short treks

[rivendellrose]

The Boy and I just binged all four Short Treks in lieu of our usual Saturday night movie.

Runaway

Acceptable fanfic. Tilly's mom continues to be mean for the sake of being mean and doesn't appear to exist for any reason other than to make her daughter miserable. She also doesn't appear to have a face -- does it suddenly cost less to hire an actress if you don't show her face? I thought the only rule was number of spoken lines, which I'm pretty sure they still kept this woman under. I can only assume they were hiding this actress's face in case they later want to cast someone else, which... whatever, I guess. Can we please stop it with the terrible-mother tropes, guys? Does no main character ever just get to have a mom who is a bit troublesome sometimes but otherwise loving and not horrible and overbearing? (Except, I guess, for Amanda, who is apparently perfect except for never standing up to Sarek for her kids.)

Po was cute, the ship was inexplicably (y'know, except for "we could only be assed to pay for one series regular and not even a lot of extras) empty (they act as if there's a period of time between shifts where no one is around, which... come on, the whole purpose of shifts on a ship is to make sure that stations are always manned!), transporters suddenly go a lot further than they ever have in the past or the future, and... if I'm honest, I find it somewhat implausible that Tilly would get even five minutes into this without running in a breathless rush to find Michael and have her solve the problem for her. But hey. Maybe she's taking this whole "command training" thing seriously. Or, more likely, Michael and the entire senior staff (and half the rest of the crew complement) are off doing something else right now.

Calypso

Not even fanfic, just an original short story filmed on Discovery's sets while the cast was on vacation. Otherwise, an Odyssey pastiche wrapped in the first twenty minutes of WALL-E and a lot of vague nonsense about people and places we've never heard of before and (I hope) will never hear of again. Apart from the sets, there is nothing here to indicate that this is Star Trek, let alone Discovery.

Let's see... so I've never heard of this planet the guy is from OR the people his planet are supposedly fighting, and we've also never met this guy, his wife, his kid, any of the twelve suitors his wife and the kid are presumably holding off back home, or the AI who of course falls in love with him while she's nursing him back to health... and yet I'm supposed to care for some reason? Nah.

Aldis Hodge seems nice. I wish they'd had him on as a guest character. On the actual show. Interacting with people I have some reason to care about.

The Brightest Star

Decent fanfic, doesn't pay enough attention to previously established canon, though.

Look, I'm the last person in the world to refuse two more minutes of Michelle Yeoh as Prime!Georgiou, and I also have a long history of deeply enjoying the chance to watch Doug Jones play delicate magic with his fingers and tilt his head in an emotionally evocative manner. But... Saru said at least twice last season that, on his homeworld, Kelpiens are always afraid. That they sense the coming of predators. And yet when we finally see how that ecosystem works... they're not afraid. The predators aren't coming at all. It's a 2001: A Space Odyssey probe that shows up in their front yard and the ones who are chosen go mildly and peacefully to it like lambs to the slaughter.

Maybe this is just me, but this is not at all the image I've gotten from literally every previous reference to how Kelpien society works. Call me crazy... but it just doesn't make sense to me.

Also, surely we are not now saying that Kelpiens are called Kelpiens because they harvest kelp, are we? Because... why would they call it kelp? When that's a word in English, and they... presumably have their own word for a thing that they... Oh dear.

The Escape Artist

Finally, some damned good fanfic.

Harry Mudd is always fun, at least ever since they cast Rainn Wilson in the role, and most of this short is a nice, light traipse through Mudd's background via him trying to convince a Tellarite not to turn him over to Starfleet, because... apparently he's on the run again. I'm not sure what happened with Stella and her daddy; I guess maybe we'll find out someday.

The twist at the end of this was where it really won me over, though. This Mudd isn't even Mudd. It's an android copy (a very nice callback to his TOS appearances), and while some beleaguered Starfleet ship now has half a dozen or more Mudd-duplicates that various bounty hunters have been duped into buying and then turning over to them, Mudd himself turns out to have been the one selling the copies of himself. I love it.

My one teensy complaint is that a few of the lines arguably might have made a person think that the Tellarites aren't part of the Federation, when in fact they are one of the four founding species (along with Vulcans, Andorians, and Humans). Discovery clearly knows this, since we saw a few Tellarites around Starfleet last season, so I'll assume this was just a bit of slightly awkward wording (or me being over-sensitive after the last three rather messy shorts).

Ahh... and now I just have to wait a little less than two weeks for the season premiere! ♥

Comments

[lizbee]

I was interested to read that Bo Yeon Kim based the Kelpien culture on Korea under the Japanese occupation -- people didn't think of themselves as being afraid, the way fish don't think of themselves as wet. Saru, as an outsider, sees more than most.

[rivendellrose]

That is in interesting way of looking at it - sort of the "frog in slowly heating water" theory, if one frog is sitting on the edge of the pot. I guess it just wasn't what I was expecting from the way previous references had made me imagine their homeworld.