Hello and welcome back to Subspace Radio. It's me, Kevin.
And it is me, Rob.
and we are here today to discuss Lower Decks season three, episode five, our reflections.
"Reflections of the way love used to be." I've just had that stuck in my head all day.
I don't recognize that song and it's no judgment on your singing
No, no, no. I think it's a Diana Ross song.
Not the sort of trivia you were expecting to be quizzed on in, in this podcast.
Look, you know what, we throw each other curve balls all the time. Pop culture is an expansive, regenerating beast. And that can involve whatever we perceive it as. Whether it's Diana Ross or whether it is, you know, the antics of Rutherford and his mind.
What a perfect segue into this week's episode, which seemed inevitable. Rutherford's implant, what's the deal with that? They left it there just long enough that I had honestly forgotten about it.
We've been focusing so much on Boimler and Mariner. Oh, by the way, let's focus on Tendi and Rutherford. He is the character in the background, and then they did the old switcheroo, and they went, now he's the main focus.
He's only in the background because they're not ready for us to get too close to him and discover his secrets just yet. We had seen the shadowy men looming over him with the light behind them. And so we knew there was some secret, shadowy past. But I don't know about you, Rob. I feel like they did a remarkable job of making a show of us finding more out about Rutherford, but we actually found out very little about him. Except maybe like, what a dick he used to be?
That's the main thing we found out. We found out that 10 years ago Rutherford was an absolute douche bag. And we're very glad he's all okily-dokily now. He's all Flanders'd up.
I had that same thought. The difference between Old Rutherford and New Rutherford is a DNA injection of Flanders.
Which, you know, uh, when it comes to genetic engineering within this Federation is illegal, of course.
Hmm.
One thing I noticed, you've noticed in recent episodes, the quality of the animation, particularly like shots of the Cerritos and other ships.
Yeah.
I was particularly impressed with just certain shots and the sequence at the end of, uh, Rutherford's battle in his mind, a light from above shines down. It's just a beautifully put together scene. The sequence of him ascending back up into consciousness was beautifully rendered and beautifully realized. I was watching it going, this is really good Star Trek. It just so happens to be animated.
But it was done in that beautiful, poignant way that in many live action versions come out as quite clumsy. Like with Torres going up against her human and Klingon self came a bit clumsy, but this,
Oh yeah.
this was actually— There's some magic stuff in there. It could have been a little bit cheesy, but it was a beautiful composition of the shots and the sequences and the tone. It was very affecting.
They really knew how to push at least my buttons and make me really hate old Rutherford. Like they bring out the Delta Flyer and it's like, Ooh, the Delta flyer! And he immediately starts making fun about how lame the Delta Flyer is. And it's like you shut your mouth, old Rutherford. The B plot of Boimler and Mariner um, doing the recruitment booth on the planet, I think, was the sweetener in the episode. High comic value, relatively small part of the episode.
I think I will look back on that as my favorite part of this episode, of just watching Boimler fiddle with the model starship on the table and accidentally break its engines off. It was so good to watch these two try to recruit for the Federation, and come up against every form of objection imaginable.
The conspiracy theorists, the gamers who trap people inside games. "Stop trapping people inside games!"
Plenty of DS9 references for you in all of that.
I was incredibly happy. References to the Ferengi, to the Grand Nagus's scepter, and yeah, you know you're in pure Star Trek world when the cool people are, the archeologists.
That's Right.
Damn, I wish I'd be as cool as an archeologist.
I almost thought that like rogueish archeologists could be our topic for this episode, I look back and there's not that many, they're just very prominent. Like Vash in The Next Generation who is briefly the captain's girlfriend and then ends up running off with Q. She's just this like memorable recurring character. I think that's who the character in this episode is based on. I think in my mind, Star Trek was crowded with rogueish archeologists, but it was really just the one.
Just one. I particularly like that we saw the genuine fear of Mariner. That Mariner finally has been brought down a peg and all that stuff that wasn't really present in season one. Like the fear in her eyes that she doesn't want to go Starbase 80.
I'll be honest with you, I'm almost disappointed. I had gotten used to Mariner being untouchable and unflappable, and on the one hand it is satisfying, but it kind of makes her like every other character of that type that we've seen. And I had gotten used to Mariner being a weirdo exception that was afraid of nothing. I can't let the mention of Butt Bugs go by without highlighting that that is an episode that I've mentioned previously of The Next Generation called Conspiracy.
