Hello. Welcome back to Subspace Radio. It's me, Rob. And joining me is Kevin Yank. How are Kev?
Still uh, on patrol near the neutral zone, on holiday. I still sound funny and I have still had less time than usual to watch Star Trek.
You are keeping those Romulan Canucks at bay, which I really appreciate. There is a new Star Trek episode out there. We are here to talk about it, and the broader themes connected to it. We are looking at Strange New Worlds, season two, episode six, Lost in Translation. Yes. And there is a moment in it right near the end where where James T. Kirk, and Uhura get right close together and he whispers something in her ear and we don't know what it is.
What i— Oh no, that's a different Lost in Translation.
I was gonna say, I missed that bit. Ah, yes. No, that is a different Lost in Translation. Although there is, Kirk and Uhura crossing paths and eventually starting their friendship is a prominent element of this episode for sure.
Definitely. So we have the first physical manifestation, not on a view screen of James T. Kirk in the prime universe, not an alternative universe, not a, a connection with La'an and all this type of stuff from another timeline or something. This is the James T. Kirk. I cannot do bigger hand gestures even though we're a podcast. So, uh, would you care to talk us through the story, Kev?
Oh, sure. High level, there is a deuterium refinery that is behind schedule. And the Enterprise, and the Farragut we are told, but we never actually see that ship as far as I
No, we
It is conspicuous how much we do not see that ship. These two ships are brought in under command of Fleet Captain Christopher Pike, looking after the three Starfleet vessels in this episode. As they start to figure out how to fix this thing and get this project on track, Uhura hears weird sounds and sees weird things.
We eventually discover that a member of the crew of the refinery has also been seeing and hearing weird sounds and weird things and is a little further down the track to madness than Uhura. Lots of chasing each other through halls and seeing horrible things we wish we hadn't seen. And at the end of it, it's revealed there were interdimensional life forms living in the deuterium. So we blow up the refinery and we all go home. The end.
And we have, yes, we have all those wonderful storylines and character connections laid out as we have the giants of the franchise, James T. Kirk finally meet Uhura for the first time, and a tantalizing first meeting between James T. Kirk and Spock.
Kirk, Spock, and Uhura and also Pike, like Kirk and Pike meet for the first time, as far as we can tell. That's a touchy one from canon because they say they, they like met once and this didn't sound like the thing they were talking about, but that's a minor detail. People meet and forget to mention it all the time.
Exactly. Even if you are meeting Anson Mount. You may or may not remember that. You're caught up in your own thing on the day, you dunno where your Farragut ship is because it never actually is shown on screen. He was dealing with a lot James T. Kirk.
There was one shot as they were evacuating the refinery that kind of zoomed back from the refinery and all of the escape shuttles are flying away from it. And if you squint, I think you can see two ships with saucer sections like undoing from the side. So one of those could have been the Farragut, but it was like three pixels wide.
It's gonna take a lot of work, a little bit too much work to do that. But that hasn't stopped Star Trek fans before to find out those little Easter eggs, like where the Millennium Falcon is in the background of First Contact during one of the fight scenes.
They never actually mentioned it, but Pike is wearing a different insignia on his shirt. Like they're all talking about the fact that he's Fleet Captain. No one mentions that, like the black circle background on his insignia must be there to represent that. But yeah, just a detail I noticed. The other thing I noticed and that is worth calling out is that Hemmer came back in uh, spectral, hallucinogenic form and prerecorded form, but it was good to see a bit more Hemmer from the actor.
And yeah, when they said you know, no one's ever quite dead in Star Trek, we've heard the fans and we're looking at ways we might bring him back. This sounds like the sort of thing they were talking about. And on the one hand, it was good to see him again. On the other hand, It still leaves you wanting more, doesn't
Oh, look yeah, he was taken from us way too soon. Wonderful performance. And we got, the range of Hemmer from, video benign, but a little bit cheeky. And, very much willing to push Uhura to not be so gullible. But then also weird, zombie esque deformed rotting corpse version. The range of Hemmer is amazing. And we had lovely little interactions between Pelia and Una, Number One.
