Discovery 2x02: New Eden
Jan. 24th, 2019 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseSo, when I saw this episode's trailer I may have audibly sighed and said something like "Oh no, not this episode," but I wound up quite liking the actual episode, despite finding the initial premise kind of tired and predictable.
I usually hate the Star Trek episodes where Our Heroes find a colony of primitive humans (or extremely human-like aliens) on some planet where they totally shouldn't be. Past examples of this have included The One With Worf's Adopted Human Brother, and The One Where Odo Turns Into a Top For a Little Girl. The only previous version that I've sort of liked was "Children of Time," wherein the DS9 crew find a colony that was started by... themselves, after a time-space thingy caused the destruction of the Defiant, and they wind up having to choose between preventing the disaster (thereby freeing themselves to return to their normal lives and families) and knowing that doing so will kill all the people on this planet, who are their own descendants. That episode, I think, was largely helped along by the fact that the people in question understood the dilemma that the crew was going through, and had informed opinions about it, as well as some degree of agency in the resulting decision.
To begin with, I thought this episode, unlike that one, was going to be taking the classic "And the poor primitives (except maybe one person with whom someone on the team has a romantic interlude with) never had a clue what had happened to them, even after they had been saved by the interlopers" route... and they sort of did, but the inclusion of Jacob, who does suspect exactly what's going on with our heroes, helped that quite a bit. Also, the fact that there was no romantic interlude between a native and a member of the crew like, say, the clueless and eternally paternalistic captain (lookin' at you, Enterprise, as the most recent example of why that's a terrible idea... although Kirk did this regularly as well, as did Riker and, at least once, Jadzia) helped somewhat to ease the awkwardness.
The rest of it might just be that I come at every episode of Discovery with goodwill and a desire to be pleasantly surprised, even if I start out going "So, they're going to have been taken from right about the time of the Eugenics War, although they really shouldn't mention that because canon says it should already have started." [fact confirmed a moment later, specifying World War Three and a date in the 2050s] "Sleeper ship or stolen by aliens?" [confirmed stolen by aliens]
Speaking of things that were kind of predictable but, I thought, still really fun, soon after her second scene The Boy and I were like "So... May is definitely an avatar of the Red Angel, yeah? Nobody but acts like they see her." Sure enough, May later appears where there's no reason for her to be, and turns out to be Tilly's old childhood friend... who, of course, is dead.
Also, she helped Tilly to arrive at the idea of dragging the radioactive debris from the planet's ring, which was conveniently about to descend upon the planet and cause an extinction-level event just after the Red Angel lured Discovery to this world, using the asteroid sample that she had picked up at the last Red Angel beacon location. This saves everyone on the planet, including our away team, which is great, but... objects in motion tend to stay in motion, especially when they're in a vacuum, and I am a little concerned that no one is worried about where this heap of radioactive debris is going to eventually end up? I suspect this will come back, because I feel like, as benevolent as their actions seem to be on the surface so far, the Red Angel feels to me as if it has its own agenda, which may eventually lead into the whole "trying to destroy all sentient life in the universe" thing that I believe has been mentioned in the season trailers. Their actions are just a little too "Follow me, follow me, do this thing, now do this seemingly unconnected thing" to be inherently benevolent. Or maybe I'm just cynical.
I don't really love when Star Trek gets into questions of Science Versus Belief, because while I'm somewhere on the pantheist-to-agnostic-with-a-side-of-atheism spectrum, myself, I don't think it's healthy for science, or science fiction, to be actively anti-religion... and then again, I don't really like wishy-washy non-statements to that effect, either, because they often come across as a little paternalistic and "Now, now, let the primitives have their little superstitions; we had to grow out of them in our time, too." So that... was not fun, for me, in this episode, though I thought it was handled fairly well and I have no complaints beyond a general feeling of "I would rather not be having this conversation in this context, really."
