S01E08. Star Trek 2009 Transcript

Josh Woodward 00:00:01
Let’s pretend it’s the end, of this whole ugly story
We vanquished the foe and we triumphed in glory
There’s nothing but rainbows and blue skies ahead
Hallelujah, amen, it’s the end

We threw off the yoke, and we broke all the shackles
We tore down the walls, and we burned down the castle
The oppressors all scattered, and naked, they fled
Hallelujah, amen, it’s the end

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:00:38
Hi, and welcome to Before the Future Came, a Star Trek podcast. We’re looking at the utopian ideals of Star Trek as we voyage from one work to the next, following a breadcrumb trail of motifs. Last episode, we discussed “Crisis Point” and “Crisis Point 2”, which had a deep awareness of the layers of media they were playing in and a whole lot of lens flares. This month we’re talking about a film which similarly overwhelms the viewer with lens flares and references: Star Trek, the 2009 Original Series reboot, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and directed by JJ Abrams. I’m Gregory, the only genius level repeat offender in the Midwest.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:01:19
I’m Melissa and all I got left is my bones.

Lucy Arnold 00:01:23
And I’m Lucy. And I may throw up on you.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:01:27
Melissa, you picked this month’s film, so if you could, give us a summary in your own words.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:01:33
Stardate 2233.04, on the USS Kelvin: a very strange and spiky ship comes out of a wormhole. It shoots the shit out of the Kelvin (USS Kelvin) in a very actiony scene. This ridiculously ripped captain that looks like a mix between Vin Diesel and the bad guy from Nemesis goes to meet the captain.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:03
It’s Thor.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:04
Huh?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:05
It’s Thor. It’s Chris Hemsworth.

Lucy Arnold 00:02:06
Well, he’s not—

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:06
Oh no, no.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:07
Oh, the captain isn’t Thor, you’re right.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:09
Yes, yes. He goes to meet Captain Nero, a Romulan with a lot of tattoos on his face, to arrange a ceasefire. Nero is looking for Spock, and when Spock is not around, he destroys the Kelvin, which had James Kirk’s dad on it. George Kirk dies, but his pregnant wife makes it off the ship. We see baby James get birthed as George Kirk heroically defends the fleeing shuttles from Nero. She has that baby very quickly.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:43
Yeah, she is in labor when the ship attacks.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:47
Yes. We then cut forward and I… forgot to note the date. So, captain’s log: Kirk-is-25-years-old date. We get a series of little origin stories. We see rebellious tween Kirk joyriding an old Corvette in one of those obnoxious late aughts sci-fi scenes where the protagonist must know 20th century music and like 20th century cars that are stick shift. Very cringe. We see a very bullied Spock get accepted into the Vulcan Science Academy despite the disadvantage of being half human. He tells them to fuck right off, and he picks Starfleet instead. We see Uhura and adult Kirk meet at a club. Uhura is in Starfleet at this point. A bar fight ensues, some sex ensues, and ultimately Kirk joins a shuttle of recruits and cadets the next morning after this fistfight and meets McCoy on the ship. The timelines do not line up with original Star Trek. I’m gonna try not to be that jerk about this film.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:59
Is it that the ages are wrong?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:01
The ages are wrong. The ages are wrong, yeah, but that’s okay. Flash forward a bit. When Kirk is obsessing over the Kobayashi Maru, which is a no-win scenario test that Starfleet cadets are put through, Spock gets mad about it because he’s been the one programming it for the last several years, but the Academy is reminded that the real world is more important when they get a distress signal from Vulcan. They round up all the cadets and throw them on board ships. This includes a bunch of cartoonish hijinks. A bunch of cartoonish hijinks. It also includes Uhura and Spock having a femdom romantic moment in which Uhura insists she belongs on a ship, and Spock tries to act as if he was being objective by not putting her on the ship.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:52
I did not read that as femdom.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:56
It’s sassy Black lady in a way that… I’ll get there. So the Enterprise is super white and shiny. The lighting is pulling some cool stuff from Original Series. There are a ton of lens flares like that. This is where you realize you are going to be in Lens Flare City. So Kirk, who is not supposed to be on the Enterprise, is having a bunch of, I’ll say, comical medical reactions as he runs around the ship. He realizes that what they’re actually about to do is run into a Romulan trap. See above about the Kelvin. And he tells Uhura, while he’s got this numb tongue, about what’s happening and how something she detected is, is the sign of what’s happening here from when he was born.

Everyone eventually believes Kirk that this is happening. So they drive off to Vulcan, which is being attacked, and Nero is readying this so called “red matter”, which is going to do awful things to Vulcan. Pike, who is the captain of the Enterprise at this point, heads off to meet with Nero, ultimately to be tortured by Nero. Spock is promoted to captain, and Kirk goes from first year cadet? to first officer of the Enterprise. Some more fistfights happen as Kirk and Sulu and a red shirt try to foil Nero’s plans, which are, of course, to destroy Vulcan.

They learned that Nero is specifically going to create a black hole at the center of Vulcan with this red matter. Spock is aware that for some reason, a bunch of elder Vulcans sequester themselves in an old cave where they cannot be teleported or contacted. So he decides to go down directly to pull them out of the cave. He saves a few of them, but his mother dies. It’s very tragic. We then see a gorgeous scene of Vulcan becoming a black hole—or a singularity, really. It doesn’t go full black hole. As is the norm in Star Trek movies, Nero’s goal is to attack Earth, and Pike is tortured for various secret codes and frequencies, which he’s supposed to apparently just kind of know off the dome.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:15
I feel like that’s a thing in other Star Trek stuff where, like, all Starfleet captains know certain codes to the fleet.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:23
Yeah, yeah, it’s weird. Kirk acts a fool on the bridge about some of Spock’s strategic decisions and gets kicked all the way off the ship and onto Delta Vega. Which, despite being the name of the planet of our unreleased pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, which is one of the original Star Trek pilots, it’s not that planet. I did have to go look that up. This one’s in the Vulcan star system.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:48
The location of the Gailaxy doesn’t work out, right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:52
Yeah. So multiple Delta Vegas hanging out. Some more pointless action ensues as Kirk outruns local fauna and meats old Spock, our favorite original Spock, in an ice cave. So-called Spock Prime, conventionally. Spock Prime, who gives no shits about temporal purity and paradoxes and anything like this, mind melds with Kirk and shows him why Nero’s so mad. A star went supernova and destroyed Romulus, and then everyone time traveled into the future. Spock Prime and Kirk scoop up Scotty and Scotty’s little friend.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:36
Scotty’s little friend stays behind but shows up at the end of the movie.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:42
Oh, right, right. So. And they use some clever future tech of Scotty’s to beam onto the Enterprise at warp. More cartoonist action goes on. Scotty manages to beam into a pipe system in engineering, and we see Kirk run around like some sort of Looney Tunes character, trying to figure out how to get him out of this pipe system.

Lucy Arnold 00:09:08
There is so much running around in this movie, right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:11
It is. There’s so much. It’s exhausting. It’s so silly. Kirk and Spock go toe to toe again on the bridge with a very well made shot of Sarek being fuzzy in the background between their angry faces while they’re yelling at each other. Spock beats the shit out of Kirk’s ass until Sarek calls him off. It’s great. After some more interpersonal moments, the action moves right into the solar system. Our solar system. Kirk and Spock go on to save the day with a bunch of different kinds of attacks on Nero’s ship, including another fistfight. Using the red matter—ultimately, the red matter is what destroys Nero’s ship. Back on the Enterprise, Kirk offers Nero surrender, but Nero basically tells him to go to hell. So the red matter explodes. The Enterprise very narrowly escapes the event horizon. We get to see the view screen crack and all that sort of stuff. Baby Spock meets Spock Prime, who goes on a little more about some destiny stuff, and Kirk and Spock are gonna be friends, and all of that. To which Spock, Baby Spock is sort of like, “…Okay.” Kirk is given an award and promoted straight to captain.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:32
Promoted from student to captain, right? Because he had not finished the academy, right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:41
Right. And he was on academic suspension when this event popped off. Yeah. We see that Pike has received his canonical injuries that leave him using a wheelchair, which… one apparently cannot be a captain and also use a wheelchair. And we end the film with Kirk and the crew taking the Enterprise out for a mission.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:09
I didn’t like this movie very much. I did not like this when I saw it in theaters. I don’t think I’ve seen it since. And I feel like I dislike different things about it this time, but also a lot of the same things.