Were they lovely? Because they were pretty this is like my main objection to this episode, the main thing that prevented me from enjoying it as much as some of the previous episodes this season, was that people were a little mean to each other These people did not seem to like each other a lot of the time. The Kirk brothers fighting,
We haven't even mentioned that. The first time we see the Kirk brothers finally together. Yeah.
Yeah. Didn't love that. Although it definitely has the feel of establishing the start of an arc, so that when eventually they do embrace and support each other as brothers, that it will be earned and it will feel important, and something that took some time to get to, but this feels like the unsatisfying start of the relationship. Una and Pella, I'm, I did not love the bickering there.
I did the one thing that made me think was when Una said, you've been in Starfleet since before I was born and I still outrank you. What does that tell you? And Pella had no, no rejoinder to that. She just walked away and said she'd get to work fixing the refinery. And that is tantalizing to me. If there is an arc that we are going to get to see Pelia go on, where she becomes her full potential as a Starfleet officer rather than a space hippy as she was called in this episode.
I am there for that. I would love to see Pelia come face to face with the fact that she is squandering her potential or squandering the opportunity or not bringing her best to Starfleet and turning into that model officer. I would love to see that. I don't know if that's why we have Carol Kane on this show, but if that's where we're headed, I'm excited about it.
Yeah, I guess I was a little bit starstruck by any time that Carol Kane comes on screen, but it can get, it did seem a little tacked on. It did seem a little bit, and here is a scene and here is another scene and they didn't, the stories didn't really seem to connect that well with Lost in Translation, if you think about it. And especially it did seem, let's, we have Carol Kane contracted for this episode. Let's put her in here.
And I'm there going, why not put her in an episode with characters she's had a connection with, say, Amanda.
Pelia's scene with Uhura in the nacelle was much more interesting to me of like, why don't you talk to me? Welcome to the Enterprise. That there was a lot under the surface there, and we could read it as an audience. We didn't need to be told after the fact what was behind it or what it meant. Uh, so I really did enjoy that little one.
And a beautiful moment of, how we refer to people who have passed on. He was a wonderful, great student.
He was just okay. Yeah.
I love the tantalizing little taste of stuff. So when you've got, I think it was Spock playing four dimensional chess with Chapel and Kirk in the background going, oh, he had it, had him in check and now, and you're, they're going, oh, that's a drop. That's a drop right there. That's, we see that later on.
Yeah. Kirk's a better chess player even than Spock.
Exactly. If you can imagine it. And yeah, and that whole concept of I like when Star Trek does that, when they have that whole element of beings beyond our comprehension and how finding different forms of communication there. I often bring up other franchises out there and I think I've been bringing up Doctor Who every week.
There's a great Doctor Who story that I quite like, it divides fans called 42, where there's a ship refining energy from a sun and it turns out the sun that they are refining from is a sentient being. So what they're actually doing is, hurting this sentient creature. So they have to release back all the ore and materials they have collected from it. And I've got very much a sense of that from this story.
Yeah we've been done doing all this talking, but we haven't talked about whether we liked it or not. So I got the idea it wasn't high on your rank for the season.
No. It was mixed and I think a big part of it is the influence of Kirk coming in. And it reminds me when the Enterprise came into Discovery in season two, and as fans who are addicted to fan service and canon references, we all lean in and suddenly we are more interested in the crew of the Enterprise than we are in the characters that are meant to be the core of our story in Star Trek: Discovery, the crew of the USS Discovery.
And I felt a bit of that again here with Kirk running around with Uhura this episode. It felt like Kirk here is not doing anything that a member of our crew couldn't have done. And the only reason Kirk is here is to play to our, our predilections as fans who love James T. Kirk. And it felt to me like a it wasn't fatal, it was a good episode, but it kept it from being a great episode. And I worry the more they lean into this.
Oh, what these people are going to be in the original series, let's reference that. Every time it's at the expense of the characters we have now, it weakens the episode and the show for me, so I suspect this is gonna be the weakest episode of the season for me. Maybe with the very first one still below it.
