Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x04 "Among the Lotus Eaters"
khaosworks @ khaosworks @startrek.website Posts 107Comments 252Joined 2 yr. ago
khaosworks @ khaosworks @startrek.website
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It’s Cayuga, as per the closed captioning, and it’s likely no coincidence. As I noted in my annotations, the Cayuga first appeared in “A Quality of Mercy”, which shares a title with a 1961 Twilight Zone episode starring Leonard Nimoy. And TZ was produced by Serling’s production company, Cayuga Productions.
Thanks!
They handled that subtly - I was wondering why they didn't raise shields against the radiation, but the shimmering impact of the debris field seen when Ortegas was in her quarters showed that shields were indeed up, so that mean the radiation could get through shields. Then it was mentioned that Spock tweaked the shield harmonics at the end - I guess he didn't earlier because he was already affected.
It was spelled Gault in TNG (but pronounced "Galt"), so it’s possible the closed captioning got it wrong for this episode. I’ll add that.
Annotations up at https://startrek.website/post/282663.
This was a very TOS episode yet in terms of feel.
The dialogue could easily have come from the mouths of the TOS cast, and the situation on the planet reminiscent of officers violating the Prime Directive like in TOS: “The Omega Glory” or “Bread and Circuses”. Even Mount's delivery when on the planet was Shatner-esque.
I can readily imagine Kirk, McCoy and a random redshirt or Chekov on the planet in Pike, M’Benga and La’An’s place, and Sulu pulling it together like Ortegas.
All I’m saying is that until we get an explicit mention that the dates for the start of WWIII in 2026 have indeed slipped, I’m not going to assume they have.
As I’ve pointed out, I accept that they will probably slip, and that the 2026 date is shaky because other dates in the same art have already been retconned, but I’m not going to depart from on screen evidence until there’s another bit of on screen evidence that directly contradicts it.
Otherwise you can have any date you want and nobody can say otherwise because temporal wars - and that’s the very thing I was warning against.
The 2026 date didn't come from the Mirror Universe, although it was in the MU episode of ENT. It was from the USS Defiant's database - the Constitution-class ship from the Prime Universe that fell through the interphase in TOS: "The Tholian Web" and somehow ended up in the Mirror Universe and over a century in the past.
Also, those guys in the Mongol-looking fur coats are the same race as the brute Pike fought to defend “Princess” Vina in the Talosian hallucination of Rigel during “The Cage”. So we’re finally getting the backstory to that disastrous mission.
That particular passage from Macbeth takes place in the context of a guard telling Macbeth that Lady Macbeth is dead. Macbeth then launches into a musing about the inevitability of death and the banality of life:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
We are all heading towards death, slowly but surely, and life is just one identical day after another, our past just marking time to the fate that waits us all.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In this speech, as he awaits Macduff’s assault, Macbeth laments that our lives are meaningless and our actions have no impact in the larger scheme. We appear briefly on this world and then vanish completely, leaving no trace.
Macbeth is all about fate, and destiny. Macbeth had no real ambitions until he was shown a future where he was King, and then he - despite initial moral qualms - was persuaded to take actions to seize that future precisely because he knew it would happen.
But did he believe this was inevitable, that this excused his murder of Duncan and the death of Banquo? His own actions to struggle against the prophecy of his defeat speak that he was at the very least conflicted about whether the future that awaits was one that was destined or one that he created himself.
To a degree, that recalls the predestination paradox. Did Macbeth kill Duncan because he was meant to kill Duncan? And will Macduff kill him now because Macduff was meant to kill him? Did they act that way because it was already writ? Or were those events writ because they acted? Who wrote the script?
DULMUR: Captain, why did you take the Defiant back in time?
SISKO: It was an accident.
LUCSLY: So you're not contending it was a predestination paradox?
DULMUR: A time loop. That you were meant to go back into the past?
SISKO: Erm, no.
DULMUR: Good.
LUCSLY: We hate those.
Applying the themes of this to the episode: the question is whether the Eugenics Wars are meant to happen, or must we take steps to ensure that they do (or don't) happen? How free is our will when faced against Time? Do the Eugenics Wars happen because we made it happen or did we make the Eugenics Wars happen because they're supposed to happen? Who wrote that script?
Sera believes that history is not inevitable. Her Romulan computer simulations tell her that if she prevents the war, then the Federation will not arise - and to a degree, she's correct (for now), because alt-Kirk's presence shows that happens. But she is also aware that there are certain things that want to happen, so like Macbeth she struggles against that inevitability by trying to persuade La'An to let her kill Khan.
In a similar way, La'An is also struggling against her perceived destiny as a descendant of Khan. La'An is afraid that she will become dangerous like him, so she tries to deny that as well although Neera told her that her genetics are not her destiny.
So what we have here is the same question raised in Macbeth: are we all fated, locked into our roles and places in history? Do our actions lead us inevitably on the path to death, and our struggles mean nothing in the larger analysis? These are not questions to which Shakespeare has a neat answer to, and neither does this episode.
La'An accepts that she is Khan’s legacy as much as the Eugenics Wars are - but does that mean she accepts that she's dangerous or will she still guard against it?
Sera refused to accept she couldn't stave off the Eugenics Wars even though she's been trying and not succeeding for 30 years and died because of it. Was she fooling herself? Or did she go down in the same way that Macbeth went down fighting Macduff even though he knew he would fail - because sometimes you just don't bow down to fate no matter how hopeless it seems?
MACBETH: I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
The future comes for all of us in the end. How we decide to face it tells us who and what we are.