Lucy Arnold 00:11:25
I remember liking it a lot better when I originally saw it than I liked it this time, which was not at all.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:32
I think this is the first time we’ve watched something, actually… that I think was just bad for the show.

Lucy Arnold 00:11:41
Yeah, I think I agree with that.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:11:44
Yeah. I think I had hoped, you know, how people feel differently about the Star Wars prequels now, for some reason?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:53
Or the Matrix sequels.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:11:54
I wondered—or the Matrix sequels. I wondered if coming back to this now, I would have a different sort of feeling about it… But I don’t. I don’t like it. It’s, it’s bad. There are things that are worse than even I realized at the time. So… I did apologize before assigning this.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:12:12
I feel like if you apologize before doing something, it does not count.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:12:17
Oh, well, then, okay: I’m sorry.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:12:19
I think you have to, I think it needs to be remorse, not pre-morse.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:12:24
Well, I didn’t know it was bad. I just didn’t realize how long it was going to feel to be watching it and taking notes at the same time.

Lucy Arnold 00:12:31
Oh, I had to stop it multiple times, and I stopped it to do laundry, and I hate laundry. I’m sure we’re going to talk about some of the things, and we’ve each brought a topic for discussion. Mine is the vilification of labor. And I want to talk about this topic because although I hated many, many things about this movie, I think the thing that really strikes me at my core is Nero and the representation of Nero as basically a worker, right? He’s a miner. He’s just a dude. And then they make him into this really, really heinous bad guy. And I, I really struggle with that idea of the juxtaposition of this, sort of what, he would see himself as, right? If this was Nero’s story, he would see himself as sort of a working class hero, right? Getting retribution for this terrible thing or maybe even stopping a terrible thing from happening to his people, right?But that’s not the story that we get.

And I’m going to say the petty thing first. So the petty thing is that Nero is cursed because he is played by Eric Bana, who you may recall from being the bad Hulk, Bruce Banner. He is also the lead character in The Time Traveler’s Wife, another cursed role. So I do think casting Eric Bana was an immediate problem. But that’s just my petty thing.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:14:20
I think he’s a fine actor. I think he, like the actor, did a good job. It’s just a bad, badly written role.

Lucy Arnold 00:14:26
I mean, I can neither agree or nor disagree with you, as I’ve never seen Eric Bana in a role that I think was good. So…

So I think to really understand the problem, I would like to start by talking about an entirely different IP, which is the original Spider-Man: Homecoming movie, which I am about to spoil. So… spoilers here. This is the Marvel Spider-Man, and in this movie, the villain is Vulture. And it’s extremely clever because this version of Vulture is basically cleaning up the city after all of the terrible things that happened to the city after that big Avengers movie when the city’s destroyed, right? Vulture is one of the guys who’s cleaning up the city, right? He’s a worker cleaning up the city, and he’s picking up the trash, the detritus. And he is told to stop because Tony Stark’s people are like, “Oh, no, we want this tech. You can’t do this. You can’t be profiting from this. We need to gather all of this tech.” And that’s what turns him into the Vulture, because he was just trying to make a living, right? And take care of his family, and he becomes the Vulture in order to take the tech and make money off of it.

And Vulture in that movie, I mean, he is the villain, right? And you see him as the villain. He is killing people, and he is villainous. However, he’s also understandable, right? And he is, in that movie, juxtaposed with Stark, who is a rich guy and a hero, but the hero who goes against him is Spider-Man, who’s your working class hero, right? The problem, if we compare… So I think it worked, is what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say I think it’s fine. I think you can make a working class dude a villain, and it can be successful, and you don’t have to do it in a way that is. That feels like you’re taking a shot at working class people. I think you can do that, and I think Homecoming does it successfully.

I think this movie does all of those things incorrectly, right? Because we have this guy who is a villain, who, if we stopped and thought about it for even 30 seconds, you’re like, “Oh, this is really relatable, right? Like, this dude just really just trying to save his people.” I’m not saying he’s not villainous, but he is relatable. But the movie doesn’t give you any of that. Like, it doesn’t give you anything to hang on to in terms of feeling that kind of sympathy in the way that they do with Vulture so successfully in that Spider-Man movie. And then when you see who we are… who our hero is in this movie: it’s the military, right? It’s Starfleet. All right. I mean, that’s a problem, right? That is, to me, that is a, that is a problem of meaning. Because when your guy who’s just a working class guy, a miner, what does he say? He says, “a life of honest labor”. “I chose a life of honest labor.” This is the guy we have up against Kirk, who’s crashing his stepdad’s Corvette into a ditch, and even Spock, who is so privileged, right? He has two choices. He could go to the Academy, or he can go into Starfleet. And these are the dudes who are up against Nero, and it chafes me, y’all. It chafes me. So go ahead, Gregory. I’m sorry.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:18:09
In Kirk’s backstory, when he talks to Pike, Pike gives him the, like, “Why are you wasting your time in Iowa?” talk. Like, Starfleet’s so much better than anything you could do in Iowa, which seems to be, you know, farming, producing food for people. Like, I mean, obviously, Kirk’s a washed out, but, like, Pike’s very clearly, like, “This is, this is a, this is a trash life of people who live here. You want a good life, which is, which is being in the military and serving Starfleet.”

Lucy Arnold 00:18:45
Yeah, yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:18:46
What does he call it? He says… He says, “It’s a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada,” which is—

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:18:56
Yeah, “peacekeeper”, which is always a good term.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:18:57
—fascinating phrase. Yes.

Lucy Arnold 00:19:01
And I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that in the real world, the military basically takes advantage of poor and working class people, right? That’s who they try and enlist into the military to pay for college. That’s the argument that they make. The recruiters say, “Hey, come and do your years in the military, and then your college will be paid for.” So who are they taking advantage of? And that’s poor and working class people. So to have that version of Starfleet in this movie, I have a real—I mean, I think that is a problem.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:19:38
I do have one tiny little drop of compliment for the film, and I’ll talk more about Nero in my segment, but I really like that Nero just refers to people by their first name. Like, Pike is like, “I’m Captain Christopher Pike of the Enterprise,” and Nero says, “Hi, Christopher. I’m Nero.” And keeps calling him “Christopher” throughout the thing. And it’s like, it’s not, it’s not. It might be a Romulans have single names like Vulcans thing, but I prefer to think that Nero’s like, “I don’t care about your rank. We are equal. We are equivalent people.”

Lucy Arnold 00:20:18
I really like that. I think that’s a great observation. And I think if that were something that had something else to hang onto in the movie, I think that would be amazing.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:20:26
Yeah. Yeah. There are two things that come to mind here. One is that Star Trek has always tried to dodge that association between military and class by not really having enlisted ranks. Not really.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:20:42
It’s got one enlisted officer. It’s got one: O’Brien is the only enlisted person in all of Starfleet, apparently.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:20:49
No, no, no, yeoman are enlisted. So all the people give Kirk things to sign in Original Series. They’re all enlisted, I’m pretty sure. And you meet Janice Rand. There are some named ones in earlier Star Trek. But this is a dance that they try to do, and I doubt it’s conscious. I doubt they are going, “Let’s separate the problems of class and military.” Maybe Roddenberry was cool like that, but I doubt it. But, yes, that comes to mind. And then on sort of Nero as a villain—and maybe we’ll get to this also later—is that, like, Nero could have come through and prevented the… Okay. Whether Spock is actually responsible for this is a whole other thing, Spock Prime. But he could have come through and just murdered Spock, and instead he went to genocide, right?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:21:44
Right. I’m gonna go into all of this in my topic.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:21:48
Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, if we’re talking about vilifying a working class person, like, why did he do this, right? And ultimately, it’s a matter of: this is an action movie. These Star Trek films always have huge stakes in them. There’s clearly… there’s shades of other Star Trek films here that they are pulling from, and that there are echoes of. So. But, yeah, going to destroy Vulcan as the mixture of revenge and preventing this later supernova.

Lucy Arnold 00:22:19
So I think that’s actually really significant, Melissa. I think that’s a great point, because he says it’s because he wants Spock to feel the same way he did.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:22:31
I’ve got a whole thing on character motivations that I am going to cover.