Yeah, getting, it is getting us. I enjoyed it. But again, I think I am a one-eyed Strange New Worlds fan, but I am getting a sense of this season that there's little hints and teasers and tastes in the season of going you're used to the Enterprise crew from Next Gen or Deep Space Nine where you're go, you've got these guys for seven years or whatever. And I'm getting a sense of this season of going, there's an inevitability here.
Sure we know about Pike and even Pike knows about Pike and yeah, and losing Hemmer last season as well going, we know where the crew is gonna be. We know the crew that is gonna stay there for decades on the Enterprise, like literally. So this case of, we don't have that much time with this crew the way that we have them. So they're, I didn't know if they'd do it. I didn't realize they'd start doing it this soon.
Not going full Game of Thrones, of going, anyone can go at any episode, and so if anyone has a long exposition scene, they're gonna be killed at the end, or have a Red Wedding episode. But it is that sense of, we know who's gonna fill in these roles in a couple of years, so how these characters are gonna move on is coming in a bit sooner than I thought it would.
I think I detected in this episode a theme for the season at large. And it was when Kirk gave Uhura the pep talk. Where he said Death is winning. It claimed your family, it claimed your friend, it convinced you to forget them because it's less painful than holding onto their memories. This, to me, was a real strong echo of the previous episode where people literally lost their memories of their loved ones, Among the Lotus Eaters.
And it felt such a strong echo or such a strong parallel that I feel like that must be a theme that we're playing with through this season is do you choose to remember the people who have left you and do you choose to feel the pain that comes with that?
That's a huge moment in the show. We've had very little knowledge of Uhura's past and to have it revealed within season one of Strange New Worlds, and now to get a vision flash of that crashed ship was incredibly powerful. And it is that overriding sense of what are you running away from? What are you accepting, what are you gonna do about it? And especially when it comes to Kirk in the future, he doesn't like a no lose situation.
Yeah, yeah.
And he doesn't like facing death.
The interdimensional entities that were communicating with Uhura here, first of all, I need to say I loved the way that they came up with her receiving that communication, the sound that they gave us, that metallic vibrating noise. It was so tantalizing and I thought from the very first time we heard it, I thought I could swore I heard a voice in that and I was like, oh, this is one of those sounds that's gonna be a distorted voice.
Maybe it's your own voice projected from the past or whatever it is, but it's, there's definitely a voice in there. And as the episode goes on, it's gonna gradually clear up until we can make out what it's saying and who's saying it. And I'm so glad we didn't go that way. Like it, in the end, the noise was just a noise. And maybe they did make it with a weird speech synthesizer thing in post-production, but it was a beautiful, almost red herring of, I wanna know what that's saying.
You don't get to know what that's saying. The message is in the visions that she's having. And so that is why we chose understanding non humanoid communication or non humanoid life, understanding what they're trying to tell us. That is the theme that we're going to explore in Star Trek here.
Definitely. So as always, we go chronologically. So do you have anything from Enterprise?
Nope.
Do you have anything from the original series?
No.
Do you have anything from the original series movies?
No, I don't.
I do, cause any chance I get to talk about Voyage Home, I will.
Oh, of course the whale
The whale probe. Yeah, short and sharp is a good one. I've talked about this so many times, but it's a great concept to, not only did Nimoy bring in with this going, I don't want an adversary. I don't want an enemy. I want a problem to solve. So there's no battles. There's no Hornblower in space, there's no conspiracies, there's no, old racist or underlying prejudices coming up to the surface. This is Star Trek at its most purest, we have an alien problem that needs solving.
It doesn't need to be blown up. And I don't know if it's mentioned in any way, shape or form about, or if it is, it's wiped off because there isn't any talk about how to kill it. It's all about how do we stop this thing? How do we communicate with it? And they're losing all their power.
Yeah there's, there's no scene of ships swooping in and taking pot shots at it and going, oh, it's made neutronium. We can't do anything about it like that is completely bypassed just by the fact that you get anywhere near this thing and your lights go out.
