S01E14. Yesteryear, How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth Transcript
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:00:00
Hey, everyone, it’s Gregory. Thank you for your patience on us getting this one out. Editing took a while longer than we expected, and next episode is also probably not going to be on schedule, so don’t worry if it doesn’t come out on the first Tuesday of the month, which is how we’ve tried to get them out in the past. It’s been a wild summer. It’s been a wild year. You all know how it is. Also, speaking of the inescapable grasp of capitalism, our next episode… So the thing that we are watching for next time is currently not available anywhere on a streaming service. So unfortunately, you will have to—at least a time of this recording—either buy it or find someone who has it, or, you know, acquire it via some other means. So thank you. And now, on with the show.
Josh Woodward (singing) 00:00:55
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 00:01:38
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 Qpid, which had characters examine past relationships. This month, we’re talking about a pair of episodes from the Animated series which bring paternal relationships out of the past: “Yesteryear”, season one, episode two, written by D.C. Fontana and directed by Hal Sutherland, and “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth”, season two, episode five, written by Russell Bates and David Wise and directed by Bill Reed. I’m Gregory, just an old, lonely being who wants to help others.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:18
I’m Melissa, and a Ter-ran who could never be a true Vulcan.
Lucy Arnold 00:02:22
And I’m Lucy, and I hear all.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:31
Well, Melissa, you picked this month’s episode, so if you could give us a summary in your own words.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:39
All right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:42
We’re doing the two episodes back to back?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:46
Back to back. Yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:47
Okay.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:48
Yesteryear. Stardate 5373.4. The Enterprise is visiting the planet containing the Guardian of Forever to assist historians in investigating Federation history. Kirk, Spock, and a red shirt return from observing Orion history, but nobody from the Enterprise recognizes Spock. The first officer of the ship is an Andorian named Thelin. After some investigation, they conclude that something in the past changed the future, and that in the current timeline, Spock died at the age of 7 during his kahs-wan maturity test. During the test, Spock remembers that his life had been saved by an adult cousin who was never seen again. And with Spock having been off observing history using the Guardian of Forever, he hadn’t gone back to save his own life as a child. Spock gears up and goes back to save himself under the name Selek, arriving early enough to see some Vulcan kids bully child-Spock, and then to see Sarek bully child-Spock for having emotions.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:52
One of the lesser Sareks here.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:54
Oh, yeah, yeah. Not the best Sarek. Spock is told for probably the hundredth time that choosing to take the kahs-wan is an irrevocable choice between Vulcan and Earth. To Selek’s confusion, Spock sneaks out to begin his kahs-wan early, and the family pet, a massive elderly canine named I-Chaya, follows him out and refuses to go home. Seleks?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:17
Big old like walrus bear thing?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:20
Yeah, yeah, like a bearish type of thing I guess more so than canine.
Lucy Arnold 00:04:24
But apparently Vulcans name their pets like Apple products.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:29
Yes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:30
The I-Chaya.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:31
Yes. And Selek follows the mournful noises of the of the bear and follows them. Spock and I-Chaya are attacked by one of Vulcan’s many dangerous critters, a le-matya, which is like a big cat. Selek neck pinches the le-matya, but after a little heart to heart between Selek and Spock about how Vulcans do have emotions, actually, it turns out that I-Chaya was nicked by it and is dying. Nicked by the cat.
Spock runs back to town to get a very skeptical healer, but unfortunately, I-Chaya is too far gone and Spock opts to put him to sleep so that he dies with peace and dignity instead of continuing to live in pain. Once back in town, Spock tells Sarek that he has business with his schoolmates and goes to show his new neck pinching skills. Selek encourages Spock to try to understand his son, then returns to the present day and exchanges quips with McCoy like normal.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:05:28
And if you didn’t watch the episode, I-Chaya was not supposed to die the first time around. So that is a change in history.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:05:36
Yes. All right. How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth: Stardate 6063.4. The Enterprise is investigating a probe that is scanning Federation systems and signaling out to something deeper in space. Their signals detect an incoming vessel that turns out to be an unidentified, unorthodox ship twice as large as the Enterprise. As it approaches, it traps the Enterprise in a spherical force field. The vessel is made of ceramic and looks like, well, Kukulkan, a serpent deity worshipped by the Mayans and Aztecs. Certain crew members, including Walking Bear, who is a descendant of the Comanche, are kidnapped into Kukulkan City. It’s a multicultural riddle city, which is what human cultures were challenged to create during Kukulkan’s time on Earth. The kidnapped away team goes around the town rotating statues to solve puzzles like good little gamers. When it’s solved, Kukulkan appears and asks why the away team isn’t showing their hatred for him, and is then bummed when he realizes that humans really have forgotten him.
