Hello and welcome back to Subspace Radio. It's me, Kevin, and Rob is not here this week; he's on an away mission. As you would've heard in the promos at the start of the past couple of episodes. He's interpreting Shakespeare's Aliens at the Melbourne Fringe Festival at the moment, and so I am very lucky to welcome my guest, Jason Snell. Jason, welcome to Subspace Radio.
Hi there. I am your Peanut Hamper, I guess.
You are. You sure are. Let's hope you don't turn out to be a megalomaniacal robot.
Hmm. There's a place where they put those.
You'd be in good company. You wouldn't be lonely is what we have learned on Star Trek Lower Decks. Um, Jason, you, you are known to me as the host of The Vulcan Hello, a weekly Star Trek podcast, much like this one, although The Vulcan Hello is not covering the animated series at the moment.
Uh, my cohost Scott McNulty is not… It's not that he isn't a huge fan of animated series, but he doesn't love them like – and this is the same for me, I think – in the same way, and feel like we can dig up details every week on animated versus live action. And also there's so much Star Trek right now that, quite frankly, getting a break between live— We, we did that live action run where it started with Discovery and went all the way through Strange New Worlds with Picard in the middle.
That was a lot of weeks of podcasting, so we are enjoying the time off. So we'll, probably pop back in at some point.
Yeah, we foolishly started a podcast two weeks before the end of Strange New Worlds' first season, and so there was nothing to do but to flow into the animated series. But we're having a good time.
Yeah, it's fun.
Before we jump into this week's episode, do you wanna introduce your Star Trek brand of fandom? What kind of Star Trek fan are you?
I was born in 1970, so I was placed in front of a television that was running The Original Series five days a week at 5:00 PM at a very young age, to the point where I cannot remember discovering Star Trek. I always knew Star Trek The Original Series. And I have those original episodes burned on my brain because I watched them literally every day, Monday through Friday at 5:00 PM and I had them memorized. And then, you know, eventually they came out on VHS and I watched those.
And then Next Generation. I also am the age where Next Generation was basically the show of my college years, and in fact was a very popular show, you know, when I was in college. It was not a niche kind of show. It was a really transformative moment for me because I was thinking that I, I didn't really know any big Star Trek fans when I was a kid.
And so to go off to college and, have Next Generation on the air and have it become a thing that sort of, everybody watched, especially as the show progressed, because the big Borg cliffhanger, Best of Both Worlds was right in the middle of my college life, and that was when the show really kind of caught fire. So that was amazing cuz suddenly everybody understood Star Trek things instead of it just being me sitting in front of my TV at five o'clock every day after school.
So that's my history, is I don't go as far back as seeing it on NBC in the sixties, but I'm one of those kids who, who was exposed to it in syndication as the Star Trek cult was growing and expanding and all of that in that period of time. So, suffice to say, when they put The Animated Series on in syndication, I, my mind was blown cuz I had no idea that had existed, and then The Motion Picture came out.
And that was also super exciting too, in the wake of everybody learning about Star Wars and talking about Star Wars, which I also liked. You couldn't be a six year old kid and not love Star Wars, but Star Trek was my thing, so I was very happy when they started making Star Trek movies.
You and I are very aligned, I think, where TOS and TNG are the Star Trek and everything else is, a bonus…
It's also Star Trek. Yeah,
Also Star Trek. Very, very well said. My cohost Rob usually covers the Deep Space Nine, Voyager end of things, which I know well, but they are not burned into my brain in the same way. Alright, so this week we are here to talk about Lower Decks season three, episode seven, A Mathematically Perfect Redemption, the ongoing adventures of Peanut Hamper. In this episode, we pick up and revisit the final moments of the season one finale, No Small Parts, and we see it from a different point of view.
The Exocomp who has beamed herself off the Cerritos and watches it from the sidelines. I really love this, watch the events of an episode of Star Trek from another perspective. It's not something we've really seen before, and to me it makes the whole moment feel more real, more tangible.