Lucy Arnold 00:22:36
Well, so, but I want to say that I do think that fits in with this idea about working class people and this sort of dichotomy this movie is drawing between, like, sort of feeling and rationality, ight? Like, that these miners, somehow, you know, they aren’t scientific and rational in the way that Spock and the Vulcan scientists are. And I think that’s a really false dichotomy that is drawn in the film. And I think that being—and I know you’re going to get more into that—but I think that being part of Nero’s motivation is a real problem for the movie in many ways.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:23:16
Yeah. We see a lot of evidence that labor has occurred. We’ve got this mining ship, this huge ship that’s really scary, but could theoretically look like that because it’s meant to chomp on asteroids. We see the Enterprise being built. We see Kirk tossing the keys to his bike to a construction worker, maybe, as he’s on his way to leave. But the closest thing to a speaking role for a laborer other than Nero and his men is Scotty’s little dude. Who… It’s unclear… Scotty treats that guy like a pet, but that guy’s clearly a sapient being, although he doesn’t get a uniform. I don’t know what that guy’s deal is.

Lucy Arnold 00:24:10
You get shades of the sort of the Shakespearean clowns if they weren’t as clever as the Shakespearean clowns, right?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:24:18
Yes.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:24:20
Yeah. Yeah.

Lucy Arnold 00:24:22
Well, thank you for indulging my absolute hatred of this sort of class warfare that film sometimes engages in.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:24:33
So, speaking of clowns: let’s talk about how this film treats women.

Lucy Arnold and Gregory Avery-Weir 00:24:38
Oh, no.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:24:42
This film… Let me put a little caveat here and say, I know that this film series gets better with regards to its treatment of women, but I’m going to talk about this film, and that is that there are very few women in this film, and they are all centered on the men that they are adjacent to. The women we have are Uhura. We have Amanda, Spock’s mother. We have Winona, who is Kirk’s mother. And we have Gaila, who is the Orion cadet that we see Kirkl having an encounter with early in the film. A sexual encounter. We hear Chapel mentioned. We don’t see her on screen.

It is tough to watch Uhura in this film. It is real tough.

Lucy Arnold 00:25:34
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:25:34
Not only is she primarily a girlfriend, when she does demonstrate her skillset, which is intercepting a Klingon transmission and doing some decoding of things, even that expertise is mostly filtered through Kirk. It is Kirk who reports her findings and gets people to believe his argument using her findings, which she then says, “Yep, that’s what I heard!”

She’s very bossy as a girlfriend. This whole scene in which she wanted to be on the Enterprise, Spock says, I don’t have the exact quote, but he’s like, “Well, I didn’t want to appear biased by putting you on the flagship.” And she says, “No, I’m assigned to the flagship.” Which, on the one hand, yeah, fuck you, Spock. On the other hand, what are we doing? What is this conversation that’s happening in the middle of a crisis in which this is the dynamic? She could have just gone on the ship. She could, you know, like. Anyway. And yet she spends the rest of the movie being very compassionate, hands on face, follow Spock into the turbolift…

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:26:39
It’s frustrating because, like, if she had, like, any other role in the film, I kind of like the Uhura/Spock thing.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:26:51
Oh, yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:26:53
Like, their relationship is really interesting, the way she’s like, “What do you need?” And, like, lets him, gives him his space, and, like, helps him when he’s being emotional. I mean, he never shows any compassion towards her, I don’t think? But, you know. Yeah, she’s cool. She seems like a cool girlfriend.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:27:10
Yeah. I think Alex Kurtzman is working his way through how to handle Spock in romantic relationships, right? Because Kurtzman is the showrunner of almost every modern Star Trek now. And so we see this done much better in later Star Treks. So this movie feels, like, part of me was like, okay, this is weirdly interstitial, right? This is between the last Star Trek: Next Generation films and it is before modern Star Trek. And so it’s kind of interstitial between, let’s say, original-Original Series and whatever this new thing is going to be, what the sequels are ultimately. But it’s not even that. Like, even in Original Series, we see women be people more than they are in this film. And it’s, it’s really, really tough to watch. And it, it strikes me as being so written by men. Everything is so centered on the masculinity of these people.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:28:23
The scene where so Uhura and what’s the Orion woman’s name?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:28:30
Gaila, I think.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:28:31
I think Gaila and Uhura are roommates, and Kirk is making out with Gaila on top of her bed. She’s in her underwear. He hides under the bed when Uhura comes in. Uhura comes in and while having a conversation, strips down to her underwear, which…

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:28:52
Yep.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:28:53
I’m not a woman. I don’t know how college-age women act. That seems weird. Do you come in, your roommates in their underwear, and you just kind of undress?

Lucy Arnold 00:29:05
Like, on that scene, the note that I have written is, “I have rarely seen more spectacular failures of the Bechdel test than that scene.” Like, you really like, not only do you have these two women talking to each other in their underwear while a man literally is a voyeur under the bed, they are still talking about men. Like, it’s like… It’s almost like they were like, “Oh, how can we best fail the Bechdel test? Like, what could we do to make sure that everyone knows we are failing this fucking test?”

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:29:42
And Kirk is such a creep in this film.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:29:47
Oh my god, yes.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:29:48
Like, so he’s hitting on Uhura at that bar in the, in the, before he joined Starfleet. She’s clearly not interested in him. She is ordering drinks for her group to take back to them. She blows them off. He insists on getting her first name. That’s his little cute thing he does. He asks her first name and then doesn’t get it. Joins Starfleet, knows Uhura’s in Starfleet, knows her roommate, right? Because that’s, you know, who the roommate of the person you’re fucking is. Still doesn’t find out her last name, even though he could just, like, look it up on Facebook or in the college directory or whatever. He doesn’t find out Uhura’s first name… Yeah, he doesn’t know her first name until Spock tells him. Or Spock mentions it, like, near the end of the film. It’s, it is wild how much Kirk is clearly just using the first name thing as a way to, like, exert power in a weird pickup artist way. It’s not negging, but…

Lucy Arnold 00:30:54
I think it also demonstrates what Lissa’s talking about: how centered it is on men, right? Like, that we can’t even hear her first name until Spock speaks it, talking to her. Like, that is so centering of male experience, right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:31:13
Right. So they’re also doing a thing, and that this kind of thing is part of why I picked this film chaining off of the last episodes that we did is they’re also doing a thing about the fact that Uhura didn’t have a first name in Original Series, right? But instead of, like, doing anything interesting with that, they have let it become this male-centered, flirty thing where, like, in that original bar scene, it’s not even that she was turning him down in a flirty way. Like, there was no, like, she was not interested.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:31:47
Yeah, talk to the hand.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:31:50
Talk to the hand. And instead, they took this thing that was this, “Okay, let’s, let’s pull this little reference forward from Original Series.” And, you know, Sulu immediately gets a first name—who also did not have a first name in the Original Series. He is immediately announced as Hikaru Sulu. And Uhura’s becomes a whole thing throughout the film. It is weird and it’s bad.

Lucy Arnold 00:32:13
It is weird and bad.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:32:15
And it’s… It’s 2009 when this film comes out. This film was probably written in 2007. Like, there’s no reason for, for any science fiction to be this ass backwards on gender, period. Next Gen is done. It’s been out. Crusher has crashed the ship. You know, like, why are we doing this?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:32:41
Speaking of marginalized people, because I don’t know that this will come up in the rest of our discussions: Sulu, specifically. Sulu’s a fencer. There’s a whole scene, there’s a scene where it’s like, “Oh, he’s going to be able to use his fencing in an action scene.” That’s cool, because that’s established in the canon in Original Series. And this isn’t a “this is bad because it’s different.” This is a “bad because it’s racist.” In the Original Series, he set up, he fences with a foil. In this, he pulls out a really cool folding katana, which he then doesn’t use in a particularly Japanese martial style. Like, he doesn’t actually do martial arts with it. Like, there’s the way that you use a katana. There are a bunch of different ways you use a katana, but a lot of them have very powerful overhead strokes. Some of them are striking when drawing from the sheath. There are a few others, but none of them are kind of the swashbuckling approach. So they gave him a Japanese sword because he’s Japanese, a Japanese character, and then didn’t do any further research on how someone would use said sword. Appalling.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:33:54
It would have been… It would have been a different thing—bad, but also maybe funny—if they had had him do fencing moves with the katana.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:34:05
Yeah, like, they could have, right? They could have had him do saber fighting, right? Because sabers are a fencing sword, and it’s just like, oh, he’s using a katana like saber. Okay, sure. But that’s not what happens.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:34:19
So, like I said, I know that this series does get at least somewhat better, although I do have memories of Uhura remaining kind of a naggy character, but her competence with Klingon as a language becomes, like, a major point, I think, in one of the, one of the later films.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:34:36
I remember really liking Beyond, but I don’t know if it would hold up if I saw it now.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:34:42
It would have to hold up better than this.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:34:43
Oh, yeah.

