It's too bad that everybody I know who has a theramin has eventually gotten rid of it. Eventually they realize that it's just sitting there collecting dust because they never touch it.
This one was hard, for me, to get through. SAM is the character who posesses the most cringe and I don't like cringe. And, OK, I have to say "for me" because how many commedians and commedies get most of their mileage with effective use of cringe? So I kinda fast-forwarded a bunch of scenes, started to piece together what was going on, and then went backwards to watch it again.
I thought of it a lot like "Data's Day". Not exactly, because for poor SAM, the stakes are as high as "Measure of a man" instead of completely low stakes. But the structure is the same.
SAM's evolved. They said that they had an idea for SAM's character and then when Kerrice Brooks arrived, they adjusted her characterization based on her and she's a bit different than she was in the past. She scrunches up her face a bit differently this time? Her movement's a bit different? Did they just write a memo somewhere between the production of Ep 4 and 5 "Hey, let's make SAM more Kerrice Brooks?"
There's definitely some fast-forwarding because we don't see SAM learning how to go from the kid who nobody greeted to the kid who gets a new name every time. The Voyager episodes where they were trying to teach Seven how to be more human were super-cringe and I'm actually kinda glad that we skipped over that.
Also I kinda wonder if Ocam's affection for SAM in giving the best greeting is maybe a bit like in Tin Man, where SAM is the only person he doesn't need to filter out.
I never got around to watching all of DS9. When it was on the air, I thought of it as a bit of a Star Trek universe rip-off of Babylon 5 and had stopped bothering to watch TV most of the time, so I never caught either show. And I remember having a vague rant as they started off with Voyager that what we really needed was a next next generation ... which takes us to now, where we have a next next generation that's going back to DS9. And I guess DS9 had a reasonable ending that people are OK with whereas the Babylon 5 fans recommend that you just treat it like the series ends after season four, which is entirely because the studio shenaned. Also, both DS9 and B5 really could use a nice HDTV remaster and aren't getting one.
I guess, as far as the DS9 part of the tale, it's a bit like Deadpool and Wolverine, where they didn't want to revisit or change the ending for the Logan movie and therefore had to zig-zag around the story. And creativity sometimes needs some good constraints because Deadpool and Wolverine worked out quite well. But the ending of DS9 was constrained because of what Avery Brooks required out of the Sisko characterization. He said he'd be back, which was something very important for him to keep, and they couldn't violate that. At the same time, he's retired from acting and overall done with Sisko, which is also his right. So, we end up with Confronting the Unexplainable.
We saw Jake from what he chose to write down, translated into a personality by SAM. We didn't see Jake. So one might assume any number of things ranging from that Ben Sisko came back and Jake didn't record it to something more prosaic. And, I dono, we've lost some of the elders in my family lately and I guess I have thoughts about how one might interpret taking care of someone from beyond the grave that I won't go into. But I can accept how it was written.
I was really really slow. I know what Tawny Newsome looks and sounds like. Illa looked familiar but I couldn't put it together that she was Illa Dax until the reveal and I didn't put it together that it was Tawny. For a few, I thought they'd brought Terry Farrell back because of the Jadzia Dax manerisms being so spot-on at points, then I read that it was Tawny and suddenly it made sense.
It's neat to have a Black co-writer doing an episode that focused on a Black character doing a tribute to a show with the first Black captain. So while there's the very practical story aspects of Jake and SAM, there's also the meta aspect of the Black experience that the show is able to put a mirror to. I loved Sisko as a character and Avery Brooks's interpretation of the character but it's never going to hit me the same way to have seen him for the first time on DS9 as it did for Tawny.
And, conversely, there's no in-universe reason why the form that SAM took had to be a Black girl, but I like the way the puzzle pieces of casting and character and story are fitting together to bring us here.
I was thinking that I really love the trio of Dzolo, B'Avi, and Kyle and was hoping that we'd see more of them so ... we saw more of them. Dzolo and B'Avi always trying to start shit with the two-people one-two punch and Kyle laughing at Jay-Den's jokes instead.
We see Genesis with her hair down in this episode of the first time.
The San Francisco shots look like they've got the extant buildings in the foreground and then substituted skyscrapers as you go back. I am happy that the eyesore that is Salesforce Tower is not present. Whatever out-of-focus building backdrop they found probably in Toronto felt San Francisco enough, LOL.
Digression to San Francisco history, by the way. Today people think of the city as the home of tech and, by extension, tech douchebags. During World War II, it was a critical Navy town for the west coast. There were Navy bars. There was a complicated sort of history for being gay in the military during that era -- Check out Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé. The military had to back off on the persecution of gay sailors during WWII because they needed everybody they could have. Drag performers, gay or stright, were men and therefore could be in combat zones and the drag show was a ray of light in dark times. Then between after the war and until they started to draw down the naval presence in San Francisco, where they suddenly didn't need every person they could, they went back to kicking gay people out of the military. Thus, lot of people got kicked out of the Navy for being gay so they'd get cut loose and, being unwilling to return home after being outed, settled down to slummy inexpensive Victorian houses in the unfashionable Castro neighborhood of San Francisco until it became a hotbed of gay culture.
So, a Starfleet bar with a drag queen tending bar where Kyle and Jay-Den (in a skant) share a moment... yeah, that's to the heart of what the city once was and still halfassedly tries to pretend to be.
And, on that, I guess we can go back to a video from 2022 about skants and skirts where it's pointed out that the real thing missing, so far, was that none of the lead male characters appeared in the skant and point out that Jay-Den is one of the leads.
I don't like the intense save-the-universe plotline that is standard in shows these days. But I do appreciate how we've got a lot of call-back to past episodes. We have the change from SAM in the first episode trying to greet people and getting ignored to now having her getting greeted her way. We have the aftermath of the Vitus Reflex prank.
Someone in the writers room has seen Red Dwarf. There's the Gazpacho incident but also there's the whole Rimmer/Lister vibe that Kelrec and Ake have. Except they are stealing like artists, because Kelrec isn't a Rimmer and Ake isn't a Lister.
I think the B plot, Kelrec's big diplomatic incident, was a little squeezed and not quite so engaging, but again it does harken back to Capt Ake's big lesson to the students from ep 3, that you can use patience and empathy to defeat your opponent.
So, yeah, I think I was watching it expecting for this to be the episode that really really really didn't land. It really could have landed really badly. But it came out pretty good, actually and I think that's credit to the writers.