Yeah, she's commenting on the plot points of that. I actually watched that episode just before I watched this episode and so I was completely refreshed for it. And it was funny cuz you know, she's calling out all of the beats that happen after she beams herself off of the ship, including like, Oh no, that big guy, he must have died. And it's like, well, yeah, that's, Shaxs dies and except, you know, then he comes back.
So yeah, that was a fun change in perspective to, to see while still letting us wonder like, well what happened to Peanut Hamper? Cuz all we ever saw was there was that thing at the very end of the episode where Peanut Hamper is tumbling in space saying Help. And that's all we know about Peanut Hamper. And this episode tells us, everything that happened between then and now at the end of season three.
Peanut Hamper is stranded, manages to construct herself a life raft, that can carry her just far enough to crash land on a planet populated by birds where she lives out several seasons of time, falls in love, is about to get married, and then some scavengers that have followed her, attack the planet. She saves the day, calls in the Cerritos, but then it is all revealed to be a long con, and she doubles down on her narcissistic ways.
Yeah, it's true. The only thing you left out there that I wanted to mention is, while she's constructing her life raft, she creates her, it's a Cast Away reference. She creates her own little friend to talk to. I just thought that was hilarious that they threw that in there. But then she, yes, she flies off and shows her true feelings right in that moment where it's like, Oh, I'll never leave you.
And then the moment that she has to get out of there, she's like, you know, get away, I need to save myself. And that is Peanut Hamper in a nutshell.
They played fair, and they fooled me anyway. They showed us at the start who she was. They reminded us who she was. And then they play out this long episode where she learns the error of her ways, she learns the value of Starfleet principles. Uh, she makes a selfless sacrifice. And I was like, Yes, Peanut Hamper, you did it. You saved the day. And yeah, they got me. Did they get you?
Yeah, I think that this is the trick to pull, right? Which is, Star Trek is about people who are good trying to better themselves. And so you put Peanut Hamper on this arc. The typical, I would say, Star Trek arc of like, she learns a lesson, she grows. There's a great moment also where it's like, Oh, she's just violating the Prime Directive left and right, and then turns out they are actually a post warp civilization. So it's like, Oh, it's okay.
It's not violating the Prime Directive after all. And she learns, and she grows and all of that. And you think, Okay, it's a Star Trek story. And then there's the twist, which is, hah, we got you. She's not redeemable, she's awful. This has all been a setup. She's doing everything she can to try and get Starfleet to come and rescue her. And I mean, there's a, you could argue a couple points that if she really wanted to get off of the planet, she could have.
But the problem is she needs to put herself out there as being a hero so that she isn't prosecuted for abandoning Starfleet. So she waits.
On second viewing, I was sitting there going, So what exactly was Peanut Hamper's plan? Because she expresses surprise that the ancient ships can fly in the end, so the scavengers come, she signals Starfleet, she's a hero, the end? Is, was that the plan? It doesn't quite…
Well, I mean, any good evil genius will have a whole series of possible plans and try to keep as many options open as possible. And I think, here, that's what's happening with Peanut Hamper, is she's like, Okay, I'm gonna string this out and work these bird people on this planet. And then she discovers the ships underneath and she's like, Okay, well that's interesting. I can do something with that. And the scavengers come, cuz she calls them, right?
And I think ultimately that is the plan that she has, is if the scavengers come and I'm protecting these bird people that I supposedly love from the scavengers, and then I call the Cerritos, then I am, gonna be the hero of my own story. And it almost works if weren't for you, meddling kids.
Apart from the Cast Away reference, I don't know if it was intentional, but I had just happened to watch Avatar a week ago, and the idea of people coming to uproot the giant tree that a primitive race lives in, in order to get at precious resources underneath it felt very similar in, in a hat tip sort of way. Peanut Hamper, played by Kether Donohue, speaks like no other Star Trek character in history. When she wakes up in the primitive town, her first words are What the frick?
