Hello and welcome back to Subspace Radio, the show where Rob and I watch an episode of Star Trek and that makes us wanna watch more episodes of Star Trek.
That's right. And I'm Rob and that's Kevin. So, we've filled that quota very well.
This week we are talking about Star Trek: Picard, season three, episode nine, Võx, and the DNA shenanigans that went on therein.
The penultimate episode of this there's been so much attention put upon this show for so many reasons. This new brand of Star Trek that's come out has ebbed and flowed with the public interest, but with Picard season three, it's definitely made some impact on the zeitgeist, as it were. Yeah, that's right. I use Zeitgeist.
I think it's worth saying out loud here, Rob. We can dispense with the air of mystery. You and I have seen the finale at this
We have.
This episode we will be talking about the semi finale, I guess you could call it. And and we'll come back for the finale in the next episode.
My, my favorite thing was before we went into the episode, Kevin Yank said, Well let's just see how it goes. And we may do a double episode where we'll talk about episode nine
Yeah, if there's not enough to talk about this half episode,
And as soon as the episode came out, I got a message from Kevin Yank going, Yeah, we'll do an episode for each one.
The pace definitely changed with this episode. That was my overarching impression.
Definitely, as there seemed to be this as, as soon as Vadic's body sprayed into the dead cold of space, not only was a weight lifted off the Titan's shoulders, but I think of the entire series and, they layered into this Federation wide attack, but there was this sense of dread that had lifted, and there seemed to be this sense of, okay, we're back into a more, a traditional approach to, to Star Trek without all that influx of this new tone that has dominated
Picard and Discovery, especially, that's been heavily influenced by most recent phenomenon of Game of Thrones and your Stranger Things and stuff like that. There was some incredible moments. There were some amazing moments in there. Especially we will, we'll spend quite a bit of time talking about the last 10, 15 minutes of this episode. Um, but for me there was definitely a lot of, despite the fact they had 10 episodes, they rushed through a lot of stuff.
And and there was a lot of hand waving of going we'll explain it later, or, just uh, let it go. We need to get to the big set pieces.
I talked earlier in this season about how I was like happy that they were not indulging in too much puzzle box storytelling of Ooh, there's a secret over here, and we will indulge in, in the mystery of it and never actually reveal it until the last moment. And I was saying there was refreshingly little of that stuff at the start of the season here.
The puzzle box became very apparent here as they ripped the top off and spent an entire hour like dumping parts onto the floor in front of us and going, Ooh look, there's this and there's that. And it's Borg again. It's DNA. And it's, there's a lot to take in this episode. There was definitely a lot to take in terms of spectacle in a good way, but there was a lot of new information to take in of here's everything we haven't been telling you to this
Yes.
Please accept it as quickly as possible because we have a finale to get on with.
Exactly. And there was also that case of, because now we have introduced the truly, big bad of the entire season run in the last two episodes, that threat that has been there for the entire first eight episodes that we have put so much import into let's just shuffle them not even to the side, like completely off the table. The Changelings had been this epic part of the entire first eight episodes of this season.
And then to cram in our realization and the explanation of the Borg, there was no balance at all. It was literally a case of the Changelings are gone, it's all Borg now. And for that was, that's that was always gonna be a tricky thing and it wasn't handled the best. But you just go look at the pretty lights and look at the, oh, and that is Alice Krige's voice. This is amazing.
The original Borg Queen. Oh, the way you could tell the moment. She said the word fuh-lesh. Like that word was the tell. I was like, Ooh, no one says flesh like, uh, Alice Krige.
She added in a couple of extra syllables for that.
Yeah.
How about you? What was your first impressions of it?
Yeah, it was, it was good. There was even more, I think, than the finale that we'll talk about next episode, this one ha had some stuff in it that I was kind of leading back and go, I know you're doing that because you think I want it, but it's a bit rich. Like the Enterprise F emerging from Space Dock with Admiral Shelby in command and fireworks going off in space around it. She gives a keynote speech from the captain's chair about the founding of the Federation.
I was going, look, it's a bit much, you know, take it easy. All those things in isolation are excellent, but you pile 'em all on top of each other and it, it strains belief that this is something that would really happen in ah, this universe. I felt like just take any one of those elements out and I would've been completely on board, take the fireworks out and make it like a grand, respectful pan over a new ship, I would've been on board.
But add multicolored fireworks that you can hear in space, and I'm like, okay, now we're, this is almost a cartoon of Star Trek fan service.
Because there was so much of it, I missed it was the Enterprise F. I know, and I, I mean, how I look, it's a ship coming out. But look at those fireworks. They're pretty. It wasn't until.
quite say it. They said vessel registry NCC-1701-F ready for departure. And it was on a distorted radio voice as everything else was going on. So it was definitely easy to miss.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
I think the only reason I caught it is that we had been given the heads up earlier, like in the press stuff before the show, that the Enterprise F would be appearing and everyone said, Ooh. The real nerdy fans said, the only place we've seen the Enterprise F is in video games and some video game designer designed that ship. Is it really gonna be that Enterprise F? And and the show owner said, you'll see.
And sure enough it was like they took, they copied and pasted the ship design from the video game into canon. And I think you can tell, like it is not quite, I don't know how you felt about the design of that ship Rob, but it was a bit of an Excelsior, in the sense that it looks great from some angles and from o other angles, you're like, yeah, why is it so fat there? You
Yeah, it's like, it,
that that's an unattractive angle. And a good hero ship should not have a bad angle.