That said, I did like one small aspect of the religious stuff in this episode, and that is that I now feel fairly confident that Pike grew up Catholic. I don't have a ton of evidence for this, mind -- he has more familiarity than I would ordinarily expect from a 23rd century man with the purpose of stained glass in medieval cathedrals, and he seemed very comfortable saying "And so with you." That's all I've got. But I'm sort of charmed by the idea, regardless, and have now filed it away as personal Pike headcanon, which is not something I ever thought I would bother with having.
Other interesting character tidbits from this episode:
- Owosekun was raised on a Luddite colony, and her family was "nonbelievers."
- Detmer has apparently had her pilot's license since she was twelve.
- Tilly grew up in San Francisco (and went to a school named after Elon Musk, did I catch that right?).
That last one is pretty unsurprising, because it often feels like everyone who isn't from the Midwest in Star Trek is from San Francisco, but... y'know, interesting to file away.
I also found it interesting that the religion put together by the colonists out of their various beliefs from back home was described as combining Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, and Wicca. That's the major five religious bases covered, of course (and presumably including at least some elements of their major subsets), but both Shinto and Wicca are unusual (if, to me at least, mostly welcome) inclusions. I would have expected a nod to Sikhism before Wicca, but I guess the writers thought Wicca was more generally familiar to their audience, which... is kind of sad, but not totally unexpected. From an anthropological standpoint, it's interesting to wonder whether the events leading up to the third world war brought about a rise in nature-focused/animist beliefs resulting in Shinto and Wicca being more common than they are today. But that's probably ascribing more thought to this than it's really worth.
The ending, where Pike returns and tells Jacob the truth and gives him a long-lasting power cell in return for the helmet with the broken video camera that captured the Red Angel's appearance, was another angle on this fairly standard plot that I liked. We could have stolen the camera (that was definitely the original plan), but instead Pike (with Burnham's encouragement) gives Jacob the truth he's always wanted, and, significantly, he decides that's all he wants. He doesn't beg to come with them. He decides to turn off the signal that his family has been keeping up for 200 years, and, from his reaction to both that and the power cell, feels content that this world is his home, and that he can help his own people. That's a relatively satisfying result for the end of this kind of episode, I think, out of the various options that are possible.
I also liked that Burnham proves here that she's learned from her past mistakes - she follows Pike's orders even though she disagrees with him, and even when he's incapacitated, and then she tells him about her vision of the Red Angel. Thank you, Burnham, for not keeping secrets, particularly about your mental state. Given her very recent personal experience with how badly hiding things about one's mental state and uncertainties thereupon can go (*coughs*ASH*coughs*) I was deeply unhappy with her at the beginning for not telling Pike about the vision, and very relieved when she caught herself and told him. Good job, Burnham. ♥
Next week: Tyler and L'Rell! Emperor Georgiou! Time to Go Find Spock!
I usually hate the Star Trek episodes where Our Heroes find a colony of primitive humans (or extremely human-like aliens) on some planet where they totally shouldn't be. Past examples of this have included The One With Worf's Adopted Human Brother, and The One Where Odo Turns Into a Top For a Little Girl. The only previous version that I've sort of liked was "Children of Time," wherein the DS9 crew find a colony that was started by... themselves, after a time-space thingy caused the destruction of the Defiant, and they wind up having to choose between preventing the disaster (thereby freeing themselves to return to their normal lives and families) and knowing that doing so will kill all the people on this planet, who are their own descendants. That episode, I think, was largely helped along by the fact that the people in question understood the dilemma that the crew was going through, and had informed opinions about it, as well as some degree of agency in the resulting decision.
To begin with, I thought this episode, unlike that one, was going to be taking the classic "And the poor primitives (except maybe one person with whom someone on the team has a romantic interlude with) never had a clue what had happened to them, even after they had been saved by the interlopers" route... and they sort of did, but the inclusion of Jacob, who does suspect exactly what's going on with our heroes, helped that quite a bit. Also, the fact that there was no romantic interlude between a native and a member of the crew like, say, the clueless and eternally paternalistic captain (lookin' at you, Enterprise, as the most recent example of why that's a terrible idea... although Kirk did this regularly as well, as did Riker and, at least once, Jadzia) helped somewhat to ease the awkwardness.