And, you know that would be a modern thing. They would have a scene of fifty Federation ships going at it, being wiped out or losing all their power just to have some sense. But in, there is none here. It's just, it's so big. You can't, it's all about how we defend ourselves as opposed to we, how do we kill it? And the process of Spock going through how to communicate with it and the the. The solving of problems let's go, let's drop it underwater. Let's hear that
Oh, I love that scene where Uhura gets to mess with the sounds and eventually it like, through a believable set of audio filters, it suddenly sounds exactly like whale song. I love that.
It's a great moment, isn't it? Going okay well, let's do it here. How's that sound? And she goes, oh, we'll try this. Could you do it that way? I'm not sure. Let's see
Add some salinity.
Yeah. And even at the end like they're going, they'll understand the songs, not the language. We'll be talking to them in gibberish. So it's a case of there's no real language or a conversation, it's just this harmony, this unity between these songs to communicate an update of where they are. It's a beautiful concept and at the end it go, it flies away and we're there going, what happened? It's a beautiful sequence of the eye of the humpback whale and the turning.
It's a beautiful slow sequence that just they go, this was the highest grossing Star Trek film for a long time, and there's just a
There's no score. There's just whale song and cross-cutting between the two things. And we are left to imagine message that passes between them.
It's a beautiful ballet of creatures and species.
So bold, so confident for the filmmakers at that time to create this whole thing. And then in the climax to trust our imaginations. Uh, trust that will be satisfying in and of itself. I know there is a passing mention in Lower Decks that the probe was sent by space whales. We are left to imagine a species of super advanced humpback whales that sent that probe. I do enjoy the mystery that Star Trek IV leaves us with a little more than that.
Not everything needs to be answered.
No. The design of that probe, I remember like drawing it in my notebook at school after seeing that film for the first time. It was, just like the Enterprise, it was such a simple shape that it was instantly recognizable and yet completely like arbitrary. It was one of those shapes that could only really exist in space. That, that, that kind of thing, it couldn't land, it couldn't fly in an atmosphere. It wasn't made for that. It was a space object. It felt native to space.
The fact that it was almost invisible except when the light was glinting off the black surface really mysterious and that blue ball that came out of it, yeah, just so much wonder and mystery and all of it left open to interpretation for us to make our own minds up about. I did love that.
And just, yeah, the simplicity of just a, sorta like a cylindrical tube and a ball. And when it does move, 'cause it's in the same sort of we see it shot the same way, just in like in, in the horizontal. But then when it starts communicating, it start, it tilts up and just that
Yeah, it dives just like the
dives like the whale and it, and they're select matching each other in their appearance and the ball goes back in and you're there going this is, just the simplicity of it makes it so much more powerful and a whole language that is so simple. It is so beyond any complicated form of speech that we have. It's a beautiful I love that tantalizing, enigmatic ending where we don't know. I love that type of stuff.
The effect that the signal has on the Earth's oceans. On the one hand, it's there as a plot point. There needs to be a threat, there needs to be something that forces us to have to deal with it.
But the idea the signal would vaporize the surface of the water and cover the planet in clouds and cause these storms that threaten Starfleet Headquarters yeah, it was all part of the mystery that I recall as watching this, that it yeah, it's a delicate balancing act to make something that is threatening but not a villain,
Yes.
I gotta ask you, as Star Trek IV's biggest fan, what is in your imagination, the message that passes between the whales and the space probe in the end when they finally communicate?
I think, yeah, like if there's any source of conversation there or some sort of connection, I think it literally would be a case of George and Gracie there going dudes, we have been on a journey. We have been in one, now we are here, we are thrown into this place. I get a sense of maybe there's some sort of ancestral connection. So they can just understand what this probe wants and what their connection is, whether they're space whales or not.
It's just a case of, oh, the journey we have gone on to talk to you right now. Oh, the journey. And I think it's just sharing stories going, we were here, we were trapped, we are free. We were gonna get killed. We are now here. We're talking to you. Come back, talk to our, the kids of our kids in a couple of thousand years. Hey, you travel safe. We are fine here. We're all good. We were on the brink of extinction apparently. Now we're gonna start again. Wahey. Okay. See you later.
Very good. Alright, I am going to take us from San Francisco Bay up to The Next Generation season one episode 18, Home Soil.
Wow, you're going to season one.