And it is the same heightened comedy language that we get in the other characters, but with all the Starfleet pulled out of it. It is a pure comic character. Writing a whole episode around this character lets us go places, play levels of heightened comedy that we don't normally see even in Star Trek Lower Decks.
Yeah, the complaints I've seen about this episode are mostly that it's all Peanut Hamper and there's very little of our characters. And I get it, and it's not as balanced as the episode last year, wej Duj, the Lower Decks on the other ships. There's not even that much of the Cerritos here; they only come in at the end.
I am gonna be generous and say, you know, once a season, if you want to go completely off the format of the show, I am happy to go with you, especially a show whose charter is so broad as Lower Decks, to do something like this. And I can also see how people might be like, Oh, Peanut Hamper, the way that she talks, it's a very modern person talking and it sticks out in Star Trek and all that.
It's like, yeah, except it's a show and it's a comedy and, for the record, I also absolutely adore Kether Donohue. And if you haven't seen her in You're The Worst, it's available on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ everywhere else. And it is a raunchy sitcom, basically, and she is one of the supporting characters and is fantastic. And what you'll find is, She doesn't talk any different in that than she does in this. I mean, really, she's not doing a voice.
I mean, okay, if she's doing a voice here, it's because Mike McMahan said, Just do your character from You're The Worst. Just do that voice. She's probably not like that in real life, I hope, cuz it would be a bit much. But it is very much in line with her live action performance. She's done a lot of voices, but that's where you can see her in live action. And that's a great show and she's a great supporting cast member in that.
So I love Peanut Hamper and I love this episode and I was happy to get it. I understand why people might say it's not what was labeled on the package, but I'm okay to give Lower Decks one weird episode a year where— I thought we wouldn't see the crew at all until maybe a tag. I was surprised they actually did come into the plot. I felt like that was generous of this story that could have been completely barren of the Cerritos.
Other standout moments to me, "Getting some major village bad boy vibes from Raw Dog, am I right?" I think that was my biggest laugh of the episode.
Who knew a bird could have those kinds of chest muscles.
Abs, yeah.
Well, I mean, birds, guess they need 'em. But yeah, it's the shredded abs. I read that as being almost a, it felt like a Disney moment, right? Where it's, oh, here is the beautiful prince who we meet and you're like, well, but she's a robot. Is that…? And it's like, nope, that's what it's gonna be. It's exactly what you think it is. It's what it's gonna be. And that, I like that. That was funny.
The acknowledgement that everything, a sky snake, a sky goat, if everything flies, why do you call them sky anythings at all.
Yep. That's the stuff I like in Lower Decks the most. If I had to describe Lower Decks to somebody, I would say it is a Star Trek show that is funny. It's not just a comedy. It does have character development. It is both a comedy and a Star Trek show, and they take it very seriously as a Star Trek show as well, even though they're trying to be funny. And I would say they're not— they love Star Trek. I wasn't gonna say, they're not making fun of Star Trek.
They are making fun of Star Trek, but they're doing it with love because they, like us, I would hope, have a sense of humor about some of the ridiculous things. As Scott McNulty always says in Vulcan Hello, Star Trek is ridiculous, right? Like, it is ridiculous, but we love it and we love the ridiculousness of it sometimes. And so saying it's a sky snake and it's like if everything flies, why is it not just a snake?
And it's like that, calling Star Trek on its own dumb premise is… I wouldn't wanna do that all the time in every show, right? That would be too much. But that's what Lower Decks really picks its spots and does a great job with.
Anything else stand out to you, you wanna touch on?
I'll just go back to the, I think it's fun and we don't see this sort of enough, the primitive culture that actually isn't a primitive culture. I mean, it does happen. But the idea that they are not a pre-warp civilization, where the Prime Directive applies, because they decided that space was dumb and they were gonna park their ships and just live attuned to the planet. Um, I like that as a science fictional concept, and especially as a Star Trek concept.