Kukulkan takes it upon himself to remind humanity who he is, including showing that he keeps creatures safe and content in cages in mentally constructed paradises. Kukulkan and the away team go back and forth about what it means to live in peace and how to go about doing so, touching on humanity being children, actually, and being disobedient, and how children, including some of these creatures, can be easily controlled and contained if you get them young enough.
And then all hell breaks loose. On the ship, Spock and their crew figure out how to get out of the force field to provide a distraction so that Kukulkan doesn’t pay attention to them. Kirk and McCoy let the captive creatures free, including a very dangerous cat critter that I think is going to be discussed in detail later. When things settle down and the creatures have been pacified, the crew and Kukulkan again discuss how humanity is violent. But it’s no longer… but humanity is no longer Kukulkan’s children to be needing to be led by a god. The ep closes with—well, among many other things—the ep closes with Spock saying that while Vulcan doesn’t have legends like Kukulkan, they have the facts of visits by ancient beings and that those beings left wiser than when they arrived. Et voila.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:15
Good old Vulcan. These are, these are very, like, tidy short episodes, as expected, since they’re only like 20 minutes. But, like, it’s interesting to see that, like, these feel canon. Like, these don’t feel like they’re some of the weirder Animated Series episodes that’s like they were just goofing around. Like, the Kukulkan episode could be like, there’s shades of Star Trek IV here, the one where they time travel back and the aliens are after whales.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:50
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:52
Like, the idea of a godlike probe that approaches Earth because of some ancient pact.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:58
And when Animated Series was made, no longer canon, I don’t know what happened… I don’t know what you do without Yesteryear in Spock’s history, because that is like, kind of a fundamentally built in…. Everyone knows about the kahs-wan, everyone knows about I-Chaya. Like, these are like. I don’t know where you learned that other than this episode. Maybe it comes up elsewhere. But yeah, Animated Series.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:25
Do you know when they removed it from the canon? Because it’s back in.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:27
It’s back in. I don’t know. It was relatively recently, like the last 20 years, 15 years. Maybe when the new shows started coming out.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:44
Interesting.
Lucy Arnold 00:09:45
I thought that Spock mentioned something about I-Chaya in another episode. I feel like I maybe read it on Memory Alpha somewhere.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:53
Okay.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:54
I think they’ve peppered some stuff throughout Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:01
Ah-ha. Okay. The Animated Series was officially removed from canon at Roddenberry’s request in 1988, with the exception of some parts involving child Spock’s youth from Yesteryear.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:14
Interesting. So that’s Next Generation through Discovery, basically, it was not considered canon.
Lucy Arnold 00:10:22
That’s kind of interesting, right?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:25
Yeah.
Lucy Arnold 00:10:26
Well, we’ve each brought a topic for discussion, and mine is, I guess, what I’m sort of tentatively calling radical autonomy. Although if you’re in a corporate setting, I don’t think we mean the same thing, just FYI. I do think—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:45
Is that a buzzword?
Lucy Arnold 00:10:46
It seems to be something buzzy, but I really don’t understand how it is anything to do with autonomy from what I have briefly read. I am not in a corporate setting, so I literally know nothing about it. But I think what I mean by it will become clear as we talk about it. I thought a very interesting convergence between these two episodes was the idea of how parents construe children. And really the lack of autonomy that parents seem to consider their children to have. I think it’s really interesting, both on these shows and in the real world, often, that parents make decisions, you know, like marrying a human or having kids at all, or deciding where to live on Earth or Vulcan or whatever. So as parents, you know, you make all these decisions and then you have kids, and then you think, oh, well, they need to make the kind of decisions that I would make or do the kind of things that I would do.
And that’s kind of wild when you think about it, because, I mean, I think that kind of thinking requires you to think that children aren’t people with autonomy, right? Like, and I personally believe that children are people.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:12:15
Can, can we get an autonomy definition?
Lucy Arnold 00:12:21
Autonomy, I think, would be meaning having agency, having the freedom to make decisions about oneself and what one does. And obviously, there are levels on which, in which children don’t have autonomy, right? I mean, babies don’t have a ton of autonomy because they can’t do anything. They can’t fend for themselves. And, you know, I think we do have a lot of responsibility for young children to keep them out of traffic, for example. Although, I mean, I could also argue that maybe we should think more about how we are building roads and stuff so that children just really shouldn’t be running into traffic. You know what I mean? Like, I think we could imagine a—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:13:03
I’m going to get into that in my section.
