Star Trek Social Club

Felt like venting. As an Asian, I have an affinity towards the Asians who have been on Star Trek. Watching “Future Imperfect” today and I was immediately moved to tears by the image of Patti Yasutake. I still have a deep sadness for her passing.

The story on the tapes jumps ahead to five years after McGivers’ death, around 2273. The exile started in late 2267, 4 months pass bringing us into 2268, McGivers becomes pregnant, dies, Kali is born late 2268, five years later brings us to 2273.

Lear refers to tapes CA5-47-31M, CA5-49-2P and CA5-39-17U. How the naming convention is organised is not clear, although the “5” could indicate the year of exile.

Lear notes that Kali’s maturity and intelligence at 5 were consistent with a child twice her age. Advanced development in children in science fiction is a common trope (see Alexander Rozhenko), but at least her Augmented heritage accounts for some of it.

In CA5-53-12K, Khan encourages Kali to quote from Kubla Khan (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves”) while Kali wants to read more Shakespeare, showing good taste for a child her age.

CA5-61-3P says that Paolo, Kamora, Joachim and Delmonda were selected for the rescue mission. It was established in the last episode that the ship could only hold four people.

Tuvok searches the entries from Day 1800-1900 and plays the last entry, which would be approximately 5.2 years into the exile. Khan quotes from William Butler Yates’s 1919 poem The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and references the last two lines of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats was contemplating the aftermath of World War I, the start of the Irish War of Independence and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which explains the poem’s apocalyptic imagery and its sense of the end of one era of history and the instability that accompanies the birth of another.

Ursula and Madot have broken up due to the death of their unborn child in the previous episode.

Kali packs a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. In the cargo pod Chekov encounters in ST II, there is no copy of the Complete Works seen, but there is a copy of King Lear, Shakespeare’s play of a king’s descent into madness.

Kali references the sinking of Sea Venture as her inspiration for naming the rescue ship Venture. Sea Venture’s was part of a supply fleet to Jamestown in Virginia in 1609. It got separated from the fleet and was wrecked on the then-uninhabited island of Bermuda. It is believed to have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest. That play in turn also inspired the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, which also influenced Star Trek.

Khan corrects Kali, who believes the wreck also inspired As You Like It, by pointing out that the play was written in 1599. There is a bigger problem here, though, as while several of Shakespeare’s plays have shipwrecks, As You Like It is not among them. Kali may be thinking of The Comedy of Errors (1592) or even Twelfth Night (1601-1602), if we’re sticking to comedies, although those also predate the wreck of Sea Venture.

Once the ship leaves, the caves will collapse and be uninhabitable, which explains why Khan and his Augments were living in the cargo pod in ST II. The ship uses a “spatial compression drive”, which sounds similar to the coaxial warp drive that could fold space in VOY: “Vis à Vis” or the spatial trajector of VOY: “Prime Factors”.

Khan alludes to Starfleet not checking back on them in the five years since the exile, a question that is as yet unanswered in this series.

The question of what destroyed Ceti Alpha VI, however, is resolved. Delmonda explains that when the power that allows the drive to bend space and time was about to lose containment, he chose to vent the energy out of the Elborean ship’s forward ports, and that destroyed Ceti Alpha VI.

This actually connects to one risk of the Alcubierre drive (which also bends spacetime), which is that everything that is caught at the leading edge of the Alcubierre “warp bubble” gets accumulated and carried along. Once the bubble stops at its destination and collapses, all that accumulated energy/debris would be released with devastating effect. I emphasise as I have always done that Star Trek warp drive is not the Alcubierre drive.

Delmonda’s replies to Khan as the latter offers to part as friends, “I have been and always shall be yours.” This is, of course, what Spock says to Kirk in his room in ST II and then paraphrases of when he dies at the end of the movie.

Tuvok dates the crash of the rescue ship at 21 years prior. Give my sums above, this would place the time of the framing sequence in 2294, although the first episode started in 2293. The dates are a bit fuzzy here because Lear and Tuvok are on the surface of Ceti Alpha V twenty-six years after the exile, which would be consistent with the 2293 date but not 2294. Possibly Excelsior was in orbit for several months after that, which might explain Sulu’s impatience.

I have only listened to the first episode. So now I am required to finish the series.

The exciting news here is that Linda Park has been confirmed with 2026 being the 25th anniversary. Scott Bakula said at the convention back in August he would return but has not officially been confirmed yet. No word if Jolene Blalock will make a appearance.

Tell me there are no women in your life without saying there are no women in your life.
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Lear’s senior thesis was an examination of the Federation ban on genetic engineering and the blurred lines when it comes to Augmentation, using the expression “God is in the grey areas,” a variation on the expression “God is in the details.” The phrase is attributed to various people, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Gustave Flaubert, and is usually taken to mean that when attention is given to details big rewards can be derived. A related expression is “the Devil is in the details”, meaning that while things may seem simple on the surface, an examination of the details will reveal complications. It’s more likely that Lear means the latter rather than the former.