It was back when we were talking about horror episodes of Star Trek, and that is the TNG episode where they went too far, with admirals of Starfleet being possessed by what is now forever known as a Butt Bug. That episode ends with a promise of that being picked up. After the conspiracy is resolved, the camera kind of sweeps out into space and we hear the ominous signal of the aliens. And meant to like tell you they're gonna be back.
And they have never been back because I think they knew they went too far. That episode was not actually very good. No one wants to see the Butt Bugs again, but Lower Decks can bring that sort of thing back as a punchline.
Um, what season was that of Next Gen?
For the record, I'm guessing season two and I'm looking it up. Let's see if I'm right. Season one, episode 25, right at the end of the season.
Right. Yes. I thought it was, um, cuz I haven't seen that, I thought there was like the big menace but, yeah, clearly it was Butt Bugs.
But back to Rutherford. We were inspired by his shadowy past, that has yet to fully reveal itself to us.
That's true.
We know that there are some people who did something to him and hope that people don't find out
And they've made him a nicer person and a functioning member of society. Oh, the darkness of the conspiracy.
That's gonna be hilarious. If after everything, it was a shadowy experiment to try and make people nicer.
Look, I wouldn't be disappointed if that's how it turns out.
Not Completely outta the realm of possibility, on this show. But yes, it's sent us looking for other examples of characters whose past was initially hidden to us and that over the course of multiple episodes, sometimes multiple seasons or even an entire series, we get to go on that arc of discovery with the character and find out where they're from, how they got to where they are, and what the shadowy mystery is. So do you have anything from the original series, Rob?
I do not. I do not. Do you have anything from T N G?
I do. I have a character from the Next Generation.
Look, after doing so many of these, we are picking up a pattern. I know what you can be leaning into and you know exactly what I'd lean into.
I knew exactly what to steer clear of because I know where you're going this, Rob. But my first entry is Data, the Android on the bridge of the Enterprise. Very early in The Next Generation they start exploring his background, to the point where I suspect that was like part of the character bible. Not only is he an android on the bridge of the Enterprise, he's the only android, and that's a little mysterious.
It's not like the holographic doctor we get in Voyager, where it is implied that this is a standard feature of every ship in the fleet now. Data is an anomaly, and the crew around him are figuring out what to make of him as well. Riker is asking curious questions in the very first pilot. What's your deal? Why are you trying to whistle like the humans do? And so that mystery is planted early in the character and they explore it throughout the series from the very first season to the very last.
I think Datalore, which is episode 13 of season one, is where this first comes to a head, and the Enterprise visits the planet Omicron Theta, where Data was first constructed. Data's creator. Dr. Noonian Soong worked there and famously created the first Androids. We return there and discover, in a closet, the parts of Data's brother Lore, who turns out to be an evil, slightly imperfect, but emotional version of Data. How did this come about? What were the uh, events that led to his creation?
It's just a gift of a character that just grows. And like from that early pilot episode, they tell and show at the same time. So Roddenberry described data as, well, he's Pinnochio. He wants to be a real boy. And they say that I think within the first five minutes of Riker meeting him he goes, You're Pinocchio. But how the character developed and grew. And you find out the basis for his creation. And it's something that evolved over decades.
They were bringing in new stuff, even in the movies with how he deals with emotion, how he with Insurrection, how his malfunction is his morals kicking in, going, what we are doing to these people is wrong. That type of stuff is really cool. And to find out why there is only one of him is a fascinating concept that is something that you can dip into every once in a while and then let the brilliance of Brent Spiner just, go wherever the hell he wants to take you.
In season four, Data meets his father, who it turns out is not dead. He's just a very old, very made up Brent Spiner, who before finally shuffling off the mortal coil, bestows Data with an emotion chip. Data uses the emotion chip when it serves the plot, leaves it on a shelf when they would rather Data continue to be Data.
One of my favorite lines in Star Trek history is in First Contact, when the Borg have taken over the Enterprise and Data has got his emotion chip in, and they're walking. I'm feeling all these emotions, anxiety and fear and stuff like that. And, Picard just goes best if you turn off your chip. And he goes, Yes, sir. And then he goes, Data, sometimes I envy you. It's done so beautifully. It's still—
It's done so beautifully and at the same time like to try and explain that scene to someone who has never watched Star Trek. They are never gonna understand it. It is the ultimate had to be there moment.