I was surprised that there wasn't a twist there about like, you know, we are behaving one way. Uh, oh we don't have to!
Let me open this tree. Here's the computer…
Yeah. And, and I actually have a question, which is if a civilization— They actually hung a lantern on this, so we didn't have to think about it. But I was wondering if a civilization is a post warp civilization and then regresses to a primitive, not warp capable culture, what does the Federation do with them? So they know, at least in their lore, that there are other planets and that they're from another planet and all of that, but they don't have that capability anymore.
Do you not talk to them? Does the Prime Directive apply? It's kind of a fun thing to think about. So I, spent a little time pondering that.
The threshold of warp capable civilization, every time it comes up, it feels somewhat arbitrary. It feels a little more arbitrary each time it comes up.
Yeah. There was a Strange New Worlds episode – was it even the first one? – where there's a planet that doesn't actually have warp travel, but they're building a warp bomb, basically. And they're like, well, this is close enough, where they decide… Because the idea is, right, we just leave them alone until they are gonna meet up with people anyway cuz they're gonna travel. And so that's at that point where we intercede.
Anyway, it's a very nerdy Star Trek question about an episode that is, I think, very knowledgeably not addressing it, right? They bring it up and then like, but it doesn't matter. And then they move on with the jokes they want to tell.
Because I'm an old softie, the thing that I picked this week for us to springboard off of into Star Trek history was the idea of a member of Starfleet, falling in love with a alien of the week. And this is something that occurred to me. It's happened just often enough that it's perfectly sized for our little show, here. And so I've collected a few examples of this. Have you got a couple as well, Jason?
Yeah, I had to stop myself after I came up with five off the…
Wow! Okay. Might have to do a lightning round at the end, here. So the way we do this is we start with The Original Series and work our way forward. I do have something from The Original Series. I imagine you do as well. Do you wanna go first?
Okay. You know how when Strange New Worlds came out, one of the things that they used as a touchstone was Captain Kirk falls in love with Edith Keeler, and then she dies, and next week everything is fine. What I always think about when people talk about the Edith Keeler thing, which is, you know, that's one of my favorite episodes. It's everybody's favorite episode, City on the Edge of Forever. It's a classic. And it's really tragic at the end of it.
But what I think about is a not good episode of Star Trek The Original Series, where something similar, where Captain Kirk falls in love at the drop of a hat. And it's Requiem for Methuselah,
Oh wow.
which is an episode where they beam down to a planet and there's like a guy and his daughter, and Kirk immediately falls in love with the daughter cuz she's beautiful. And although I really am a defender of, you know, there was that essay about how people think of Captain Kirk as this womanizing guy. And although he fell in love a lot, it was emotional and he was emotionally disturbed when Edith Keeler died. And he wasn't quite how he gets portrayed.
However, in Requiem for Methuselah, he immediately falls in love with this girl who… She turned out to be a robot, is that right? I think.
That sounds right to me. She's very unemotional and then it all makes sense she's revealed to be an…
She's an android that's been created by Flint as a companion. Flint is an immortal being who has lived many lives on Earth and then in space. He's been DaVinci and Gutenberg and I forget who else, and so I just, I love that episode cuz yeah, Captain Kirk falls in love with an Android lady, and he falls hard, and at the end of the episode he's so upset that she's— Like Edith Keeler, right? But nobody ever mentions, What if Rayna? Why didn't they worry about her?
Because it doesn't make any sense that he falls in love with her, except that the script says that he does. Cause I mean she's pretty and all, but she is just a … a robot.
