody who would have been riffing really well with a Tom Baker doctor. That really would have been fun to save. And I know that there is equal fandom on the part of the producers of both programs.

And there has been talk of if we can figure out a way make it work, a crossover. And I find myself thinking, I really hope they do that and do some fun de aging shenanigans with Carol Kane's character, because I think it would be fun to de age her, even if she's with the current Doctor. So it's like the possibilities there, I think, get my nerd juices going. So this episode was not one that left me completely cold. It was just like, oh, the things that are supposed to be the most fun are the things I tend to find the least interesting. Showing me the special effects, showing me dinosaurs running through the jungle, showing me like, okay, you're doing those things well, but that's not enough. I wanted, like you mentioned, like the Picard moment of the debate, having a conversation in which somebody says, I don't agree with you, Captain. That's compelling drama. As opposed to everybody scrambling to say they stole our antimatter. And then at the end it, you know, like the kind of. You have this time travel moment, you have Spock saying, like, if we don't escape this wave, it will be enough energy for us to get back home potentially. And then you get back home. And the one thing that I was like, okay, this is like the fan servicey moment that I did appreciate where they are all ordered to keep this entire experience under their hat. So again, Star Trek, strange new worlds informing the original series. When Kirk turns to Spock for the first time and says, time travel, is that even possible? And Spock's response is, theoretically, if you have enough energy, you could do it. And it's just like, okay, so they've now, yeah, reclaimed a moment that Spock would be able to say, like time travel, gosh, and still have had this experience. So I'm like, I'm like, I, I appreciate that thought went into the episode, thought goes into these. And they care about continuity.

So I appreciate that. It's just, I found myself feeling like, I hope they put this one forward because they were like, okay, there's not a lot of meat on this bone, but it's fun to look at and it might get a lot of families engaged with the season and we'll keep the better episodes in the hopper for the middle of the season. So I've just found myself thinking in those terms because in previous seasons I remember the clunkers kind of coming toward the middle of the season and thinking, oh, how disappointing. So maybe this time around they were like, let's get this one out in front. You know, get past it. So we'll see. Is there anything else you wanted to say about this one before we wrap it up?

Matt Ferrell: I wanted to ask you a question. I was like, we always try to watch the, the episodes obviously, like in context of the time. And I was just thinking when I was watching this episode, is there anything about this episode that jumps out at

Sean Ferrell: me as this is a product of

Matt Ferrell: our time and because it was so dumb, I don't know if there was a clear thing that jumped out at me. Was there anything that jumped out at you?

Sean Ferrell: I couldn't help but wonder if we are seeing the first fingerprints of the new ownership of Paramount. They lean pro trump and Star Trek historically is a more progressive vision of the future. And I couldn't help but wonder if we're seeing some pressure from the ownership of the Star Trek IP to say, let's just lean into action and do away with deeper stuff. So that's, that's where I feel like if our era is leaving a footprint right now in this episode, that's where I think it might be.

Matt Ferrell: We'll have to assess the coming episodes to see if that feeling continues again. I've watched the second episode. So it's like, I don't want to

Sean Ferrell: give anything away, but yeah, it's interesting. But I do appreciate that footnote to my comment, because my comment is in a vacuum of just one episode. I found myself thinking like, is this the dumbing down of Trek? And maybe it's not, because maybe the next episode is one where just like two guys locked in a room talking about philosophy for an hour and like, okay, I'm ready for it. So, yeah, it's, it's that. That would be up my alley. That's. That's kind of like my bread and butter. Everything I just said is, should be taken with a pound of salt. Because I do believe deeply, we cannot fully analyze the era that we live in. We need time in the equation because emotions and personal subjective stance in trying to take in the world paints too many pictures and we cannot fully analyze the moment. We can never be truly objective. And I do believe that, that the value of trying to assess what's going on, I'm not saying you shouldn't put energy toward that, but it's really, really hard to contextualize the moment you're standing in. Five or ten years from now, we'll look back on this episode and we might say, oh, look at what it was doing. How 2026. That's maybe the biggest takeaway from brand new episodes that we're looking at, is that we are, you and I, in our analysis and conversations, are as much of the episode as the episode itself, because we are in this moment with it. People 10 years from now, including us, might look at this very conversation and say, how 2026 of them. That's all to say. Tune in next week, folks, when we're talking about the Griffin incident, which originally broadcast on July 30th. Yes, that's also in the past. I don't think we're going to catch up in real time, folks.

What did you think about this episode? Did you agree with Matt and me that maybe dinosaurs and time travel felt a little been there, done that? Is that a time travel joke? I don't know. Or did you find yourself engaged by this and you were happy to see all the storytelling that was given to us in this first episode? Jump into the comments, let us know. We'd love to hear what you have to say. Especially if you love this, let us know. Matt and I are just two guys, you know, trying to make a podcast. We don't know what the hell we're doing. As always, liking, subscribing, commenting, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the join button there. Not only does it allow you to throw coins at our heads, but it'll make you an Ensign. Which means you'll be signed up for our spin off show Out of Time, in which we talk about that things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking it out.

As always, thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.

One five-minute scene made Matt sit up: a man flatly refuses to accept he carries a deadly disease, and it feels ripped from 2026. Matt and Sean talk about the accidental anti-vax parable buried in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 20, "The Way to Eden." Space hippies hijack the Enterprise chasing paradise, and one man's denial of the science reads very differently today. So is this clunker secretly ahead of its time? Or does the DayGlo nonsense smother the one idea worth keeping?

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 02:37: Mailbag
• 04:17: Today’s Episode
• 05:04: This Time in History
• 10:46: Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about rebellion. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. We're currently in the last days of the Original series. You heard me right. I said we're in the last days of the original series. Why am I emphasizing that, you wonder? Why am I saying that in the way that I am?

Matt Ferrell: Well, because we're liars.

Sean Ferrell: Gentle viewers and listeners, we have to apologize to you. We lied to you last week. With all the best of intentions, Matt and I said, yeah, let's watch the new season of Strange New Worlds, which is beginning to drop next Thursday, Thursday being the day we record, which means the new episode dropped at 3am this morning. And Matt and I didn't realize that watching it the day of recording would basically be an impossibility. So we're not going to talk about Strange New Worlds yet. We're going to start that watch next week. I super duper promise. I triple promise it's going to be next week. We'll be watching the first episode of season four of Strange New Worlds, which means those of you who scrambled to watch that episode in anticipation of us talking about that episode, well, I got some good news and I got some bad news instead. Today on Trek in Time, we're going to be talking about the Way to Eden, which originally broadcast on February 21, 1969. As I mentioned, we'll also be talking about what the world was like at that time. So that's the good news. The bad news, we're going to be talking about the Way to Eden, which originally broadcast on February 21, 1969. Talking about the world at the time of original broadcast. That's right, everybody. I'm letting the cat out of the bag early on this. This one's a stinker. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Today's episode, directed by David Alexander, story by Arthur Hyneman and Michael Richards. No, Matt, not that Michael Richards. A different Michael Richards. Should I tell you which Michael Richards this is now, or should I wait till the end? And that's a serious question. I'll let you pick.

Matt Ferrell: It's a good tease.

Sean Ferrell: Wait until the end. All right. Okay, we'll talk about Michael Richards at the end of the discussion. If I somehow forget, please remind me. Before we get into our conversation about this episode, we always like to visit the mailbag and see what you've had to say about previous episodes. Matt, what did you find for us this week?

Mailbag

Matt Ferrell: There were a couple and it was from the Lights of Zetar episode, everybody's favorite. We had AJ Chan who wrote at 146 in our podcast wrote written by Sherry Lewis. This is the Sherry Lewis who created Lamb Chops Play along according to IMDb. I did. When I read this comment AJ I heard a record scratch and I went that can't be. Let me go to IMDb and look up Lamb Chops. Sean. She wrote this episode.

Sean Ferrell: I wish now that Lamb Chop had appeared in the episode. Wouldn't that have been fascinating?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it's Lights of Zetar.

Sean Ferrell: That would have been great.

Matt Ferrell: And the other comment I wanted to call out was Mark Loveless. He wrote quoting you. It would have been Red Mist filling that room when we talked about the pressure scene but have just like crushed her. He wrote, oh my God, that is burned into my brain forever. Plus plus now I have to re watch the movie Kick Ass just to see Red Mist which means I also have to rewatch Superbad. Thanks, Sean. There goes my weekend. The sexism was hard to deal with. Even taking into account the 60s I half expected some male to accuse her of having her monthlies.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it really.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it was hard, sadly. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you everybody for your comments. We always enjoy reading them and we love sharing them. Jump in now if you'd like to respond to any of those responses and we'll get a chain going of just responses to responses.

Matt Ferrell: Let's do it.

Sean Ferrell: That sound you hear, those lights you see. No, it's not you falling in love, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Take it away, Matt.

Today’s Episode

Matt Ferrell: The Enterprise is hijacked by a criminal doctor and his loyal hippie like followers who are attempted to find paradise.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: That's right. We have with us the the full cast except for Nichelle Nichols. I'm not sure where Ms. Nichols was at the time of filming, but we do get some everything from Captain Kirk all the way down to Nurse Chapel, who, Nurse Chapel, in a good turn of how to really provide good bedside manner, is clearly judging every person in sick bay through this episode. So that was fun to see. The original time of broadcast, February 21, 1969. So basically a week earlier than last week's episode. What does that mean, Matt? Well, yes, it means you're about to sing Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone, which was the number one song this week. Take it away, Matt. If anybody's confused, it's just occurred to me. We're in episode, what, 4 million of this podcast. And if anybody's confused as to why when I introduced the number one song of you might not hear anything, it's because of copyright. We're not able, even if it's Matt singing, we're not able to share the song because of copyright. So trust me, Matt's singing voice, it's in rare form. And the number one film this week at the box office. Yes, Matt, we're still in the midst of the 93 year long streak of Funny Girl being the number one film in the box office. Yes, Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Funny Girl still number one. And we've been talking about the shows that were the top programs in the nielsen ratings of 1969, as opposed to what we did for the first half of season three, which was to look at the competition on Friday nights. These are just the major programs, regardless of the evening that they aired. We've talked about everything from Rowan and Martin's Laugh in all the way down to here's Lucy, which was Lucille Ball's return to return to television. She had ended one program on NBC. It started up a new one at CBS.

The same thing was happening or about to happen with the Red Skelton Hour, which was a 20 year long program. It was a variety show. It was hosted by Red Skelton. And Red Skelton had had a career as a radio and a motion picture star. And he was very much of the vaudeville history of early film and television entertainers. So it was very broad comedy. The image that I found for this program is literally just him in a hobo clown outfit. So it's that style of comedy. He was on the air in this program for 20 years. However, it was not 20 years straight on one network. The network that he started on, NBC, is also the network he ended on for basically two years starting in 1970. At this point, he was on CBS. He was on CBS for about 15 years and was, I mean, I'm talking about it as one of the top ten programs on the air of 1969. Matt, remember the program that I talked about where it was a well received spinoff of the Andrew Griffith show, the Mayberry RFD and it was canceled merely because CBS was moving away from middle America programming and moving to let's go where the hip young kids are living in the cities? This is another program. They effectively canceled one of their top rated programs starring a beloved entertainer who had been on the air for 20 years simply because his show appealed most to people in the Midwest and those Midwestern, more elderly audience dollars were not as valuable as the younger dollars in the cities. CBS was going through a massive if it's rural, get it outta here, we're going urban attitude. People still talk about that today. I do not believe it is happening today, but the fact that it ever actually did happen is. I mean, it's bonkers.

Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And in the news on this day, February 21, 1969, wanted to highlight a article from the New York Times about the recently sworn in president Richard Nixon, who over a two day period made two major addresses to Congress. And this is the second one. And at this second one he made a call to not do away with, but to evolve the Electoral College in presidential elections. Calling for a change to the rules that would allow for a person to win the presidency if they gained 40% of the electoral vote. If nobody reached that number, then there would be a popular vote runoff. I did not realize that during the campaign for presidency in 1968, which obviously Richard Nixon won, one of his campaign platforms was to end the Electoral College. Once he got into the presidency, however, it evolved with him saying he understood historically the necessity of the Electoral College to protect smaller states from being overrun by the desires of the larger states. Hold back from saying the Electoral College should be removed and instead went with a more nuanced the Electoral College should evolve. One of his suggestions being, you should no longer be a winner take all system. It should be apportioned according to the vote of the popular vote. Therefore, if you win 60% of the popular vote in Tennessee, you should get 60% of their electoral votes. A nuanced argument about evolution of the Electoral College, which I found surprising considering who it was and what era it was. I tend to think of the calls for the Electoral College removal and evolution as being born in the year 2000. Why do I think that, Matt? I think you know why. Yes, a guy named Hanging Chad on. Now to our discussion of this episode. This is the Way to Eden. Where do we start? I've already started. I already let the cat out of the bag. I already started like this.

Today’s Discussion

I feel like everything we've said about previous episodes that were not great, that were clunkers, this makes those that we've been talking about basically for like the last six episodes of this podcast, we've had, like, this isn't great. We had one last week that rose above the others and we were pleased to see it. But this is like, this is not a great era of Trek. This episode sticks out like a sore thumb in my childhood memory. I loved Star Trek enough as a kid. Like most young viewers, I would watch terrible episodes of shows that I loved simply because I loved the program overall. Even as in that moment as a child, I would be thinking, this is dumb. And this one ho-boy. Like, let's put in a bunch of musical numbers. Let's. Yeah. The guy who played Adam, his last name is Napier, he got this role in an audition where he jumped up on a table and belted out a Doors song in front of everybody that he was auditioning against. That's how he got this role. And he and the blonde singer wrote these songs. And as one comment I found, as I was doing research for this episode pointed out, this is the worst kind of padding. Watching people be sung at makes me feel awkward in a way, as if I am in the room with this awkward singing. And it makes me feel so cringy that not only is it like I'm in the room while watching this episode, I feel like I'm standing next to the performers, just standing there. And then they cut to the audience, these Starfleet uniformed officers who are grooving along. If you look at their eyes in the one sequence where they're. It's. The room fills up with Starfleet officers. Whenever they showed the Starfleet officers from the front, no two Starfleet people are looking in the same place. It is moments of just like extras basically going, like, what are we supposed to be enjoying? Like, I feel that awkwardness. I feel the forced nature of it.