You're gonna have to have watched, all these episodes of the Next Generation series. You need to have watched Generations, I'm sorry, where he does his "Open Sesame! Humor. I love it." You need all that to get to the payoff.
Who's your first character, Rob Lloyd?
My first character is from Deep Space Nine, and we're looking at a character who started off very dull and boring and actually became more and more interesting the more we find out about their checkered past. And I'm talking about the great Julian Bashir.
What? Oh, you've shocked me. Not the DS9 character, I thought we would be looking at. Maybe you've got another one in the oven.
That's my only DS9 character for this week.
I thought for sure we would be talking about Odo and, and what is a changeling and who are the changelings and all…
Look, that's a multi arc episode type of exploration. My, my love of Odo will span this entire podcast.
We'll find plenty of other opportunities to talk about Odo. Let's talk about our good doctor Julian. Speaking of Data, by the way, Julian Bashir reawakened Data's dream subroutines that his father left to him. Another one of those little morsels of the past that enabled him to blossom as a character.
Beautiful. Look at that connection. So Bashir came into it as quite a green character. Like he wanted to come out to the frontiers of space, cuz his life was too safe and easy. Um, he was a bit of a hound dog.
But a hapless one, like I feel like at least at the beginning, his reach exceeded his grasp by a fair amount.
Very much so. He is not your, James, T. Kirk, who is successful and confident with the ladies. Bashir is constantly tripping over himself, and a bit more grovely and weaselly than, than he would like to let on. But he's kind of like a nothing character, you kind of ignore him. And it isn't until Doctor Bashir, I Presume, the episode where we meet his parents, and we find out he was not originally the brilliant, amazing, incredible, medical mind that he is and that he was genetically engineered.
I like how you planted that seed for us earlier in the episode when talking about Rutherford's personality, manipulation.
Arcs, I'm all about the arcs.
Yes, genetically manipulated. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure that was the original reestablishment of the status of genetic manipulation in the Federation. Like there was Khan, exiled from Earth in the mid 1990s and returned in Star Trek II. But apart from that, it was just kinda left there as a fact of the future of humanity that we tried it once, genetic manipulation, and we learned our lesson. But they brought it back as a huge wrinkle in the character of Julian Bashir.
Yes, it was like this underground, black market type thing. I mean, we all remember the nineties about being big pants, big shirts, and big genetic experiments. That was how the nineties were for me. I don't know. How bout you, Kevin?
Yeah. Oh, uh, of course, uh, every weekend.
So yes, it was laid there, the dark times of the 1990s, where genetic manipulation got carried away and there was great warfare and darkness and so, to bring that back in, it's an interesting concept to bring to Star Trek. Cuz it seems Star Trek is a very pure, optimistic, hopeful view and very much, um, not as a derogatory term, but like meat and potatoes version of sci-fi. We're explorers and we are doing good stuff and, you know, we're about the utopian future.
Whereas genetic engineering gets into that murky, dark cyber punky type of William Gibson style of sci-fi. So, ingraining that into this Star Trek world is an interesting balance. And I think they, they get that balance quite nicely with Julian Bashir.
It feels to me like a substitute for racism in a way. Star Trek is like, we cannot vilify races. We are evolved beyond that. We are a post racism society in the 24th century, but those genetic manipulation people, boy, they are the garbage of humanity.
But how it is explored, these parents who just wanted the best for their child, but Julian didn't have a say in it. And so he isn't the way that he wants to be. And so battles through the course of seven seasons, how he comes to term with it. And there are future episodes where other genetically engineered characters are brought in, and how they haven't coped as well with their genetic enhancement, cuz Bashir is the shining light. It worked perfectly.
So there's just a, a hair's whisper of difference between a success with generic engineering and then creating a misfit within society who has to be imprisoned and researched and doesn't have any freedom. So yeah, I wanted to explore a character who was not very interesting to begin with, and this added layers to him.
And I mean Alexander Siddig is incredible, and shows his range and quality as an actor over the course of that season of how he morally comes to terms with what that means for his personality and who he should have been or could have been, and all that type of stuff. And he handles it in a beautiful, truthful, emotional way. He's a great realistic actor. He's not playing it for a Star Trek genre style. He's playing it, the real drama of it, and it elevates Julian to a higher plane.