Lucy Arnold 00:34:43
Another thing I couldn’t help but notice about Uhura was that her hair styling and her ponytail, I thought it was so, so Western, right? Like, it was really, really white hairstyle for her. And I think especially since, you know, we’ve watched a lot of Strange New Worlds lately, and I think that version of Uhura just feels so much more… I don’t know. Good.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:35:12
Yeah, feels good. And Uhura, in the movies, in the Original Series movies also migrates to a fro, I’m pretty sure?

Lucy Arnold 00:35:21
I think you’re right.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:35:23
And, you know, I mean, you know, it’s the ’70s or whatever, so one must. But this, the glitz and glam of this, of this movie, the very bright colors, the sharpness of the colors… I’ll get into the lens flares later. But, like, the brightness of this, of this film contributes to a certain degree of sterileness that her very straightened hair, very long hair—both of which are like a particular kind of fixation—does fit with that in a way that is unappealing. Everyone is a cheerleader. Everyone is pop, right? And that’s right in line with that, the swinging ponytail and hands on boyfriend all the time. Anyway, I think this was hard to watch on that front, especially having seen, you know, we talked about the first episode of Discovery where Georgiou and Michael Burnham, just, like, are two human beings.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:36:34
The first line passes the Bechdel test.

Lucy Arnold 00:36:36
It rocked so hard. I struggled as well. It was really hard to watch this version of Uhura specifically. I mean, I think we’ve just seen, I mean, even Nichelle Nichols’s version of Uhura, I think, is better than this.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:36:52
Yeah. She had more to say.

Lucy Arnold 00:36:53
I thought… Yeah, she’s just so. She’s so sidelined in such a… It felt such a gendered thing, you know. It felt bad. It felt bad to watch.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:37:05
It’s, it’s one of those things where, like, you look at modern, the current set of Star Treks, and, like, they are not entirely reactive works. They’re not like, they’re not looking at this film and going, “God, we don’t want to be that!” But maybe also they kind of are a little bit? Maybe they’re kind of like, “Oh, look what we did 15 years ago. Let’s not do that.” Or I guess it would have been ten years ago at that point, but it’s a, it is a very sharp contrast, so. Yeah. Yeah. And the poor moms, one of them murdered, one of them only for the birthing. Only, only for the birthing.

Lucy Arnold 00:37:44
You know, I don’t know that it will come up any other time, but I do love me some Winona Ryder, so I’m always glad to see her.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:37:54
Was that the mom?

Lucy Arnold 00:37:55
Spock’s mom is Winona Ryder.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:37:57
I did not recognize her at all.

Lucy Arnold 00:37:59
If that baby is half Roxy Carmichael, it has at least half a chance! I’d know her anywhere. I could see her face. I love Winona Ryder.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:38:08
So, we talked a little bit about how it kind of feels like Uhura’s first name is held as just a way to get to a plot beat or to a little joke. And I feel like a lot of characters in the, in this film do things as if they’re characters who know the story of Star Trek and know that they have to do things in order to make Star Trek happen. And none of the characters’ motivations really makes—I don’t want to say “none”. A lot of the characters’ motivations don’t make sense to me.

We talked about Nero earlier, and I think we can return to that. Like Nero… So, Nero was a miner. He watched. He heard that his planet was going to be destroyed, right? A supernova was happening with some amount of time to stop it. A Vulcan ambassador-scientist—it’s unclear why Spock is in his old role. He’s an ambassador nw, he’s not a scientist, but he comes up with this red matter thing that can save Romulus, and he’s too late to save Romulus. If Spock had not come there, Romulus would have been destroyed, too. So Spock, like, Spock, didn’t, didn’t, is not at all culpable for the destruction of Romulus.

Fine. Nero sees his planet destroyed. He’s very distraught. He attacks Spock. They get in a fight. They go through the wormhole. Nero is, like, immediately sees a Federation ship, immediately asks after Spock, attacks it. This all kind of makes sense, right? He’s overcome by grief. He isn’t thinking straight.

Then 25 years pass.

Nero the miner and his crew of laborers, right? These are Romulans. They’re culturally different, but they’re not, like, they’re not maniacs when they start, right? But I think we’re just supposed to think that Nero has been driven insane with grief for, again, 25 years.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:40:27
It’s a long time.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:40:29
And in the original script, they get sent to a Klingon penal colony, which is why there’s that attack on Klingons that is completely unclear why it happens. And so, like, that’s at least an explanation, that’s at least an explanation for, like, what they were doing for 25 years instead of just, other than just waiting for Spock.

But, like, if your planet was destroyed 25 years ago, at some point there you go, “You know, I’m not sure that Spock could have done anything.” Possibly, you go, “Hey, maybe I should call Romulus and let them know that their star will explode on this specific date and that they should do something about it or evacuate,” right? Or maybe I should just show up to Romulus, give them this fancy ship and help them conquer the galaxy.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:41:21
Yep.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:41:22
Instead, he wants to get revenge on Spock? Fine. He wants to have Spock feel his pain? Fine. The way he does that is by committing genocide, destroying an entire planet at great personal risk, and then going on to be like, “Oh, I also want to destroy Earth, his other home.”

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:41:42
Wild.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:41:43
This is…

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:41:44
He wants a Romulus free of the Federation. So instead of going to Romulus and setting them free of the Federation, he goes to destroy Earth.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:41:52
Yeah. And he does all these things in ways that will not at all prevent the destruction of the planet. And, like, again, if this was happening in the week following the destruction of Romulus, that makes sense, right? I can believe that someone is just, like, so distraught and so, you know, running on caffeine and grief and anger and rage that you’re just gonna wanna strike out and have revenge on everyone. But, like, you cannot operate on that level of stress for 25 years with your intense Romulan emotions, right? Because Romulans and Vulcans have overwhelming emotions. It just doesn’t work. You can’t do that.

Lucy Arnold 00:42:34
And I also admire that they were able to, like, be so focused in all of that grief. Like, I… that’s not my experience with grief.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:42:44
Like, they’re overwhelmed with grief, but also able to maintain very careful plans, including being able to somehow calculate when Spock is going to emerge from the time travel singularity, even though they don’t know when he went in.

And, like, let’s compare this with a very similar villain from Star Trek: the villain of Prodigy. Which I’ve only seen the first season, so there might be details in the second season I’m leaving out. But the villain of Prodigy primarily is the Diviner, and he’s this, this alien bad dad who the Federation came to his—minor spoilers for Prodigy, none of these are big reveals, but this is… where I’m talking about character motivations that are unravel, like, revealed over the course of the season.

The Diviner’s culture was… The Federation came, made first contact, and he feels that they caused a civil war on his planet that resulted in essentially this planet dying, like, destroying itself. And so he wants to… He is angry at the Federation, and along with 99 of his compatriots, is sent back in time to deal with this. And his primary motivation throughout all of this is to stop first contact on his planet. He wants to prevent the Federation from ever interacting with his planet.

So first of all, the Diviner has a plan that actually will help, right? Like, his motivations are, like… He, like Nero, wants to destroy the Federation, but the Diviner does it because the Federation’s very existence is a threat to his planet. As opposed to previously, where the Federation and their red matter technology is the solution to saving Romulus, the Diviner changes over the course of his time. In the past, the Diviner starts out furious in some way, and that shifts to the simmering resentment. He makes compromises. His entire life is taken over by this effort. He actually does multiple things to try and effect this. He captures a ship, he prepares a virus to distribute like, he does a bunch of steps. And it’s not, like… Revenge is part of his motivation, but he has had time to think over how to have his revenge in the best way possible, and he carries out that plan. As opposed to Nero, who it seems to be “first thought, best thought” for 25 years.