I feel the lack of. There's like a lack of respect for the audience and for the characters at the same time. It's weird. It's just in this one in particular, the kind of vacuous presentation of the hippie movement in what has been pointed out by other analysis of this episode. This is effectively a takedown of Timothy Leary. This is. He's a learned man. He is a college professor. He is supposedly an intelligent person, but he's gone off the rails, clearly insane, and embraced this weird culture. And the depiction of this weird culture. It's like Star Trek in this moment, decided, well, we've taken the progressive side in a lot of different ways. How about we do a takedown episode in an unfair way of the rebellion movement in the United States? We're going to, like, take these kids down a notch. And it's just. It's. They are attacking them for being overly intellectual. They are attacking them for being unwilling to accept authority. They are attacking them for the parody of hippie talk, the use of Herbert, the chanting, the like, the music, the colors of the clothing, the style, what they're wearing, putting one of them in an ear, prosthetics that look like somebody with a two handfuls of Silly Putty just kind of slammed their hands into his sides of his head and then let go. And it's like, I can see your fingerprints in there. It's just. It's everything about this. As a kid, I would watch this episode and be like, this isn't fun. This isn't fun. Of course, ultimately, the takedown at the end of like. And they can't get what they want because Eden is actually full of poison. And it's just. What. What were we.

What were we offered? What was this?

Matt Ferrell: Can I add to this?

Sean Ferrell: Oh, sure. And then I've got a. And then I've got a spin at the end. I've got a spin at the end, which is the Michael Richards connection, which we'll get to after you talk. Okay, so go ahead.

Matt Ferrell: My notes on this are short and they parallel a lot of what you just pointed out. The whole aspect of hippies, am I right? Was basically the attitude of the entire episode, which was perplexing. And the idea of that they're so disconnected, hippies don't really understand reality and that they're going to basically end up getting themselves killed. That's like the lesson that they're trying to teach us. By the end of the episode, which is so unbelievably stupid and hacky and just bad, I was just perplexed at how much this episode just is just like. It's like watching an episode of the Gong Show.

Sean Ferrell: It's just awful.

Matt Ferrell: But, Sean, I'm not going to defend it, but there was an element in this episode that made me go, wait, wait, is this having a kind of moment? Is this. Is this kind of. I'm having an out of body of experience that this episode still has something to actually say today. And it's the Anti Vax movement, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Ferrell: The Anti Vax moment. It was when that scene happened where they said, he has a disease. He's in denial about this disease. And he's like, I refuse to accept your science and what you're saying. And he's basically just flipping off at them. I'm sitting there watching this, and for the entire episode, Sean, I'm basically sitting there half asleep. This episode was so boring. It was making me angry. And then that scene happened and I sat up and went, holy crap. It actually has something to say that's like very 2026. Holy crap. They of course would have no idea that that would be the case when they wrote this. But I gotta tip my hat. They had a point of, there is a movement of people in our world, not just the United States, that refuse to accept reality as it is. And they have. Whatever their reasons are, they believe their own reality. And that's, that's actually very dangerous. And we're witnessing it in 2026. RFK Jr everybody. Oh my God. Like what's happening here in the United States right now is literally take that character and put him in charge of the U.S. healthcare. That is what we have right now. And I was just dumbfounded that there was a five minute sequence in this episode that made me go, you go, that's awesome. Well done show. Now can we skip the rest of this crap? Because this makes no sense. And the other thing I wanted to point out was the takeaway at the end of the, killing the characters off at the end.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: I thought was like the most heartless, harshest way they could have ended this episode. Kill the hippies. Yeah. Who.

Sean Ferrell: Who thought that was the hippies? The hippies would kill themselves. Like the hippies are so head in the clouds that they will kill themselves. And it is again, evocative of the response to a lot of the anti vaxxers which was, well, it doesn't really matter. They feel that way because if that's how they feel, they won't take care of themselves and then they will end up dying off. And it's like, no, that's cutting your nose off to spite your face because it's a destabilization of the protection of the wider society. That's the problem. Not that John doesn't believe in vaccines, but that because John doesn't believe in vaccines, he's putting us all at risk of a thing. I agree with you. That's the one element here that stands out. And it made me wonder about like the alternative version of this, which was like, if you sucked the hippiness out of it. And it was just a story of like, we've been sent to stop this ship because we know it's full of people who, who are carrying a disease and they do not believe it's real, but it is. They are all carriers. They will not get the disease themselves, but they are carriers and they are trying to find a new home and they won't stop visiting planets. And whenever they do, there's an outbreak of that disease. And we need to stop these people. And we're trying to figure out what to do with them. That would be a compelling story of we are here to help you find a place where you can be safe. And those people saying, just leave us alone. We're going to go wherever we want because we reject your rules and we reject your society and we reject your conclusions. That would be a fascinating episode. Instead, this one is so dressed up in DayGlo colors that any wider message like you picked up on is hard to see. It's really kind of. It feels strangely like.

I don't know when this episode would have been going into production, but at this point it's being broadcast early, early, early in the days of President Nixon, only a month into his presidency. But it likely was being written and being produced right around the time of the elections in 1968, if not just after that. And it made me wonder, is this somehow a network or production response to all of the conflict of 1968? The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And RFK, the chaos of the Democratic Convention, the rising hippie movement, the calls for peace and ending Vietnam, civil rights? Is this somehow a reactionary response to all that? To say, you know what? People are asking for too much? It just kind of feels like this knee jerk response in a way, which is really strange considering, like, you take these people out of this episode and put them on Laugh in and they would have fit in perfectly because Laugh in was a extremely successful program that was effectively putting hippie movement attitude on television every week. So it's this kind of weird. Which side of this discussion are you landing on? When you are arguably one of the more progressive programs on television, it's really surprising to say, have them paint with such a broad brush. People who are rejecting wider society is just being painted with this kind of like. And look how dumb they are. And we're gonna make fun of them. Very, very odd.

Do you want to hear the twist?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. What is this Michael Richards connection?

Sean Ferrell: Michael Richards is the pen name for one DC Fontana. DC Fontana did not want her name on this episode, so she used the name Michael Richards. She also wrote the first version of the episode, That Which Remains, in which the artificial intelligence guardian of the planet kept showing up and touching people. I am for you touching them. She wrote the first draft of that. They made big changes to it. She did not like it. She put her pen name on that one as well. She did it on this one. The original story of this one was not a Chekhov meeting. We didn't even talk about the Chekhov love story, which is so forgettable and silly as to be like, just completely put it into a. Put it into the shuttle bay and eject it from the ship. Originally, it was going to be McCoy's daughter was brought on board the ship and she and Kirk begin to have a romance. And then through multiple revisions, it ended up being like, what put into Chekhov instead of Kirk? I'm not saying I would have liked that better. I think it's actually kind of creepy if McCoy's daughter shows up and then Kirk and she start to have some sort of romantic entanglement that seems completely unnecessary. But DC Fontana's involvement in the original draft of this makes me think it would have been a lot smarter. I do not know what the plot of her original draft was, other than to know that McCoy's daughter was going to be involved in it. But I have to think there was a bigger message and probably not painted up in hippie colors the way this one was. For it to reach the point where she would rather have her name taken off of the episode than to be associated with it speaks volumes. And it really kind of. We've talked about her before and how, you know, if Gene Roddenberry is the father of Star Trek, she's the mother.

And she's in fact, responsible for a lot of those elements that are the key elements for me and my fandom of, like, what are Vulcans and how does this work? And the progressiveness that we are very often giving credit to the overall program for. Seems like it often comes from her. Found myself sitting here and thinking, like, wow, she really must have loved the opportunity, the possibility of Star Trek, because she hung on to coming back for the animated series and for Next Generation, despite the fact that she was asking that her name be taken off of episodes. There must have been things going on behind the scenes that really made her willing to say, I want to stay within this family as it moves forward. Because when you're taking your name off of episodes, you would assume that you. That the worm had turned. You'd assume that it'd be like, okay, this is this. I'm out. But that's not what happened. She wanted to be a part of it all the way into Next Gen. And then when we get to Next Gen, things forced her out for good. Finally, at that point, in a. In a way that had to do again, with things being changed in her scripts in ways that she did not like, the same thing kept happening to her here. And it's really tragic, like, to have an episode under the name of Michael Richards and we're sitting here like, what a clunker.

But it started off with some other possibility under her.

Matt Ferrell: So whatever that possibility was, it would have been better. There's no doubt in my mind.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's. This is a hard one to watch. So I guess my, My only question for the viewers and listeners. We had a comment from Babarudra, I think it was last week, where he basically hinted at this episode coming up and he was like, there's one on the way. That's really gonna be a rough watch. Yep. Babarudra, you weren't wrong. But is there anybody out there? And I invite this with genuine curiosity. Is there anybody out there who's like, no, this one is one of my favorites. I really would love to know what it is about this episode that some people might connect with. Or is this one where you're all seeing the same thing we're seeing, which is like, boy, rough terrain ahead. So jump into the comments, let us know. As always, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us directly, you can go to trekintime.Show. Click the join button. It'll make you an Ensign. Which means you'll be signed up for our spin off program, Out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about the rare late-season bright spot in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 21, "The Cloud Minders." After weeks of episodes that dragged, this one finally feels like real Trek again. They pick apart why it works, where it still limps, and what a bigger budget might have done for the back half of a struggling season 3. First aired February 28, 1969.

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 03:46: Mailbag
• 05:53: Today’s Episode
• 06:24: This Time in History
• 10:48: Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're going to be talking about what might have been. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time. This is the podcast that takes a look at all of Star Trek in chronological Stardate history. We've worked our way through a lot of, strangely, through the prequel and sequel programs before we've made our way this far in the original series. That's right. We're in season three. We're well past the halfway mark in season three. So we're maybe five episodes away from wrapping up the original series and moving on to the motion pictures, which, to give everybody a heads up, we will be doing the motion pictures. But we've got some news to come in a minute. But I was gonna say quickly, but who are we? I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some science fiction. I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a novel coming out in April of 2027. I always have to think very consciously about the year because what I want to say is, I don't know, 2023 feels right. So I have a horror novel coming out in 2027 in the fields. We thirst more about that as we move forward in time. And with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, are you enjoying the Canadian wildfires as much as we are here in New York City?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, I'm, I'm. I'm loving the bouquet in the air, the smell of smoke, the healthcare, the health warnings that keep coming up on my phone. Loving it, Sean. It's great.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Yeah. The healthcare warnings coming fast and furious here in New York City. And I had to. I had to go out this morning and I was wearing a mask because the smell, I knew it was going to impact me. I did end up getting a severe headache, possibly as the result of all of that. But as I was out, I was the only person wearing a mask. I saw people jogging and I saw a couple stand outside having a 15 minute long chat while holding a newborn baby. And I thought, all right, come on. So here we go. As Matt hinted at a moment ago when he raised a finger and was like, hold on a second. As we were talking about what's coming up next. What's coming up next? We'll give you the teaser right now instead of waiting until the end of the episode. As we record this, we are one week away from the fourth season of Strange New Worlds dropping. So we'll do what we've been doing. We'll pause the original series rewatch and we will watch Strange New Worlds in real time as we did with Starfleet Academy viewers. Listeners, I hope you'll join us next week as we enter season four of Strange New Worlds. And then once that ten episode cycle is complete, we'll return to the original series. So we hope you'll be interested in joining us on that little cul de sac. So what are we talking about today, Matt? That's what you're wondering. Well, let me tell you. Today we're going to be talking about episode 21 of season three of the original Series. This is the Cloud Minders. This is originally broadcast on February 28, 1969. It is the 74th produced, the 76th aired overall. It was the 21st of the third season. Directed by Jud Taylor, story by David Gerrold. We'll get back to that in a minute. And Oliver Crawford. Teleplay by Margaret Armen and as I mentioned, February 28, 1969 this episode has some guest stars in it.

Jeff Corey as Plasus, Diana Ewing as Droxine, Charlene Polite, Fred Williamson and Ed Long also star in this episode. Before we get into the details of this episode, we always like to jump into the mailbag and see what you've had to say about our previous episodes. What did you find for us in the mailbag this week?

Mailbag

Matt Ferrell: We talked about Mark of Gideon last time, so there were some comments on there and we were not alone in our opinions of that episode. Let me just say old Trekkie ouch. This one left a mark. That's kind of really good summary. We had one from RH1962. This episode and also Miri are the only two that I watched once on the first release and would never watch again. They both give me the heebie jeebies. Then we had Babarudra chiming in saying it's a terrible episode, but that's no reason to thrust the trauma of mummenschanz on people. We were cursed to have grown up on that crap. It should have stayed dead and buried in the 70s moment.

Sean Ferrell: Mummenschanz are like vampires, Babarudra. You can't get away from them.

Matt Ferrell: And then finally we have wrong answers only from Mark Loveless. He's been absent for a few weeks, but he's back. Plot of Lights of Zetar. Spock gets out a rare Vulcan musical instrument, a Zetar. When he plays it, the lights attached to it in combination with the music cause an odd reaction similar to a trance which stops as soon as the music stops. As a result of several crew being in a trance and neglecting their duties, a near fatal accident happens and the zetar is banned from everywhere except Spock's quarters. As McCoy sums up at the end of the episode, it's not like we have a group of musically inclined space hippies who are soul searching for the meaning of life on board. Yes, Sean, we are two episodes away from my fave Cringe fest.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I know what you're. I know. I know exactly what you're heading toward. Yes, yes, Mark. Yep, it is just a few episodes away, but like I mentioned, detour into strange new worlds. Which means we've got 10 weeks with which to prepare. Those lights you see that sound you hear? That's the read alert. Time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. As is the trend with season three. Matt, I think you'll find this very brief and to the point.

Today’s Episode

Matt Ferrell: Kirk races against time to acquire plague fighting minerals from a world in the midst of a civil uprising.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: Doesn't get simpler than that. This message, this message from Star Trek that minerals can fight disease, well, it dropped on February 28, 1969. What was the world like at the time of original broadcast? Well, Matt, you may be anticipating that you're gonna sing You heard it through the grapevine, but not anymore. No, that's right, you've moved on. You are now singing along to Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone. Take it away, Matt. That's right. That we are everyday people. And at the box office. Yeah, we got. We shed one thing that we've been talking about quite a bit. But we can't shed all the things we talk about quite a bit. Funny Girl was still the number one film in the theaters. Yes, that Funny Girl with Barbara Streisand. And we've been taking a look at the 1969 top rated programs. We of course have had shows like Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, Gunsmoke, Bonanza. They were all above a 24 in the Nielsen ratings as compared to Star Trek's third season, which was kind of like bouncing along. Some of these episodes got as low as the mid sixes in the Nielsens. Some of them have reached as high as the mid eights in the Nielsens. Not a great run for season three. And we've talked over the past few weeks in particular about the show feeling weaker as it's gone on. So here we are with yet another entry into the 1969 top rated programs. Here's Lucy with a 23.9. And for anybody who's thinking, well, we've talked about Lucille Ball's program before in our rewatch of the original series. No, not this Lucy. That was a different Lucy. Here's Lucy is an American sitcom starring Lucille Ball. The series co starred her longtime comedy partner Gale Gordon and Ball's real life children, Lucy Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. It was broadcast on CBS from 1968 to 1974.