It's a fascinating contrast to Data, where clearly the mystery was premeditated in the creation of Data's character at the start of the series. Whereas Julian Bashir, it feels much more like you said, they wrote him as kind of like the playboy doctor that all the ladies would fall for, and that it didn't really work on the screen. And then he sat there as, I think you said, a bit of a nothing character.
I'm sure they found it difficult to create an interesting story because their original plan for him didn't seem to work, and they created this new story for him that blossomed. And not only was the story interesting and satisfying, but it brought out new colors in the character that made us lean forward as an audience and empathize with him more in ways that he wasn't empathetic previously.
Very much so. Like he had a deep, dark secret and he was afraid to share it. And that seemed to be, a great way to do it.
My next character is from Star Trek Voyager. And we are talking Seven of Nine.
Okay. Oh, you don't wanna go with Harry Kim? That's fine. Okay.
Nobody cares, Rob. Nobody cares.
…bagged again!
He does. I feel so bad cuz I, I like the actor and honestly, I like the character as well. Everything he does is perfectly genial and enjoyable. Is the the version of the character that has taken on a life of its own in pop culture. That is what we are bagging. The actual onscreen character, the work done by the actor has all my thumbs up.
Well, I'm very grateful that there are some people out there who give their thumbs up, uh, to Harry Kim. So yes, let's look at the incredible Seven of Nine played brilliantly by untrained actor and model and just brought into be a bit of eye candy and she knocked it outta the frigging park.
Freaking nailed it.
A standing ovation for Jeri Ryan, please.
Yes. Premieres in the season three finale and season four debut, Scorpion part one and two. The mystery of Seven's origin is established in the very first episode after that two parter, Season four, episode two, The Gift, which is mostly about Kes, but this is where Seven is still all dressed up in her Borg, and this is the episode where she gets her catsuit.
That's only used one episode. It's in most of the publicity images.
Oh, the original…
…silver one. They only use it for like one episode and then they put her in, well, the more comfortable and I do that in inverted commas. yeah, other comfortable catsuits.
Well in that episode, it is established that she was originally Annika Hansen, and was assimilated as a child, and therefore her re-assimilation into humanity will likely be challenging. I don't know if you would call it a mystery initially, but the idea that she was assimilated as a child does plant that seed of, well, what was the story there?
It's very tragic. It's incredibly tragic.
They pick up that thread just four episodes later, so I feel like they had this plotted out, at least to this extent. Season four, episode six, The Raven where Seven starts to hallucinate a black bird and being chased down the hallways of Voyager by Borg drones, and gradually realizes she is reliving the events of her assimilation as a child. She ends up leaving Voyager and tracing to the site of her family's crashed ship, the Raven, and therefore discovers her origin story. It is heartbreaking.
It is implied to be heartbreaking. I feel like in this episode, the initial resolution of this story, there are a couple of shots of like her father being dragged away from camera by a Borg drone, as a young girl screams for help. It is mostly implied and the trauma is there to be seen on Jeri Ryan's face.
But we don't actually get the full story until the following season in the two-parter Dark Frontier, season five episodes 15 and 16, where the crew of the Voyager plot a raid on a Borg sphere to steal a transwarp coil and use it to get home more quickly. Seven is assigned the task of reviewing her parents' logs, which apparently they, collected from the crash site in between scenes. And it turns out her parents were scientists studying the Borg.
And they followed a Borg cube through a transwarp conduit into the Delta Quadrant where they continued to shield themself from detection and conduct duck blind studies of Borg in their natural habitat onboard the cube. It all has that sense of foreboding, of this can only end badly.
This is not gonna end well.
And indeed it does. As the technology fails them in a critical moment, they end up fleeing for their lives from a pursuing Borg cube that shoots them down and assimilates them, as a family. It's kind of this three beat thing of establishment of mystery, we understand the broad strokes of the facts, and then we actually get to go there and relive it with, Seven in the following season. It is not the central mystery of the character.