Well after, it, it took me a while to get used to, back in the eighties and nineties of the new design of the Enterprise from when Next Generation first launched. But after Generations when they've incorporated these newer types of Enterprises, they've never really, they've be been a bit samey. They've, I haven't been able to really distinguish them much from the Enterprise from First Contact or the Enterprise from, the ones that come later on.
But yeah, so this one didn't, yeah, it was a little bit Excelsior. I couldn't really tell the difference between that and the Titan. They didn't have that really
had a really fat wide bottom and very circular, very rounded, much like the Excelsior, it had two necks with a gap between them, connecting it to the sausage, to the connecting it to the saucer.
Please keep that in. Please keep that.
And uh, the other thing it had that you, that made it stand out for me as a video game origin ship is it had the black panels on the top of the saucer. It had like, it has patches that are black instead of the metallic color of the hull. And that is something that very much came in the video games is when they wanted to design the imaginary next generation of ships. They're like, we're gonna give them all black
black.
panels to make them look like extra sports car-like. And yeah, that was definitely preserved here.
It's been a big, noticeable thing within the other franchises like Star Wars and stuff like that, that blend in comic books, computer game law novelizations, all that type of stuff. So for Star Trek to start to do that as well is, is a sign of the evolving nature of fandom and franchises out there.
Yeah.
So the biggest secret that wasn't really a secret of all was of course the Borg behind it all. And Troi did her she served her purpose well and then was well and truly shuffled back into the background.
I did appreciate her kind of pulling rank on, on Picard and Crusher in that moment where she said, hang on, there's protocols, your son's dangerous. I have one job in Starfleet and that's to keep the dangerous people behind force fields. And your son is now a dangerous people.
That's the one, that's the one thing I wanted to say. It's, it started off she came in so strong going, he can't leave. He's a dangerous presence. He has Borg part of him. But Jack left because of plot contrivance, they went, we can't keep him here. We don't have enough time to go through it. So he'd literally,
saddest part is that this, like the first 10 minutes of this episode, cancel everything they achieved in the eight episodes up to this point. We'll keep Jack away from the Changelings. We'll keep Jack, ultimately, away from the Borg. That was the entire point of the eight hours of TV we have watched this point and then they're like, so there are protocols. Cut to the protocols failing miserably, as for some reason they went, okay, let's see, what are we dealing with here?
Someone who can control minds of people, so let's send two heavily armed people to restrain him.
Yeah,
That was never gonna work.
it said yeah, they got to a point where they've got, we've done this for eight episodes. Now we've got two parts, but we need Jack off the ship because we need him to start off this whole process to bring our threat. So he needs to be gone within five minutes. So he easily got through an entire ship with only two people him controlling.
He gets onto a ship and gets out of it, get near without any tractor beams or any type of teleportation getting him beamed off or anything like that, purely for the fact of it's a plot contrivance they needed to get.
theme, I'll say, of shuttles that get away suspiciously easily.
So yeah, it was very, that stood out for me of a case of that wasn't story, that was a plot contrivance of we need to get Jack to B so he has to leave A straight away, and everything that we have done beforehand that could easily stop him from doing that, that has stopped him from doing that, you know, we have to get rid of that completely because we don't have time to have a big chase scene through or overriding things or someone helping out in some way, shape or form.
Because no, he needs to go right away. We need to leave him now.
In the midst of all this, we get the reveal that the thing about Jack is that he has inherited a Borg organic technology that was embedded in Picard when he was Locutus, way back at the Battle of Wolf 359 in Best of Both Worlds, and I had seen some fans pick that in advance, and it felt to me like it was supported by the clues. The red vines, the controlling bodies, the hearing voices,
The motherly voice.
of that stuff connected back beautifully. They did a lovely thing in that corridor with the red door where the voice went back and forward between Beverly Crusher and the Borg And it was almost imperceptible until you knew to look for it. That was all great. And then they push beyond that and go, but wait, we got more. And the more is that the Changelings, were embedding that code, which they stole from Picard's body into the transporter system.
And we've rewritten the genetic code of everyone in Starfleet and they are now receptors to Jack's transmitter.
Only if you're under the age of 25.
Only if you're under the age of 25. Which I was like, I'm sure there was a good explanation for that, that I missed. I'll watch it again. Nope. There wasn't, said it doesn't affect people under the age of
Yeah. Beverly said something about the cortex stops developing at 25, but it's just case of young fans of Star Trek, you are easily manipulated by other things. Us old school Star Trek fans, we're the old trusty ones. We can't be, we can't be manipulated by anything.
I can see the hand of the creator in that, that they said, what do we want? What kind of story do we wanna tell this season? And they went we wanna tell a story where we show and demonstrate that old people have worth and that there are things only they can do. And so let's make it so that the Borg only assimilate people under 25. That was the leap.
And new isn't necessarily better. New can be dangerous. And the old ways are the best. And for the last two seasons, they've been focusing on this whole disease that killed Picard. And again, like what they did last week, which I've been picking up with, Riker and Troi going, oh, I hate the farm. Let's live in the city. A total disregard of what the creators did beforehand. And this was, this disease that Picard's had all for two years. No. It's all Borg.
I'm gonna be ranting about this a lot next week, by the way, but I actually quite like the Irumodic syndrome was never really fully explored or explained, and it, in hindsight is remarkably consistent that all they've really said of it is, it is a structural defect in your brain that we have no explanation for. And it's rare enough that we don't know a lot about it other than we call it Irumodic syndrome.
And so I think that is a beautiful retcon, if you want to call it that, or rewriting, or reverse explanation of a mystery that has existed in Star Trek for a very long time. And to me, it, it works because it is more satisfying than the explanation we had before. It holds more water, it holds more story weight. It affects the character in a more interesting way than you have a special disease.