It was Lucille Ball's third network sitcom following I Love Lucy and the Lucy show, which was the second one. That one stopped broadcasting in 1968. And that's the one we talked about the last time we talked about Lucille Ball. This program originated as the result of Desilu Studios having been fully purchased. She lost control of all of the programs that she owned, including her own show. No longer being able to be in control of her show, she ended the Lucy show and started here's Lucy on rival network CBS. This show would go on to run for several years and this was the first one that starred her real life children. So when I was a kid, I remember watching reruns and there was a sudden jump in, in what the program looked like in these reruns. Where it would go from Lucy living with her neighbors in the country to suddenly Lucy being in a city with her children involved. And I never understood why these episodes seem so mismatched. It was literally yesterday as I put together these show notes that I was like, oh, oh, that explains was two different programs. And in the news on this day, February 28, 1969, we have of course, headlines revolving around recently sworn in President Nixon. He was already traveling the globe. He had visited Berlin and he had visited Rome in a European tour. He of course called for the Berlin Wall to be taken down and for a reunification of Germany that would of course take place in decades later. There was also an article on this day in the New York Times that the US warned that Hanoi's attacks could imperil the halt in bombing in Vietnam. Of course, and spoiler alert, Matt, the bombing would continue and guess what? It would expand. That's right. We were still, you know, Nixon's expansion of the bombing in Vietnam and extending it to the point where it was technically war crimes by going into Cambodia and Laos.

Today's Discussion

That's still in the future at this point. They were still trying to figure out how to make some kind of peace early in Nixon's presidency. On now to our discussion of this episode. Matt, it's been a rough run. We've had the lights of Zetar. We've had the mark of Gideon. I'll take us all the way back through Whom Gods Destroy. We've had episode where we're like, this feels like it could have been an animated episode. This feels like it was thrown together as a first draft and filmed. We've had a lot of questions about why and how the quality of the episodes dropped this one. I would like to open with an opening question to you. Did this feel to you like a kind of return to form while not being a perfect episode? Did this land in a better place than the previous episodes that we've been discussing over the past few weeks?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, with an asterisk in the sense that it felt more Trek to me, dealing with a heady topic, picking it apart, not having that Hanna Barbara cartoon style of we're walking down the same hallway five times plot device they kept doing for the past several episodes. I don't think it's a great Star Trek episode, but it felt more Trek.

Sean Ferrell: Let's deal with your critical response before we get into kind of an overall dissection of thematically and plot wise, what the. What this episode seems to be wrestling with, which. The reason I want to do that is because I feel like this episode is a. In another way, a very strong return to Trek in that it is very thematically of its moment because it really feels like it's a late 60s take to say, like, what is our current world look like and why does it look that way? So I want to. I want to lean into that as well. But the critical response, the one that says it's still not firing on all cylinders. What did you see and what were some of the causes that you think might have been playing out in your viewing?

Matt Ferrell: I don't say the word boring. That's not the right. It's not exactly it. But it felt. Didn't feel as tight. It dragged. How they handled the structure was so paint by numbers that we've seen in the original series before. So it was kind of like they used a blueprint they've used a few times and just used it again. Just different characters, different place, different like motivation. But it was still that Mad Libs plug verb here, adjective here, this. You know, it's like, then you've got your story. It still felt like that to me, which is why that's my critical response of it doesn't reach the heights of previous original series, but it feels more Trek because they're using a blueprint from previous episodes. And this blueprint, not against the original series. It's been used in Next Generation and Voyager. Like pick every. Every single Star Trek series uses this exact blueprint at least once. So it's a good blueprint to use, but it's so overused. And so for me, that was the critical response of just in general, why it's not quite reaching the heights that I would hope for.

Sean Ferrell: So if I'm hearing you, it's a little bit like, oh, this feels like Trek on autopilot, as opposed to Trek being inventive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could see that. And the formula is right there. Come to a place, there's a ticking clock in the background and somebody says, oh, well, we could help you, but we're having this insert civil strife here. And then the results play out the way you would expect it. I, I completely agree with the. It is a formula that you see a lot in Trek. You see it a lot in all television writing. It's a great way to. You mentioned paint by numbers. It can be a paint by numbers approach to, to building in drama into a. Any show. Leaning into the discussion around thematically what this one is about, I'm picking. I'm picking up a lot of what it feels like a very progressive take on the civil rights movement and the. And pushing back very, very hard on the arguments around, well, if these, if this group of people were actually able to function at a higher level, they would have done so by now. And the response being they have been forced into circumstances where they have been held back for so long in circumstances that do not allow growth, that what you are seeing is a system of inherent racism that has kept a group in a position where you can continue to say, well, look, they aren't any better than this. And this felt to me like ripped out of the headlines of 1969. 1968, of course, was a year of tremendous strife in the civil rights movement with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Robert Kennedy, the riots around the Democratic Convention, the images that came out of that. The ongoing strife of the Vietnam War, which had its own angle, was also charged with a racial component.

A majority of the soldiers fighting in Vietnam on behalf of the US were people of color where the options for getting out of service, getting out of the draft, were not as easily available to people of color. So you end up with this very uneven year of 1968, which would have been when this would have been being constructed, and that it ends up on the screen in 1969. And as I was watching it I kept going back to this really feels like 1969 projected on the screen. And I felt like from that perspective, this for me is another one of those episodes that I remember very clearly from my childhood. I think the message is so clear from a certain perspective. It is such a nice distillation of a complex issue into easily readable segments. So that from a child's perspective I was able to pick up on the importance of fair treatment means equal standing. Equity is key. And I couldn't have said it in those words, but I could have explained as a kid what they were trying to get to, that the unfair treatment started well before any of these people were even born.

Matt Ferrell: I had the same feeling that it's 1969 on the screen. Like it is loud and clear. But the thing that resonated with me, this is part of why it felt very Trek. It's also a universal truth that they're arguing here that is timeless. And sadly, what you just said right now, Sean, still applies, still applies today and the things we're having happen. But I also found it interesting you could take on the surface level of this story it is today. It's about people who are being forced to literally mine and damage themselves for the benefits of the wealthy. And cobalt mining. Anybody literally, like the exact story, it's like for 1969, it's an abstract idea for racism. And then today it's like, well, literally this actually is something that is actually happening today around mining. I thought that was absolutely fascinating of we're kind of pillaging countries that are less wealthy and have less availability to them for the benefits of the United States and Europe and the wealthy nations of the world. And it's just like this episode is kind of blowing my brain of yeah, yeah, racism. But it's literally what's happening today.

Sean Ferrell: It's both racism and capitalism. It's a takedown of, of late stage capitalism in the form of you. You can't just be happy that you have work. We take care of you. The kind of paternalism of. I just saw a headline recently which was a billionaire was claiming that the solution to the Social Security crisis that is looming is for people to work longer, to work longer through their life. Okay, this, of course not the solution. Like, oh, Social Security cuts are going to hurt, then maybe don't retire.

Matt Ferrell: Says the person who has billions of dollars.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, said the person who has billions of dollars. So, like this, this episode feels like it's cutting through a lot of these a way that, as you mentioned, like the best Star Treks become more relevant as time moves on because we see, as they get older and are still relevant, how universal those truths are. They cut deeper. And I think this is one of those that does that. I also want to commend this episode in a way that may seem counter to some of my normal criticisms of Trek regarding its sexism. This episode certainly does have sexism in it. If it were being made today, I don't think it would be made in exactly the same way. Diana Ewing, as Droxine is in this. In this one, as well as Charlene Polite, who is Vanna. Both of them, there's a. There's a certain amount of either ogling or. Or when Kirk faces off against the somewhat murderous Vanna and turns it into a moment of like, well, I'm kind of enjoying this. It's. It's a little bit like, ooh, yucky. But I think that the depiction of the One as a leader of the rebellion and that she has gained this ability to plan and to think strategically. I like the element of like, we brought you into our home. It's kind of like you're one of the good ones because we brought you into our home and you repay us in this way. Which is like a direct civil rights callback of the treatment of people of color. Except for the good ones that could. You know, we would work with them. But why are they upset that it's a woman? I think is important in. In the depiction there. And that when there is a depiction of other members of the society, they sh. There's a little bit more of a plurality. We only see a handful at this point. Star Trek's extras list was very, very short because these episodes had very small budgets.

So the fact that this one has multiple locations and it has some extras in it meant that they were putting a little bit more into this episode. I think that may be a result of it being a story from David Gerrold, who at this point, if his name is involved in the story creation, it gets a little bit more effort. And I think that that's. That throws back to what we've been saying over the past couple of weeks. His name wasn't connected to storylines. They were running with probably very little work onto certain screenplays and just filming what they got. But the ones that he was involved with got a little more money, a little more attention. So I think that the depiction here of the leader of the Disruptors being a woman was one step that I was like, I like that. I also think they give a Lot of good screen time to Droxine. She's not written the way she is. Accidentally, I feel like she is written with a kind of egalitarian naivete by design. She is not who she is because she's a woman first. She is who she is because she's out of touch. She's one of the elite and she doesn't realize her privilege. So she is the voice of the entire people in the floating city. I'm watching the remastered version, so the special effects in the show have been added to with some additional cgi. I just want to say I love the depiction of the floating city here. I love the fact that it is talked about in the way it is. It is depicted the way it is, and it is literally. It looks like something out of a fantasy fairy tale, literally a castle floating in the sky. And as absurd as it is, if you just stop for a minute and think, like, well, what would the logic of this be? At some point, I get the impression that at some point in this planet's history, the people were like, the air down here is poison.

We should live.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Above it. Then they built it. And then at some point, people were just like, well, if we bring everybody up here, it's going to be really crowded. Maybe we don't do that. And I like the fact that it's. Again, it harkens to a history of this planet, a history of these people, where the privilege and the historic misuse of a large group of people is given a blind eye. Boy, does that feel like it resonates for me with the parts of American history that are not talked about, because nobody wants to talk about how slavery was one of the ways that this country built itself in its early days. And the echoes of that continue through to today. So this episode, for me, like, it hit a lot of very good notes. And I found myself thinking, oh, if only. If only season two had gotten more viewership. Only the network was like, well, let's not strangle this show with a half as big a budget yet again, so that it's now a quarter of what the first season was. If only it had gotten a little bit more effort and a little bit more attention. If this was kind of the baseline for what episodes in the third season could have been, instead of it being the outlier. Because I think that this one is a demonstration of, like, it could have reached better heights. But if this is what the norm was, think about how good some of the episodes we've just kind of limped through the difficulty we had in talking about them in a way that actually felt productive. It could have been so much different. I understand we can't wave a magic wand to make that happen, but did you have a similar thing where you're like, oh, if only?

Matt Ferrell: Oh, yeah, I definitely had that feeling of. It felt like if they had more budget and more time, this would have been one of those episodes that would have been elevated to the original favorite episodes from season one and season two. I also had the feeling that Lando was gonna walk in at any moment. It's literally cloud city.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: But this episode, like you said, it evokes the history of why they may have built this cloud city and not wanting to acknowledge the reasons why they did it or how they did it and just like, oh, this is the way it is. We magically have been here. The way it is today is the way it's always been and it will always be this way.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: But there is an aspect to the storytelling that drove me nuts. I don't know if it drove you nuts. Again, this is me going thinking too logically about a science fiction show. It was the surprise of here's a Federation world that has basically an enslaved population.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: We didn't know. Yeah. Wait, what? You just let any rando join the Federation and you don't, like, find out how their society works and do a deep analysis? They show that in future series. You know what I mean? Like, it's like. It's not like just, oh, you sign on. It's like you're invited in and there's a vetting process and certain criteria has to be met. So you'd assume back then it's the same thing, but here's a group that just had a whole enslaved people and you didn't know. Come on, what's happening here?

Sean Ferrell: Well, there's. I mean, there's a couple of different responses that I could take to that, one of which is, you're absolutely right, but that's because at the time they were just flying around the galaxy, visiting planets. And by the time you and I were adolescents and then watching through Deep Space Nine and heading toward Voyager. Yeah. They had created what would have been a much more realistic approach to what does this all mean? Also on display in this one for me was, as we learn from the later shows and the movies, they make it very clear we don't approach anybody who doesn't work, doesn't have warp capable technology. We don't just show up at planets. This is now, I think the ninth episode this season where they're visiting a planet that doesn't demonstrate having anything like a spaceship, even let alone warp technology. The thing that this one does have, at least they show that they have their own teleporters. So it's like, okay, they're advanced, they have stuff.

Matt Ferrell: They have a city that can float.

Sean Ferrell: It's like, they have a city that can float.

Matt Ferrell: I can see that being. Spock says they're not space faring, but they have floating cities.

Sean Ferrell: So, okay, and Spock says, like, this is the most impressive demonstration of antigrav technology I've ever seen. And it's just like, yeah, you got an entire city floating in space, but it is that thing of yet again, does Starfleet have one ship? Yet again, there is a disease rampant on a planet. Yet again, the Enterprise is like, there's only one cure and it's on this one planet. We are the only ship that can go get it. I'm like, we're really bringing out that horse. That horse was dead in season one. And you just beating it and beating it and beating it.

Matt Ferrell: It's a disease and we're the only

Sean Ferrell: ones who can get there. And having somebody say, starships don't just show up to deliver medicine. And I was like, I liked the fact that that was in there. Like, yeah, a little bit of an effort at like, yeah, we're gonna do. We're doing this as a favor. We're doing it because we're the only ones available. But it does, you know, hit those moments of like, okay, the planet is the only source of this special cure, but the planet doesn't have spaceships to be able to say, like, oh, yeah, we're going to load up a bunch onto our cargo vessel and we'll be right there. It's no, you got to send your best crew that is supposedly on a five year mission to explore deep into space. They need to stop by and take this medicine to the sick people. And it's not even people. I like the fact that I did like the fact that this time they were like, okay, it's not going to be the people, it's the plants. The plants are going to die. And I was like, at least that's a. That's a little new wrinkle. So thank you for that.