And it’s, it’s frustrating because so many characters do things to make the movie happen, which, I don’t mind coincidences in films. I don’t mind characters making one of several reasonable decisions to make something happen. But like, Spock maroons Kirk on a planet in violation of regulations. You know, instead of, like, throwing him in the brig, he puts him in an escape pod and launches him to a planet. Because that planet, unbeknownst to anyone, is the planet where old Spock and Scotty are. And that’s the reason why he’s marooned there is so he can run into old Spock. But that doesn’t make sense as a character motivation for young Spock. This is rife throughout. All of the major decisions that drive the plot, or…

Pike assigning Kirk to be his first officer? Why? Because Kirk needs to end up as the captain. But Pike doesn’t know that. Pike has met this kid once. As far as we know, he met him in a bar where he had just gotten beaten because he was an awful creep to a cadet, convinced him to join Starfleet. Years later, runs into the student, is like, “You stowed away on my ship and you were right about one thing, so you get to be my first officer.” It’s, it’s…

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:46:59
Yep.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:47:01
The characters here aren’t characters. They’re cardboard standees of Original Series characters. And it’s so frustrating.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:47:08
It is.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:47:10
I feel like I ranted there.

Lucy Arnold 00:47:14
Do you feel better?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:47:16
No. I want to say more good things about this film. There’s some things I like about this film that we’ll presumably get into, but it’s really hard not to get angry thinking about this this film because I care about Star Trek. All right, so those are the main topics covered. So now it’s lightning round time. What other interesting things did we spot?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:47:40
I want to talk a little bit about destiny, and I want to talk about it from two angles. One of them is what we’ve sort of already touched on a decent amount, which is sort of this canonicity. Where, where do we expect things to end up? Because we are familiar with Star Trek, when we watch this film and we maybe have some questions about to what degree JJ Abrams is familiar with Star Trek in watching this film. And then I also want to talk about the in world sense of destiny, which is my least favorite thing when it comes up in Star Trek. I would rather things be about “connection” than be about destiny in Star Trek. And we could fight over that.

But, you know, we watched this, and we have this happen when we started watching modern Star Trek as well—

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:48:35
Discovery and Strange New Worlds.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:48:36
—especially the ones set in the past. Yeah, exactly. We’re looking back and we’re like, “Oh, how are they going to fit Burnham into the fact that, you know, she’s Spock’s sister?” And, you know, are Spock and whichever Kirk gonna become friends? And is Pike gonna end up in a wheelchair? Like, all of these things that we’re looking for, like, how is this gonna align with what we know of canon? And touching on, like, Greg, what you were saying about the character motivations. This film is just hurtling, just full tilt, warp speed, can we get to something the viewer recognizes as the destinies of these characters? And it doesn’t even seem to understand what those are the same way we as viewers and overly geeky fans of Star Trek do, where we look at this and we’re like, what is… How is this friendship developing? Kirk, Kirk stood in Spock’s face—extremely close—and mocked him for feeling bad about a genocide and his dead mom. I’ll tell you who can’t be my fucking friend after that, right? Like…

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:49:45
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:49:46
Like, what is…?

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:49:46
That’s one of the few character motivations I understand, right? Like, Kirk is, the reason Kirk is so mean is because he is trying to, to achieve a thing. But, like, why do you make up after that?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:49:56
Right?!

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:49:57
Also, Spock beat you! The things that Kirk knows about Spock are: made an unfair test, tried to drum him out of Starfleet, begrudgingly said he was correct about a thing, beat him to within an inch of his life, and then got in a fistfight as an ally.

Lucy Arnold 00:50:15
And then came from the future and said you’re going to be best friends.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:50:15
And abandoned him.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:50:18
Oh, yes. Yes, that’s right.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:50:19
Right. Yeah. This movie feels so confused. And we have seen Star Trek films—I guess not on this show, other than First Contact—we have seen Star Trek films want to be action films, and do so very shakily, right? This is a problem, a thing that happens in Star Trek films. This went action first…

Lucy Arnold 00:50:43
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:50:44
..in a way that results in this tangle.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:50:47
There’s a lot of action in Star Trek, right? Like, Star Trek has always had bar fights and space battles and so on, but it didn’t feel like this, where the movie exists to take you from set piece action scene, to set piece action scene.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:51:02
Right. And I do think the movie feels different even at the time, watching it. And now looking back, now that we have some shows running under our belts now, there is a difference between watching what feels like could be a one-off film versus actually having real showrunners holding the bibles in their hand making new Star Trek, right? It doesn’t feel like 2009 made canon. It does feel like Discovery did. Like, they had, Discovery folks had the right to. 2009 did not.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:51:37
And we talked about how the Discovery premiere has all these action scenes that we enjoyed, or at least I enjoyed. And it’s because all of those action scenes were in service of the story rather than the other way around.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:51:52
Right. And then to sort of move it in-character here, we have our old gentleman, Spock, our favorite Leonard Nimoy, who is just looking… his age. You know, he’s literally talking about destiny and talking about, I’ll say predetermination. Maybe it’s just determination. I don’t, I don’t know that I could distinguish the school, the official schools of philosophy. But, you know, he is, he’s like, “This friendship is going to happen. This, you know, I am making room for it to happen. I’m facilitating it. You’ll kiss and make up.”

But this is, this friendship is predicated on the series of events that gets him and I’ll say, “Kirk Prime”, into the space they’re in. And just having Kirk be a captain and Spock be a first officer is insufficient. Well, I mean, this series is going to show us it is sufficient. But, like, from, like, a how did we get here? standpoint, it doesn’t make any sense, and I am amused. I very much related to Kirk when Spock is talking about this to Kirk and Kirk kind of rolls his eyes a little bit. He’s like, “Okay, but actually, can we talk about what’s happening? It has nothing to do with this friendship business.” They’ve set Spock Prime up very much in contrast with these kids, right? Like Spock, he’s got very soft lighting on him. He’s got this wise old man voice. He’s all, like, adorably bundled up in the cold. And Kirk is running around, cuts all over his face and stubble and this very earth living, you know, bright person. And it just, it feels like this massive disconnect, and it feels like the disconnect of the rest of the film. It feels like there’s a stodgy thing saying, “Destiny! How are we gonna get to the friendship?” And then we have the rest of the film, that’s like, “I gotta punch someone in the face, and we’re gonna punch each other in the face. There’s our friendship.” And it’s just… It’s rough. I will take Strange New Worlds talking about destiny over this disjointed people talking past each other about destiny.

Lucy Arnold 00:54:07
It really… The movie seemed to only have three modes, which is either, like, violence, like, we’re having a fight scene or an action scene. Or there’s just straight up exposition where somebody is literally just explaining some really dense plot points, like Leonard Nimoy did in that part with him. Or there’s quippy dialogue that actually is not communicating anything meaningful about the characters to each other. So those are kind of the three modes that exist in this movie.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:54:43
Yeah. Even Sarek and Spock’s touching little moment that they have where Sarek is saying, like, “Yes, you have two paths, as we discussed 25 years ago. You can choose to be human or not, and you should embrace your emotions because they’re there. And I married your mother because I loved her.” Which, every Sarek at some point must admit, it falls flat. For one: not my favorite Sarek actor. He’s fine, but not my favorite.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:55:15
Yeah, he doesn’t get a lot to say or do.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:55:18
No. You would think: he’s the one whose spouse died.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:55:22
Yeah, maybe he’s, you know, got an opinion on that, but.

Lucy Arnold 00:55:25
And I know if Winona Ryder was my wife, I would be able to communicate some level of affection for her.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:55:33
Right. But even that interpersonal moment falls flat where we have seen in other Star Treks, Sarek be a very, very good, you know, emotor with his children. And it just, they can’t even pull off that mode because they’ve got—it’s either gotta be quippy or it’s gotta be exposition. And it turns into exposition: “I married your mother because…” It’s just a mess. It feels like the show needs or the movie needs to, like, settle the fuck down. Like, it’s like a young child running around. You’re like, “Hey, cool it. Take two breaths. Relax. You might get somewhere here.” That’s it. That’s it on destiny.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:56:15
All right.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:56:16
I hate destiny in Star Trek.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:56:18
Let’s have a palate cleanser, because this one, I think, will be less of a rant and an actual discussion of Star Trek. So this film does the Kobayashi Maru, which is, I think, one of the cool little, like, details of the, of Star Trek that is returned to repeatedly. So Kobayashi Maru is an exam or a simulation that people get, that Starfleet Academy students run through. And they’re cast in the role of bridge crew on a ship. The Kobayashi Maru is the civilian transport, right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:57:04
I think so.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:57:05
There’s a civilian transport in trouble that’s being threatened, in this case by Klingons, who the roles are like, what species it is changes in each Star Trek era. But the students are tasked with rescuing the crew of this ship and surviving this attack by a bunch of enemy ships. And the whole point of the Kobayashi Maru is it’s designed to be unwinnable. Like, something will always happen that will cause you to fail and your ship to get blown up.