As you know from Kevin and I, listeners, if you don't know, come from an improvisational theater background. And one of the skills I was taught when you are creating improvisational stories in a long form format is the end is always in the beginning. So when you're moving forward, look back, you can, you don't
what's already there.
what's already there. And so bringing in this disease that they don't really explain, they just say it's there doesn't, but how Matalas has worked so hard to tie back with what has been created in seven years of, TV show, four movies. It's all there. You don't need to bring in all this new stuff that doesn't connect. You can find it in the past. And so that, so much retconning. I have never seen so much retconning of a show literally from one season to the next, ever.
I don't think I've seen it so clearly where this, without some shows that have completely changed format and disregard like eighties shows where, which is reset button at the end of every episode. But this is still keeping on the trajectory.
They did it more well here than not. Like my main discomfort watching this episode was not the facts that they were introducing or the logic that they were asking us to buy into. It was just the pace of revealing it that they have been holding these things in reserve for eight whole episodes.
Having characters very awkwardly not speak to each other or open their mouths and not say the thing that's on their minds, in order to avoid telling us any of this stuff until the last minute, so to, to maximize the shock value or to add to the strength, the punch of the finale. That's what bothers me.
The actual logic of the idea that the Borg sneakily rewrote Picard and then when Picard's died, thereby foiling their plan, their fallback plan was to sneakily rewrite everyone through the transporters. That's stuff like, I like it. It feels fresh and yet relatively consistent with what we know of the Star Trek world, DNA shenanigans aside, which we're about to talk about.
The other thing that I really felt like added a layer to what was already there, that, that kind of felt like it was already, it already existed, no one had yet put their finger on it, was the commonality between the Borg and the Changelings. And there was a bit of this last episode, but the Borg reveal had not come yet, so we weren't quite sure what they were talking about.
But the, these are both races who look down on humanity and the broader Federation because they live as individuals, or as they say in this episode, like shattered glass, that they are these separate entities who can't feel what each other feel. They can't empathize with each other. And, and there is weakness and chaos because of it. And the idea that the Borg and the Changelings would come together in alliance in a belief that the right way to live is in complete connection with one another.
That is something I can't believe I never saw that before. And it was sitting there the whole time.
Yeah, but it is interesting, they reduced the threat or the impact of the Changelings, which was really like for eight episodes it was ratcheted up. You didn't know, like you literally didn't know who to trust and, trust no one, all that type of stuff. Ro sacrificed herself, to help Picard get away. It's been, been happening for years.
This type of process of, we, it's from the highest level to the lowest level, and then it just gets reduced down to, oh the whole plan was just to change the structure of the transporter system and you're there going, no, they were doing more than that. They weren't just there to set up that program. That was one thing, but they have infiltrated and crippled the entire Federation.
So there's that's a war on two fronts, but we pushed that front aside to just focus on the Borg threat as opposed to the fact that they've set up the… I'm sounding very critical, but I absolutely adored, I've adored this season and I've adored this episode. But it is that case of there was a lot of sacrifices made for pace and time. So it was a war on two fronts, the Borg and the Changelings, and they never dealt with both, which they had to at the same
Vadic and the Shrike exploded at the end of the last episode. And, the show kind of went, that's it for the
That's it for the
we we fixed that problem. And you're like there's still like all the evil Tuvoks out there. What are they doing? Probably a lot, right?
Yeah. And that's stuff where we can talk about, when we talk about how they dealt with that. When we talk about that next episode
The remote assimilation technology, I thought was okay. Like the suddenly, the uh, transmission comes through, Seven flinches and says it's a borg signal. The screens on the bridge, uh, glitch with green Borg stuff, which is I'm like, I'm not sure why that's happening. And then the young people on the bridge the black veins spread across their face.
And their eyes go black.
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, that's a lot for a bit of DNA to do there. But I suppose like the alternative would've been worse of nothing visually changes about them, but they suddenly start acting like drones, would've been worse. I think they needed to do something. It like it's a visual medium. They needed to show rather than tell, and that worked enough.
I'm glad they exercised the restraint to not have like metal implants bursting from people's faces and us having to believe that a radio signal caused a metallic thing to burst from someone's face outta nowhere. Like that, that could have happened and they exercised enough restraint for it not to happen. And it created, I thought, an interesting visual of what does an organic assimilation look like?
Yeah, there is that case of there are certain phrases or turns or concepts within sci-fi that can become like a magic wand and DNA since the nineties has definitely become that, oh, late eighties, early nineties has definitely become that. How does, how do we explain this? DNA! There we go. It's all DNA manipulation. So, the creation of organic technology and all this type of stuff connected is techno babble to the extreme, to the point where it's almost, abracadabra. It's DNA it's the future.
That's what they'll figure out. And you go, oh, okay. We just have to accept that. But having that visual realization and change of the veins coming through and seeing that dramatic visual image of the eyes turning black, is that effective, oh, we know that they have now literally changed physically, so they have changed internally as well.
Yeah. I chuckled because we really got to see who Geordi's favorite daughter is, as he asked the computer, Computer locate Alandra La Forge. And did not seem to care a wit for what happened to Sidney the bridge. Interestingly, the computer responded with The life signs of Alandra La Forge are no longer compatible with human designation, which I said out loud, that's not the question he asked. He asked, where is she?
So yeah, sometimes the computer tells the audience what they need to know, not the character what they asked.
There's a epic escape to try and get off the Titan. Geordi has come up with an idea and they just have to trust him. And uh, we had the moment I realized while that happened, I went, of course this is gonna happen. I can't believe that I didn't pick it earlier. We had a sad goodbye that we had to say goodbye to one of the MVPs of this season, really.