Matt Ferrell: This is such a minor note, but did you enjoy the Khan glasses that everybody was wearing?

Sean Ferrell: I did. The moment they showed up, I was just like, were those in the prop room when they made Star Trek 2? I did really like it. I Was like, it kind of, for me, had a moment of, oh, would those have been something that would have been supplied to the Botany Bay when they were being left on that planet with the, like, you're going to have to have, like, you're probably going to be doing some mining. You're going to be doing these kinds of things that are going to require extra technology. It seems to me like within the mythos of Star Trek, Kirk would have given Khan and his people a bunch of technology and a bunch of equipment that might have helped them in settling in the world. So I found myself thinking like, oh, yeah, okay, so they've got the same glasses. That's great. I thought. I've actually did think that was pretty cool. And my brain immediately kind of retconned everything to. To fit it all together. And as I say, all of that, it just makes me want to. Once again, for our viewers and listeners pitch, if you haven't listened to it, we will talk about it, I'm sure, when we get To Star Trek 2 the Wrath of Khan. If you haven't listened to the audio, it wasn't even a po. It was a podcast. It was an. A radio play of Khan. And it's available. I listen to it on Spotify. It's available wherever you can get, I think audiobooks from the Star Trek universe, it should be available. And I just want to throw that out there as a reminder. It's a great story and it's a really, really neat bridge between the introduction of Khan in the original series and what his mindset was and the experiences of his people heading toward Star Trek 2. So recommend that. Having said all of that, this one landed for me in a place that felt a lot better. It, of course, at this late stage in season three, still feels like, oh, that you can see the cracks.

You can see them limping toward the finish line. But I did find myself enjoying this one just as a watch. So this is one of those ones where I would rewatch this one, whereas the last few episodes I'd be like,

Matt Ferrell: no, no, I don't.

Sean Ferrell: I don't need to revisit that. So, yeah, viewers, listeners, what did you think about this one? Jump into the comments. As always, we are very interested in hearing what you have to say. We want to share your thoughts. And we've had some hard weeks where it's been difficult for Matt and I to find something nice to talk about in the episodes. I feel like this one's a little different to this land in a similar terrain for all of you let us know. As always, liking subscribing, sharing with your friends, leaving comments. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. They really do help. And if you want to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the Join button. It allows you to throw coins at our heads and we'll also make you an Ensign, which means you'll be signed up for Out of Time, our spin off show in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. Usually movies, TV shows that we're watching, a lot of horror, a lot of sci fi, a lot of things that are just the golden age of television, I would say. As we are perusing all the various streaming networks, we hope you'll be interested in checking that out once again. Next week we will be starting our watch of season four of Strange New Worlds. We hope you'll be interested in joining us there. We'll be talking about the first episode as soon as it airs, so we hope you'll want to join us for that. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about the possession horror hiding inside Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 18, "The Lights of Zetar." An alien energy takes over Lieutenant Mira Romaine, and the creepy voice, the floating body, and the "you can't have her back, she's ours" menace feel pulled straight from a 1960s Hammer horror film. So is this secretly one of Star Trek's scariest hours? Or does the show waste a great idea by burying the reveal for 40 minutes?

Chapters

• 00:00: Intro
• 02:30: Episode Description
• 02:58: This time in History
• 06:30: Today’s Episode Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about flashes of inspiration. Welcome to Trek in Time, everybody. We're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We're also talking about what was going on in the world at the time of original broadcast. So currently we're in the tail end of the original series. Not season one, not season two. We've made it all the way to season three. Matt, can you believe that we can see the end from here. So we're talking about the 1960s. Well, we're talking about Star Trek. And who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell, I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a horror novel coming out in April of 2027. Oh my God, that sounds like the future. It's called in the Fields We Thirst and it's a little horror novel about bad things happening in the war torn fields of World War I. I hope people will be interested in checking that out. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. So between Matt with the tech and me with the fiction, we've got Star Trek. How are you doing, Matt?

Matt Ferrell: I'm good, how about you?

Sean Ferrell: I'm doing okay. It's summer, it is muggy. And to make the recording work well, I've got all the fans, I've got the dehumidifier, I've got the air conditioning all off. So if by the end of this episode I look like I need medical help, get me medical help. So today we're going to be talking about the Lights of Zetar, which is originally broadcast on January 31, 1969. It is the 73rd episode produced. It is the 73rd aired overall. It is the 18th of the third season. Originally directed by Herb Kenwith, written by Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis. The guest actors in this one, the main one we're going to talk about, there's a couple people in the background that we would recognize like Lieutenant Kyle John Winston, he's a familiar face. But mainly we're going to be talking about Jan Shutan as Lieutenant Mira Romaine. So we'll be talking about her quite a bit. And of course we have all of the original cast members, all the way from Kirk all the way down to Majel Barrett. Yes, Christine Chappell is in this episode. Look forward to talking about them. And I also look forward to talking about how we've talked about it a number of different times, how Strange New Worlds reinforms this show. And this is an episode where I think we're going to bring that up occasionally. So those lights you see, those sounds you hear. Yes, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description, as has been the trend for season three. Buckle up, it's a long one. Okay.

Episode Description

Matt Ferrell: Strange energy based alien life forms threatened the Memory Alpha Station and the Enterprise crew.

This time in History

Sean Ferrell: Maybe not as long as I remembered. Anyway, we're going to be talking about that in a few minutes, but first we're going to take a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. As I mentioned before, January 31, 1969. What were we shaking our tails to with? Well, Matt and I weren't born yet. I know you're looking at the gray beard and you're saying, how's that even possible? Trust me, I wasn't born yet. So people other than us were dancing along to yes, Matt, you guessed it, they were still dancing to I Heard it through the Grapevine by Marvin Gaye. I know you enjoy singing this, but please keep it to just a few bars. Take it away, Matt. Good. And at the movies. Well, Matt, I found myself a little disappointed to say once again, the number one film, Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif. I've mentioned this one before because it was number one for a good solid six weeks. We haven't mentioned it the past few weeks because we had Bullet showing up occasionally and a little movie called Candy which nobody had heard of. But Funny Girl was back at the top spot this week. We've also been looking at the various shows that were at the top of the ratings list for 1969 as compared to Star Trek. This episode of Star Trek is a bump up. It gets a little bit over an eight in the Nielsens. But in comparison, Rowan and Martin's Laugh in, which was the number one show for 1969, was getting a 26. So you could see why Star Trek was on its way out. Not due to its anything that was wrong with it. Of course. We're talking about a show that had its budget slashed in half every season it was in existence. So at this point in season three, they're barely, they're barely getting anything. And that's why we're seeing limited number of extras and limited scenes in places where they would have had to build a new set. But in comparison to that, we have.

We've talked about the top four shows. So far at number five on the list for 1969 is a show we did talk about a couple of years ago, Matt, Family Affair. I don't know if you remember what this one is about, but it is, of course, in the trend of uplifting 1960s sitcom settings. That's right, it involves death. Family Affair is an American sitcom starring Brian Keith and Sebastian Cabot. It aired on CBS from 1966 to 1971. The series explored the trials and well to do of well to do engineer and bachelor Bill Davis as he attempted to raise his brother's orphaned children in his luxury New York City apartment. That's right. Bill Davis is taking care of his dead brother's family. And last week we were talking about Mayberry RFD which also included a man who was a widower raising his children. Yes, in the 1960s, the formula for a family sitcom was kill the mom at the very least and sometimes kill them both. And in the news on this day, January 31, 1961, we're seeing the very first days of the Nixon presidency. And so the headline that I wanted to point out this week, Nixon seeks plan to replace draft with volunteers. Now, I'm not going to give any spoilers. I'm not going to let anybody know how that turns out. But Matt, what do you think? How do you think that'll work out? An all volunteer force going to Vietnam? It's going to be great. Yep. I think it's going to work out perfectly for Nixon and the administration as they try to win a war. They would always remind people we didn't start this one. Now to our discussion of this week's episode, the Lights of Zetar. Matt, I think I started the conversation last week and it largely revolved around our entire conversation would roll around this, this little nugget which was, boy, did we not like that episode. So I'm going to ask you to start us off this week with your thoughts about the Lights of Zetar.

Today’s Episode Discussion

A step up, a step down, or a step sideways. What did you think it was?

Matt Ferrell: I don't think you could get lower than last week's episode. So this is a step up to probably what was like the episodes before the last one. So I guess what you could say is, I did not like this, Sean. I'm finding the end of Star Trek The Original series, these last handful of episodes. Like somebody's taking bamboo shoots and shoving them under my fingernails. I am not. I am not enjoying myself. Sean. Wow, this is hard time. This is an episode. You may like it, but I found this so boring. Just boring. And it's doing something. I've noticed a pattern in the past, like four or five episodes where they will do something like a sequence happens, like a little arc, and they just repeat that arc and they repeat that arc and they repeat that arc for 30 freaking minutes. And then by minute 40, they finally start to move things forward again to hit a conclusion. And what it comes across as. Here's another episode that would have taken 20 minutes, but they stretched it to 45. And it's driving me bonkers because in this episode, there were moments of coolness. There were moments of great character development. There were moments that was like, that's neat. But it was in the middle of just, I don't care what's happening in this episode at all. And it wasn't until minute 40 that they finally started to push forward the story of the aliens and how they were controlling the woman. And it was just, why did they wait for so long to do this? Because they didn't have enough meat on the bones. I just.

Sean Ferrell: Keep DeForrest Kelly's weight out of this. I largely agree with everything you're saying, and I think there's a number of. Just a little bit scattershot. I just want to throw out some things that I want to say. Like, these were things I saw and I understood they were happening, but I don't want to talk about them in any kind of depth. Terribly sexist episode. Boom. Oh, it's horrendous. It's horrendous. It does things that just. Like, they keep calling her a girl. Like, it's just like the girl. The girl. We're going to talk about the girl. We're going to have a. We're going to have a scene about the girl, and she's going to sit at the table and we're all just going to. All the men are going to talk about her, but she's not going to say anything other than that. I liked that scene. I found myself sitting there going, like, this is a really interesting scene. How they're, like, doing all the sciencey stuff to be like, what could possibly be happening? Because we can't wrap our heads around these things. But look at the data. I was like, great sciencey stuff. Let her talk. The repetition that you mentioned, I get the weirdest feeling like. Like somebody. The edict in the writer's room does feel to be like, just create a simple scene arc and we'll just keep repeating it until we've got enough time filmed. Like, it does feel like exactly what you point out. And it doesn't need to be that way because I go back again to something I mentioned a few minutes ago. The funding, I think, is the problem. I think they are literally just shooting first drafts of scripts. I think that they land on good ideas when they get to the 40 minute mark. The stuff about the alien entity here, it being a collection, effectively the life force of, of a collection of aliens that has been diminishing over time and is now down to just a handful of them.

And I found myself thinking that should have been in minute 15. And then the rest of it is ethics of like, can we save this dying civilization? Is there anything we can do? Is there any way to make the. Yeah. Like, is there a moral ground to say? Like, what if she's willing to sacrifice herself? Think about the complexities of the episode. If she had been like, I'm willing to do this. Think about the complexities of the episode. If she had been given some autonomy in this, as opposed to just being literally a body that they're like, we can't let the body be taken. We're going to put her into this hyperbaric chamber. A little more sciency stuff around. Why they think that will work much have been nice because suddenly they have a plan that involves atmospheric pressures. And why? Why? It's not clear. It's like there's a throwaway line as they start putting her in where somebody says, and I think it's McCoy just kind of like thrown in, like, because these alien entities have been in space for so long, they've adapted to space to the point where atmospheric pressure will affect them. I'm like, okay, fine, like, if that's your solution. But again, that should be a scene of sciency stuff that should be built up too. And I just kept going back to it. Felt like the good ideas finally got to the script and then they should have gone to a rewrite where they put all that right at the front and then pull it all forward and pull out attention by giving her autonomy. Giving a question mark to.

Do we just get rid of these aliens? Is there any other option?

Matt Ferrell: I'm going to push back on you a little bit because you said you feel like this is a symptom of the budget cuts. I'm going to be very brutal. I disagree. I think it's a lack of imagination and talent. I think that's what we're seeing. I think we're at the C level tier of script writers at this point in the show's life. The best writers were in season one. The worst writers lasted to the very end. And we're seeing the results of that. It's a lack of imagination. And there was probably an edict around trying to make the show feel action oriented and like things are happening. Yeah. And so they find the loop of that thing happening and they just repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. And then they get to the end where the interesting stuff starts happening. And that's the part that would be heady. It would be people in a room talking. It would be them discovering the whole pressure thing. They could have. It could have been a discovery that Bones had. But it's like it takes time and effort and skill and talent and imagination to flesh those things out in a way that would still have that sense of urgency, something happening. But it strikes me as not just a budget cut thing. It seems like it was gotta satisfy the audience. They want something like, you know, ray guns. They want people running around and punching each other. It's like, let's just do that 40 minutes and then we'll just throw in some interesting sci fi stuff at the end. It's like, that's what it comes across to me as. And that doesn't seem like it's just purely a budget cut. A budget cut issue. It's more than that.

Sean Ferrell: I don't disagree with that. I think there's a Venn diagram where you and I could, like our proposed causes could overlap.

Matt Ferrell: Both right at the same time.

Sean Ferrell: Like, they could both be right at the same time. Why? Why don't you have better writers in that writing room? Why is this the C tier? Because your budget was cut and the good ones went off and got other jobs. They're writing for Mission Impossible across the hall. One of the things about this one that stood out to me is something that is an element that we've talked about I don't know how many times. I'm coming to a conclusion that I never anticipated. And it goes all the way back to the very early days of this podcast when we were watching Enterprise. And then it came up again as we were watching things like Discovery and now the original series, Strange New Worlds. Does it. Star Trek is effectively a horror genre. This is a possession story. This is the Exorcist. This is Young woman. This entity takes her over. She begins when she. It becomes the most interesting when she starts speaking. And when she's leaving, that sound, that noise comes out of her mouth. And when she starts talking in the voice of the entities and they are like, you can't have her back. She is ours. Those are literally lines from a Hammer horror movie. Like, think of the Hammer films where it's the 1960s, everything has got the dayglow colors, even though it's horror. And you get the girl who's floating in the air while Dracula is pulling her toward him with hand gestures. And you can't have her back. She's mine. I'm watching this one. I'm like, if this head, like, it hit a certain note for me where I was like, if this was just a little bit better, it would be really, really cool. And it's just too bad they couldn't make it just a little bit better. Like, for me, the sexism is straight up 1969. So I'm like, I'm not.