My gut plonks for between 2024 to 2025. This handwaves a few issues:
- Why didn't the Travelers intervene? Talinn was dead by mid-2024, and in any case, it's possible that since they saw the DTI was already involved, they allowed the humans to work out the problem for themselves.
- The production art in "In a Mirror Darkly" (which is shaky canon at best, I admit, given other dates in that same art which have since been retconned) puts 2026 as a start date for WW III, prompted by issues over genetic enhancement and involving Col Green. It's not a stretch to say that if the existence of the Augment children became public, it could trigger this.
- Khan's age. Ricardo Montalban was about 46 when "Space Seed" was broadcast, and Khan did look like he was in his late 30s to early 40s then - which is plausible for a ruler of about 1/4 of the Earth for a period of 4-5 years. Our current date for the end of WW III is 2053, Riker saying that was 10 years before First Contact in 2063. So the year that Khan left Earth can be no later than 2054 or thereabouts. If we work backwards, then Khan would have been born around 2014. The young Khan we see in this episode looks to be about 10 years old, so our window becomes about 2024-2025, and I go for the later date because that would give Green a little bit of a runway before blowing things up.
The 2022 date is based on a very literal interpretation of Sera’s line that this was supposed to take place in 1992 and she’s been stuck here for 30 years. I’m not convinced that’s a good basis to pin down the year.
Just had this discussion in my annotations post. My take is that it’s a civilian ship, as you suggest. Not necessary a cargo freighter, just not part of the United Earth Fleet.
That wasn’t the Prime timeline, though, or it never really got the chance to be for very long - that was 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.
The Narada incursion had the benefit of three things - a black hole, a very intense ion storm, and the magical red matter. We can minimally accept that as a unique confluence of events that led to a branched rather than overwritten timeline, at least.
To support the resilient river of time model, when I was studying history in grad school I came up with this axiom: history isn’t inevitable, but it has momentum.
To put another way, any given historical event is the natural outcome of historical events before it, and therefore when changing history you’re not just trying to change the one thing, but dealing with the weight of everything before pushing the timeline in that direction. That’s why it’s so hard to change history, that - in Sera’s terms - it seems like Time itself is fighting you. Call it historical momentum, call it historical inertia, what you will. And so the more “momentous” the event, the harder it is to just change it - things will “want” to go back to the way it was.
This deserves a lot more looking into. Possibly a post in c/DaystromInstitute at some point, but, like Holmes, I cry out for more data before wanting to form a workable hypothesis. As a side note, I’m already gathering data for working out Una’s chronology. It’s filling out nicely.
We don’t disagree in broad terms. I just recoil from the easy (and potentially dismissive) answer if I don’t think it’s actually necessary for the most part, so I’ll stick to not futzing around with established dates until something really tells me otherwise. As someone who’s been playing around and figuring out Trek chronologies since the early 90s, this is where I’m most comfortable being.
A general observation: I think that this episode is consistent with the way time travel is seen to work in the Trek universe - that the timeline is overwritten rather than branched. The Kelvin Timeline remains the one sole example of a branched timeline that was created as the result of a temporal incursion. In all other cases, the timeline becomes (in my favorite comparison) like a palimpsest.
It might not, but until there’s an explicit on-screen contradiction or mention that the timeline did shift, for the sake of fostering discussion it’s better to say that the dates stand and see if we can work around it.
I grant that you are correct because the dates have to slip since hopefully WWIII doesn’t actually start 2 years from now, but there’s a larger point I’m trying to make here.
If we use the Temporal Wars as a trump card to every Trek inconsistency, there’s really no point playing the Watsonian game. “The temporal wars changed it” is functionally equivalent as “a wizard did it” or “God made it so”. It’s a cop-out that shuts down discussions instead of extending them.
I mean, it’s very tempting. Why did Chekov recognize Khan if he didn’t show up on screen until Season 2? Temporal Wars. Why did Wesley say the Klingons joined the Federation? Temporal Wars. Why was Sam Kirk said to have 3 sons in one episode but shown only to have 1 in another? Temporal Wars. I could go on. Every query becomes a closed question from this point out and that’s no fun. That’s been the danger ever since the TCW was introduced in ENT.
That was a reason why alternate timeline discussions were very closely regulated on the old r/DaystromInstitute. So I would rather not invoke the butterfly effect for anything if there’s no particular reason or explicit statement that it happened.
If we take the chronology in “Mirror Darkly” as still valid, then Green started the war in 2026.
2026: Earth's World War Three begins, over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement. Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.
Depends on when - early on in TOS: “Errand of Mercy” he’s pretty eager to turn it into a hot war with Kor and like the latter is indignant when the Organians deny them the opportunity to do so.
My thinking is that Kirk saw action of some sort during the war and lost a lot of friends, leading to a general antipathy against the enemy as is natural, but his duty as a Starfleet officer and captain to keep the peace tempered his anger and kept it in check, which is why he was willing to work within the rules when dealing with the Klingons in “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Friday’s Child” and “Day of the Dove”.
It was only after David’s death that he reverted to his “never trust Klingons” stance but even then his own sense of duty as a officer more or less kept him civil and professional in TUC, allowing him to see the sincere peacemaker in Gorkon and realize the extent of his own prejudices.
Zac didn’t intend for Starfleet to notice the delta. He was content to just stay on Rigel VII as High Lord Zacarias, thinking that Starfleet would never return to the planet because of the debris field and the radiation. But then the Kalar used the delta as a symbol and it got spotted.