Lucy Arnold 00:13:05
Oh, good. Well, I mean, I think we could imagine a different world, too. But even in the world that we have, I think it’s interesting how often parents and then the wider culture don’t consider children to be people with a whole lot of autonomy and the ability to make decisions for themselves. I mean… or if they do have autonomy, it’s really constricted by these expectations. And I think that that creates a, I think that creates a problem for children. And we saw it in the episode Yesteryear with Sarek saying to Spock: Yeah, I know you’re gonna pass this, as long as you have the right mind and heart, right? Like, I was like, okay, well, that’s… And Spock was like me. He was like, “Well, what if I don’t?” So Kukulkan…
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:14:00
It’s “Kukulkan”. [ed note: different pronunciation]
Lucy Arnold 00:14:01
Kukulkan.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:14:02
We had to look this up. It’s, I mean, you know, it’s an ancient Mayan name that also exists in other cultures, so its pronunciation varied. But best I could see is Kukulkan.
Lucy Arnold 00:14:14
Kukulkan has a… his is very overt, right? He has all these peaceful specimens who live in complete containment, right? He has basically a zoo. And what we see are very small glass structures that these creatures, he calls them specimens, are living in. And he says this is because they’re safe here and they, you know, can’t get into trouble. And, like, this, you know, “I’ve done this for them.”
And I thought that was such an interesting correlation between the episode about Sarek and Spock, because there’s ways in which Sarek has also created that kind of glass container for Spock, right? Kukulkan has a couple of interesting lines like, “My children, I hope to help you, teach you.” Which I would want to have a discussion about what he means by “teaching” there. I am not sure… I don’t know that teaching and learning are possible without some kind of belief in autonomy.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:15:16
And I feel like Kukulkan specifically talking about teaching is weird because he’s keeping these entities in paradise virtual realities. So, like, no teaching that can be granted to them can translate into any useful capabilities, right? They’re not, they don’t have sufficient autonomy to even make use of teaching.
Lucy Arnold 00:15:38
Yeah. It’s really interesting for me as a teacher because, you know, we often talk about classrooms, and teachers will say things like, “I’m preparing them for the real world.” And it’s kind of like, what are you talking about? This is real. But in Kukulkan’s case, like, he really… He’s not preparing them for anything or offering a real experience for them. However, I will say I also disagree with Kirk because Kirk says “If children are made totally dependent on their teachers, they will remain always children.” And I strongly disagree with that, too. I mean, that is factually incorrect. Like, children—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:16:19
Yeah, they will grow up. Their teachers will leave. They will become adults—
Lucy Arnold 00:16:24
Children will—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:16:24
—of some sort.
Lucy Arnold 00:16:25
Children will grow up, and they will not be children anymore. And what they, how they think about the world is going to be impacted by whatever you did as a teacher or a parent. So I think that’s kind of a wild take on Kirk’s part to be 100% honest. Like, what are you talking about? Like, please, I need a citation. Actually, there’s several citations I’m asking for in this episode. I’m afraid they’re going to need to say more.
And then one of the hazards of thinking this way about children is it sort of encourages us to think this way about the world, right? That we can just, like, inflict what we think on other people or that other people can just do the things that we want them to do. And, like, there’s a quote—and, Gregory, you’re gonna have to remind me of the book—but Greg had shared a quote from a book, like, probably a month or so ago, and I think about it maybe every day since then. The quote is: “One of the hazards of refusing to accept change in yourself is getting locked into the habit of trying to change others so that you can have the illusion of remaining the same.” And I think there’s a real, like, that really resonated with me in watching these episodes.
I guess I would also just add a couple more points. I don’t think anybody else said they were going to talk about Shakespeare. So I will just note that “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless child”, which comes up in the second episode, is from Lear, Shakespeare’s Lear. And Lear, of course, is a king who loses everything and has three daughters that he hopes will take care of him. And only one of them is good according to him. So he’s kind of cursing the other ones like they’re thankless. Which is interesting, right? Because I think it assumes a certain view of children. I think in this case both Sarek and Kukulkan are both like Lear in that sense, right? Like, and they have this expectation of their children—or what they construe as their children—that they should be thankful for the things that they’re offering, even though those things were not necessarily things that were desired or needed by the children. Like, they were the ones who decide that and then got to decide whether that was the children were behaving acceptably.
And I have a lot of trouble with it as an anticapitalist anyway because I do feel like owing, like when we talk about owing people things like owing our parents gratitude or owing anybody anything, I mean… And I do in many ways feel like we’re interconnected as people and—but I prefer to, I feel like it’s more generative for me to think of that as an interconnectivity and like, and that our connections are valuable rather than thinking of it as a system of debts and… I don’t know what’s the opposite of debt? Whatever that is.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:19:43
Balance?
