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4thofelevenIn which just because they don't have a holodeck doesn't mean they can't get trapped in the holodeck.
We've seen the 'crew gets trapped in genre fiction' story more than a few times in Trek, but this week manages to feel fairly original; it feels a bit like “Our Man Bashir”, with most of the crew fully integrated into the story and only one character aware things aren't normal – it's even the ship's doctor again! And I appreciated getting a M'Benga story; he's been wasted the last few weeks, so it was good to get the focus back on him.
I also really appreciated how, rather than give us a full fantasy world, the setting was instead slightly redressed versions of the Enterprise sets; it had a very TOS surreal feel to it, and let the gorgeous costuming designs really stand out.
At the same time, though, I felt there were some basic problems in the way the story was written that weakened the episode. The first is that, since most of the crew were completely lost in their roles, it makes their parts feel a bit meaningless. We're not seeing Pike and Spock in a fantasy world, we're seeing completely unrelated characters who happen to be played by the same actors. And it makes some scenes feel like pointless padding; we don't need to see evil queen Uhura scheming if its not really Uhura and tells us nothing about her as a person. Any scene without M'Benga or Hemmer, the only 'real' people, is just random fantasy nonsense without any connection to anything else. I'm sure it was fun for the actors to stretch their range a bit, but it felt more than a little self-indulgent.
The other issue is that, after spending most of its run time on fantasy nonsense, the show suddenly shifts gears and tries to tackle a far more serious and emotional story – and it feels like this should have been the focus of the episode. As fun as it is to see Ortega run around with a sword, that's time that could have been devoted to M'Benga's relationship with his daughter.
And that's a problem that's plagued this storyline from the beginning. We get informed of his daughter's situation and illness right at the end of “Ghosts of Illyria”, it's very much the B-Plot of “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach”, and now here it's resolved right at the end of things giving us little time to actually focus on the situation or learn about her as a character. SNW has developed a very bad habit of only revealing what its episodes are really about at the last minute, and this feels like another case of that.
And the way that the story is resolved is just plain weird; it feels like the writers decided the storyline wasn't working out as an ongoing arc and decided to just cut it short in the most abrupt way possible. M'Benga is presented as being wrong to be taking extreme measures to try and save his daughter, and yet none of the episodes have made it clear as to how bad the situation has become. (And the decision not to give the daughter any physical symptoms or evidence of her illness doesn't help.) A few weeks ago, in “Lift Us”, it seemed like M'Benga had made a big step towards finding a cure; now he's written as grasping at straws and keeping his daughter needlessly confined as he waits for a miracle that will never come.
The 'solution' presented here also had awkward parallels with “Lift Us”, where once again a child is being asked to sacrifice themselves to save their community. The idea that the daughter isn't really in a position to meaningfully consent to leave the ship and her father forever, or, for that matter, that neither she nor M'Benga know enough about the nebula entitity to trust its motivations, is never really raised. And, oddly, the episode seems to be aware that there's a problem there as, in a moment that almost made me laugh out loud, literally seconds after she leaves, she reappears, having spend subjective decades with the nebula and reassures her father that it was the right choice and that there's no lingering issues we need to worry about. It's like the writers realised too late that their ending wasn't as positive as they'd intended and quickly attached a note saying “Don't worry, everything's fine, please don't ask any further questions” rather than reworking it to make more sense. We don't even get a moment for M'Benga to reflect on losing his daughter before she's back!
(Oh, and let's not get started on the bad implications of writing a story where a black father has to abandon his daughter so she can have a happy life. I thought Trek would have learned its lesson there after the DS9 finale.)
(While we're on it, here's a dark little thought – in the Boltzmann Brain scenario, such brains are just as likely to spontaneously cease to exist as they are to spontaneously form. How long is 'Debra' going to continue to exist before she vanishes, taking Rukiya's consciousness with her?)
And then there's the half-baked theme of 'writing our own stories'. This sort of comes into play during the fantasy sequence – and I do like it as a meta touch that the daughter has been rewriting the fantasy story to pass the Bechel test by making Una and Ortega's characters friends – and is meant to be the opportunity that the daughter is being given by joining with the nebula. At the same time, the story somewhat falters there – at the same time as the daughter is given the chance to 'write her own ending', M'Benga feels he's bound by the established narrative; that he, like the king he's playing, must give up his 'mercury stone' and happiness so that it can survive and thrive.
The message almost seems to be that while they approve of people diverging from the established stories and writing their own narratives, SNW's writers themselves, like M'Benga, are still trapped by the established narrative and canon, and can't bring themselves to break free. And as long as that's true, SNW won't ever produce something truly original.