Lear also mentions discrimination against hundred of people with small percentages of Augment DNA, many of them Starfleet officers. Known Starfleet officers with Augmented genetics include SNW’s La’An Noonien Singh, although to what extent she has Augmented abilities is unclear, and Una Chin-Riley, although she is not a descendant of Earth Augments but is augmented due to her Illyrian background - both as of 2261. Dal R’El (PRO) was a Human Augment hybrid, and as a result was initially barred from entering Starfleet Academy in 2385. The 2370s would see Julian Bashir (DS9: “Doctor Bashir, I Presume”) and the members of the Jack Pack (DS9: “Statistical Probabilities”).

Tuvok expresses skepticism about Starfleet officers judging people with Augment ancestry that they do not control but Lear says he’d be surprised. She may be referring to incidents like Chin-Riley’s court martial in 2260 for concealing her Illyrian heritage (SNW: “Ad Astra Per Aspera”).

Tuvok also thinks Lear isn’t telling him the whole story. He says Vulcans find it incredibly difficult to lie, and many are incapable of it, and that this somehow this makes them sensitive to others lying.

Tuvok’s admission that lying is difficult for Vulcans rather than impossible is probably as close as we can get to a fair formulation of the “Vulcans never lie” myth. If we accept Vulcan logic as being devoted to the principle of c’thia, or “reality-truth”, an acceptance of reality as it is, as opposed of what we want it to be, then one can see why it becomes difficult as a matter of principle to deviate from it. Most times when we see Vulcans lie it is usually for what they consider the greater good, or justified as such, with Spock being a prime example. Even Tuvok himself lied when he went undercover in the Maquis (VOY: “Caretaker”).

McGivers and Khan’s as-yet-unborn daughter is named Kali, the Hindu goddess associated with time, death and destruction, although Western depictions of her mostly emphasize the latter qualities, mainly because of her association with the Thuggee cult.

Barolo wine is a red wine from the Piedmont region of France, made from nebbiolo grapes. The bottle in Ivan’s possession comes from a warlord in Kashmir, at the Northern tip of India, bordering Afghanistan.

Ursula’s “If you strike at a king, you best not miss,” is a combination of a saying attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (“When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”) and the more famous pop culture formulation from The Wire (“You come at the king, you best not miss.”). Ivan’s retort, “I never miss,” is also what James Bond quips when he despatches Elektra King in The World is Not Enough.

The song the young Augments are listening to on Ivan’s boombox is “Your Touch” by Particle House, released in 2021. There were several references in previous episodes to this still being a timeline where Khan and his people left Earth in 1996, but if we are to take this as accurate, perhaps we are in the timeline where the Eugenics Wars took place in the 2020s (SNW: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”).

We know that McGivers eventually died because of the Ceti eels, and we are now told how she became infected.

Ivan’s scream of “Khan!” is of course echoing the infamous scene where Kirk also screams Khan’s name in ST II.

I’m pretty much on board with the idea that Lear is Kali. The sums work out (she would be around 25-26 years old), as well as why Delmonda would hand her McGivers’ logs and Lear’s interest in how the Federation deals with people with Augment ancestry. They could of course throw us a twist, but it’d be a cheap one given the build-up.

As Marla slips away, Khan quotes from the last stanza of Kubla Khan: “A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision I once saw: / It was an Abyssinian maid / And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora. / Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song, / To such a deep delight ’twould win me, / That with music loud and long, / I would build that dome in air…”

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/559351

I rushed to book my room.

The title may be a reference to the Aristotelian concept of the common good, although that has been used to justify utilitarian positions, where the correct decision is deemed to be one that benefits the greatest number of members of a given community. Of course, that means that the minority may bear the brunt of the disadvantages.

The synopsis of the episode confirms the spelling of Elborean and Delmonda.

McGivers’ log says it’s the 208th day of the exile, which means about a month has elapsed since the last episode.

Delmonda says a “pandem” is “a collection of minds bonded beyond convenience or aptitude”. Given the literary proximity of Khan’s story to Milton’s Paradise Lost, one can’t help but think of “pandemonium”, which was Milton’s name for Hell, or “the place of all demons” (pan + demon).

The deception that Delmonda detects from Khan is of course his spin on how he came to Ceti Alpha V - not by choice, but because Kirk exiled them there.

Joachim calls the Elboreans “Elbs”. Erica says he’s the best fisherman of their group and the first one to chart the “Sunless Sea”, taking the name from McGivers’ quoting of the opening of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”

Ursula says her and Madot’s baby is due in eight more weeks (two months), which is consistent with it being about seven months since the start of the exile, since the baby was conceived about a week into the exile (KHA: “Paradise”).

Khan says the four most terrifying words in the English language are, “We come in peace.” In DIS: “The Vulcan Hello”, T’Kuvma exhorts his people to “lock arms against those [the Federation] whose fatal greeting is… ‘We come in peace.’”

McGivers alludes to the fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel” when she says “no wandering through the caverns without breadcrumbs”.

As noted at the start of “Paradise”, in 2287 (six years prior to 2293) an “anonymous source” (or so she told the Starfleet Civilian Resource Allocation Committee) gave Lear McGivers’ logs recorded while on Ceti Alpha V. She now reveals that it was Delmonda.