Lucy Arnold 00:19:44
Yeah, yeah. I think to think about relationships in that sort of transactional way is also one of the things that capitalism creates in us. And I know that’s something that we talk about with Star Trek a lot is like in what ways does the worldview that’s espoused in Star Trek, like, is it really imagining this sort of utopian future? And I would say a lot of the these relationships that they’re depicting, like this is very transactional. It’s very steeped in sort of what I would say is late capitalist view of relationships. And I think it’s ultimately sort of diminishes the possibility of, you know, a relationship with a child or with someone else. You know, to think like that. I will just—
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:20:41
We see that with Sarek, like…
Lucy Arnold 00:20:43
Yeah, we do.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:20:45
Very much so.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:20:45
Sarek doesn’t get to have the relationship with Spock that he maybe wants because of how he treats him.
Lucy Arnold 00:20:50
And Spock doesn’t get to have the relationship that he wants, either. Like, nobody’s satisfied. And I can just say as a mom, that one of my offspring texted me this week and thought I was going to be a guest speaker on the prison-industrial complex. And I wasn’t the guest speaker. But he loved it, and then he said, “But I already knew everything they had to say because of you.” And like, he was grateful, you know, he said, “Thank you. I’m glad that I know this.” But I certainly didn’t demand it of him. And it actually, I think he’s giving me back way more, you know, than I gave him in offering that, you know. And yeah, so I feel a kind of sadness, honestly, in, in looking at how some of these characters interact with each other and how they construe both children and how that means that they construe other people and other relationships. And I do think it is very much of its time in the United States of America and not a sort of utopian space future.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:22:00
Sometimes I kind of think of Star Trek the media franchise, as like, you can imagine that there is this Star Trek world that exists out in the multiverse. And like, we are looking at it through the telescope of the media creations, the TV shows and movies. And like, there’s some cases where I’m like, I can criticize the world of Star Trek as the whole gestalt seems to portray it, or I can say, I don’t think that this is a very, like, clear view of Star Trek as a whole. I feel like the writers and directors of this episode have a fuzzier view than usual of this broader thing. And like, that’s silly, right? That’s, there is no world except that which is portrayed in the media. But it’s, it’s interesting of me to be like, “Is this a problem with this episode or with Star Trek as a whole?” I feel like sometimes Star Trek gets better at how they treat children. In like, I think Deep Space Nine has a little better job of at least like, letting children do things on their own. Jake and Nog especially.
Lucy Arnold 00:23:12
I mean, I think Alexander’s story, Worf’s son Alexander, to me, his story is one of the most resonant stories in Star Trek.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:23:20
Yeah.
Lucy Arnold 00:23:20
I will also say I think it is wild to have 7 year olds make irrevocable decisions. Like, I don’t know what world you’re living in. If you asked a 7 year old, “Go ahead and decide what your rest of your life is gonna look like, bud.” Okay.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:23:36
Seven year olds have trouble deciding what they’re going to wear today… To be fair, so do I. But, you know.
Lucy Arnold 00:23:43
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. That kind of blew my mind a little bit when Spock is like, “You get to decide the rest of your life right now.” And I was like, didn’t he just say that kid was seven?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:23:52
Yep, yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:23:54
And Vulcan seven, which is younger, right?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:23:56
I think so. In the Sharper Tooth episode, one of the things that… When I was thinking about children and how children are treated, something I hear from my colleagues at work when I ask them, when we talk about autonomy of children, which… I don’t know why we talk about it. We talk about this because I work there. They say that their children don’t have enough knowledge of the world or themselves to be granted any autonomy. And I say “any” by the standards of the people on this call. But they mean, you know, this comes up with, like, whether a child can identify as trans. “A 6 year old doesn’t know enough to be able to know if they might not be the gender I tell them they are,” right? So more than even just like, children are people, it’s this like, mysterious, undefinable threshold of knowledge. And I thought about that with Kukulkan of like, “We used to be children and now we are not.” And I’m like, the fuck? One: racist. Two: like, what? Because you know who they’re talking about, right? They’re not talking, they’re talking about the Aztecs and the Mayans, in part, because that’s where Kukulkan was, right?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:25:07
I’ll, I’ll talk about that later.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:25:09
Okay. When I got to that part, I was like, “Jesus, how did I pick the most offensive fucking episode for us to watch?”