The rest of it might just be that I come at every episode of Discovery with goodwill and a desire to be pleasantly surprised, even if I start out going "So, they're going to have been taken from right about the time of the Eugenics War, although they really shouldn't mention that because canon says it should already have started." [fact confirmed a moment later, specifying World War Three and a date in the 2050s] "Sleeper ship or stolen by aliens?" [confirmed stolen by aliens]
Speaking of things that were kind of predictable but, I thought, still really fun, soon after her second scene The Boy and I were like "So... May is definitely an avatar of the Red Angel, yeah? Nobody but acts like they see her." Sure enough, May later appears where there's no reason for her to be, and turns out to be Tilly's old childhood friend... who, of course, is dead.
Also, she helped Tilly to arrive at the idea of dragging the radioactive debris from the planet's ring, which was conveniently about to descend upon the planet and cause an extinction-level event just after the Red Angel lured Discovery to this world, using the asteroid sample that she had picked up at the last Red Angel beacon location. This saves everyone on the planet, including our away team, which is great, but... objects in motion tend to stay in motion, especially when they're in a vacuum, and I am a little concerned that no one is worried about where this heap of radioactive debris is going to eventually end up? I suspect this will come back, because I feel like, as benevolent as their actions seem to be on the surface so far, the Red Angel feels to me as if it has its own agenda, which may eventually lead into the whole "trying to destroy all sentient life in the universe" thing that I believe has been mentioned in the season trailers. Their actions are just a little too "Follow me, follow me, do this thing, now do this seemingly unconnected thing" to be inherently benevolent. Or maybe I'm just cynical.
I don't really love when Star Trek gets into questions of Science Versus Belief, because while I'm somewhere on the pantheist-to-agnostic-with-a-side-of-atheism spectrum, myself, I don't think it's healthy for science, or science fiction, to be actively anti-religion... and then again, I don't really like wishy-washy non-statements to that effect, either, because they often come across as a little paternalistic and "Now, now, let the primitives have their little superstitions; we had to grow out of them in our time, too." So that... was not fun, for me, in this episode, though I thought it was handled fairly well and I have no complaints beyond a general feeling of "I would rather not be having this conversation in this context, really."
That said, I did like one small aspect of the religious stuff in this episode, and that is that I now feel fairly confident that Pike grew up Catholic. I don't have a ton of evidence for this, mind -- he has more familiarity than I would ordinarily expect from a 23rd century man with the purpose of stained glass in medieval cathedrals, and he seemed very comfortable saying "And so with you." That's all I've got. But I'm sort of charmed by the idea, regardless, and have now filed it away as personal Pike headcanon, which is not something I ever thought I would bother with having.
Other interesting character tidbits from this episode:
- Owosekun was raised on a Luddite colony, and her family was "nonbelievers."
- Detmer has apparently had her pilot's license since she was twelve.
- Tilly grew up in San Francisco (and went to a school named after Elon Musk, did I catch that right?).
That last one is pretty unsurprising, because it often feels like everyone who isn't from the Midwest in Star Trek is from San Francisco, but... y'know, interesting to file away.
I also found it interesting that the religion put together by the colonists out of their various beliefs from back home was described as combining Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, and Wicca. That's the major five religious bases covered, of course (and presumably including at least some elements of their major subsets), but both Shinto and Wicca are unusual (if, to me at least, mostly welcome) inclusions. I would have expected a nod to Sikhism before Wicca, but I guess the writers thought Wicca was more generally familiar to their audience, which... is kind of sad, but not totally unexpected. From an anthropological standpoint, it's interesting to wonder whether the events leading up to the third world war brought about a rise in nature-focused/animist beliefs resulting in Shinto and Wicca being more common than they are today. But that's probably ascribing more thought to this than it's really worth.