We've seen the 'crew gets trapped in genre fiction' story more than a few times in Trek, but this week manages to feel fairly original; it feels a bit like “Our Man Bashir”, with most of the crew fully integrated into the story and only one character aware things aren't normal – it's even the ship's doctor again! And I appreciated getting a M'Benga story; he's been wasted the last few weeks, so it was good to get the focus back on him.
I also really appreciated how, rather than give us a full fantasy world, the setting was instead slightly redressed versions of the Enterprise sets; it had a very TOS surreal feel to it, and let the gorgeous costuming designs really stand out.
At the same time, though, I felt there were some basic problems in the way the story was written that weakened the episode. The first is that, since most of the crew were completely lost in their roles, it makes their parts feel a bit meaningless. We're not seeing Pike and Spock in a fantasy world, we're seeing completely unrelated characters who happen to be played by the same actors. And it makes some scenes feel like pointless padding; we don't need to see evil queen Uhura scheming if its not really Uhura and tells us nothing about her as a person. Any scene without M'Benga or Hemmer, the only 'real' people, is just random fantasy nonsense without any connection to anything else. I'm sure it was fun for the actors to stretch their range a bit, but it felt more than a little self-indulgent.
The other issue is that, after spending most of its run time on fantasy nonsense, the show suddenly shifts gears and tries to tackle a far more serious and emotional story – and it feels like this should have been the focus of the episode. As fun as it is to see Ortega run around with a sword, that's time that could have been devoted to M'Benga's relationship with his daughter.
And that's a problem that's plagued this storyline from the beginning. We get informed of his daughter's situation and illness right at the end of “Ghosts of Illyria”, it's very much the B-Plot of “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach”, and now here it's resolved right at the end of things giving us little time to actually focus on the situation or learn about her as a character. SNW has developed a very bad habit of only revealing what its episodes are really about at the last minute, and this feels like another case of that.
And the way that the story is resolved is just plain weird; it feels like the writers decided the storyline wasn't working out as an ongoing arc and decided to just cut it short in the most abrupt way possible. M'Benga is presented as being wrong to be taking extreme measures to try and save his daughter, and yet none of the episodes have made it clear as to how bad the situation has become. (And the decision not to give the daughter any physical symptoms or evidence of her illness doesn't help.) A few weeks ago, in “Lift Us”, it seemed like M'Benga had made a big step towards finding a cure; now he's written as grasping at straws and keeping his daughter needlessly confined as he waits for a miracle that will never come.
The 'solution' presented here also had awkward parallels with “Lift Us”, where once again a child is being asked to sacrifice themselves to save their community. The idea that the daughter isn't really in a position to meaningfully consent to leave the ship and her father forever, or, for that matter, that neither she nor M'Benga know enough about the nebula entitity to trust its motivations, is never really raised. And, oddly, the episode seems to be aware that there's a problem there as, in a moment that almost made me laugh out loud, literally seconds after she leaves, she reappears, having spend subjective decades with the nebula and reassures her father that it was the right choice and that there's no lingering issues we need to worry about. It's like the writers realised too late that their ending wasn't as positive as they'd intended and quickly attached a note saying “Don't worry, everything's fine, please don't ask any further questions” rather than reworking it to make more sense. We don't even get a moment for M'Benga to reflect on losing his daughter before she's back!
(Oh, and let's not get started on the bad implications of writing a story where a black father has to abandon his daughter so she can have a happy life. I thought Trek would have learned its lesson there after the DS9 finale.)
(While we're on it, here's a dark little thought – in the Boltzmann Brain scenario, such brains are just as likely to spontaneously cease to exist as they are to spontaneously form. How long is 'Debra' going to continue to exist before she vanishes, taking Rukiya's consciousness with her?)
And then there's the half-baked theme of 'writing our own stories'. This sort of comes into play during the fantasy sequence – and I do like it as a meta touch that the daughter has been rewriting the fantasy story to pass the Bechel test by making Una and Ortega's characters friends – and is meant to be the opportunity that the daughter is being given by joining with the nebula. At the same time, the story somewhat falters there – at the same time as the daughter is given the chance to 'write her own ending', M'Benga feels he's bound by the established narrative; that he, like the king he's playing, must give up his 'mercury stone' and happiness so that it can survive and thrive.
The message almost seems to be that while they approve of people diverging from the established stories and writing their own narratives, SNW's writers themselves, like M'Benga, are still trapped by the established narrative and canon, and can't bring themselves to break free. And as long as that's true, SNW won't ever produce something truly original.