Matt Ferrell: Oh, yeah, Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: I look at that and I'm like, of course they were going to do that. But the other elements where another draft of the script leaning a little bit more into the sciency stuff, letting the stuff that's revealed at minute 40 be revealed by minute 15 so that we can have some of the more interesting conversations. And they already had so many scenes that, like, this is another one where I'm sitting there and, like, they finally are letting everybody on the bridge talk.

Matt Ferrell: Yes.

Sean Ferrell: Everybody gets to say a line. Everybody's got something to do. Uhura’s like, I'm trying to get through this interference, but I'm getting these weird signals. And Sulu is like, oh, my gosh, this thing is like, I can't fly away from this thing. He gets more lines in this episode than I think he's gotten in a season. And, yeah, it's great. Like, I had no, like, no problem with Sulu other than the one line where he's like, I don't think Scotty knows she has a brain. Like, okay, let's not.

Matt Ferrell: They undercut themselves constantly. Like, you mentioned the whole. Like, you brought up how the sound she makes. The horror aspect, I thought was extremely well done. There were moments in this show that were like, ooh, that's really creepy. That's really kind of cool. I don't know. It's kind of like, you know, the old horror movies of, like, don't go in the basement, and the character goes in the basement. There'd be no reason for that character to actually do what they're doing, but they're doing it because it's pushing the plot forward. There's elements of that in here where it was just the. She goes, she's on the planet. She says, we got to get out of here. It's coming back. They're like, what are you talking about? It's coming back. It's coming back. It's going to kill us. Got to get out of here. So they go back onto the ship, and then later she has that vision of the future, like she envisioned it, and tells Scotty. And Scotty gaslights her and tells her, oh, no, deario. Little girl.

Sean Ferrell: Boy, does he. Yeah, it's all in your head. It's all you, silly. You've got space madness.

Matt Ferrell: In the realm of, like, we just talked about, there are moments where every character has a line and every character is in here. I would say not all the characters are represented well at all. And so that scene where Scotty talks her out of telling the captain what she experienced makes zero sense for the Scotty that we've gotten to know up until this point. And two, they were on the planet with her when she said, it's coming back. It's gonna kill everybody. How did she know? She clearly has a connection to this thing. And the fact that he's saying, don't tell the captain that you're having visions of this thing. They already know. They saw it firsthand.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: So everybody would already be thinking this. And the fact that they were pretending like, oh, that didn't happen. This is the separate little thing we're having now made no sense to me. Which is why in the end, when Scotty tells her, you got to tell the captain about what you were saying, and she tells him, and Captain Kirk looks a little upset, like, why didn't you tell me? Again, in the back of my head was, Kirk, dude. You were on the planet with her when she said, it's coming back. And you were like, no, it's not. And then they got the beam down call of like, hey, it's coming back. And you're like, how did you know you knew this? Like, you all experienced it. It's like they all went into a collective amnesia of what they experience just for the plot to move forward. And to have these moments of a character not telling another character something, it made no sense. And so the characters were behaving in a way that was not true to their character. So, yes, every character uttered words, but they uttered meaningless, stupid words that really didn't advance anything for the characters that we knew. And it felt wrong that Scotty was doing that. It didn't feel like him to me when that whole sequence.

Sean Ferrell: I agree. And it goes to a bit of a truth about writing that I occasionally still have to rediscover But I discovered it in very grand ways years ago. Probably my second novel, which is man in the Empty Suit, which of course is a time travel loopy, loopy, loopy thing. I hit a point when I was writing that where I was like, I can't withhold from the audience at all. I get more traction out of telling them everything as soon as it logically comes up. And then there's more playground when everybody's on the same page and everybody knows everything that the people on the page know, as opposed to, oh, I need to keep this secret. And I feel like this screen, this screenplay falls into that trap of, well, we can't let anybody know that these are alien entities that exist only because they somehow survived an apocalyptic end to their world and they are now looking for a new host in which to live. We got it. That's the big reveal. We can't tell anybody. And that creates all the kinds of weird logic loopholes and anti character moments because you're trying to protect the secret, you're trying to protect the threat. Like, how can she have this connection? Like, like I keep saying, by minute 15, everybody should have been like, these alien entities that want to find a new host. They think Lt. Romaine can be that host. Oh, my God. And then you think about, like, what story comes out of that. It's one that's engaging, it's interesting, and it still has the horror elements of. She can still have like the creepy voice come out. They can still say things like, you can't have her back. She's ours now. You can still have. When Kirk is like, I'm gonna see if I can talk to them because now they're in her and I can, I can have conversations with them. I'm like, that's probably the closest that we've seen Kirk get to being Picard. And he. And it's a good scene.

And imagine if we had had like three scenes like that where he keeps going back in and arguing. Imagine a version of this where he goes in and he realizes during a conversation he's not speaking to the same entity he was before because there's multiple of them and some of them are surfacing. And then you get a multiple personality thing going on where maybe he's convincing one this isn't okay, and he doesn't know which one that is. And he's going in. He's just like, I hope I can get back to Bob, because Bob was on my side. So. So, like, you end up with opportunities if you big make that big reveal. How do we deal with this dilemma as opposed to the mistake of the dilemma is the big shocker. That's one of my big complaints about a lot of the M. Night Shyamalan films. He used a twist in a way that was really masterful in one movie. And then he's tried to recreate that and everything else.

And it's to varying degrees of success. Because sometimes the reveal isn't enough to let logic gaps kind of like trip along for an entire movie. I agree with you. The formula that they keep landing on, it tends to me to appear to be like, we got to keep the secret because the secrets is going to be exciting at the end. Like, no, Nobody gives a crap by minute 40. Nobody is going to be excited to find out that these lights are alien entities. We would have been excited at minute 10 or 15, and then at minute 40 to see Kirk finally have a breakthrough or the last ditch attempt doesn't work. And, like, the last thing we want to do is put this woman into this atmospheric chamber and potentially crush her. Yet we have to. How do we do this? And to have a scene where, like, one of the things that stood out to me is her being in that chamber was another bunch of horror motifs because she's literally floating. So it has that kind of possessed, possessed young woman floating above the bed. Like, it's got all those things going for it. It's just the words that are coming out of everybody's mouth. Felt to me like it was almost in the wrong order. Like, if you took the screenplay and flipped it and all the reveal was at the beginning, then you can have all the cool stuff that you had. And Sulu can be saying, like, I can't get away from these lights. And you get Scotty, who's like, I love her, even though we'll never see her again. Like, it's fine that he was in love with her. Just don't gaslight her. That's not okay.

Matt Ferrell: It's kind of sad because this is 1969 and the sexism. If it had been a male character, I could have seen them telling the story more from her or his point of view, and it would have been more horrific of him losing control of himself and the descent into madness. And I can just see them focusing on that more. But for a woman in 1969, they're not gonna do that. They're not gonna do that. There's two things. Sean, this is gonna highlight for you what I thought of this episode. The two things I found hysterical to me. Cause I'm just laughing in my head. Is there was a sequence where they're all kind of rushing in action. The whole ship is like in motion. And they're running on a hallway and there's like a thousand people in the hallway. And they're all doing different things and running different places. And there's this one dude who looks like he's cranking the hell out of the wall.

Sean Ferrell: Art on the wall.

Matt Ferrell: It's like he's doing this cranking motion. What looks like it's supposed to be something that turns on the wall, but it's not turning. And you can tell he's just pantomiming it. He is acting his heart out, fake turning this thing on the wall. And the camera goes by him this way and he's doing it. And then the camera goes the other way and he's still doing it. And he. He runs. I'm like, you go, buddy. You go. Was the first thing in my mind. And then later, when she's in the

Sean Ferrell: pressure chamber, he's the crank turner. Yeah, exactly.

Matt Ferrell: It's like, what are you cranking, dude? Why do you have to do that?

Sean Ferrell: I have one guy, she's in the

Matt Ferrell: pressure chamber and they're cranking up the pressure. And Kirk yells at one moment, I don't know if this happened to you. He yells more pressure. In a way, all I thought in my head was I heard Billy Joel kick into gear pressure in the back of my head during that scene. And it ruined the entire ending of the episode for me.

Sean Ferrell: Oh, that's very funny.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: That final scene included a lot of static shots of people where it was like, we need to increase the pressure. And then I don't know if you felt like you could do a super cut of that and turn it into a 30 minute long super cut of just over and over again of like Spock going, I'm going to increase it just a little bit. And then Dr. McCoy and then Kirk yelling, pressure. And then the girl's floating and then Spock is. I'm going to increase it just a little bit. And they reuse the same footage of Spock every single time because the dial doesn't move. But I will also add this based on the numbers that they show on screen. She is under so much pressure.

Matt Ferrell: She was.

Sean Ferrell: She would have been pulp. It would have been like Scotty would have gone over to that little window to look at her and give her the thumbs up and let her know that he loves her. And he would have looked in there. And it would have been just been red mist filling that room. Because at one point I think it hits 30 atmospheres before they stop showing numbers. And I'm just like, 30 atmospheres. Okay, so you're saying that you're putting her through all of that and then McCoy's like, you're going to be okay in there, little girl, because you're going to be in there for about 20 minutes. I'm like, 20 minutes. People who go deep sea diving sometimes have to spend hours, days. Like, it's one thing to say, like, it's the future. They can do anything because it's the future. No, you can't. It's a human body. Technology is not going to be able to. Like, thanks to technology, we can now decompress a human body that's been under deep, deep sea level of pressure in five minutes. Like, no, that's not what can happen. It's a human body. It's going to take as long as it's going to take. And you just said she was under 30 atmospheres of pressure. What do we have to do to get these aliens out of here? I don't know. Maybe put her on Jupiter.

Matt Ferrell: Great. Him looking in the window. And then the window suddenly just turns red.

Sean Ferrell: She goes. Just goes. As she. Like, she would implode. She would, she would. It would be the most horrific. You want to talk about horror? It would probably be the most horrific depict of the crushing of a human body. As Scotty is looking through there and just going, hang on, Lassie, you're gonna be right as rain. No, you're not being crushed. Like, it just. It reached a point of absurdity for me.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it's happening.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. I was like. I was like, if you're gonna show that compression chamber, most of the kids watching at home, if you just say, we're gonna have to put it under tremendous pressure. Show us a dial that doesn't have any numbers. Show us a dial that just like, has a red line way at the bottom. And Spock goes. And it goes up and they're like, you're gonna need more. Oh, no, she might die. Like, why give us a number that anybody with a brain is gonna say, like, wait, you're doing what to her?

Matt Ferrell: How.

Sean Ferrell: How many pressures? How many atmospheres? That poor girl. That poor girl. I will end on this note. I like this one so much more than the previous weeks. So, like, you take everything I just said, and yet I feel like this one is head and shoulders above that previous one. And for me, this had Glimpses of why we like Star Trek. I watched it and I saw all the same stuff you did. And I was like, this one feels like Spock is Spocking. This one feels like Bones. I was going to say Bones is boning, but I'm not going to say that.

Matt Ferrell: Don't say that.

Sean Ferrell: I'm not gonna say that. That would be a great setup to a joke. This one feels like Chekhov is Chekhoving. This one feels like Spock is Spocking. This one feels like Bones is boop. Like cut. To pardon our dust, We've got some repairs we gotta do. This one feels like Star Trek to me. Whereas last week it felt like. Did a bunch of people just kind of hijack the studio and force all the actors say certain lines while they've filmed them?

Matt Ferrell: Like last week. I apologize to everybody listening to the show. I'm sorry. If you watch this, I'm not gonna say that this week. I don't feel that way about this week's. This week's did have some. I did get some enjoyment out of it. So it's. It's not a complete train wreck.

Sean Ferrell: So, viewers, listeners, what did you think? Jump into the comments and let us know. We really look forward to hearing what you have to say. We didn't have any comments in this episode. Matt and I are on a very regular recording schedule. Having said that, I have no idea why. Sometimes when we record, we have comments, other times we record, we don't have comments.

Matt Ferrell: We've missed a bunch of weeks.

Sean Ferrell: Right? But it has to do with the release schedule and the recording schedule. So there will be a point where these two things will line up and we'll have the comments. But just to let you all know, we want the comments. We love hearing what you have to say about the show. We always like to include those. It just so happened this week we're recording and we didn't have any new ones to share because the episode hadn't released yet. So jump into the comments. Let us know what you had to say. Liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends and commenting are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. We appreciate all of those. If you want to support us directly, you can go to trekintime.Show. Click the join button there. Not only does that allow you to throw coins at our heads, but it also signs you up for Out of Time, which is our spin off podcast in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. As a matter of fact, we are going to record an episode of that right now. So if you're interested, we hope you'll check it out by subscribing through trekintime.Show. Thank you so much, everybody. Thanks again for watching or listening, and we'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about what killed Star Trek in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 16, “The Mark of Gideon.”

Chapters

• 0:00: Intro
• 2:12: Viewer feedback
• 3:42: Today's episode
• 7:40: This time in history
• 14:22: Episode discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek In Time, we're talking about what really killed Star Trek and left episodes that made people think it was super silly. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. So we're looking at right now the original series. We're in the third season. That's right. These are the dog days. I mean that both in the fact that we are recording this in an incredibly hot summer day here in the US and in the fact that the latter part of the original series, season three, it's getting kind of rough. It's a slog. It's a slog. But then after that, we'll move through the original series movies and on to Next Generation. And we hope you'll be up to joining us for that. And who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm an author. I write some sci fi. I write some horror. As a matter of fact, I have a book coming out in April of 2027, a horror novel entitled In The Fields We Thirst. It's a Little World War I horror ditty I hope people would be interested in checking out. More information is. More information can be shared. And with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, people don't like it when we talk about the weather, but how are you?

Matt Ferrell: I'm hot.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: I sent Sean a photo earlier of my dog. Had been outside for like half an hour, and my wife noticed that the dog was chasing the shade. And so she opened the door, called the dog back in. Dog came inside and immediately just laid flat, just collapsed on the laundry room floor. Cause it was cool and the dog was hot and was just like, I can't take it.

Sean Ferrell: Neither can I.

Matt Ferrell: It's hot.

Sean Ferrell: Neither can I. So before we get into our conversation about today's episode, which is the Mark of Gideon, originally broadcast on January 17, 1969, we'll talk about both the show and that day in history in a few minutes. We always like to get into the mailbag and see what you've said about previous episodes. So what have you found for us this week, Matt?