Very much. Yes.
And what were your thoughts about the death of Captain Shaw?
There are worse things than being, the most memorable character in one season of Star Trek. You're in, you're out. You get to do conventions for the rest of your life. It is so easy to water down a character over many years and turn them into something less memorable with familiarity. The fact that everything we got from Shaw this season was strong, almost every one of his lines was
Mm-hmm.
I think there is something to be celebrated that they had the courage to create something they knew was great and end it before it got less great.
Because he was such a wonderfully written character and a wonderfully performed character as well. I mean, any, any other actor in that role, it would've probably come across as a bit too jarring, probably a bit too two dimensional, black and white. But the natural charisma of Todd is just there on display. And so you forgive those moments of harshness and prejudice. Those, those scenes of true reliving his trauma during the original Borg battle.
That, that type of stuff comes from, good writing, but skilled performance. And so you forget the fact that he is a plot tool to get us to the character who is actually the regular cast member and what they need to achieve with their character arc.
He's there as a springboard for Seven of
He is there for Seven of Nine. Yeah, exactly. And that's how good he is to be able to hide that. And then you don't realize it until after he's gone. You go, he was never gonna be there for any other time because this is, this is Seven of Nine's show. So he did a great job, wonderful job,
I thought he deserved a better end. Like the, the death in the corridor was,
With those conveniently set up boxes. They were very conveniently set up in the cargo area, like they were spaced out one on one side of the corridor, one on the other side. That's
The, I don't know if you noticed on the floor there was a, an X and it says Shaw stand here and like between the two boxes. Yeah. He, died a pretty swift death that I think to my eye did not gain anything. And in a sense deaths can be shockingly meaningless.
Reference Tasha Yar, for That in itself can be an effective emotional tool for storytelling, the meaninglessness of a death itself resonates, but think I'm probably not the only one who felt like Todd Stashwick if not Captain Shaw himself deserved a better ending, a more heroic end. One that achieved something.
It was most definitely functionary. We have to get our lead cast off this ship. We need to keep the supporting actors, Seven of Nine and Raffi on this ship. We need to now position Seven of Nine into a complete leadership position, and we need to get rid of this character straight away.
And eight and a half episodes of development be damned, get shot like a chump, in a corridor behind a conveniently placed box, and hopefully his final lines will be emotional enough that you forget the fact that he died like a chump.
If you're looking for a reason for him to have died, you can go, oh, he's the one who knew about the sub-level with the shuttle, because he's an engineer and he recognized the maintenance channel that the people were broadcasting on. There's a little bit of, they would not have gotten that far without him, but he didn't get himself off the ship, is the tragedy here.
And he survived the Borg last time, and he didn't survive the Borg this time.
Yeah. The, we haven't talked about the fleet formation and appearance and swift dispatch of Admiral Shelby.
Has Shelby been in it before or is that her one and only appearance?
In Picard, this is her only appearance, but she, she was in the two-parter, Best of Both Worlds. She was the young hotshot who came on the ship, and she was the expert in the Borg. She was sent and she said, Hey, Captain Picard, Commander Riker, we're going to check out this planet. It's had all the major cities scooped off the surface, and this is a pattern we've seen before, we think it's the Borg. She is gunning for Riker's job throughout this two-part episode.
She comes right out and says it, and she says to Riker in the turbolift, You're in my way, my next job is going to be first officer, and I won't settle for anything less than first officer of the flagship. So get outta here. Go be a captain somewhere cuz you're in my seat. And Riker is like, there's a great line where he says, Shelby, you do an end run around me like that again, I'm gonna snap you back so hard you'll think you're a first year cadet, and it is so good.
Hard ass Riker is a sweet taste. She is a little too ambitious for her own good and at times is the person with the bad idea that allows our heroes to have the better idea in that two-parter. But she is, effectively, she is the Federation Borg expert and established that way in that episode. So when she comes back here, you're like, Ooh, how ironic.
And they say it, they say, how ironic to hear Shelby of all people preaching something so Borg-like, she hated the Borg more than anyone back in the series when she appeared. So yes, that was great to see her. I thought it was a shame that they couldn't afford to give her a crew on that, that Enterprise F bridge of hers. It was very obvious she was sitting in an office chair in front of a blue screen of some kind.
But yeah, the crew did show up just to, to dispatch her very quickly.
Yeah, there, there was one silhouette that ran behind her as things were going wrong. And then two people with phasers stepped up and shot her in the chest, which was, it was a great, shocking moment. But I'm not sure I, I really bought the reality of the Enterprise F other than it was a CG model surrounded by fireworks, and the bridge did not look like a bridge to me.
Yeah.
It looked like a corridor or a, a matte painting. And uh, next episode, when they, they swiftly move along to the next Enterprise, I'm like, what happened to the Enterprise F? Ah, who cares?
So let's let we've delayed it long enough. Let's go to
The D! The fat one.
Everything you could have wanted. And just they took that time. Sure. The Federation is falling apart. It has come under complete Borg control. Jack has now been completely assimilated with into the collective. But let's take this time, ladies and gentlemen, to see the D again, to walk on the carpet, to touch the chair to just talk about the phaser banks and the armor array and dropping lines about what, whatever happened to the Enterprise E?
Yeah, That wasn't my fault.
the, The line that launched a thousand. Twitter, Twitter messages.
A nice little uh, contribution there, like beta cannon or like the novels I believe have established that Worf went on to be the captain of the Enterprise E. So that was something that fans who uh, look at the wider universe assumed to be true until we are told it's not. And this reinforced to that little bit of history without telling us a story that there wasn't time to tell. They hinted at a story that we might get somewhere else someday, which was great.