Like I'd say when people think of Seven of Nine, they don't think first of the mystery of her origin. They probably think first of whether she will become a productive member of the crew, whether she will take orders from Captain Janeway and accept her as the inevitable mother figure she needs. That is probably what people think of first with Seven of Nine and—
It was very much they were setting her up as the rather warped version of Eliza Doolittle. So can we take this, you know, urchin from the streets of the Delta Quadrant and bring them into proper Federation society. But as always with sci-fi, you connect it back to a human element. That's far more delicious and incredible to witness the horror and the trauma and the tragedy of all this lost opportunity.
And the hubris of the scientists, who thought that they were in many ways untouchable and putting their daughter at risk just for the fascination of the scientific discovery about these creatures. And she became the gift that kept on giving and it's made even more remarkable by the fact that,
Untrained actor.
untrained actor who was brought in purely because she was a model, and Jeri Ryan goes, I got this. I can…
This happens really early in connection with this storyline. The moments where she is remembering her past, or getting hints of Annika Hansen, her whole presence changes. Her whole voice changes. She speaks in an emotional tone that is not present most of the time. And it is, it is not overplayed? It is played subtly and truthfully and touchingly, with a level of skill that I would not expect from an untrained actor's third, fourth episode of television.
Just incredible stuff and to have her alongside some truly great, experienced actors and you can see that she's just springboarding off them. What she's learning off Kate Mulgrew, what she's learning off Robert Picardo is just, you know, outstanding. And so it wouldn't have worked if she wasn't a good actor. You would not believe any of this stuff. If, you know, you'd be a bit cringy, you'd be a bit, okay. They're trying.
If she didn't knock it outta the park, the tragedy and weight of her loss is so much more powerful because she just commits to it a hundred percent.
Let's go to your last character, which obviously is Elim Garak.
I do wanna talk about Garak, cuz Garak is one of greatest characters created in Star Trek, and he doesn't get as much focus. And his story arc is incredible. Oh my God. Oh—
Another time.
With the Obsidian Order.
Spies in Star Trek.
Love it. Love it. No, again, I'm dipping my toe into my favorite of the new series, Strange New Worlds. And we're looking at yes, Una Chin-Riley, or Number One, who didn't have a name until this new series, didn't even have a name for her appearances in Discovery season two!
They enjoyed that mystery, and I'm almost disappointed they let it go. Like, I feel like it would be a delightful thing that only fans noticed that she was never given a name. They could play with that so many ways of people like almost saying her name, or almost seeing her name somewhere. But I guess they felt like they did it every way they could. And then they finally, they owed the person a name.
Exactly.
…was be a regular character.
So they've added so much with a character who just appeared in The Cage, the rejected pilot of Star Trek, with Mrs. Roddenberry herself, Majel Barrett. And so they've recast it with a wonderful Rebecca Romijn. You wanna talk about an actor doing an incredible job within a sci-fi genre type thing, her work in the first two X-Men film, ah, amazing.
Mark my words, she has more gravitas of command than even Captain Pike does in this series. Like, I would follow her into battle before I would follow Captain Pike, who, who is a bit of like the nice dad, but I feel like when he needs someone fired, he sends Una Chin-Riley down to do the dirty work.
Yeah. Gotta gotta get rid of that guy over there. Could you, uh, you know, let him down easy. I've gotta work on my pirate impressions!
Yeah.
So this is another interesting way of doing things. So with Data, they laid the groundwork to reveal this character as they went along. With Bashir, they had one idea that didn't work, so they laid in this other track. With Seven of Nine, it's not so much a mystery, it's more of a, the reveal of the tragedy of how they got there. Whereas with this, they had a character who's already appeared, but they needed to take it more than just being a title, and they needed to build a character behind it.
So what they built in. When in doubt, like they did with Bashir, let's build in genetic engineering. Not only do we give her a name, we give her a species. She's Illirian and the Illirians are banned from the Federation because their entire culture is founded on genetic engineering and improving yourself. So we find out through the course of the first season, she has lied to be in Starfleet, Pike finds this out, and he defends his friend. He's known her for years.
And he realizes she's not defined by where she is from, but who she is. And so much so that becomes the big cliffhanger for the end of season one, that her identity is revealed and she has taken away by the Federation. And Pike has got that look in his eyes, determination, he will get his friend back.
How do you feel about this storyline, Rob?
Look, I'm actually okay with it, and it does create a good connection between her and La'an, both being from a genetic engineering type background and there's a good connection between them and there's some beautiful scenes between the two of them, looking upon everybody else within the ship.