And the way it’s always explained is that it’s a test to get captains comfortable, or at least introduced to the idea that sometimes it might be an unwittable situation and they’ll have to make difficult decisions. And it’s been established that Kirk cheated at it because he doesn’t believe in no-win scenarios. And so he kind of hacked the test in order to make it so that he could win.

And the way that people approach the Kobayashi Maru and the way that characters kind of frame their loss or success at it is different in show to show. And it really reveals, I think, things about the show. We get sometimes the Kobayashi Maru exists to teach you that you will have to make sacrifices. In order to succeed, you’ll have to give up people. You’ll have to send people into danger. You’ll have to sacrifice your own ship in order to protect other people.

In the case of… There’s a Prodigy episode where Dahl goes through the Kobayashi Maru and he almost solves it. Like, he does this really wild, very un-Starfleet approach that actually if he hadn’t fucked up at the end randomly, he would have succeeded at the scenario. And, like, that’s interesting because that’s kind of saying, well, the Kobayashi Maru is only no-win if you’re thinking like a Starfleet officer. If you’re thinking like a child, you’re able to figure it out.

Lucy Arnold 00:59:14
A child who broke out of prison.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:59:16
Yes. Yeah, a very smart child who’s good at dealing with impossible problems. And the way I imagine, like, as described—and I think it’s introduced in The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek II. The way I imagine Kirk breaking the Kobayashi Maru, because I don’t think it’s depicted there, is he very quietly hacks the system to, like, adjust a few variables and then comes out looking cool, right? Because part of Kirk’s whole character, this movie, very much reduces Kirk to a two dimensional philanderer. Like, a reckless, rebellious philanderer.

But Kirk has always at least been a little showboaty. He always wants to come up with a clever solution. And I imagine that Kirk hacked the thing and then played it straight, and it was only discovered long after the fact that he cheated, right? That it was this, like, discovery and this scandal.

But in this case, Kirk doesn’t have to take this test, right? He’s already taken the Kobayashi Maru, so he volunteers to take it again, hacks it in a way that, like, turns off all the lights and is very flippant… He’s eating an apple, just kind of kicking back, pretending that this test is nothing, and solves it by, basically, magic, right? The way he solves it is like, oh, the Klingons don’t have shields anymore. And that feels like… I mean, again, why did you think that would work? Why does this accomplish your goals? This is just the only… In this case, he only hacks the Kobayashi Maru. And this is a different Kirk than The Wrath of Khan Kirk, but in this case, he only hacks it just to say “fuck you”, and gets in trouble for it, even though this was a voluntary retake of the test. And also wasn’t, obviously wasn’t deceitful about it, right? He’s just like, “Yes, I hacked your test.” And it… I don’t know what this show is saying about no-win scenarios. I guess the show is saying if you’re flippant enough, you can just trust that things will work out? And you’ll end up captain when you cheat openly? I don’t know. I don’t know what the Kobayashi Maru exists for in this story.

Lucy Arnold 01:01:43
A thing I was curious about in that part is we find that Spock designed the test. Is that true in any other versions of Star Trek?

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:01:55
Well, I think he had been—I don’t know that he originated it. I think he had been programming it these years in which he was at the station, at the Academy.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:02:05
Yeah, he wrote the test the past four years. Not. He didn’t invent the Kobayashi Maru.

Lucy Arnold 01:02:10
Because it seemed to me, like, sort of a way to spotlight Spock as being this sort of test creator? I don’t know. Assessment creator. And Kirk being a bad boy, right? Like, I don’t… I’m not sure this movie had greater designs than that.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:02:34
Yeah. So when I first saw this, 2009, I was a fairly recent college grad, and when they said that this was the third time Kirk had taken that test, and he had a real “fuck it” vibe about it, it made me think of the way students take SATs and the GRE. Where you take—I took the SAT… two times? Three times?

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:02:57
Huh.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:02:58
And by the time I was—yeah, look, look. High school was a lot. And, you know, by the time you’ve taken it your third time, you’re not flippant. It matters to you, obviously, right? You’re doing it that many times and you want that perfect number. But there is a certain degree of detachment. Like, by the time I took that test the second time and left the room, I couldn’t have told you anything that was on it, right?

But I could, I had the formulas, right? Like, it was, it was, like, ingrained in my head. And his attachment to retaking that test to get a certain outcome, but also only sort of caring about the results. Like, my first SAT test would have gotten me into the same school I got into anyway, right? I didn’t have to take it again and again, and he didn’t have to take the Kobayashi Maru again and again. And, you know, there were people… There’s a person I went to college with who, like, tested through a bunch of classes in a way that wasn’t normal to be able to do at that school. And it was like, why are you doing this? Like, I don’t know, this sort of test frenzy that is part of American culture in academic spaces or, you know, student spaces, kind of seemed to be part of that. Where Spock, who could get into the VSA, who had his choices, right? Of the two paths, one of them being very academic focused, was the writer of this test. It kind of seemed to be in that space to me. I am far removed from the weird little brain who would take the SAT three times. But, yeah. Weird stuff.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:04:36
I would, yeah. I think that if he cared about his grade, that he would pass the test in a way that didn’t make it immediately obvious that he had cheated.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:04:47
Right, right.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:04:49
I don’t know.

Lucy Arnold 01:04:51
Well, you want to know what’s funny? Humor is funny.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:05:03
Hm. Is humor funny?

Lucy Arnold 01:05:04
Well.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:05:05
Oh, no.

Lucy Arnold 01:05:06
So, you know, I’m an English professor, and sometimes I teach Shakespeare. And whenever you teach Shakespeare, you have to deal with the concept of comedy because you have tragedies and comedies. And it’s, you know, Shakespearean tragedies are a good example of something that, you know, just stands the test of time. People still understand what it is like to be ambitious. People understand what it is like to be jealous. People understand what it’s like to be an old man who’s worried about his children and the future of his land or whatever.

But the comedies are a little trickier, because although some of the themes of those texts are still resonant, in many ways. I really like a lot of the comedies. The things that are actually funny, the jokes don’t always make it, right? They’re not always funny today because we don’t have the same context for that humor for to be funny. So you often have to explain a whole lot to students, you know, for them to be able to get the joke. And then, of course, it’s not funny anymore because you’ve explained a whole bunch. And I always tell my students, it’s really similar to, if you just watch an episode of, like, The Daily Show from ten years ago, you’re gonna have the same experience of reading a Shakespearean comedy, right? The humor is not gonna be funny because it’s so contextual. It’s so based on that specific time and space, that sort of moment. Comedy is so driven by that sort of kairos, right?

And I think this movie really suffers from that reality about comedy. I did think there were several funny moments. My favorite funny part was probably the Vulcan bullies, when they come up to Spock—

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:07:06
Yes!

Lucy Arnold 01:07:07
—when he’s a little kid at the school, and, and one of them says, or, you know, says something to him, and he says, “I assume you have prepared new insults for today.” Like, I think that scene is hilarious.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:07:19
Because I love the idea of Vulcan bullies carefully crafting the insults that they think will make their target feel bad. Like, I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s adorable. I mean, awful, but adorable.

Lucy Arnold 01:07:34
Yeah. And it takes place, of course, in the Vulcan version of Holes. So, like, it’s, it’s great. Like, this is a super scene. I think that, like, you know, Kirk to me in his first, that first moment in the bar is very funny, when the guys come up to him to be bullies, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’ll be, go get a few more guys, and it’ll be a fair fight. It’s already four against one.” Like, that’s funny. I thought that was funny.