And boy, yeah, I said earlier in this season that I am a Constitution class guy, just like Jack Crusher I have to take it back. The D, the Enterprise D is my first love. I've I've got three models of it sitting in this room right now, those curvy lines, the too big for its own good saucer section, it all speaks to me. I love it dearly, and I don't think I realized how much I missed it until we saw it in all its CG 4K
Well, Yeah, we haven't seen it since since Generations.
It still has the scrapes from, its landing on Viridian III across the surface of it. And there's a line where Geordi says the, the port nacelle covers are a complete nightmare. And as it flies out of the Fleet Museum, if you look closely, there's some panels missing on the top of port nacelle. Like they went way above and beyond in, in creating this, unlike the Enterprise F that I felt like a CG model and they couldn't afford a set, they couldn't even afford a bridge crew.
You know what the bridge should have been? It should have been that bar.
that's
have Shel Shelby at the bar doing her announcement about frontier
Full credit to them, they've been staying away from that bar these last
Yeah, they'll have to use it for one last time.
Yeah. Yep, Yep.
I thought very much of you when they just took their time around this old friend, this old house that you used to live in for seven years. And especially those Next Gen fans like yourself who, lived and breathed that show and those four movies. This was what you've been waiting for, because they never did that even with the with the original cast, with the original crew, it was all about, the cast. So that final, beautiful moment on Star Trek VI, that that's a completely different Enterprise.
As is famously known, they demolished every single set of the Enterprise Bridge after every Star Trek movie, cuz they thought it was the last one.
And they did that here too, they had to rebuild this thing from photos.
Oh my gosh. And so to have that moment that the original crew never had to actually have the original seven walk around, and I'm so glad they mentioned the carpet, I'm so glad they mentioned the carpet.
A shot of the commissioning plaque just close enough that you could read Admiral Gene Roddenberry uh, first the first name on the plaque. All of it was there. They showed us exactly what the fans wanted to see, and they showed us that it was a little better than we remembered it as well, like the, when they turn on the lights and there's a shot of the panels, like lighting up in sequence. And that's ooh, like it looks just like we remember it, but it's also just a little bit better.
It's how we wanted it to be, but couldn't afford to make it back then as well. Just a tasteful amount of improvement. The special features on Wil Wheaton's show The Ready Room talk about how, especially the tactical station, the curved tactical station, that Worf stands in front of, that one, back in the eighties when they built the set, there was no LED backlighting that could work in that, like thin of a surface back then.
And so the, those panels were actually lit by fluorescent tubes behind them. And because fluorescent tubes have a bluer, colder light compared to all of the other stations and screens on the bridge, that one of Worf's was like blue tinted. And they slavishly recreated that here to be true to the original.
They gave it a bit of It's too bright in some spots and too dark in others because there was once a fluorescent tube behind it and they made sure that the color temperature was wrong in the right way. So yeah, it was a loving recreation.
All our talk this whole season about, where the money's gone into the bar, now we know where the money's
Now we know. All is forgiven. Like set every other scene in that bar. Also Geordi, you have to buy into this because by the time that ship crashed in Star Trek Generations, there had been some changes made to the bridge to make it look more modern. There was extra stations at the side of the bridge. There were some extra stripes and extra details added to to add some visual interest for the greater detail that you see on a cinematic screen. And that has all been taken out.
That Geordi in his restoration,
Went back to
Yeah, went back to the original setup and uh, you can buy that Geordi would do
Of course he would. Yes. And there, there was a lot of talk about what he could find and how, it's very much your dad talking about fixing up the car or in all those American TV shows of the eighties and stuff like that, the dad's got the car in the garage that they're, they've got a roadster that they're repairing or fixing. But yes, that whole lead into uh, to hope and the talk of family, and we're all with you. You are my family.
We've gotta go save, Sidney and the other one and Jack as well, their family too. Really
No mention of Alexander or Kestra, I noticed. Worf apparently has no family and Riker and Troi. Troi, who's saying, and all of your family matters too, doesn't mention her own
They're our daughter. Yeah, they talk about the dead son quite a lot in this season. The daughter's amazing. That's one of the few highlights of Picard, season one I love. Their daughter is incredible. Yeah. She should get her
Well, I guess she doesn't use transporters. She's safe.
safe. She's safe. Someone's looking after her on the farm that they hate.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So let's talk DNA. Because um, a lot hinges on the power of DNA in this episode.
magic wand.
The idea that a transporter could be programmed to replace some of the common sequences that exist in all humanoid beings, so that there is the seed of the ability to be not just controlled by the Borg, but like organically assimilated by the Borg.
Yes.
It's a lot. The one thing I give them credit for is, depending on the timeline we're being asked to accept here, there is time for a DNA change to result in a change to physiology. And this is my biggest objection to the way DNA is handled in Star Trek, is that you point a beam at someone and change their DNA and they instantly morph into the new shape. Let's inject some Klingon DNA like we saw this in with Dal in Star Trek Prodigy last season.
We'll activate your dormant Klingon DNA and 10 minutes later, his teeth are growing.
I am not a cell biologist by any means, and hey, you are write in and tell us what we're getting wrong, but the little research I have done to confirm that I am appropriately outraged here, tells me first of all, if you can manage to alter every cell in someone's body to change their DNA at once, you are nevertheless looking at months to years before the changed programming of that DNA will result in changed anatomy due to new cells following the instructions, the
growth blueprint embedded in that DNA. And so when I say DNA shenanigans, this is basically what I mean, is that we change your DNA now and it instantly modifies your anatomy. What did DNA in Star Trek trigger for you, Rob?
