Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
It’s very easy to take a point of view that makes it look like mysogyny whenever a show with a woman-led cast gets canceled but let’s face the simplest facts first: Paramount+ is a shit streaming platform with a limited library. Prodigy is a kids show and kids shows don’t drive subscribers. If they really wanted the show to succeed they would have put it somewhere with an actual audience.
When it comes down to it, Paramount+ itself was an idiotic play. They should never have tried to go solo but all they could see was a gold rush, now they are finally starting to see that they were actually late and are stuck scrabbling for scraps with their limited offerings
The more I think about this episode the more impressed I get. There's so many small moments where they could have taken the easy, obvious choice and it would have been fine, and instead they were just a little more thoughtful and a little more creative and it shows.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who's very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise...just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she's one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
They could have had the Romulan agent just be a cold, ruthless assassin from the future who's here to get the job done, and that would have been fine. Instead she's this slightly unhinged woman, trapped out of time, stuck undercover on an alien world for thirty years on a mission that she's not sure exists anymore and I love the way she starts losing it at the end, that she just wants to kill this kid and be done with it.
They could have cast Khan as a hot 20 something available in the Toronto area and had him to a Ricardo Montalbán impression and give us a tense standoff, and I would have been annoyed at that, but it probably would have been fine. Instead they show us an actual child, and remind is that Khan was a horrifying monster, but he was created by a world with monsters of its own, monsters who built a child in a laboratory and raised him in a basement, and suddenly its a piece of implied context made explicit that I didn't even know I wanted.
And of course they could have just had Kirk agree to fix the timeline because its the right thing to do, or because he loves La`an, or because...honestly, because the plot has to happen, this is something that so many stories would just gloss over to keep the story moving. And instead we get one line, "Sam's alive?" and my heart jumped to my throat a little bit and immediately we understand why he's willing to go through with this.
I'm really really impressed with the writers on this episode.
Although it does remain very funny that they're doing this much work to make us care about Sam Kirk, a character who's fate is to die off screen to a brain parasite before the episode even starts. Sorry Sam.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who’s very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise…just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she’s one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
It’s not just fun–but it speaks to a different demographic than most shows speak to.
It’s telling older women that it’s not too late to change and grow and learn. Here she is, obviously having already lived a long life–but then we learn she hasn’t ALWAYS been an engineer from the start. She did not begin as someone obviously fascinated by science.
She realized later in life. And then she was able to SUCCESSFULLY pursue her career and become an expert. Just because she wasn’t a child prodigy didn’t mean she couldn’t learn and grow. There’s SO many stories focusing on people who have things 100% right immediately out of the gate. Top grades in school, top performance at work, accolades, reccomendations from the time they were teens.
But this story is of an ordinary eccentric retail worker…who goes back to hit the books and succeeds with her change.
This lesson will go over 75% people’s heads…but in true Star Trek fashion, even if it elludes many, it’ll hit home with the demographic it’s meant to talk to. Older women who feel like they’re too old to change. That they shouldn’t even try. It’s talking to THEM like so many other characters in Star Trek talk to other overlooked people.
And that makes this detail–one out of many in this excellent episode–top Star Trek.
Also it feels kind of significant that they finally dropped the word socialist on screen to describe the Federation? They've always danced around it before, but I'm glad they finally made it explicit, even in an off hand way. It helps make the Federation feel less "magical" and more like something that people who existed in history, connected to both the past and the future, had to actually build
I really really like Pelia as a character and a concept. I think its a very smart approach to immortality to have her be someone both used to and unresistant to change. The world happens. Time moves on. Over centuries kingdoms turn into empires turn into wastelands turn into spacefaring cooperatives and she's not jaded nor stagnant, she just continues to grow and adapt and change as things change around her.
I do love also how she’s not some wisened genius race. She’s just old. Like maybe her people were space faring at some point in time, but given how long they live getting fast high end tech isnt necessary so they probably werent as advanced as most species we encounter in star trek.
But also even if they were it’s been a long time since they used their tech and even if they remember it it’s not like she would know how to build it. Like I know how to drive a car, and can do some basic mechanic work, and I know the broad strokes of how an internal combustion engine works. If someone asked me to build them a car they’d be out of luck.
I feel that TNG is getting pretty dated too, it’s older now than TOS was when it aired. It also has some pretty rough spots early on. Very good show and generally a good start for new viewers, but I feel a curated list of the best TOS episodes would also make a good start.
Star Trek fandom is OLD. And a lot of the old fans go back to the BBS and email list days. They’ve/we’ve weathered plenty of technology changes.
This is in fact the one sub I am NOT surprised is so active. It’s one part Old Fandom, and one part the new shows coming out being pretty good, making the fandom alive and kicking instead of moribund and dead.
I can’t say they were always as civil as they might be. Even in the late 80s with laserprint copies in vogue, there were folks who thought shouting everything in AllCaps was the way to get their message across.
@BROMETHIUS you may wish to check the pinned message at the top of this community.
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I started with TNG just because I've seen clips of Q. Worth it.
I have since finished TNG and am a couple episodes into TOS. Suprisingly TOS is not as bad as expected. It kinda holds up and the quality is pretty dang good on Netflix, again to my surprise.
Not sure I am gonna watch many of the other shows. I tried Discovery and Picard and I'm not really hooked. They are not bad, just eh. I do want to watch all the old movies though, right after I finish TOS which will probably take me a few years :D
I would at least touch on VOY, it needs a bit to get going, just like TNG I suppose, but it's solid. And the big, big payoff is watching DS9 after that. DS9 is fantastic, but it only gets better with the context from VOY and TNG.
Can you give a (spoiler free if possible) reason for why you would recommend watching VOY before DS9 instead of the other way around? I assumed that VOY might contain spoilers for DS9 since it aired later.
There’s this weird cultural norm that says TOS is extremely cheesy, Shatner hams up every episode, the sets are all terrible, and it isn’t worth watching. It’s sad because TOS is my favourite and it has so many interesting stories, and Kirk is such a cool captain. Even TAS is worth a watch, especially the episode Yesteryear!
It’s a real shame TOS got shafted by season 3, and we never got more of its peak due to diminishing budget. That’s what networks love doing though, they can never appreciate a good thing until it’s been off the air for decades and people are clamouring for more.
I would highly recommend anyone starting off with a collection of some of the best or most relevant episodes of TOS, as well as some of the poor ones like Spock’s Brain. I’ve found at least the bad TOS ones are interesting, but bad TNG ones can be just boring.
Me at the beginning: Oh, great. More time travel. I'm so sick of time travel and temporal mechanics. The Science Vulcan Directorate has determined that time travel has been done to death.
You echo my exact sentiments. I was so prepared to be disappointed by "yet another time travel episode to modern day, oh boy" and the writers pulled it off.
I've been incredibly impressed by S2 so far, gotta say.
That wasn’t the Prime timeline, though, or it never really got the chance to be for very long - that we the timeline when Pike decided to write to the kids and avoid his fate. So while a butterfly effect may have ended up having Una still incarcerated, that wasn’t what we wound up with, not at the end of the episode, and not in “Balance of Terror”.
Having Una have temporal shivers from a timeline that no longer exists would be a neat idea, regardless.
Is that a reference to how the eugenics wars were supposed to happen in the 90’s but obviously those came and went so they’re softly retconning when the eugenics wars took place?
I kinda like this theory. The temporal wars are still affecting the timeline, but time is pushing back to repair the timeline. In-universe reason to both retcon and act as a story element as well (with hopefully a Wesley Crusher appearance at some point?)
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