One of my favorite moments in Sherlock, the Steven Moffat version of Sherlock Holmes, which I never really liked, but there's a beautiful moment in the season two where Holmes and his brother Mycroft are sort of like looking around at everyone and go, how do these people function with emotions and all that type of stuff. And there's a similar moment between the two of them and some great moments of charm when they're going… when they find out the competition, within the,
Enterprise Bingo.
Enterprise Bingo. Um, but that beautiful moment where the two of them of these elevated level of genetically enhanced life forms are looking around and going, how do they function?
I have to admit, this storyline is one of the aspects of Strange New Worlds season one that I'm most ambivalent about. Um, it is the, cognitive dissonance of… Increasingly, with each season, with each series, modern Star Trek is leaning into the idea of inclusiveness, and that diversity in all of its forms is something we have learned to celebrate, and we accept every person on their own merits. That is like hammered into the scenery with modern Star Trek in a way that I firmly believe in.
And just like I was saying before that the stigma against genetic manipulation is like the substitute for racism in the Star Trek universe, in modern Star Trek I can barely bring myself to believe that that sort of prejudice would exist in that universe.
If you are so accepting of diversity in all of its other forms, including like holding your worst enemy to your chest and making them a part of your crew, how could you possibly sustain a blanket grudge against anyone who would dare to change their own genome in the name of science or the betterment of the species? I'm not sure I buy this story in today's context. But the more I sit on it, the more I have to admit it was well written. It was well played.
If you set aside the one impossible to believe thing that people would be prejudiced against genetic manipulation, if you accept that one impossible idea, then it's a great story with great characters, and maybe I should just get used to it.
I think you are warming up to it just in the monologue you were just doing. You were convincing yourself as you were talking. It was beautiful to sit here and watch going. I don't even need to be here, but I'm happy to be the audience.
Ultimately, what's gonna matter to me is do they tell a worthwhile story with it or this just a cheap way to add a character's vulnerability to what seems like an indestructible first officer.
Yes. And I mean, they did have the episode focus on the Illyrians, so obviously we got a little taste of it, but again, it'll be a case of finding out more about the culture, finding out more about Una, and finding out that backstory of her and of her culture as well.
Like our tribute to David Warner, his one speech about the Cardassian people is more information than we received over the entire seven years of their appearances on Deep Space Nine, in many ways, about how their culture evolved and how they were saved by warfare. So it's gonna be very interesting if they can inject that level of, like with the Kelpiens as well, how we found out about how their race has evolved.
And that's what we need to do now with the Illyrians, and we need to find that tangible justification for why the Federation is so opposed to it. And this is putting it in the front line of the storytelling, now, cuz it's the cliffhanger of season one is about getting her back. So it's not just about getting her back, but making her accepted within the Starfleet community, and why that prejudice is there. Cause at the moment it's just a case of, oh, it's wrong.
I'm curious how big of a thing they're going to make of this because it was a twist in the very final moments of that last episode. And it could be that they're setting her up for a season long arc, or it could be one of those twists like Lower Decks did to us this season, it's resolved in the first 10 minutes of the following season. Something that has caught my attention is that between seasons one and two of Strange New Worlds, they are publishing a comic book miniseries called Strange
The Illyrian Enigma. And the blurb for that, this is a, a mini series that is kicking off in December, and tells a story in the gap between the two seasons: "Commander Una Chin-Riley, first officer and helmsman of the USS Enterprise stands accused of unlawful genetic manipulation by Starfleet. Sparing no time, Captain Pike and his crew set out in search of evidence to prove her innocence." Now, I assume they're not gonna resolve this in a comic book because that is not Star Trek's style.
If they put a question on screen, they give you the answer on screen as well. So this is probably going to be like an interstitial story, adventure offscreen that is completely optional, and vaguely non-canonical. But it is being co-written by one of the uh, producers of the TV series. So it is close to canon.
I assume we'll get back to the season and they'll go, you know, all the heavy lifting will be done in the comic book and so they'll just arrive going, what have you found?
Yeah, I think you're right. The other thing that's fascinating about Una Chin-Riley's mystery is no matter what happens, the crew of Deep Space Nine still have to be scandalized by the discovery that Julian Bashir is genetically modified a hundred years from now. So, how is this going to be resolved in a way that leaves space for the space racism to come.