Viewer feedback

Matt Ferrell: Well, we have one from Babarudra, who wrote this is on the Whom Gods Destroy episode. I'm not from Gideon. Is that even in Rhode Island? And wow. I remember seeing something about the Axnar thing years ago. I didn't even know they made any on YouTube's I'll have to check that out. And there was other comments from, like, the old Trekkie who commented on the Axnar thing and supporting it. So there was a lot of people that didn't either know it was a thing or didn't realize that some stuff had been released. And so it sounds like some people are gonna go check that stuff out. I still have to check it out myself, but. But I've been distracted recently, so I haven't been able to do it quite yet. Then we had a comment from Wayouts. Imagine if they turned the bad guy into Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. The Kurtz that came home.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And I was like, wow, Apocalypse Now. Like, that is who that should have been. Like this former great leader that has just gone completely bonkers. The Kurtz of it all would have been so much better than what we got.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And then we had wrong answers. Only not Mark Loveless this time, but from Paleghost69. Mark of Gideon. After stumbling on a Commerce planet, the Enterprise has been disabled due to a parking violation, an unpaid fee they were never warned of, and have to work through the economy's multiple currency systems to trade for a simple parking pass. A Mark of Gideon decal on the ship.

Sean Ferrell: There you go. That's pretty perfect and better than the

Matt Ferrell: episode we just watched.

Sean Ferrell: We'll get into that in a moment. Those lights you see, those sounds you hear, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Take it away, Matt.

Today's episode

Matt Ferrell: This is a long one, so strap yourself in.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, get ready.

Matt Ferrell: An overpopulated race of aliens abduct Kirk to solve their problem.

Sean Ferrell: That was it. That was it. That's the episode in a nutshell, everybody. The 71st produced, the 72nd aired overall, 16th of the third season. The mark of Gideon, directed by Jud Taylor, written by George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams. And that may explain, Stanley Adams involvement, may explain why this one had some tribble during production. Oh, do you know why I said that, Matt? Sean, any idea? Yes, that's right. Stanley Adams is the actor who played the gentleman who provided all those tribbles in that episode. So many episodes ago, during the filming of the Trouble With Tribbles, Stanley was speaking with Roddenberry about overpopulation. He was very, very committed to the attempts to slow population growth. And he said to Roddenberry, you should do an episode about that because it's thematically very important. Roddenberry apparently challenged him to write the episode himself, which he did, and then it would later be rewritten by George F. Slavin and produced into this show. Upon seeing this episode, Stanley Adams, well, he, at an interview years later, would say, there's a rule in television. Take the money and run. He was not pleased with what they did to his script. We will get into that at the end of the episode, but for right now, let's just take a look at what was going on. January 17, 1969, the day of original broadcast. Well, Matt, I don't have to tell you. That's right. You heard it through the grapevine yet again. This song stayed at number one for a good two months. Take it away, Matt. They say that Marvin Gaye is gone. I beg to differ. And at the movies, we've talked about this one before because it spent one previous week and then we've done the timey wimey stuff. The order of the episodes that we're watching them is not the order of broadcast. It's the order of largely production, but stardate order.

This time in history

So Bullet was number one for the second week in a row this week. Yes, it's the Steve McQueen film. And in this film, Stephen McQueen is all man. I won't say any more than that. We've also been taking a look at the shows that were running in 1969, those programs that were at the top of the slot. This episode of the original series will not be the full, complete start of the slide into the obscurity of the ending, but it's not a good sign. January returning after the holiday. This one gets about a 6.5 in the Nielsen ratings, 4 points below what the average was for this season. So this is like, these are the days where they knew their days were numbered. But what were the other programs that were at the top? Well, at the very top in 1969 was Rowan Martin's Laugh In. The SNL precursor was getting a 26. So that gives you a sense of the scale that we're looking at. Other programs we've already talked about so far included Gunsmoke and Bonanza. But this week at number four, with a 24 in the ratings, which is interesting. Mayberry RFD. Matt, are you familiar with Mayberry RFD? No.

Matt Ferrell: Is this some kind of spinoff of Andy Griffith?

Sean Ferrell: It is, in fact a spinoff, and do not confuse it with a SVU or a CSI. RFD stands for Rural Free Delivery. It was an American sitcom that was a spinoff from the Andy Griffith Show. It aired on CBS from 1968 to 1971. The Andrew Griffith show ended in 68. So this was the attempt to continue on with storytelling in that world. It was created by Bob Ross and It ran for three seasons, 78 episodes total. And it centered around Sam Jones, played by Ken Berry. If you have seen Ken Berry's face, we'll provide an image from the show. He's a. That guy. You've seen him in a thousand things. And there were all sorts of attempts to get him to be the lead in his own show. And he would be in things that would be okay. It lasted a few years, but he would never have that runaway hit that would keep him in people's televisions for long term. So here he is playing a widowed farmer. Yes, in the 1960s and well into the 80s and 90s, it was very popular to say, let's make a family sitcom, but kill the mom. So here he is a widowed farmer. He's a town council president, and his son Mike and he are living with Aunt Bee, who's serving as a housekeeper. Yes, that Aunt Bee. And amongst the various characters that would visit the show included Goober Pyle, who of course was the replacement for Gomer, who went on to have his own spin off prior to the end of the Andrew Griffith Show. And a number of other characters from the original Andrew Griffith show would appear occasionally. The show was popular and consistently ranked in the top 10 of the Nielsens. But it was canceled in 1971 because of CBS's rural purge, a term which is as hard to say as rural juror. The rural purge was CBS's decision to move away from programming. The image was that their programming was all was rural. They wanted to move to a more urban look.

So they did away with programming that was doing well simply because it no longer fit the suit. And in the news on this day in 1969, January 17th. Well, yes, we see there are some headlines like, Johnson offers plan to check inflation in 1969. That was sweet of him, considering there had been a presidential election in November, he hadn't even run, and he was literally days away from leaving office. So he's kind of just like, hey, by the way, like, let's do something about inflation. I gotta go. But the news story I wanted to talk about was something that I feel is kind of topical given the point of and the manifestation of this episode, which was about the attempts for peace in Vietnam. I've said this before, probably say it again as we move through the final episodes of the original series. Spoiler. None of this would work. The war will continue on for years. But why, you ask? Why will the war continue for years? Headline, Expanded Vietnam Talks Begin in Paris tomorrow. Round Table agreed upon. Yes, yes, you heard that right from the article. The accord broke a 10 week deadlock on procedural matters that had blocked negotiations on substantive issues by the participants in the conflict. Under the terms of the agreement, representatives of the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, will sit at a circular table without nameplates, flags or markings. Two rectangular tables measuring about 3ft by 4 and a half feet will be placed 18 inches from the circular table at opposite sides. The seating arrangements were the main stumbling block to the the expanded talks. I will read that sentence again. The seating arrangements were the main stumbling block to the expanded talks.

The Saigon regime and Washington contended that the roundtable proposal would give the front the same status as South Vietnam and insisted on some device to indicate the existence of only two sides. This would buttress their contention that the Viet Cong guerrillas were only agents of North Vietnam. Today's agreement provided a seating formula elastic enough for the Allies to speak of two sides and for the enemy to speak of a four sided affair. This ambiguity permits all participants to claim victory in the protocol dispute.

Matt Ferrell: So no words, Sean, There are no words.

Sean Ferrell: There are no words. Peace in our time, right? Um, that's right.

Matt Ferrell: That's right.

Episode discussion

Sean Ferrell: I've read some other commentary about this episode that I completely agree with, which is the first six or seven minutes of this episode are really quite riveting. And then it trips into logic gaps and weird decision making for image repurposes or shock value or just some strange sort of like, well, let's just make them kiss so that people at least have somebody to look at and it falls apart completely. I found myself thinking this is the kind of episode that made people say Star Trek is kind of silly. People who might not have appreciated it from its earlier episodes or the cornerstone episodes. Matt and I have been talking about the strange experience we're going through right now. Where so many of season three's episodes are, are the ones that live rent free in our heads, images or moments, and yet we don't connect them to season three. So it's that kind of weird confluence of, well, the writers and producers and actors really were hitting their stride and knowing who these characters were and how to put them on tv. But unfortunately all the good ammo had been used in the first two seasons and what we're left with are things like this. Now, Matt, I will leave it up to you. Do you want me to share what the original screenplay was going to be now. Or would you like me to save that till after our discussion?

Matt Ferrell: No, no, let's talk about it now. Let's talk about it now.

Sean Ferrell: The original title of this episode as it was written by Stanley Adams was no Place to Die. The plot was originally intended as a sci fi heist involving a deceptive overpopulated planet that plotted to conquer the USS Enterprise to enslave their own people. Instead of inviting only Captain Kirk as is portrayed in the show, the Gideonites were petitioning for membership and asked for a diplomatic meeting. And when one of the diplomats at this meeting reveals to McCoy that he has an incredibly fast regenerating hand, it piques McCoy's interest. There is then an attempt by Gideonites to get on board the Enterprise. They use this regeneration ability that they have to convince the members of the Enterprise that it's worth going to the ship and studying them. Once they're there, they take over the ship and their plan is to introduce death through viruses to their overcrowded world with the help of Dr. McCoy. Their goal is to introduce death and create effectively a slave class, keeping the current controlling faction in charge of the planet and safe from the virus, but introducing the virus into the general population and thereby creating a slave class that would have to work under the control of that smaller group if they wanted to avoid dying as a result of the virus. The resolution is that Kirk gets the diplomat who reveals all of this. He then gets some of the Gideon guards to join the fight and they turn against the the council that was trying to manifest this kind of atrocity, this horror. So it's almost akin to introduction of a almost holocaust setting the terror of taking an entire planet over through the use of a virus and creating a slave class underneath. A very small select few would have been the story.

But what was going on in Star Trek at this time is the budgets have been slashed in season two and, and they've been slashed in half again in season three. How do you put together an episode that is supposed to be an overpopulated planet with army factions taking over the Enterprise? It would have included fight sequences on the Enterprise full of extras. It would have included fight sequences on the planet full of extras, no budget. So they end up chopping up the story so that it can be effectively a bottle episode. They're using one pre existing set for the shots of the diplomatic council and then the rest of it takes place on the Enterprise without even much of the the rest of the crew present. Except for those sections where it's Spock and crew talking to the diplomats. So this is all clearly cost saving measures and it creates this weird storyline. Like when I read the original script outline, Matt, I was like, that would have been a great episode. But what we're left with, it doesn't even feel like it's a story. It feels like a bunch of colors on the screen. I found myself just watching this with kind of my mouth open of like, I can't believe they did these. They did this. This is just.

None of it makes any sense.

Matt Ferrell: I have nothing good to say about this episode except for the first five minutes. Show started. Don't remember this episode at all. Don't remember a lick of it. It's starting. Kirk ends up the beam down. He's on this fake ship and all you have is the hum of the ship he's wandering around. And it reminded me a lot of these Next Generation episode with the Doctor when she gets in this warp bubble. Reality, the warp bubble. I was eating it up. There was interesting camera moves, interesting camera locations that created this. Just ultra wide shots of him on the bridge that created just the isolation. It was so well done. The sound effects and the sound design. I was like, wow, how come I don't remember this episode? How can I not remember this episode? This is incredible. This is such a great way to start a show. Then minute six hit Sean, then seven, and then eight. And each minute I watched this show felt like it took five extra minutes. So by the end of the episode, I felt like I'd been watching this episode for three hours and I wanted to jump off a roof. This episode was such a train wreck. There was no logic at all. It's like, okay, here's this planet that's so advanced they can make a full scale replica of the Enterprise underground. But it's overcrowded.

Sean Ferrell: Remember, they're overcrowded where there's not enough room for people.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, there's not enough room, but we can build a full freaking replica of your spaceship. Okay, so why do you need a full replica? Because we want to trick you into falling in love with my daughter so you kiss her. You couldn't have just done that in a random room? Like, just. No, there's like, there's no sense and there's no. For you and I. There is no point in trying to make sense of it. The script is just fricking stupid. It is just so stupid, it was almost offensive to me. I got angry by the end of the episode and my notes were like, great. Beam down the. The coordinates. They kept saying verbally I was like, it's weird that they're having them read out the coordinates. They've never done that before. Yeah, that's weird. Oh. Oh. They just were using it as a plot device.

Sean Ferrell: It was Chekhov. That's why they were doing it.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, right. And then it was just the. Oh, I like the camera moves, and I like that what they're doing for the execution of all this kind of stuff. And then it turns into just a litany of comments that are just like, basically just wtf, wtf? In all caps, wtf and all bold WTF in the biggest font I could find. It was just. It just got weirder and weirder. And for me, this is an episode nobody should watch. And if you listening to this episode of Sean, I talking about this, watched it. I am so sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That's all I'll say.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: The one thing that kept occurring to me was like, I think that what the script has is a little bit of probably unprocessed emotional hangover from the era because of what Spock is saying about diplomacy and bureaucrats. That's the one thing that, as I was watching, I'm like, this is really. This feels like it is of the era. Marry those statements to the news article I just read. I think the American public at this moment was going through this. What is their job if they're fighting over tables? And for Spock. And this is a moment where I say, there's for me a connective line between what's going on in the script that did get filmed and what was going on in the world. For me, that's very much like, this is 1969 anger. This is dissatisfaction. This is confusion. But the fact that it's coming out of the mouth of Spock was like, this is just bad because it doesn't make sense for him as a character. Because for him as a character, he'd be like, diplomacy is the proper way. And as a Vulcan, he would be like, diplomacy is the proper way. And it can be very difficult. And this episode is largely looking at Leonard Nimoy acting as a frustrated Vulcan. And it doesn't, like. Even the characterization feels like it's being chipped away in this episode so that Spock isn't Spock and Spock's father is a diplomat. And I'm just like, he would not say these things. They don't tie it into any greater character arc. It is literally, we are watching people get frustrated with the moment and not demonstrating who they are as characters, but really in any way, shape or form. And when people are demonstrating who they are as characters, they don't make any sense. The leader of this people is just like my. My daughter is going to become a symbol because she's doing this. Doing what? Becoming Typhoid Mary. Like turning that into a calling. Young people will.

