Pike, La’an and M’Benga visit Rigel VII, the site of a previous disastrous mission, but when they start losing their memories, the Enterprise crew find disaster “Among The Lotus Eaters” in Strange New Worlds SE3 EP4 written by Kirsten Beyer & Davy Perez, directed by Eduardo Sánchez.
Mark Turetsky: Will, imagine for a moment that you found a place that allowed you to forget. Not just the pain and heartbreak of your life, but forget every episode of Star Trek ever. And then, just as maliciously, every Star Trek came rushing back. Not just the “Inner Lights” and the “Far Beyonds The Stars,” but the early Picards and the “Thresholds.”
Will Nevin: So you’re saying I’d get “Starship Mine,” but I’d also have Into Darkness…well, fuck. That’s a real pickle, Mark.
Mark: Welcome to the cruelty we call life, Will.
Welcome (Back) To Rigel VII
Mark: How long has it been since you watched “The Cage” (or “The Menagerie!”), Will?
Will: A lifetime ago, if ever. My TOS is generally confined to a love for “Space Seed,” “City on the Edge of Forever” and any jokes we can make about Spock’s brain.
Mark: Well, if you’ll recall, “The Cage” involves Captain Pike being kept in a kind of human zoo by some giant-brained aliens called the Talosians. A subplot of that episode is that two weeks prior, the Enterprise had visited Rigel VII, where they were attacked by the locals with swords and three of the crew were killed, along with Pike’s personal yeoman. The Talosians then torture Pike by forcing him to relive his memories of Rigel VII, which looked like this:
And he fought a Kalar who looked like this, and only made some kind of animal grunting sounds.
Anyway, this is all to say: the premise of this episode is, yet again, following up on “The Cage.”
Will: And in a way that doesn’t make “The Cage” required viewing or make you feel like a dipshit for not knowing the backstory. Instead, what this episode does is flesh out more of that original mission, making it even more tragic and confronting Pike with almost more problems than he can handle.
Almost.
Mark: I should also say that Pike at the beginning of “The Cage” is on the verge of resigning and either becoming a rancher or an Orion slaver (this is likely a joke). He says he’s “tired of being responsible for two hundred and three lives. […T]ired of deciding which mission is too risky and which isn’t, and who’s going on the landing party and who doesn’t, and who lives and who dies.” So it’s not like the personal stakes for Pike here just come out of nowhere. It’s a smart move on the part of the writers to bring this back.
Will: This interpretation of Pike has layers, man. Not only does he have that baked-in exhaustion, but he also comes with the weariness of a man who knows he’s going to end up in that chair — and that the fate of the galaxy literally depends on him accepting it. I’m not going to say this was a “return to form” since the first three episodes of this season have been absolutely fine, but this one has all of the elements that make Strange New Worlds such a gem.
Mark: Yes, it would appear that Mount’s paternity leave, such as it was, was done when they got to this point in the season, and they’re once again placing Pike at the center of the story. As far as Star Trek planet-of-the-weeks go, Rigel VII has a good look to it. It’s not obviously the area around Toronto or a series of nondescript caves, but I did find the use of the “volume” screen got a bit distracting once I noticed it. I wouldn’t want to go back to the gradient-lit backdrops of TOS or the Planet Hell soundstages of the TNG era, but I could wish the volume screen were just a bit better hidden.
Will: I think we both would rather have this than, say, Picard’s gimmicky/pathetic reuse of sets. Television economics of the 21st century, Mark! But, yeah, let’s get to what Pike, M’Benga and La’an were doing down there. On that previous mission, Pike left something (and turns out, someone!) behind that resulted in some cultural contamination, so Starfleet has sent in a Prime Directive strike team. I’m not exactly sure how you’d clean up a mess like this, but, hey, I guess they have to try?
Mark: Are you familiar with the TOS episode “A Piece of the Action?”
Will: The one with the gangster planet? Of course.