Kirk did not need a mind meld from Spock in order to get over Edith Keeler, but that's what…
Yeah, that's right. That gets conflated a lot too, where people are like, Oh yeah, I remember Spock made him forget about Edith Keeler? It's like, no, that was the robot lady! So that's, my first one, is little deep cut. Scott and I watched that one for his other Star Trek podcast, Random Trek, and if you haven't seen it in a while, cuz this is one of the ones that I don't revisit and watching it, it's like, wow, like, it's so good as a bad Star Trek episode.
There's so many strange things about it, um, about the art direction. They have like a lot of weird plastic silverware and stuff. But it, it doesn't make any sense at all. Not a lick of sense.
I just remember really wanting that little model starship, that Flint shrinks the Enterprise down, to hold the whole crew hostage. Yeah, that looked great on his table.
Yep. Yep. It's good stuff. Anyway, yeah, that's a very weird episode. The Kirk stuff in it makes no sense. He falls in love with the Android and that's it.
Season three, episode 21 of The Original Series. So the dying embers of the show. They knew they were canceled by this point.
Yeah. As a season three, it's actually not, I think not among the worst of season three. It's watchable. It's completely watchable. It's just dumb.
I've got another season three. I am going to take us to, for the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky.
Yeah.
Dr. McCoy discovers he is, afflicted with a terminal illness, has months to live, and coincidentally meets the beautiful Natira, the high priestess of this flying generation ship that thinks it's a planet and is disguised as an asteroid, and falls instantly in love as well, as they did in the sixties, it seems. Although in this case it is Natira who professes her feelings first.
I am pretty sure they have had zero lines of dialogue with each other at the moment she chooses to profess her undying love for him.
Love at first sight. Yeah, this is— What's cool about this episode, again, as somebody who watched it in syndication, is they kind of do a pretty good job of selling you that they're writing Dr. McCoy out of the
Yeah I remember feeling, my favorite character is…
Yeah, it's like Dr. McCoy, well he's leaving. And he's actually dying. And it's like, Oh, okay, well then this is the end. That's a wrap for DeForest Kelley. And then they're like, No. Oh, he's, he's going. He's fine. It's fine.
Yeah.
But they really do sell it for a long time as McCoy is outta here.
In a way that they didn't do at those times. Like it's a taste of serialization, um, in the storytelling. And it enriches McCoy's character immensely. I think this is the richest McCoy story we get in The Original Series.
Yeah, yeah. The one, the only one that might have been as good would've been The Way to Eden, another bad episode. But that was supposed to be, it ended up being like Chekov's sister or girlfriend or something, but it was supposed to be McCoy's daughter Joanna. And that was like, they had a whole plan and then they changed the script and McCoy didn't get that, but he did get For the World is Hollow.
Some beautiful lines, like I'm on a collision course myself here, Jim, when he is describing his reasons for staying behind, like seeing a character basically saying, Look, this is all the time I have left. There's some great Chapel moments in this episode as well. Now that we're getting to know a new Chapel in Strange New Worlds, those few character beats she was given way back then, they shine brighter for me now on rewatch.
She's the one twisting McCoy's arm into letting Kirk in and letting him know what's going on. And she's the one in the transporter room saying, A lot can happen in a year. Give yourself every moment. Some great, great lines for a very underserved character in this one.
Yeah, definitely.
Where to next? Jason,
Well, I'm gonna skip over the other three third season TOS episodes I have in my…
You wanna mention them briefly?
Yeah, why don't we do it now? I don't know what it was with season three. They were flopping around. Um, I just added, cuz you mentioned it, the almost same plot as For the World is Hollow, which is The Paradise Syndrome. Except there Kirk, Kirk has amnesia. And this is the planet of the Native Americans, essentially. And it's unclear. They're like, Oh, some aliens took some Native Americans and dropped them here. Like, okay, alright.
So he falls in love with Miramanee, and she's gonna have his baby. And this one takes place over months, actually, which is another cool thing where Kirk is gone for months.
Unusually epic.
But the reason is so she can be pregnant. And then she, does she die at the end?