It's definitely something we've brought up before and we've talked a little bit about Julian Bashir and how he became a far more interesting character once they introduced his manipulation of DNA.
DNA re-sequencing. They hit on a goldmine when, whoever created the word re-sequencing. I want to know when the word re-sequencing first appeared in Star Trek history because they, they should be paying that writer serious residuals, like entire seasons of Star Trek plot have been justified by that
It's amazing. Within the world of science fiction, you get a phrase or a word to justify something or explain something, and it sticks. Then you can use that forever. Like in Doctor Who, it took them a while to figure out when, one actor leaves and another actor takes the place of The Doctor, they called it renewing. They called, it change. It took them quite a few years to come up with the term regeneration. And so now, yeah, and now that's it. It's stuck.
So re-sequencing is very much a, it's a, yeah, like you said, it's the goldmine has never stopped handing over beautiful nuggets. With that justification. But also it's been brought up in Strange New Worlds as well with this only real sense of prejudice left within the Federation is towards species that manipulate their DNA. And Number One, of course, Rebecca Romijn has uh, is public enemy number one because of her being from a species that that, wholeheartedly embraced DNA manipulation.
So it's definitely embedded in there and has become encompassing of many different justifications within the Star Trek world. It's far more complicated than just a flick of a switch and you turn, you have more bumps on your forehead than you used to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like the two examples I've brought are definitely these kind of ooh, your DNA got messed up and now you're changing. It sounds like, What you stick onto is that idea of deliberate DNA manipulation is a taboo or a crime in the
I've got, I've actually gone for a representation of a species, so more of a general look. And then I've gone to one of the most infamous episodes in Star Trek history and how,
I think we have a match. All right, I'm gonna go first because I've got a TNG. This is season seven, episode 19, so right towards the end of
The Next Generation. And this is an episode entitled Genesis, which famously is directed by Gates McFadden. She got her turn in the director's chair and she plays a pretty major character part in this episode as well. So she did a lot of work in this one. And I gotta say, this is a good DNA story. I went back to watch this expecting, I think it's, there's a lot of makeup in this episode as people change.
And it's the eighties or early nineties by this point, and it doesn't all look super convincing, but the story holds up. And also I think better than any other DNA story I've heard, I've seen in Star Trek, the science holds up. They at least make the attempt to explain in scientific terms that are real, based in our real world knowledge of DNA what's going on here. In this episode, it's all Barclay's fault.
Barclay!
Barclay is going through his hypochondriac phase where he is spending his spare time surfing the web for diseases that he might have and then showing up in sick bay, convinced he's dying. And Crusher is completely frazzled by dealing with this guy who, keeps self-diagnosing. She's like, you promised you would stay off the computer. And turns out he's actually caught something. He's caught a, an alien flu that human biology is not equipped to fight.
And so what Crusher does, and she talks through the science later in the episode when things go horribly wrong, she synthesizes an artificial T-cell to activate the introns, the dormant parts of the human genealogy from past stages of evolution. She reactivates some of these introns, which are real things, you can look 'em up online, and it's a fascinating read, in order to activate some natural immunity or immune system to fight this alien virus. And she sends Barclay on his way.
But then, things start getting weird. Uh, it turns out that the synthetic T-cell that she synthesized is itself like spreading among the crew and activating all of the dormant gene sequences in everyone onboard the ship. Conveniently Picard and Data leave the ship to go and retrieve a rogue torpedo for a couple of days as this is going on.
And so you get that nice thing of, things just start to go wrong, and then you cut to Picard and Data returning to the ship days later to discover just how wrong they got. And Troi is this salamander creature with gills that lives in her bathtub with the temperature turned up in her quarters. Worf is this armored turtle thing that is only seen in, in silhouette, but is convinced that Troi is his mate.
This is, again, linking into that brief period in season seven where Worf and Troi were together. But he's pounding on her quarters' door to get in. Picard, after coming on board the ship and himself getting infected, Data says to him I can already tell in, in, in the tricorder that you are de-evolving into something akin to a pygmy marmiset. you get to see Jean-Luc Picard or more appropriately Patrick Stewart play a very different character color as he is frightened by the slightest shadow.
And yeah, it's, it is delightful. I went back to watch this thinking, okay, I'm gonna watch a bad episode of TNG, but it's actually really good. It really holds up. In particular, Data's cat spot transforms into a lizard, and I'll just leave that there.
Hm. And it, and of course, all resolves in the end, and there's no.
All resolves in the end. Yeah. Data figures out what's going wrong and manages to synthesize a cure, release it into the air supply. Everyone is mortified at what they did when they
Of course, of course. That representation of how we look upon that very nineties, and it's still here a little bit, that very nineties simplistic view of DNA is then, and they do it with like futuristic things, with splicing your DNA with animal stuff, so you've got like these hybrid type things. And so that's a case of what will look cool as opposed to what actually that means on a fundamental cell by cell basis.
You go no, I want to have turtle Worf, or I want to have salamander Troi, or I want to have marmiset Picard. It just strips it right down of all the complexities of, the basic structure of us as what we stand for. They go no. I want 'em to look like a cheetah.
Yeah. It's I think my favorite character turn in this is really subtle. Riker de-evolves into some kind of like primitive human, so he's basically becomes a caveman. But in the initial moments of the transformation, like Picard is away so he is on the bridge, he is in command, and he, his, he keeps forgetting what he's doing in the middle of doing it. Or someone will ask him a question and he will not be able to hold it all in his head at once. And just that.