He says the line, young people will respond to this. And I thought, once again, inadvertent. It's setting up the idea of, yeah, the people who are older, well, they won't make a sacrifice. And what was going on with Vietnam at that point? The average age of the soldiers in Vietnam was 19. Like, who's making the sacrifice here? Young people, usually minorities, the poor, the people with the power. My daughter will be a symbol so that young people will willingly kill themselves through this disease. Through a disease. There are other episodes of Star Trek where they introduce things like willingly committing yourself to death because a fictional war is underway. This overpopulated planet is so desperate for people to volunteer to kill themselves that they decide, you know, what would be a great way to do that? Really painful disease. That makes a lot of sense. Like. Like Matt just said, we can't analyze this. This is unanalyzable.

Matt Ferrell: I know. Because, Sean, first problem, are planets overcrowded? You're a space faring species. What could you possibly do about this? Like, there's no episode. There's no episode. You could literally put people on ships and go populate another planet. Like, there is no reason for this to even happen. No, it's so bonkers. Stupid. I agree with you. There is definite. The tone of the news of The ERA is 100% in here. And I was reading it, I was feeling it through the episode, but it was so incoherent in the story. It was just completely lost. They could have done something that was really impactful, but instead they gave us this slop. And then there were parts of the show, Sean, that were just, I thought were either unintentionally funny or just outright just funny funny. And you brought up the whole Spock thing. Bones says to Spock, just when I thought you had a future in diplomacy.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: And I thought that was the funniest thing for him to say, considering his father's a diplomat and considering he turns into a diplomat by the end of his life, that we find out from the shows he is a diplomat. And so I thought that was pretty funny. Unintentionally funny. I rewound and watch this several times, Sean. When Kirk is basically. When they Initially, like, capture him. And the head guy, head diplomat, is like. Says his. What are you just gonna say? And he goes into the room and out of the room come two dudes in all black with the hoods up. Those two guys, I don't know what cue the director gave them, but they got this like, what you gonna do, dude? Look on their face. They look so proud of themselves. Like, we got you. It was the weirdest acting. And I keep watching it over and over again.

Sean Ferrell: It's a little bit in that moment, like, he's arrested by Moomin johns. And if anybody. People don't know what I'm referring to, Google Moomin johns. Yeah, you'll enjoy it. I also just want to end on this note. There are two things that I remember from my childhood about this episode that I was enjoying watching. You just mentioned you liked that scene. Two things that I enjoyed, I remember from my childhood. Just the weird creepiness of when for whatever reason, the faces of all those people illuminated in green, appearing on the screen, appearing at the window, disappearing just before anybody looks, with a kind of, is this a ghost story? Sort of vibe. But it's not. It's literally in. Yeah, it's in.

MatFerrellt : It's.

Sean Ferrell: They make the claim there are so many people pressed against the hull of the ship that we're hearing their heartbeats. Okay, so when they go to a window, if something happens to the screen, we actually see people, but they're not climbing all over each other and trying to survive. They're all just standing there like a choir. And then the better version is when we were with the leaders of the planet, we see in the background, through what's supposed to be a window, like a cage, we see what effectively looks like a bunch of Teletubbies just awkwardly bumping into each other for no reason. It's like, okay, if it's overpopulated, why do they walk like that if it's overpopulated? Everybody's walking like their hands are glued to their thighs. Like, when I walk through a crowded room, I'm not waddling. And these are a bunch of Teletubbies just bouncing off each other.

Matt Ferrell: I like that you call them Teletubbies because to me, they were more like non playable characters from, like video games just walking down the street, bumping into objects that they weren't supposed to bump into. Yeah, so stupid.

Sean Ferrell: There's nothing. There's nothing about this episode that is worth holding on to. I feel like this is the.

Matt Ferrell: It's sad, it's the.

Sean Ferrell: It's. And it's the first that I can recall where you and I were both like, this is really pretty unforgivable. This was. This was just bad, bad, bad. Yeah. If anybody out there disagrees with us, I would love to hear how you connected to this one. Like, is. Is there a nostalgia viewing of this where you're able to reclaim that earlier viewing mentality and you're just able to say, like, yeah, it's. It's fun for me for that reason? Or did you agree with us? Like, this is. This is rough. This is rough. Jump into the comments. As always, the comments are an easy way for you to support the podcast as our liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. If you want to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.Show. Click the join button. Not only will that allow you to throw coins at our heads, but you'll be signed up for out of Time, our spinoff program in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this show. Next week, we're going to be talking about Lights of Zetar. Please, wrong answers only. What's that one about? Don't say it's about this one because I don't want to hear it. As always, we appreciate your watching or you're listening. We hope you're enjoying our rewatch. We are so close to ending the original series, getting into the movies, which means we're super, super close to Next Generation. And for me, that's going to feel like a breath of fresh air. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.

Matt and Sean talk about the release of all stakes in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 14, “Whom Gods Destroy.”

Sean’s comic collection goes on sale July 3rd. Details here: https://www.whatnot.com/s/VMjS3uri

Chapters

• 0:00: Intro
• 3:26: Today's episode
• 5:12: This time in history
• 7:51: Episode discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're taking a look at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. Yes, we started way back at Enterprise, and here we are, 232 episodes later. We're almost done with the original series. Matt, I don't know about you, but things aren't working out the way I thought they would. Let's do a podcast. It's about Star Trek.

Matt Ferrell: It'll be fun. Will it?

Sean Ferrell: Will it? It's been fun. I joke. We are watching all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order and we're taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we've been talking lately about the 60s, and as we finish up with the original series, which, as by my count, is just a few episodes away, it looks like maybe a month and a half, we'll suddenly find ourselves in the movies and we'll be skyrocketing through the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond until we're finally, guess what, Matt? Gonna land in the Next Generation. I know that Matt's looking forward to that, and I am as well, and I'm sure a lot of people in our audience are, too. And who am I? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some horrors. As a matter of fact, I have a horror novel coming out next year, 2027. For anybody who's watching or listening, this in 2028. And with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And, Matt, how are you doing? You've been enjoying for the past two weeks a lovely head and chest cold.

Matt Ferrell: So, oh, yeah, it's been a lot of fun. You might notice me muting my mic every once in a while as we talk today, because I'll be having a coughing fit. But, Sean, before we move on, what

Today's episode

Sean Ferrell: is the title of your book?

Matt Ferrell: You did not tell us the title of your book.

Sean Ferrell: Oh, the title of my book is in the Fields We Thirst. It is a horror story set in World War I and more. As we move forward in time, it's going to be a while before it's out. It will be out in April of 2020, so there's plenty of time for me to talk about it. Right now I am literally eyeball deep in edits, and I'm at that stage of edits which basically can be summed up as, oh, my God, what have I done? This shall pass. I know it will. It will all be great. It will all be fine. I will get through this. I've done this before. But in this moment, it really is. Oh, my God. I need a writer. I need a writer's dad. Today we're going to be talking about the episode Whom Gods Destroy. This is the 69th episode of the original series produced. The 71st aired overall, the 14th of the third season. It's a lot of numbers. And it aired originally on January 3, 1969. That's right, Matt. We cannot get closer to the beginning of 1969 than this very episode. I haven't looked ahead. I haven't looked at dates. I cannot guarantee we're not going to dip back into 1968 for an episode or two. I'm hoping we don't, because if we do, we're going to be talking about hey Jude and I don't want to do that. So let us now talk about whom God's destroyed. That noise you hear those lights? You see? That's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Matt, don't be too confused if this sounds somewhat familiar.

Matt Ferrell: Captain Kirk visits a mental health facility and confronts an insane starship captain who believes he is destined to control the universe. I see what you mean, John. We've seen that before.

This time in history

Sean Ferrell: We've seen this before. So here we are, January 3, 1969. Strangely just a year and a half removed from the start of the series in which an episode that basically had the same plot existed, but a very different world. 1968 changed so much from presidential elections to the attempt to de escalate the Vietnam War. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the assassination of a presidential hopeful and a civil rights leader. So very different era and only two years after the original series began. But what were some of the details about this early days of 1969? Well, Matt, you may have heard this through the grapevine. The number one song was I Heard it through the Grapevine. Take it away, Matt. As always, if I close my eyes, I would swear Marvin Gaye was singing through my earphones. And the number one film this week, just like last week, this would be a two week number one spot. Good grief, it's candy. Yes. This is the movie that Matt and I talked about last week. A film that neither of us had ever heard of before. Written by Buck Henry, one of my favorite comedy writers of the late 60s, responsible for what's Up Doc? Which is one of the funniest movies ever made. As far as I'm Concerned. And this one being a sex farce that included a cast that includes Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Mattho, Ringer, Ringo Starr, John Astin and Sugar Ray Robinson. Yes, you wondered if there was a party game you might play in which you had to name name six people who've probably been in a room together. You wouldn't have thought Sugar Ray Robinson would be in that list, but you'd be wrong. On television, we've been taking a look at 1969's top programming. Last week we talked about Gunsmoke. Yes, of course, Gunsmoke is going to be up there the week before that, Ronan Martin's Laugh in and the Number Three show for 1969.

It's not too much of a surprise either. It's Bonanza. We have many of the programs that we've talked about over the past 60 odd episodes of this podcast as we've been talking about the original series. It's no surprise that we're going to see these shows when we talk about what was popular at the time and in the news on this day in 1969. From the New York Times, a bunch of local news around school board work, the superintendent, relationship to city government. This is something that, as a New Yorker, I can tell you they didn't solve any of these problems in 1969. How do I know that? Because they're still talking about all these problems in 2026. But the headline I wanted to point out was US offers plans to End Deadlock in Vietnam Talks. Spoiler. It won't work on now to our discussion about this episode, Whom Gods Destroy. I know what I want to talk about in this conversation, Matt, but I'm going to throw it your way because I started last week's conversation.

Episode discussion

So why don't you lead us off about your feelings about an episode in which Kirk and Spock find themselves at a mental institution which is attempting to solve mental illness once and for all, and they find themselves trapped by a madman.

Matt Ferrell: Well, Sean, my feelings about this episode are complicated because there was a big picture. There was a little bit of a flashback to last week where we talked about how the show technically was fine. It's fine. But it felt like it went on too long for me. It just felt like they were doing the same thing, the same exact thing, through three acts. It didn't feel like there was a real strong progression of tension being built, all those kind of things happening. We can't get in the details, but one of my big pet peeves was they blew up a girl on camera in a fairly besetting way.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. But they waited to do that until like, literally, like six minutes before the end of the episode. And it was like that, if you had done that 20 minutes in, would have ratcheted up the tension and then made everything after that way more tense. But they didn't. So my big complaint about this one was the structure and the storytelling just felt very repetitive. You joked about it with the description of what this is about. Yeah, the exact plot we have seen before. So it's a plot we know. And then it was like a plot script that felt like it would have been 20 minutes of an episode, but they took the same kind of sequence and just kept repeating it three times and then blew up the girl. So it's kind of like. It makes it sound like I'm saying you need to blow up girls to make it exciting. I'm not saying that, but there's a.

Sean Ferrell: There's a book on screenwriting called Save the Cat. You should write a screenwriting book called Blow up the Girl.

Matt Ferrell: It's Blow up the Girl.

Sean Ferrell: Blow up the Girl. It is, Yeah. I completely agree. And I love the summary of it just repeated three times and then they blew up the girl. I couldn't agree more with. I mean, we've seen this setting and Star Trek is going to repeat itself all the time. I mean, we see it like every series does their version of X, and that's fine. Bottle episodes will sometimes feel repetitive. Like. And I'm fine with. I'm fine with repetition. If there's a specific newness of flavor, it's a little bit like chicken is always going to be chicken. This chicken has saffron, this chicken has black pepper. So there's your newness. So it's like very similar cooking techniques, but a different flavor. This one edges up against things, but choices are made and the script is written in a way. And this is something that came up last week for us. I really feel like they knew it was over. They gave up and they had a list of plots. They just turned to a group of writers and said, okay, you do this one, you do this one, you do this one, you do that one. And then when the first draft was done, they shot it. And in this episode, I also feel like they may have cast people in this episode based on let's get this person some work so that they maybe can get some other jobs as opposed to casting people in a way that makes sense. The woman that they blow up is Yvonne Craig, she was Batgirl, the Batman TV show. We should give her her due because Batgirl effectively started in. In the TV show and then was brought into the comic books later and is considered a pivotal character for DC Comics. So that's in no small part due to Yvonne Craig. She is extremely charismatic. She's likable on screen. She does a great job in this episode with what they gave her, which was not a lot, but she really kind of like, chews the scenery in some interesting ways. There's a lot of scenery chewing from everybody.

Matt Ferrell: You're telling me two episodes in a row we have Batman actors?

Sean Ferrell: Yes.

Matt Ferrell: We had the Riddler last week.

Sean Ferrell: We had the Riddler followed by Batwoman this week. Yes, yes.

Matt Ferrell: Okay, so. All right. Just want to make clear. I just want to make that clear.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah. So there's a definite. There's. There's like a. There's like a bat pole from the Batman soundstage right down to the Star Trek soundstage. They don't give her a lot to do, but what they do give her is memorable. I like the aspects of her saying, I wrote a poem and then she reads Shakespeare. You didn't write that. Like. Like, did you know? The fact that it was written hundreds of years ago doesn't change the fact that I wrote it this morning. I love that line. But mainly Steve Innat as Captain Garth. The actor himself, I find very charismatic. Matt, are you familiar with Rick Mayall, the British comedian? He died young. He was. He was a. He was not that old when he passed. He was 56. So he was rather young when he passed. But he was in the Young Ones, and he was in Drop Dead Fred, and he had a quality that was strangely similar to Inet. And so I found myself kind of captivated by this performer for his kind of stature and the way he kind of carries himself. And I found myself thinking, like, what happened to him? And it turns out, in a strange twist of fate, Steve Innatt also died as an even younger man. He would pass away in 1972 at the age of 37. I found myself thinking, like, what. What an odd coincidence between him and Male, who he reminds me of. Male was a comic actor as opposed to being more like in. At with being a dramatic actor. But there's a kind of cadence to the delivery, a kind of way of carrying themselves and a kind of. In Inat's performance in this one, I like the way that he had that kind of wildness in the eye that spoke more than the lines he was saying, because the Lines he's saying are largely at certain points, he's petulant and immature. And it doesn't come across as. As the kind of deep, troubling villain that I think that the story kind of wanted it to be. It's not. Yeah, it's not grounded in a place.