Yeah, season one, early TNG. And it is, this is a very wooden episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But perhaps most memorable, this episode for the phrase ugly bags of mostly water.
I've been described that many, many times.
This is so early that Tasha Yar is still on the bridge of the Enterprise in this
Oh, wow.
The Enterprise visits a terraforming project on a planet that is behind schedule and the Enterprise is there to get it back on schedule. Is this sounding familiar, Rob?
Little bit.
The plot of this episode is very similar in many respects to what we got this week in Strange New Worlds. The Enterprise delegation beams down, gets a very awkward tour of the terraforming facility, by a woman who I apologize if she's listening, not her best work, I'll say. They're not down there five minutes before one of the colonists is killed by a drilling laser that seemingly takes on a mind of its own and drills him to death.
One thing leads to another and they discover that the drill was under the control of a non humanoid form of life that was present on this planet and undetected until now, and has been working against the terraformers in order to try to preserve its species.
The life form is initially seen as just a blinking white light at the end of one of the mining tunnels, and they beam it on the ship and it's sitting in a bell jar in the medical lab as Dr. Crusher scans it with increasing levels of magnification. It starts to split and divide, and eventually takes control of the universal translator and starts communicating. When it can speak for itself, it lodges a complaint that the terraformers were destroying its habitat.
Picard does some diplomacy, beams it back down and the story ends there. Rewatching this episode just today, I was struck by how it is almost beat for beat, what we got in Strange New Worlds, but with none of the character development. It is truly the first outing of this plot, and the writers were like this plot is so interesting. It is such a sci-fi story that will stand on its own.
And it is for me, such a contrast with this week's episode of Strange New Worlds, which is the same story, but carrying so much character development weight. We have Uhura reckoning with the death of her parents and the death of Hemmer. We have La'an face-to-face with the mirror image of her love in James Kirk. Pelia and Una arguing about what makes a good Starfleet officer. None of these things are present in the Next Gen episode which is just played completely straight.
And so I would not necessarily recommend this as one of Next Generation's best. But it is interesting to look at just to see how far we've come in, uh, telling the same kind of story and how much we get out of it.
It does sound very much like just a procedural episode.
It is completely procedural.
So it's comparisons for me is around in the late mid nineties there was Law & Order juggernaut going on, but my favorite cop show was a show called Homicide: Life on the Street, which was more an ensemble, developed the characters more, and Jerry Orbach, who was on Law & Order at the time, he, they did crossovers. It was one of the earliest stages where I became aware of crossovers.
So you had characters from Law & Order go to Homicide and Orbach always said he preferred going onto Homicide because he could expand his character. He could have little moments where they're not just— Cause you watch Law & Order and you've got these great actors and they, you never reveal any of their character. They're just, they're going procedure, talking through this type of stuff, and there's no color or shape or interest to it.
So this episode definitely feels these are shells of characters just to push that narrative idea forward. And when you've got the greats of Spiner and Frakes and McFadden and Stewart of course let these characters, let these actors shine. They don't need to just sprout technobabble.
Yeah, the closest we get to character drama in this episode is that question of like, how much did the colonists know and when did they know it? And ultimately what's revealed is there were signs that they chose to ignore because they're career-driven and they didn't want— this is a recurring plot point in Star Trek. The worst bit of news to a scientist that is trying to use this lifeless rock is that there is life on that lifeless rock.
And that's the tension in this episode is that these scientists blinded themselves to the signs of life, because they did not want their project to suffer.
As Dr. Ian Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, you spent so much thinking about if you could, you didn't stop to think about if you should.
Well, There you go. That's a couple of examples of non-humanoid life.
We went from the highs to the, to, to the wooden. We had the success of Star Trek IV to a later episode of season one of Next Gen, wooden as it may be. What a, what a wonderful cavalcade of range and quality we have in this franchise. We'll be back next week with the episode I have been hanging out for Kevin, oh, we finally get to talk those old scientists. It's gonna be real. It's gonna be a crossover. I'm gonna hear Boimler's high-pitched scream. It's gonna be awesome. It better be awesome.
All right. See you then, Rob.
See you then.