Yeah,
Yeah, I mean, that makes it easier. Spock's gotta be like, how many times I gotta make this guy forget? Um, I wanted to throw in All Our Yesterdays, where Spock falls in love with Zarabeth, Mariette Hartley. She looks human, but you know, Spock's not so, uh, it counts as an alien of the week.
Uh, and one of the star Trek novels in the eighties, A. C. Crispin wrote Yesterday's Son, which is a sequel to this, where they go back to this icy, back-in-time planet, and it turns out that there is a Vulcan-human hybrid character who is Spock's son, who has survived All Our Yesterdays. But I always liked that episode. Well, I don't like the witch trial part of it, but the icy part of it with Spock, I think is a…
Yeah. They go through the portals and you get kind of vignette sized visits to places.
It's a doomed planet, but they flee into their own history. It's kind of cool. Mr. Atoz, A to Z, the librarian is there. And then the other one from season three is The Enterprise Incident. Speaking of Spock, where Spock, uh, actually it's kind of a fake out, like Peanut Hamper, Spock sweet talks the Romulan commander and, then betrays her. But that's actually a fun episode too.
A Vulcan seduction is, interesting to see. Way back then. Yeah, absolutely.
All right. Uh, you want my, uh, moving forward in history.
Yeah, I've got something from TNG, but I bet you do too.
OK, I was torn because there were two kind of "social issues" episodes of TNG that involved a main character from the show and a romantic relationship with an alien of the week. And the one I'm gonna pick is The Host, which is season four, episode 23. This actually introduces the concept of the Trill, and Trill symbionts. But the way it does it, and the reason that the tri are the way they are, is so that they can have Beverly falls in love with a Trill ambassador. The host body is killed.
They implant his symbiont in Riker. Riker, who is suffering mightily from "Trill syndrome" saves the day while he's basically dying and they're concerned he is gonna die. But in a last minute reveal, they've sent a new Trill host and the symbiont is saved and Riker is saved, and the new Trill host is a woman. And Beverly has that moment where she's like, Mmmmm…
I'm out.
No, I can't, I can't make it work. But that was, you could see how they plotted that and they were like, Aha. And then here's the twist at the end is, it's a question of like, are you still you if it's, if the gender is different and how will she react? And, and she basically, it's like there's a Doctor Who comedy sketch that is very similar, which is, Face it Doctor, you're literally not the man I fell in love with, because into Joanna Lumley, I think, at that point.
So, that's basically what happens with Crusher in this is like, Yeah, uh, I feel for you, but you're a girl now, so m-mm, no. Bye.
Yeah, they revisit the same sort of setup years later in a memorable episode of DS9 with Dax and go the other way and go, Yeah, I can work with this.
Well, I mean, it's essentially them saying, Okay, we did it wrong, let's, let's, let's think about this. But it is funny to think about that. The whole concept of the Trill, which has been – this is the beauty of Star Trek, right? – is that you take this little foundational piece and you build on it and build on it and build on it, and they're still doing it even with Discovery, right? They keep building on it.
But it was a plot device, to create this episode where Riker has to be bonded with a weird symbiotic creature, and Beverly has to struggle with her feelings. And then the, the symbiont being placed in a woman at the end is almost like just a Star Trek tip of the cap to, we can't have our main characters in long term relationships, so this is how we're gonna solve it.
This is how Star Trek has changed over the decades. Back in TOS, Star Trek didn't have this rich lore. It had to imply it. And now we do have the rich lore. Like, you can write a moment about the Prime Directive and it pulls forward everything we've learned about warp being that moment for civilizations to come into the galaxy. Um, it's what keeps us watching, I think. But it hasn't always been what Star Trek had.
Right.
TNG season seven, episode 14, I'm sorry to do it, but I have to bring it up. Sub Rosa
Ooooooh ghosts! Space romance … ghosts.
In this episode, again Crusher is the subject of a seduction by an anaphasic life form,
Mm-hmm. It's a ghost.