And I found myself thinking, wow, what a missed opportunity for them to have created a character. My first thought was like, this could have been a con like character. And then I thought, what if it had been kind of the. From Starfleet Academy, the villain from that who plays a kind of madman, his background, his tortured childhood, the kind of neurotic psychotic take he has on responsibility. This role here could have been like that. And I found myself thinking, if this didn't feel like such a first draft, what might a third or a fourth draft have felt like? If they had crafted out a character who was. He's. They kept saying, your illness made you mad. Your illness has affected you. You got this injury, this illness did this to you. What if instead it was simply ptsd? They refer to him as being the winner of a war. The Battle of Axanar is still taught at the Academy. What if the presentation here had been in a very 1969 way, about the horrors of war and what it does to those we send to fight on our behalf. There's a Next Generation episode which I believe is in the first or second season about that very topic. Like, there is this storyline about like, they sent us away, we won their war, and then they don't want us to come back. And I found myself looking at this and thinking what an amazing episode this could have been if Captain Kirk was coming with the cure for mental illness. To find a man who had taken over an asylum and had a moral and just argument to make, as opposed to, this is effectively just a Batman villain, kind of goofy, and he's. And he's bad to be bad. And he blows up a girl in the third act.

And it's just like I found myself thinking, missed opportunity, missed opportunity, missed opportunity more than anything else.

Matt Ferrell: I mean, that ties into one of my notes about this episode, which was, boy, the portrayal of mental illness. Kind of questionable in this entire episode because they were playing it like Saturday morning cartoon of like, these people have a mental illness, so they're crazy. And everybody is chewing scenery and acting crazy. And it's that over the top cartoonish portrayal of somebody who's insane. And that, as we know today, is not remotely accurate to the different various, like being bipolar, ptsd, all these different mental. Mental challenges and illnesses people might have. There's so much nuance to this. I keep thinking of like One who Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah. It's like you could have had multiple styles of insanity and portrayal, but everybody was just walking around chewing scenery. Everybody was just doing the same thing. This one note, over the top, screaming at the top of your lungs, being wild with the wild look in your eye. And it made me think about the same thing of. This guy could have been terrifying if he vacillated between this a little bit of more a mania moments and then other moments just quiet, just directness where he seems completely rational but terrifying and then flipping into mania and then flipping back. So if they had done that with him, it would have been a little more scary. It could have been a con like villain. Yeah, that would have carried more weight. But the fact that he was just this cartoonish, insane guy, it just cut the legs out from underneath the entire episode. There was no real tension in anything until the girl blew up. So.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, until the girl blew up. And I think to dive a little bit more into like the first draft, itis of this and it doesn't have tension, it doesn't have stakes. One of the things about this episode that I do love is the okay, beam me up. Queen to queen's level three. And he's just like, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? It doesn't have a. He's like, what? Why are you talking about that now? Well, this is what we agreed upon. And like, he throws a tantrum. Now you give me a villain who maybe has said to Kirk in a dismissive way, you consider yourself a Starfleet captain. I am the one who invented what a Starfleet captain has to be. I am the one who had to go in and win that war. I am the one who defined all the rules that you operate under. But you get to do it without any hardship. And I didn't have that luxury. So I am going to take back my opportunity to have fun in the galaxy and I'm going to do it with your ship and I'm going to do it with your face. And nobody's going to see it coming. And then to go and be told, queens to Queens Level 3, and have him throw a tantrum would have shown. Okay, this guy is conniving. He maybe even has some legitimate arguments to make, but he's also out of control. And that tantrum, I like the tantrum. I like what Scotty and Sulu are doing with Uhura. Is constantly in the background. She's like, I'm trying to get them up on the. Up on the con and. Or up on the radio. And Sulu is probing the shield and trying to figure out the weakest point. And Scotty and McCoy are having very clearly. All of that was shot in about 15 minutes. They're all. Yeah, they're all on the bridge. You know, the director was just like, okay, you guys are done filming that other episode. Okay, everybody get in front of the camera, and we're gonna run through this. 1, 2, 3, go. And they just say these things, and they never leave the bridge.

And it is all super quick. It was probably shot 20 minutes. But the problem is, where the girl blew up should have been at the beginning. And where Queen's Gambit 3 was planted should have been toward the end. Because the moment Scotty says, we have a passcode and it was your idea, we know he's never getting aboard the Enterprise. It removes all the tension. And I was just like, why would you do that? They do it, like, 15 minutes into the episode. And then I'm like, if you hadn't had that. If the entire episode is the cat and mouse game inside the asylum, and who can be trusted and who can't be, and is this person a patient? Or are they actually threatening me? And it culminates with him turning himself into Kirk and going and getting on the radio and saying, beam me up. And we're all like, oh, no. And then Scotty pulls that out. It's going to be like, ha, ha. They did it. But instead, they do it in the first act, and we're left there like, they're never getting off that planet. Scotty keeps saying, what if they're already dead? We as an audience know they're not. If the entire episode took place aboard the Enterprise, and it's just like, oh, my gosh, what happened to them? We don't know even know if they're alive. He didn't know the passcode. That is a pitch for a really great other episode. Imagine an episode completely aboard the Enterprise with Scotty in command, and he sees Captain Kirk say, beam me up. And he's like, give me the passcode. And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And. And then you have an episode where they're on the ship and they're like, what happened to our captain? Like, that wasn't him. What happened to Spock? Where are they? Are they safe? That would have been a great episode.

Like, this is A first draft.

Matt Ferrell: The thing I liked the most about this entire episode, and you're gonna laugh when I say this, but was the ending. But I liked when it was over. Sean. I liked my favorite part of this entire episode was the Kirk on Kirk action. It's like once we got into the Kirk on Kirk fight, when Spock comes busting in and it's Kirk and Kirk who's the real Kirk. Whole sequence to the end, I freaking loved. It's like I thought it was really fun. They actually had a stunt double that kind of sort of passed.

Sean Ferrell: It looked like Shatner. Right. So it was good.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, it was. They didn't have a redhead fighting him. So it like, it like you could

Sean Ferrell: tell who weighed 50 pounds.

Matt Ferrell: It felt like, yes, exactly. Somebody who's half his weight and half his age. It was clearly somebody that kind of the same. Similar body type, everything like that. So it was really well done. The fight was pretty cool. And then the whole trying to get Spock to figure it out was a little ham fisted. But it led to my favorite moment at the end when Kirk says yes and congratulations. What. What took you so long about the, like, what took you so long to figure out who was the real cap that could be real captain? And Spock's reaction to that. What he says back about like the. Oh, well, he's. I was waiting for him to just beat you. Cause I knew he would beat you. Yeah. Which I thought was the best response. The character development and the jokes and the humor between characters we love at the end. And that fight, I thought was actually probably the highlight of the entire episode for me. So I might be slightly forgiving on this episode because it ended on kind of a nice, kind of like palate cleanser after the lack of tension and 40 minutes of just really nothing happening.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. I find myself in the same territory as last week where I'm like, I don't hate it, but it wasn't good. Yeah, it's just, it's just like maybe this would have been. If you gave me a fourth draft of the same story. I bet it would have been really great. And if you'd had different casting, mainly of the main villain. I didn't even mention this. Like, this actor was three years younger than Shatner and Shatner is saying, they still teach your maneuvers at the Academy. I'm like, yes. You couldn't find in all of Hollywood there was not a 50 year old actor available. Give me a seasoned actor who is playing this as I am grounded and I am dangerous and I am angry at how I was treated. I've been locked up here because I turned into who needed me to be to win that war. And that war, as I mentioned, was Axanar. Matt, does the name Axanar mean anything to you?

Matt Ferrell: Nope.

Sean Ferrell: Okay. Would it surprise you if I told you that Axanar is responsible for Paramount's shutdown of fan fiction and fan made film around Star Trek? How there was at the beginning of this century a Kickstarter where an individual was raised money in order to make a prequel story based on this episode. It proved very successful and it gained more and more steam. And over the multiple years it reached a point where another Kickstarter was done and more money than was anticipated was raised. And they were filming, they were writing and they were able to use special effects techniques. I would, I would say like Babylon 5, but a bit better. Pretty compelling special effects. It finally reached a point where Paramount went from, oh, it's, we don't really bother people who make their own things. Because of course people who make their own things are doing it with late 20th century. It looks not so great, the acting is not going to be so great. Like they're keeping Star Trek alive. But who, you know, we don't really bother with it. But this was becoming a moneymaker and it was becoming a moneymaker in a way that Paramount woke up to and it turned into a major lawsuit that ended up changing how Paramount responds to fan based projects like this. Axanar as a thing still exists. Axanar was basically as part of the negotiations of closing out, the lawsuit was given the ability to finish their project. There has been a lot of fan grumbling around the fact that a lot of what was promised in the Kickstarters never manifested. But I think it was due to a lot of hobbling by the lawsuit itself. But a lot of stuff was shot, a lot. There was a plan to make a feature length film that would then be self released. And they ended up being given the authorization to be able to take what was supposed to be a feature film, release it in two segments, two smaller segments.

They had from the first Kickstarter completed what was basically a fake documentary about the battle of Axanar in which the filmmaker himself played the character of the villain in this episode. So it is supposed to be 20 years prior to the original series. It is supposed to be the Four Years War, as it was known between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. And the war is not going well for the Federation and it speeds up development of The Constellation class starship, which is, of course, what the Enterprise is. So it's the Federation trying to build this new class of starship. And one is built in time to enter the war. And on the other side, the Klingons are relying on their D6 style Klingon cruiser. And when the Constellation class comes in, they have to speed up their development of the D7, which is the type of Klingon cruiser we see in the original series. So it's this prequel which is about this conflict. The Klingons have no respect for the Federation. They're basically steamrolling them. And it's about the growing respect within the Klingons toward a Federation that's actually able to defend itself. Some of the stuff that you can find if you go to the Axanar YouTube page includes, you can watch the original fake documentary. They are releasing stuff out of curiosity. I went to it today. They're releasing stuff as of, like, the past couple of weeks. So there's still stuff coming out. And the stuff that's coming out, I ended up watching a few minutes of one particular thing, which was a brief film where it was the character of Saval, Ambassador Saval, who was a character on Star Trek Enterprise. He was the Vulcan ambassador who was so contentious with the humans in that series. It's him talking to an aide and they are having effectively a little debate about whether or not Vulcan should leave the Federation.

And he is making the argument, well, if we leave, others will as well and it will be the beginning of the end. The Klingons will roll over all of us individually, but if we stay together, we're stronger. Really good special effects. Long opening sequence showing a starship coming toward Vulcan, a shuttle swooping over the desert, moving toward the main city. Like it was. I was watching and I was just like, this is really pretty good. And the character of Seval is played by Gary Graham, who was the actor who played Saval in Enterprise. So among the actors who were a part of the Axanar project included Gary Graham as Ambassador Saval, J.G. hertzler as Captain Samuel Travis, Kate Vernon as Captain Sonia Alexander. And then these two were the names that really kind of like popped out at me. Richard Hatch, who was, of course, in the original Battlestar Galactica TV show. He played Klingon Supreme Commander Karn, and Tony Todd, who was. Yes, that Tony Todd, who played Worf's brother, who was Candyman. Yeah, who sadly just passed away, what, a year ago? Two years ago. He plays Admiral Marcus Ramirez. This was a fan Started project. They raised enough money to get the attention of these actors to be in this thing. The second Kickstarter really took off, they were shooting for $100,000. They ended up getting 600,000 because of one, let's see, what was his name again? George Takei, who found out about and liked the project and went to. Yes, he went to the Twitter machine and was just like, I like this. And everybody ran to Kickstarter and threw money at it. Part of the negotiations with Paramount around what to do with this was no actors can be paid to be in it. That was part of the hobbling of like, you keep it, you. It has to be fan service. It can't be sold. You can't have paid professional actors. It has to be a passion project.

So, Matt, if you and I decided we were going to run around in my backyard with toy phasers and pretend that we were, you know, in Starfleet and then released it on YouTube, it would be 1 embarrassing and 2 allowed. But if we tried to hire actors to do that and then put it on YouTube and charge a fee for it, that is not allowed. So this was the beginning of the end of Paramount, CBS effectively letting the fandom do their own thing, which was part of what kept Star Trek alive for all those decades. So it's, it's a, it's, it's sad. It's, you know, I understand the corporate need to like, we need to have some sort of limits about what we do and don't allow. From what I've seen, if these people had actually produced a feature length movie that was up on YouTube, first of all, nobody was going to confuse it with official CBS films.

Matt Ferrell: It has nothing to do with that though. It has nothing to do with that. If they did, if they allowed this to happen, they would lose control of their ip. There's legal reasons why they would have to do this. I'm not taking the side of the corporation, but they have to do that or they lose it.

Sean Ferrell: But I'm like, isn't there a middle ground where it could have been maybe, okay, you can do this with our blessing. If we have a stake, if we have crediting, if we like you go through an official process of review in order to get the endorsement and then that allows you to do some of the things you might want to do with it. Like you can't pay your actors unless we give you approval and then you can pay them like it. Maybe there's middle ground there, but I don't know. I end up looking at this thing online and I was like, this is. This is kind of cool. Like watching a scene that's not from an official show in which Saval is making an argument about why Vulcan needs to stay in the Federation as a part of the character arc. For my headcanon from Enterprise, I found it really kind of fun. So I don't know if anybody in our audience is familiar with Axanar. If you are, jump into the comments. Let us know what you think about it. If you have any suggestions of, like, where to start with it, because I came to it, I had heard about it over the years but never really paid close attention to it. So if anybody in our audience is like, oh no, here's what you should watch first and here's some other things, drop into the comments. I'd love to see what you have to say. So having said all of that, next week we are going to be talking about Mark of Gideon. Please jump in the comments. Wrong answers only. What is Mark of Gideon about? Here's a starter for some of you. It's about a guy named Mark. You know where he's from? Matt?

Matt Ferrell: Gideon.

Sean Ferrell: He's from Gideon. So take it from there. As always, jump into the comments. Let us know what you thought about this episode that we just talked about. Do you agree with Matt and I that it's a lot of samey Samy? Or is there something about this one that stands out to you that makes you really enjoy it? We look forward to hearing what you have to say and as always, liking subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you want to support us directly, you can go to trekintime show. Click the button that says Join. It'll make you an ensign. You'll get to throw some coins at our heads and you'll be subscribed for our spin off program out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. Also, quick plug for my my comic book collection back here. Down below in the show notes, there's going to be a link. A friend of mine is helping me sell these comics through whatnot, which is like a live auction site, sort of like ebay with a streaming aspect to it. Check out that link, keep an eye on it and you can see what comics I am selling. If anybody is interested in comics, I hope you'll check out the show. Anyway, thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, we'll talk to you next time.