But so much of this movie, especially Kirk, I think he is the worst. Spock a little bit too, though. It’s just a sort of misogynist humor. That scene in the bar, another part of the humor is that he, I’ll quote unquote accidentally, he plunges into Uhura and grabs her boobs. And it’s clearly meant for humor in the movie, right? It’s supposed to be funny. And I was just, you know, my 2024 self was like, “Wow, that’s terrible.” Like, because he does, you know, his reaction is not, “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.” His reaction is, “Hehe, I touched her boobs.” And it’s so gross, right? Like, it is, it’s appalling to me to watch. And it’s, and it is the sort of way this movie operates. The him hiding under the bed and being a voyeur. Like, the movie’s playing that for funny. Like, haha, look at Kirk. Isn’t he a bad boy? And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s terrible. It’s terrible for Uhura.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:09:00
Yeah. And they’re also doing things about the red shirts not being intelligent as a funny thing, right? The guy won’t open his parachute. There’s the Cupcake guy. Like, they’re doing these, like, dumb, meathead quote unquote ableist things, right? And those are played for laughs. Those are totally supposed to be funny. I mean, the reference of Cupcake again later is funny.

Lucy Arnold 01:09:22
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:09:23
That guy being not smart—

Lucy Arnold 01:09:25
It’s not funny.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:09:26
—is played for laughs, too, and that’s not funny.

Lucy Arnold 01:09:28
And another thing that I really struggled with in this movie was Chekhov’s accent, which is, in this movie, played to be so hilarious. And it’s interesting because I do think there is a little bit of humor that’s played in the old movies with Chekhov’s accent. I know the whale movie.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:09:44
“Nuclear wessels.”

Lucy Arnold 01:09:45
Yeah. And I guess that’s where they were coming from with this. But it’s not funny. It feels so, like, US-centric, right? Like, it’s so, it’s so bizarre to think here we are in Starfleet, surely… Like, why are we flipping out about this, right? Like, it’s, it feels so, um. I don’t know, old-fashioned.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:10:09
And it doesn’t make sense because—god, I am the pedantic asshole. If I voice record a fucking password, it’s gotta voice match! He would have said it, “wictor wictor”.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:10:19
Yeah, the computer would have understood.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:10:22
Yeah. It’s his fucking voice print. Why would it sudden—why would he have typed in “Victor” and then not recorded? You know what I mean? Like, it just makes no sense. It’s just for laughs in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:10:37
And part of the humor there is that reference back to the old stuff. And there’s a lot of things that are clearly meant to be jokey references here, but they’re not, they’re not implemented properly. Like, there’s a, “Damn it, I’m not a doctor. I’m a whatever.” But it’s just sort of thrown out there. Like, it’s just sort of said, not in the context that it would have been said in the show. And so it doesn’t land as a joke for me. Like, I don’t go, “Oh, he said the thing.” I go, like, “Why did he say the thing? Has he seen Star Trek? And so he knows that he’s supposed to say the Bones line.”

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:11:13
Yeah.

Lucy Arnold 01:11:14
The bizarre experience in watching the movie was being like… Because it felt to me like they were playing so much of the movie for laughs. But it was either something that kind of felt really gross in 2024, or so much of it was this weird slapstick, you know, when Kirk’s fingers swoll up, and I was just like, why are we doing this? It’s so stupid, and there’s no reason for it. It’s not funny. And it’s also nonsensical in this bizarro way. So it was a… Just looking at the comedy of this film, I don’t know if it was funny in 2009. I can’t speak to that. I can’t remember.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:02
I’m shaking my head “no,” for the listener.

Lucy Arnold 01:12:04
I feel like I liked it better when I saw it in 2009 than I did when I saw it a couple days ago, but it’s not funny. I guess you could just watch that one scene with the Vulcan children, and you probably have seen the funniest thing in the movie.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:21
I did like, in the bar, the awful bar scene where Kirk is hitting on Uhura. There’s the person stuck in the middle—

Lucy Arnold 01:12:27
Oh, yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:12:29
Oh, yeah. That’s good.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:30
That is, that is a classic, always funny bit of someone sitting very still in an interaction that they don’t want to be part of.

Lucy Arnold 01:12:38
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:39
That: funny.

Lucy Arnold 01:12:40
Yeah. There were a couple moments like that I thought were funny.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:43
Yeah. Yeah.

Lucy Arnold 01:12:45
But it is hard. I mean, that, that grabbing somebody’s boobs joke is gonna be hard to get past for me today. Like, that’s a hard one.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:54
Yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:12:57
Really sets the tone for the film.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:59
It does. It really does.

Lucy Arnold 01:13:01
Yeah, it sadly does.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:13:03
Yeah.

Lucy Arnold 01:13:03
I’m really sorry I didn’t like it better than I did.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:13:08
It’s sad. So, as is probably clear by how frustrated we are, we are all huge Star Trek fans. So let’s head to Ten Forward and talk about some stuff that we geek about, about Star Trek. I’m not sure how positive it will be about the film, but at least we’ll be talking about things that we like about the world in general.

Mine is pretty quick. One of the things that I really unequivocally liked about this film is the design of the sets for engineering areas, docking bays, a lot of the kind of more industrial parts of spaceships. There’s a whole lot of support structures, metal support structures. There’s big pipes running through, big tanks. The walls look like they’re made of concrete or something. They’re very rough and not finished. Often Star Trek sets are like polished plastic or metal looks, and these look very unfinished.

And if you look up pictures of the equivalent spaces on aircraft carriers today, modern aircraft carriers, they’re very similar. Like the hangar where the jets are kept on an aircraft carrier looks almost identical to the place where they, like, get on the shuttlecrafts to head to the Enterprise.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:14:36
Oh, cool!

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:14:37
And the engine room of an aircraft carrier, or other very large naval ship, is a small version of that huge, sprawling engine room of the Enterprise in the movie. I really like that someone on the production went in and was like, what would these spaces look like? And I think just looked up inspirations and was like, “Oh, let’s actually make this a realistic space where, like, you’d be able to access machinery without having to pull a panel off the wall. Make it look like it’s built to be able to handle a ship coming in too fast and ramming into the wall.” It’s a really cool design.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:15:20
Yeah, I liked it.

Lucy Arnold 01:15:21
Also really ambitious belief in a lack of railing.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:15:29
For sure.

Lucy Arnold 01:15:30
They really believed that their people were going to be so dexterous that they would not fall off of those catwalks. And I, as a very clumsy person, admire that ambition.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:15:41
Yeah. Like our contemporary military, they do not have an OSHA telling them how these structures must be built.

Lucy Arnold 01:15:52
On the downside, quite a lot of people did fall off of those catwalks.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:15:57
Well, you know, if you’re making an omelette, you gotta have a few people get terrible injuries falling from a great height.

Lucy Arnold 01:16:06
Well, so I did struggle a little bit. And usually this is the easy one for me, the one thing I geeked about. But a thing that I really liked about this movie is the idea of having an alternate timeline. I think that that lack of allegiance to, I guess, canon in that way, the willingness to just do, “Hey, let’s, what if we did a different timeline?” I guess I don’t love that it’s a Vulcan genocide that’s the sort of the big, I don’t know, event of it.

But the idea that you’re willing to do this spin off timeline and things be different, I do like that. I like that they are willing to play in that space. In fact, I guess maybe it would have been, I think that maybe they could have pushed more into that space. Been less beholden instead of more beholden to the events and the characters of the franchise. So I don’t know if I have a ton else to say, because I don’t know that it’s really the best version of that alternate timeline idea, but I do think it’s good that they thought, “What if we did this?”

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:17:23
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:17:24
Yeah. It’s where they tried to pull it back and tie it together is where you get kind of into that destiny stuff, right?

Lucy Arnold 01:17:29
Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:17:29
Like, “Oh, it must, it must end up with this friendship. It must end up with XYZ.”

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:17:35
They could have had, like, Kirk end up as the pilot. I mean, that might have been too big of a difference, but, like. Or, I don’t know, have Uhuru be the first officer instead of Spock. Like, if you’re going for different timeline things, have one of the crew secretly be a villain. I don’t know. Like, there’s all sorts of interesting stuff you could do with that.

Lucy Arnold 01:17:56
And with less winking, I think. I think it’s a little too winky.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:18:00
Yeah. I did not like Into Darkness, which is the Khan remake. But one of the things that I liked about it is that—spoilers for a terrible movie—Khan isn’t the villain of that film. He ends up villainous, but he’s not responsible for the initial events, I think, right?