That kind of life form has gotten a mention in Lower Decks this season already. Tendi worried that Rutherford had been taken over by an anaphasic life form when he was in a coma. But yes, in this, uh, it is the ghost that every woman in the Crusher family. Has fallen in love with over the generations, and is currently living on Planet Scotland, where Crusher visits the funeral of her Nana at the start of the episode.
This episode is reviled, I think, because it just involves a lot of scenes of Crusher, writhing in ecstasy from an invisible ghost. But on rewatch, what this doesn't get credit for is giving us that moment of Crusher deciding to walk away from Starfleet, and Picard standing in the transporter room saying, I'm not gonna let you go. And she's like, Are you holding me hostage? And he has to let her go.
Seven seasons in this relationship is rich enough that they can stare at each other across the transporter room. And Picard can know something is wrong with you, Beverly Crusher. Walking away from this is not you. That sequence of events of Crusher's leaving and therefore we know something's wrong with Crusher is fun. It's a sweet twist in a bumpy episode, for sure.
Yeah, I hate this episode so much, but um, uh, you're, does fit the premise of what about. I'll put it that way.
All right. Accepted.
I have one extra that I'll throw out there as my bonus, which is season five, episode 17 of TNG, The Outcast. This again, trying to deal with issues. Riker falls in love with a character from an androgynous race that finds gender presentation to be anathema. And so it is meant to be a gay rights parable; I think it's basically bungled.
They cast Melinda Culea from The A-Team as the genderless, yet strangely female so Riker can fall in love with her without anybody feeling creepy about it, alien and, uh, I don't think it really works. Uh, I see what they're going for,
The best of intentions, you watch it and you want to give it the win, but it doesn't earn it.
It does not earn it. But it's a similar thing where the episode, the reason I bring it up especially, is the falling in love with an alien is the point of the episode. It is absolutely the entire reason the episode exists.
Yeah. It gets to me as well, like it is sad that it is saddled with that weight of social issue because, the story itself is sweet. Watching this couple have their meet-cute and believably fall for each other, and Riker have to fight for – I just went to say fight for her, which is the whole problem – before they get reprogrammed by their society. Like it is a lean-forward episode. It gets me. But yeah, it doesn't quite work at what it's trying to do. My bonus is a Voyager episode, if you will.
Season five, episode 17, The Disease, which is a Harry Kim love story. What do you think of Harry Kim, Jason Snell?
I don't hate him. I don't think he was particularly well served; I think he's kind of a boring character. I mean, just overarching my feeling about Voyager is Voyager is a show that, I don't even wanna say it was ill conceived, but it seems like they made a lot of initial conceptions of what it was going to be. It feels very much like a show where they had like a whole basic thing laid out, characters, premise, and then like handed it over to someone else and walked away, it feels like to me.
Where it's like Voyager seems to spend a lot of time having to live down a lot of very early decisions that it made. Harry Kim, should he have not been there? Should they have done more with him? Something. But unlike some of the other characters, where they seemed to put an effort into sort of like branching them out, I felt like Harry Kim just sort of never went anywhere.
And it doesn't help that my favorite episode of Voyager, Deadlock is the episode where Harry Kim dies, actually dies, but there's two of him, so it doesn't matter. And they send the other one over before they blow up the ship. So, I don't hate Harry. I just, it is not a character that was developed at all. Maybe one of the most underdeveloped regular characters in Star Trek history.
This episode is an attempt to address that exact thing in which, Harry falls in love with a member of a race that is traveling on a generation ship, and they have become xenophobic as a result. But his love interest is revealed to be a member of the rebellion to escape that xenophobic lifestyle and reconnect with other species and places. They have a chemical connection with their partners.
And so the opening of the episode is them kind of stumbling into Harry's quarters kissing, and there's a weird lighting effect going on between their bodies. And over the course of the episode, Harry does increasingly insubordinate things in service of their budding relationship. He disobeys orders to break it off. He steals a shuttle craft in order to take her on a date.