The ending, where Pike returns and tells Jacob the truth and gives him a long-lasting power cell in return for the helmet with the broken video camera that captured the Red Angel's appearance, was another angle on this fairly standard plot that I liked. We could have stolen the camera (that was definitely the original plan), but instead Pike (with Burnham's encouragement) gives Jacob the truth he's always wanted, and, significantly, he decides that's all he wants. He doesn't beg to come with them. He decides to turn off the signal that his family has been keeping up for 200 years, and, from his reaction to both that and the power cell, feels content that this world is his home, and that he can help his own people. That's a relatively satisfying result for the end of this kind of episode, I think, out of the various options that are possible.
I also liked that Burnham proves here that she's learned from her past mistakes - she follows Pike's orders even though she disagrees with him, and even when he's incapacitated, and then she tells him about her vision of the Red Angel. Thank you, Burnham, for not keeping secrets, particularly about your mental state. Given her very recent personal experience with how badly hiding things about one's mental state and uncertainties thereupon can go (*coughs*ASH*coughs*) I was deeply unhappy with her at the beginning for not telling Pike about the vision, and very relieved when she caught herself and told him. Good job, Burnham. ♥
Next week: Tyler and L'Rell! Emperor Georgiou! Time to Go Find Spock!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 10:00 pm (UTC)I actually happen to like those two specific episodes, though I agree the theme is overdone.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 01:03 am (UTC)Both of them had their good points, I agree - I haven't seen anything TNG in long enough that I hesitate to make a value judgment, but I at least always liked Rene Auberjonois doing pretty much anything. Those two were called out specifically not because I especially dislike them or thought they were especially bad examples of the trope, but more because they were the first two that popped into my head.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:59 am (UTC)It's nice to see a character who might possibly be canonically religious in a specific sense, rather than the vague "default non-denominational-secular-but-still-intensely-Christian" feeling we usually get from Star Trek. I get tired of how specific religion is only for aliens in Star Trek.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 01:55 am (UTC)I cringe at most "science vs religion" plots because on the one hand they either go to that patting the benighted primitives on the head place that you mention, or on the other hand they do this "Here are things beyond our current scientific understanding! So if you *don't* translate the sensawunda you feel about this into something spiritual, you are broken and soulless" (strong implications about real-life conspiracy theories and/or Christian faith healing being true left as an exercise for the viewer). Or they assume that because some people have mystical beliefs that those are necessarily in conflict with sciencing the shit out of an unknown phenomenon. Not everywhere and everywhen is debates over young-earth creationism, guys!
(And if the question you're trying to tackle is about self-determination or right to proceed about one's life unimpeded or colonialism or the right to privacy, then please talk about that, showrunners. Don't try to wrap that all up under "religion", because religion can mean so may different things, and storming someone's house to take their ancestral object of worship away to a lab is different from going "I'm not sure this space amoeba is actually god.")
On the one hand I'm like, my issues with this kind of plot come from having grown up in a [hyper-religious] luddite commune myself (side note, I want to know everything about Owosekun now!) and being allergic to "I had a vision and therefore *you* have to believe, and change your life/do what I say", but on the other hand I think there are enough survivors of Christian fundamentalism in the Star Trek viewership that they *should* probably be considering some of those angles along with things like people from minority religions who get told their beliefs don't matter.
And but so: I am ambivalent about that whole plot thread, but I thought they did a lot better than they could have, and Michael and Jacob are a huge part of that. And Pike's general reasonableness. I like that the captain Michael is super not mutinying against is so bloody decent this time out!
[ETA: I'm tl;dr on the religion stuff, I know I am, and I apologize! It's been a month where I've been engaging with a bunch of that stuff on a personal level--interacting with certain people from my old weird childhood for the first time in ages, for example--so it's right near the top of my mind right now. I think I'm failing in not splurging it all over everyone else, sorry. Don't feel you have to reply. <3]