Lucy Arnold 01:18:22
I have no memory of it.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:18:24
There’s another plot going on. There’s a military conspiracy, I think, and Khan is scapegoated, but then takes advantage of it to become a villain. It’s more, it’s not a retread of the original thing, and I think that that’s cool. Oh, yeah. Cause Khan hasn’t been discovered, doesn’t get discovered by the Enterprise, right? Like, that event changes. The Botany Bay doesn’t get found in the same way. I think.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:18:52
Yeah. And so I was thinking, like, what else goes on with this alternate timeline? I think that’s where Star Trek Online is set?

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:06
I think you visit. I think you can visit it or something. Yeah.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:19:11
Okay. Okay. So it’s post-Nemesis and post-Romulus destruction, but I think still in the original timeline. Okay.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:22
Star Trek Online is weird.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:19:23
That makes sense.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:24
It does weird stuff.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:19:25
Yeah. It brings forth all sorts of all the things that, like, several of the things that we’ve touched on and been like, “Oh, I wonder what the Progenitors are like. I wonder what the Breen are doing.” Like, they’re all in Star Trek Online. They all had the same questions that we did, and they decided to just do it, I think.

All right, so my little item is lens flares! So. I know… So, okay. When Star Trek: Discovery came out and in its opening shots, there are lens flares, I was like, “Oh, I thought we all hated lens flares, especially in Star Trek, because the 2009 film did it so much and everyone sneered at Abrams”, right? And that Abrams kind of, like, not fell off, but, like, I at least stopped watching his films. And everyone in the film space seemed to sneer at lens flares. And then it’s just normal now. It’s just… It’s just in modern Star Trek, which I am continually surprised by. This movie had even more lens flares than I thought it did.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:20:33
It was so bad to look at. It was so, like, it… I am not particularly visually sensitive. This hurt to watch often.

Lucy Arnold 01:20:44
Yeah, I am visually sensitive. And there were parts I did not watch.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:20:51
JJ Abrams can use lens flares in a cool way. Fringe has plot-relevant lens flares. When you see lens flares in Fringe, it’s because there’s been some sort of dimensional travel going on or some sort of reality distortion, and that’s cool. And it’s rather… he uses a rather light touch in there. This, like, just sometimes I couldn’t see what was going on because of the camera shake and the lens flares.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:21:20
And the tilting, all the tilting. So he did an interview in 2009 where he admitted that in Star Trek, they were overdone. And he said, but what he said was interesting. He said, “I love the idea that the future was so bright, it couldn’t be contained in the frame. The flares weren’t just happening from on-camera light sources, they were happening off camera. And that was really the key to it. I wanted to create the sense that just off camera, something spectacular is happening.”

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:21:49
That’s beautiful. I wish it had worked.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:21:51
It’s beautiful. I also wish it had worked. But I thought that was a really interesting motivation for doing it. It kind of fits with the kind of glitz and glam of the whole, of all the sets and stuff like that anyway. But I… It makes me feel old, maybe, but I’m still surprised when I watch a modern Star Trek show and there are lens flares in it, because I’m like, I thought we had all agreed this was bad, but apparently it has now receded to appropriate dramatic use instead of three times a scene.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:22:25
Because we can—

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:22:25
Anyway.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:22:26
Yeah. We can basically avoid lens flares now. Like, camera and lens technology is advanced to the point where we don’t have to have any lens flares. And so they become this visual shorthand for something too bright to represent on screen. And are generally used okay in Discovery.

Lucy Arnold 01:22:44
I think I was gonna say, the thing I am hearing is that because JJ Abrams ran, we can take baby steps.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:22:53
Yes.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:22:54
Yes. My understanding is that all the lens flares in Star Trek 2009 are real. Practical. They’re not CG.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:23:05
Except for the ones in the CG scenes, presumably.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:23:09
Fair. Yes. But all of the ones that would involve cameras do involve cameras and light sources. Yeah. It’s a dedication and a design intent that is interesting.

Lucy Arnold 01:23:23
Well, at the end of each episode—

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:23:27
I’m so worried.

Lucy Arnold 01:23:29
—we pick the next thing we’re watching based on a connection from this episode.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:23:33
This was bad, so.

Lucy Arnold 01:23:34
Honestly, I feel like we’ve been really edging around what I’ve chosen for maybe the whole run of our podcast. So I think it’s finally time.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:23:50
Okay, now I’m excited.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:23:51
Okay. I know one of two things it could be. I know two things it could be. Go ahead.

Lucy Arnold 01:23:57
Well, here’s good and bad news, so don’t get super… Don’t get super excited. But a thing that I loved about this film, as I just talked about, is the fact that they said, “What if we had an alternate timeline?” But guess what? That’s actually not a new idea in Star Trek. In fact, it’s something they’ve been doing maybe in every series, or at least most series has a alternate universe that we visit and have visited in many of the franchises. So we’re gonna go to a alternate Star Trek episode, and actually, we’re gonna watch a pair of episodes that I don’t think I’ve seen. It is possible that I have seen them, but I’m not sure. We’re gonna watch two episodes that are “In a Mirror, Darkly”, the 18th and 19th episodes of Enterprise season four.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:24:58
Wow.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:25:00
I knew it was gonna be Enterprise! I knew it was gonna be Enterprise!

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:25:03
I don’t think I’ve seen this either. And I, they’re generally, like, considered some of the better Enterprise episodes, I think.

Lucy Arnold 01:25:09
Yeah. I mean, people who are Enterprise defenders say season four is the best season. I am not sure. I feel like I thought I had watched all of Enterprise. I am not sure, I have seen some of these episodes in season four. So I am a huge—I think y’all know, but I’m a huge fan of the parallel universe, my, maybe my favorite shit in Star Trek. And so I’m pretty excited to see one that maybe I haven’t seen. And also, I love the “In a Mirror, Darkly”. That’s a great title.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:25:43
What’s it, a?

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:25:44
It’s a very good title.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:25:45
—a two parter?

Lucy Arnold 01:25:46
It’s a two parter. They also did mention how Scotty murdered Archer’s dog.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:25:55
Yeah, Scotty killed Archer’s dog.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:25:58
Well, Schrodinger’s boxed him.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:26:00
Yeah. Let me back, back away from that a little bit. In the, both a comic and the novelization, maybe, that beagle conveniently shows up on the transporter pad of the Enterprise. So depending on what you consider canon, the dog is okay.

Lucy Arnold 01:26:18
Yeah. Also, we don’t know about this alternate timeline. We don’t know what happened to that dog, but I assume we’ll get to see the dog in these episodes. I feel like that dog’s on all the time on Enterprise.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:26:30
Looking forward to it.

Lucy Arnold 01:26:32
Yeah. And you can find Enterprise on Paramount or wherever you steal your Star Trek.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:26:41
So next time we’ll be discussing “In a Mirror, Darkly” on Before the Future Came. You can find links to some of the stuff we talked about and other show notes at beforethefuture.space. And we also, I’ll probably include an image of a lens flare and a few other pictures. Maybe some weird guy, Scotty’s little friend, I don’t know.

If you could, it would be really helpful for you to rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts especially, or anywhere that you found the show that has ratings. And if you want to give us feedback, we would love it. We don’t hear all that much from listeners, and we’d love to know what you like or want to see more of. You can give us questions on cohost at cohost.org/beforethefuturecame, you can comment on individual episodes on our website, or you can write us via email at onscreen@beforethefuture.space.

Lucy Arnold 01:27:38
I’m Lucy Arnold and sometimes blog@intertextualities.com.

Melissa Avery-Weir 01:27:44
I’m Melissa Avery-Weir and I live at irrsinn.net and on Mastodon as melissa@irrsinn.life.

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:27:52
And I’m Gregory Avery-Weir, and you can find me at ludusnovus.net or on cohost at cohost.org/gaw. Our theme music is “Let’s Pretend” by Josh Woodward, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. See you next time.

Josh Woodward 01:28:09
I’m sure we’ll all live happily ever after
Surrounded by butterflies, children and laughter
It’s a fairytale story, so let’s just pretend
Hallelujah, amen, it’s the end
Happily ever after, the end

Gregory Avery-Weir 01:28:33
Make sure not to cut this part into the episode.