The moment of the episode, I think that the thing that this was constructed around, was when Janeway expresses her disapproval and disappointment to Harry, and he says, You only feel that way because it's me and Harry Kim never does any wrong, right? Harry Kim's the model officer. I'm not interesting enough to be insubordinate. And she says, look, if it was Tom Paris, I would still be disappointed. I just wouldn't be surprised.
And so, it is an attempt to take what Harry Kim was and turn that itself into a story, but you don't quite buy it. Like I don't care what the chemicals are doing, Harry Kim would never steal a shuttle craft. This just is not believable.
Right. Yep. By the way, my other, uh, honorable mention was going to be a span of episodes in season one of Star Trek: Discovery, where Ash Tyler is revealed to be a Secret Klingon, uh, and Burnham has to deal with that, but, eh. I, I didn't like that. Actually, I like the twist. I didn't like the fact that as soon as the twist happened, they said, Oh, but we fixed it now when he's just a guy again. Cuz it doesn't make any sense, right?
It's like, no, no. He's a Klingon who had some human thoughts put in his brain and who was reconfigured to look like a human. And then literally they have like a hand wavy thing where L'Rell comes in and says, Oh no, I fixed it. Now he's just a guy. Like, come on! That character was only interesting because he was not what he seemed, and they're like, No, no, he's exactly who he seems now. The end. And then they wrote him out of the show the next year anyway, so who the heck knows?
My regular co-host Rob and I are improvisers, and in improv that is what you call a "cancel", when you set up a premise and then defuse it, to the disappointment of the audience that had invested in it. Unlike Harry Kim, where it was all about the chemistry, the chemical bond, there was no chemistry between Burnham and and Ash as far as I could
No, no. There's way more chemistry between him and L'Rell, actually.
Oddly. Disturbingly
And obviously in season two, they kind of wanted just like send him off with her a little bit to see about that and with Mary Chieffo, and then they like shut the whole thing down. And I don't know, it's… I actually like Discovery season one. I think it's a pretty good season one, especially of Star Trek. But that is one of the frustrating— You talk about handing a show off to somebody who didn't make any of the decisions to set it up.
That happened to Discovery like three times in the first season, and then kept happening for a little while. So I think they made the best of a very weird, bad situation. But that's one of those cases where, and I would say Discovery more than maybe any other Star Trek show, you can just see the hand of the producers coming in at various points and saying, Yeah, we just don't want this to be the case. Let's just get rid of it.
And Ash, Tyler's one of those where it's like… Again, they spent, what, the first two episodes we meet this Voq, this weird Klingon who's super devoted to the cult, and then you get the amazing twist, which is like, Oh my God, that guy, they found with Harry Mudd, he is the Klingon. and then they're like, Yeah, well, we're done with this, now. We don't know what to do with it since then. It's like, what are you doing?
Like why, why walk that distance if you are not gonna do anything when you get there? That was, that was early Discovery. There was a whole lot of that going on.
Sure was. Sure was. Well, thank you Jason Snell. For our listeners, if you wanna catch up with Jason, if you're into Apple stuff, you should visit sixcolors.com and see all of his writing and coverage there. Uh, if you're into nerdy pop culture like this stuff, you should visit theincomparable.com, a podcast network full of shows just like this one, that cover all sorts of pop culture. If you've, if you've got a, a pop culture kink, it is covered there somewhere.
I think so.
Anything else to say, Jason?
On The Incomparable Network you can find Vulcan Hello. We'll be back with more live action commentary down the road, and hopefully he'll get Random Trek up and going again, which is fun cuz it's just Scott and a bunch of different random guests talking about literally random episodes from the whole Star Trek canon, which is, it's a lot of fun.
I look forward to it. Thanks again for visiting us here on Subspace Radio, Jason.
Thank you for having me.