Ah, space racism.
Now we don't have to do our episode about racism in Star Trek.
We'll just go off and watch Star Trek VI, which is great.
Well, we have ended our investigation of mysterious backgrounds with another character just like Rutherford whose full mystery has yet to be resolved. Uh, so the, the mysterious character backgrounds continue.
Don't you worry Odo and Garak, we will get to you in more detail in future episodes.
Before we go this week, I did wanna take a moment to mark the passing of our very own Kai Winn of Bajor. Louise Fletcher passed this past week. And what an amazing actor. I struggle to point to any other recurring guest star in Star Trek who was as formidable and celebrated and actor as Louise Fletcher was. Like, that is the big guns showing up on your starbase. It was amazing that was willing to do that job.
It's a sad state of the industry, isn't it, that an Oscar winning actor for one of the most incredibly powerful and understated performances in cinema history couldn't get regular work and spent the next three or four decades of their career jumping about from TV work to TV work, and barely getting any cinema work again. Which we would look upon as Star Trek fans going thank you so much for slumming it with us, but elevated the quality of the show.
I mean, there's so many incredible actors on Deep Space Nine, in my opinion, more so than many other Star Trek shows. Just the quality of the actors they have on there, and Louise Fletcher is the perfect example. Kai Win is not just a one note character. From her very first appearance, there are so many layers to her. She's not just blind ambition. And what they did with her character in the future seasons and stuff like that is incredible. Just adding to all that she is.
Such a master of the craft. And it's such a shame that her part of popular culture is not being as celebrated as it could, because she's just a superstar of a performer. And just the range and depth, some of those lines that she delivered to Nana Visitor as Kira, done with such warmth and charm and calm, but the venom behind it was incredible.
The innocent smile and the knife in the back at the…
Knife in the back. And then the frailty she shows herself later on. Like she's such a powerful figure in the early seasons, but then the vulnerability she shows when her and Gul Dukat, who's in disguise as a Bajoran – you have to be there – shows her vulnerability as well.
I love that they gave her so much to do in this show. I would not be surprised if they wrote the character and went, Wouldn't it be great if we could get a Louise Fletcher type for this? Wouldn't that be incredible? Uh, does anyone know her agent's number? She'll surely say no. I really only know her from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a very similar character, Nurse Ratched in that seminal film.
likewise is the most evil villain you can imagine, who is absolutely convinced that she's doing the nicest possible thing for everyone around her.
Star Trek was not a slum for her. She did Exorcist II: The Heretic, all right? There are many levels to slumming and, uh, we are high level slum when it comes to Star Trek.
They took that archetype of Nurse Ratched of the smiling villain who is absolutely convinced they're in the right. And they gave us multiple seasons of television to extend that story and go, well, if that character is true, then where does that take us? And we get to see the vulnerability that we never saw in Nurse Ratched. We get to see her challenged in ways that we never saw Nurse Ratched challenged. And it is so much richer a character and experience because of it.
So recognizing what she did well and giving her an opportunity to build on it, I love Star Trek for doing that.
The format of Deep Space Nine allowed this character to not— If she appeared on Next Generation, would just be a one off episode and then gone, like David Warner. But with Deep Space Nine being set in the one location, the reoccurring appearance and the growth and the development of Kai Winn is the perfect example. When you go, why set Star Trek in one place? Here, you get to see this character grow and develop and become this overarching villain. But there is so much more to them than that.
They become this 3D, living, breathing entity that you can sympathize with at some times, be aggravated by, be angry with. Louise Fletcher as Kai Winn justifies why Deep Space Nine needed to be set on a space station in one location. You could not have had that glorious development of a character if it was just trekking from place to place.
The memory alpha page for Louise Fletcher calls out many of her credits, and the fact that they intersect with other long running guest stars, and small players in Star Trek cannon, because of course they did. The one that stands out to me as I'm scrolling right now is that in 1994, Fletcher co-starred with David Warner in the thriller Tryst.
Ah, well there you go. That would be one of the seek out and, uh, explore. I'd be interested to see what other, like C or D grade movies she made in the eighties. It's a real shame. Just go through that and going, Oh, scraping the barrel right there. But she always brought it. She's incredible in whatever she did.
Kai Winn. We salute you.
And go on with the Prophets and, uh, may you walk with them.