The acting that he does in those moments of, I am frightened that my brain isn't working, but I am in command, so I can't let it show is beautiful. It is some really strong Jonathan Frakes stuff, way back in season seven. So, yeah, really good. But it does have that DNA problem of you change someone's DNA and hours or days later, they are a completely different creature that uh, that only gets worse as Star Trek indulges itself. What's your first one?
I'm gonna talk about a species that has been, cloned, but also DNA manipulated to be so subservient. I can't go past without doing a Deep Space Nine reference, we're gonna be looking at the Jem'Hadar.
Ah.
And how they are manipulated, DNA wise to be addicted to a drug, ketracel-white, so that they become dependent and they are completely reliant on the Vorta and their position within the Dominion cuz they are the foot soldiers and they are incredibly violent, brutal incredibly strong physically who could dominate any race, really.
They have an honor code within their own subservient nature, but this is where the fundamental basics of this race is controlled down to a DNA level so that they are purely at the control of another species. And to make them addicted to a drug very much pushed a lot within that nineties era of sci-fi about what, drug epidemics and how that looks in within a futuristic setting.
But it's a fascinating concept of the codependence of a species, those three levels from the foot soldiers to the yes man, then to the brain of the operation with the actual Changelings. But they're a fascinating species and they developed them throughout, like how their own culture that they had to develop because they were pretty much bred and created by the Changelings. But, life finds a way to, to quote Jeff Goldblum. They developed their own culture.
It's fun to explore what even is a culture under those constraints, and that culture still happens. It is beautiful. I feel like there is more to be told there, they did not explore the Jem'Hadar as far as they could have, and I feel like maybe if they had, in the context of DS9, it would've robbed them a bit of that stormtrooper sense of inevitability that you need with the boogeyman of your series.
But now that is resolved it would be lovely to go back and see like what, if anything, remains of the Jem'Hadar in the universe.
Because they kind of were filtered out within this most recent season Picard, where the Changelings themselves are a threat as well, when the whole point was that all they do the change things, they change their forms and they're the intelligence of them. But
They're the puppet masters. Yeah, they pull the strings.
Yeah. But we did see episodes where, we see them when they haven't taken their, when they haven't taken ketracel-white, you see them how their withdrawals and how that affects their bodies and their minds. And so that's a really fascinating way that takes away from how, that, that sorta like simplistic view of, and now you look like a rhino OSCEs because you've got Rhino OSCEs DNA in you. How that breaks down you as a person from a fundamental basis when you are.
You are manipulated from every cell to you can only survive by being addicted to this particular thing.
I love that the villains that are the Jem'Hadar and the Vorta, two species created through genetic manipulation, designed species, designed to be in service of a master race. These created slave species, that how ugly that is almost justifies the other side of the coin of how hard a stance the Federation takes against genetic manipulation. And I love that. It's a, nice bit of if-this-then-that in the DS9 storytelling.
It's if Bashir was manipulated to make him smarter, what else would be possible in a universe where that's possible? What would be possible is that a villainous race like the Changelings could create a slave species to their own design. And and if this is true, then that must be true, is the, it is the essence of good science fiction. And I love that those things, like they found that in the context of a single series so that it is internally consistent in that way.
Yeah. And they do show the whole, that Bashir is the Goldilocks example where he has the other members who have, he sees them as like his family that have had the same process that he had, but they have become misfits. They have become, they have to be looked after and supervised because they can't exist outside of the institutions that they're tied within. They're dangerous and dangerous to themselves and to others.
Yeah and I like how they brought that element into the Jem'Hadar, that they are vicious and scary and they are the boogey men. But you did have a sense of sympathy and empathy towards them for how their lives were controlled and manipulated. Next up for you?
I think we're gonna match on this one. I'm going to Star Trek: Voyager, season two, episode 15
Threshold! I was gonna, I was debating whether Threshold or Tuvix and I went with Threshold.
We could talk about Tuvix For sure. Yes. In Threshold, Tom Paris attempts a transwarp flight and there's a lot made of the fact that Warp 10 means occupying every point in the universe at the same time.
Make sense. Makes sense.
He achieves it. Somehow, he achieves it, and then somehow he returns to exactly where he started. It's all very hand waved. Even the warp science, before we even get to the DNA, even the warp science is completely bent in this episode. The problem with this episode is that the person who wrote it, I think, did not care about getting the science right. They or they were on a timeline, they were like, I'm gonna break every rule I need in order to get my
I just need to get this script done in time. I don't care what, I'm not even gonna pay any attention. I've got a short amount of time. Let's get in and out.
So let's move past the warp stuff. But it makes no sense.
That's another episode. We can break down Threshold over multiple
Yeah. Yeah, we can. This is the episode in which Tom Paris and Captain Janeway infamously evolve into salamanders and have salamander babies together In the last two minutes of this episode, that's what
In out.
Gosh, of the swamp, you mean?
Yes, exactly. I'm not, I'm look you, you come for high brow entertainment when you do a podcast with me, Kevin Yank. Good Lord.
This is. It's painful to watch Threshold, and it's painful in ways that I didn't remember it being painful, like the actual DNA changing, evolving stuff, and even the salamanders at the end. It's at least surprising. It's at least interesting.
But the bulk of this episode is just long sequences in which Tom Paris is lying on a table, feeling sorry for himself and talking about everything that's wrong with his life, everything that's wrong with his dad, and he wants to be famous to impress everybody. But the big lesson of this episode is what is most important is that he believes in himself, which is completely f like it's a completely fabricated lesson. It has nothing to do with the events of the episode.
And so it just, there is almost nothing that holds water in this, and I don't want to entirely blame it on the actor. I think there is plenty of blame to go around. He was not given good stuff to work with.