Mark: Well, the Sigma Iotians in that episode had based their civilization on a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and it ends with McCoy noting that he might have forgotten his communicator on the planet, and Spock worrying that the Iotians might base their culture around it. For years, Ronald D. Moore wanted the Deep Space Nine crew to revisit that planet and find a culture of Trekkies, but the idea got shot down (Star Trek: Prodigy ended up doing a similar thing in their episode “All the World’s A Stage” last year). Anyway, this plot seems set up to play on that expectation, but it quickly pivots.
Will: Because, as we soon learn, Rigel VII has some bad radiation mojo that makes everyone lose their memories at night in a process that the Kalar call the “Forgetting.” Mark, I’m going to be honest — I was distracted in the back half of this episode trying to remember(!) a short story I read 20 years ago that involved a mysterious object in Earth’s orbit that caused everyone on the planet to lose four days of memories each night. Turns out, it’s called “Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind” and it was written by Philip Jose Farmer — and it began as a TOS pitch!
Mark: Well, I hope they paid Farmer’s estate for this! The core lesson that we’re taught here is that, stripped of biographical memory, we still maintain an essence of who we are: Pike feels a duty to protect his crew, M’Benga seeks to help people and La’an, well, she doesn’t get much of a chance because she suffers a near-fatal wound. It seems to contradict Star Trek: Picard’s theory of biographical memory, where Lore gaining all of Data’s memories effectively makes him Data, but then again, I had some serious problems with that.
Will: Even the good parts of Picard are probably best left unexamined. We see the landing party deal with the Forgetting in their own way, still retaining some core of themselves, while being helped by one of the Kalar who continually encourages them to “live in the moment” — because that’s all you have when you don’t have memories. I think maybe a bit of the planet-side stuff was drawn out — boy, those little time slips are convenient! — because this story was much more about choices than action, and it got dull when Pike was slugging it out with various Kalar, including the yeoman he unintentionally left behind.
In the end, I wonder if the writing put too fine a point on it since Pike literally says, “All of this is your fault and your choices.”
Then again, writers who use subtext are cowards.
Mark: And I’ll point out that my spouse, who studies neuroaesthetics, says that the way this episode shows “the forgetting” is consistent with patients suffering similar brain injuries, so that’s a plus (she wants me also to note that she is not a neuroscientist, she’s a humanist academic with an interest in neuroscience).
Frankly, I was a bit shocked that Luq didn’t turn out to be a deposed king or something. His secret pain was the loss of his son, which, fair enough.
I Fly The Ship
Mark: They finally did it, Will! They gave Ortegas a character focus episode!
Will: I FLY THE SHIP. How many Ortegas stans are going to get that tattooed somewhere? Great, great, GREAT stuff for her this episode. Loved it. Loved every part of it.
Mark: Me… I’m a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong: I love Ortegas, Melissa Navia does a great job, but even though she’s got the pilot’s logs in this episode (apart from the opening voiceover, which is Pike’s), she’s relegated to being the hero of the b-plot. And even so, she’s not the character that learns and grows from the experience: once again, that privilege goes to Pike. Not to mention that for much of her portion of the episode, Navia is given the extraordinarily difficult acting job of acting scared and confused, alone, speaking to herself. She does a great job of it, and she sells Ortegas’ drive and heroism, but I wanted more.
Will: So she’s not the hero who gets all the character development, but she’s hero-ish. I see that frustration, and with Mount’s return, that does bring us back to one of the central points of last season — that this can easily become The Chris Pike Show.
Mark: She’s heroic, but not the protagonist.
Will: Exactly. And I see nothing wrong with wanting other characters to have their turn, even though this episode scratched that itch for me with Ortegas. And speaking of other characters, it’s not often we see Spock make an incorrect judgment call, is it? His decision to take the ship into the asteroid debris field almost cost them their lives.