Don't just, don't give all the blame just to, to Robert Duncan McNeil, there's so
He did not write the line as the doctor is frantically trying to save his life and increase the charge by 3%, maximum dosage, go. Robert Duncan McNeil is asked to lie in the bed and say the words, Pepperoni pizza! I could really go a pepperoni pizza right about now. It's an hour of that. It's really painful.
That being said, I have just found out that Threshold did win outstanding makeup at the Emmys. So there you
They did a good job with the makeup. They, yeah. He, they did a good job. They, you couldn't tell that it was Robert Duncan McNeil underneath that salamander at all.
Look, it's a big it's a, when you get to something like that, that fundamentally alters your physicality, your personality, and down to it's core, when it comes to DNA or in any type of, when it comes to science fiction or fantasy or stuff like that, there is a line that you have to decide of whether once that alter alteration happens, that person is gone, or whether there is a chance to get them back. And it's either black and white.
They don't make the decision, here. They don't make the decision. They hedge all the way through. They kill him. He dies on the table, and then without explanation, comes back to life. And the Doctor goes, you have two hearts, and your brain waves are changing every few seconds. But he still recognizes us and he still knows the voyager. And like, yeah, he wants that pepperoni pizza. It's bad.
And after all that, and big salamanders and salamander babies and all that type of stuff, they go straight back, they go,
Cut to: resolved.
is resolved. we gotta carry on with our
On the science, I will give them this small bit of credit. The way the doctor explains that he cures them is somewhat scientifically accurate, from my reading. Something that some of the Reddit posts that I've read about this stuff in, in, in Star Trek Reddits from real scientists commenting on the science is that if you want to change someone's physiology by altering their DNA, you gotta get it all. Because if you just change the DNA in one cell or a group of cells, that's not enough.
All the other cells of the body are still operating on their original instructions and like the majority is likely to win. So in order to effect a change, you have to either change all the trillions of cells, you gotta get 'em all at once, or you have to kill off all the cells that have the original DNA and then let the new DNA spread, or at least kill off the DNA, destroy the DNA in them. And in this episode, that is effectively how the Doctor claims to have effected a cure.
He says, we're gonna extract especially strong radioactive particles from the warp core, and we will use them to destroy all of the altered DNA and let the original DNA reassert itself. So there is something there that it is least like the, that is I think the one point on the board that the science consultant managed to get that They were like, Oh god, I only get to fix one thing in this script? Okay, fix this.
Yeah. But yes, so Threshold is infamous in more ways than one. It's just the broad strokes of using DNA for what? That's not even for a gimmick. It's just, they literally, it comes across as we need to fill 50 minutes of television and because it, it's from Michael DeLuca and and the teleplay is by Brandon Bragga. So Brandon Bragga has been with the show for a while.
Oh, poor Brandon Braga. He will never live that down. That's the episode that people bring up with him of did it ever get worse than Threshold for you? And he goes, oh, Threshold, please let me forget it.
Never. We will never let anybody forget it.
Look, I will say just because we matched on Threshold, I will say it did get worse than Threshold in the DNA stakes and Star Trek Discovery's explanation of Ash Tyler and Voq is particularly egregious because that is the time where, as far as I can tell, according to that story, you can copy someone's memory, personality, and consciousness through their DNA.
What is explained in a horrible line of dialogue in Discovery's Vaulting Ambition is that Lieutenant Ash Tyler, the original human, his DNA was harvested in order to reconstruct his consciousness,
Kevin Yank is putting up the uh, the quotes.
and rebuild his memory in preparation for grafting with Voq's psyche.
Yeah, that's the word. They used it a lot in Discovery. Yeah, grafting. Grafting a personality onto another personality.
With DNA. With DNA, somehow.
Yeah. Because that all went very, it's almost body horror. It is body horror stuff in there. There's some horrific stuff in, in, in there about, the, like the body horror and the physical violation and yeah. It was not done well at all.
Yeah, I think they changed their mind halfway through the plotting of Ash Tyler. I think as far as I can tell, originally it was supposed to be Voq the Klingon, and Ash Tyler was a fake person, created for his spy persona. And that it, he was physically modified and pretending to be Ash Tyler. But then they're like, would it be like they're, when you make Michael Burnham and Ash Tyler stand next to each other, they look really good together. Why don't we make them fall in love?
Why don't we make her fall in love with the Klingon spy? And then they're like, oh, that's, they're so good together, we really like to get him back next season. How about we, we say that he's not a Klingon. He's actually the original human psyche. And we'll explain it with DNA. This is, yeah.
Yeah. It's like what they do with Alison Pill's character in season one. She kills somebody and that they wave it away with a explanation. They go, oh, possession,
Yeah.
Now she's a Borg Queen. Yeah. That type of retconning while they're going along is it, the clumsiness of it really shows.
So I think we can conclude that of all of modern Star Trek's sins around DNA, Star Trek, Picard does a reasonably constrained job. Like it, it exercises some self constraint.
Yeah. And it has been explored throughout the entire series, like cuz we didn't even address like Khan, Khan's genetically altered as well. So it's not something that's just been brought in. Like I said, it was quite vogue in the nineties of that type of stuff, but it has been a part of sci-fi exploration even back in the sixties.
Yeah. Well, there you go. That's DNA.
That is the DNA of the DNA within Star Trek. And next week we get to finally let go of the shackles. We've already seen episode 10, The Last Generation, now we get to talk about it. That people have seen on the big screen. Some people have seen it in IMAX. There has been so many posts about tears and crying and, oh it's gonna be, it's gonna be emotional next week, Kevin. I dunno if I'm, my heart is up for it.
Oh you can't stop me.