Mark: I do love that the one thing Ortegas remembers is that she’s pissed at Spock for making that call. One thing that’s inconsistent, though, is that Spock and the gang on the ship seem to have lost their ability to read. If their skills have degraded to that degree, there’s no way Ortegas should have been able to do something as complicated as flying the ship. I get that it was a necessity of plot, but still.
We also get a bit of a focus on Nurse Chapel trying to figure out what’s causing the memory problems and looking for a cure. And I especially appreciated that she was shown to be competent all along, without a trace of “oh, if only M’Benga were here, he would have figured this out.” It’s good when there are two competent medical personnel on the ship. They should probably have more!
Will: We know the Enterprise will eventually have another doctor at least.
Mark: But along with that comes a likely demotion for M’Benga. Sad.
The Batel Botheration
Mark: And while we’re on the subject of things I found disappointing, there’s the subplot of Pike’s relationship with Captain Batel.
Will: Batel made my brain hurt in this episode specifically because we just saw her working for the Starfleet JAG, and now she’s sad that — in retaliation for Una’s [whatever happened to her] — she’s been passed up for promotion to commodore? Kind of a mess there. But, yes, more substantively to your point, she doesn’t seem to have very much agency in all of this.
Mark: Yes, she seemed to be a member of the JAG corps who held the rank of captain, but it turns out she’s got her own ship, the Cayuga. So was the Cayuga just orbiting around Earth while she was doing all her lawyerings? It seems like a waste of personnel and ships. My other gripe about this relationship is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a spark between them. I care much more about the Spock/T’Pring/Chapel triangle than Pike’s arrangement with Batel.
And you brought up Una… have we all forgotten that Batel arrested Una in person and then had her tried for sedition? I get that she was just doing her job, and that she did everything in her power to help Una (which, I honestly don’t know about legal ethics, but that doesn’t sound right, shouldn’t she have recused herself at that point?), but for Una to come around this week and say that she likes Batel, it’s a bit much.
Will: It’s too much for one character to bear. It’s fine for Pike to have a love interest, and making her a fellow starship captain is a novel story. But to also position her as the antagonist for a plot that was neatly wrapped up over a handful of episodes seems like a miscalculation and a waste. We will certainly get some distance from her involvement in Una’s case as this series continues, but I wonder if the damage has already been done. A little more character development for her would be nice. More or less, actually. Right now, it’s in an interminable middle ground.
Mark: She doesn’t even have a first name! But yes, interminable middle ground sounds like an apt metaphor for her and Pike’s relationship. Still, I guess it’s nice that her gift became Pike’s focus for his determination to get his memories back. That’s as good a basis for a relationship as anything.
Will: Next time we have a holiday gift exchange, I’ll have to get you a combadge. Maybe one of those badass “Future Imperfect” ones that smartly combined rank *and* the communicator.
Mark: But I’ll have sold my uniform to buy you a new strap for your old-school tricorder!
Will: Joke’s on you, my man: I ain’t sellin’ my tricorder.
Stray New Words
- “My main reason for hanging on to the [recordings] is that I don’t want to lose my identity. A major part of me, a unique person, is not in the neurons of my mind, where it belongs, but in an electro-mechanical device or in tracings of lead or ink on paper. The protein, the flesh for which I owe, can’t hang on to me,” Philip Jose Farmer, “Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind”
- Aside from the Trek-ness of this episode, the other major divergence from Farmer’s short story — or at least what it eventually became — is that the object causing humanity’s memory loss remained in orbit for eight years…and took a lot of memories during its stay. In the story, humans eventually develop the ability to survive on notes — or as we see in this episode — “totems.”
- In “Sketches,” there is no protection from the memory loss. And lost memories don’t return. In this episode, it appears that Kalars do have the ability to make and retain memories, but those memories are blocked by the forgetting.
- Batel’s gift to Pike comes from the planet Galt. Could this be the same planet as Gault, where Worf was raised by the Rozhenkos?
- No Pelia this week. I guess she was in her quarters taking a nap.
- Ortegas’ hat was great.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