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:25:14
This is not… This is not by any means.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:25:20
But yes, that. That component of childhood autonomy is also, I think, folds into there a little bit.
Lucy Arnold 00:25:25
I think a lot of people think that… I mean, I don’t know, maybe there’s a book somewhere about parenting where it tells people, just tell your kids what to do because they can’t reason or… You know, I feel like a lot of people come from that kind of school of parenting. It’s just, it’s not matched my experience, you know, like, I am a parent. I’ve done this twice. I don’t. I mean, I’m different now than I was the first time I started doing this. But, you know, I, I don’t find that it’s that often that I have to, like, just tell someone what to do. Sometimes I do. I’m not gonna say it’s never but it is a lot rarer, I feel like, than a lot of people think it is.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:26:08
Yeah. All right. I want to talk a little bit about monocultures in Star Trek and in these two episodes, which I think demonstrate some of the problems of monocultures in Star Trek pretty damn well. So we’ve talked about it a little bit before and I think it’s just sort of well established that Star Trek has the fatal flaw in scifi and fantasy of each planet kind of having one culture or maybe two if you’re gonna have people with black paint on one side and white paint on the other side, you know, that sort of thing. And you get this very… like, Vulcan is the place where people act like this and there’s nothing different, everyone acts the same. Or Romulans are all like this and there are convenient things about that. One, it makes your writing simpler, it makes your story bible simpler. It is easier to have a utopia in a monoculture. That’s one of the things, like in the real world, when we talk about, “Oh, the rest of the world has socialized medicine!” They’re like, “Oh, but Sweden is a monoculture. So we can’t do what they do because we are so complex here.” Leaving aside, you know, what aspects of that are true or not, that’s sort of the space Star Trek plays in. In these two episodes we have, like, I think the most quintessential examples of Vulcan as a monoculture and a very rigid one in which, as we said, Sarek tells a seven year old—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:27:40
You must do this specific ritual or you will be banished from Vulcan culture forever and not be considered Vulcan.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:27:46
Exactly. There is one way to be Vulcan. This is what Vulcan is. Now we find out… I think these episodes, like, I think Animated Series is like early 70s, maybe mid-70s. Then the movie comes out. We find out in a few Star Trek movies later that there are Vulcans who are not like this. Spock’s brother has gone off to be a long haired hippie and have emotions, right? So they eventually complicate this. And of course modern Star Trek is, you know, it has finished that.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:28:14
Pro-logic extremists and so on.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:28:15
Exactly. But this idea that Vulcan must be one thing. One: makes no sense. Like, even with the idea, you know, there’s that idea that Vulcans have such strong emotions, blah, blah, it has to be controlled. The idea that there can be no variance, no variation, even in a person who has mixed biology. If you’re going with some sort of biological fundamentalism or whatever, like essentialism, I guess. Makes no sense. And then if we transfer over to Kukulkan’s stuff, his, I think “his”, right?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:28:52
It’s generally “he”.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:28:54
Okay, I started my notes with “it”. And I was like, this is untenable. His ideas of peace and safety, right, are completely rigid, completely fixed. We don’t see any of the paradises that the critters are living in, I don’t think? They don’t, like, show us. Presumably there’s variation there, each one of them is going to have their own sort of habitat. But the solution to peace is to encapsulate, isolate, contain, and don’t allow any cross contact. Don’t allow anything else. And then to leave a riddle for each species, you know, for humanity, for whatever to say, “Yeah, build the city that I have told you to build through some calendars and so on, and you will do it right. And you will have the piece that I tell you you should have.” Which I don’t feel like the episode directly addresses this, this cookie cutter aspect of that. Like, it touches on it a bunch of ways, right? And obviously breaking the animals out and… It’s so funny to, to hear them be like, “zoos are bad.”
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:30:01
And there’s a concept that’s, that sort of is passed by pretty quickly where like, Kukulkan told different Earth civilizations the same information and each of them got it wrong. Each of them tried to build, let’s say, so all our ancient monuments—and I’ll talk about this later too—all our ancient monuments are like fragments of Kukulkan’s great plan.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:30:24
Right. No one got it right. He was waiting for the signal to be told to come back. And by the time, like, everyone forgot about him and he was never called back. The way the monocultural part allows Star Trek to tell these little encapsulated stories works for a 24 minute episode, but is just so fucking broken when spread across an entire franchise. Like, it is… They can only do so many Yesteryears. They can only do so many Kukulkan episodes without it just being episode of the week, right? That’s where you get some of the more boring episodes of Star Trek is, “Yep, we met another weird deity that didn’t do anything interesting and had bad opinions on humanity. Humanity is children. No, they’re not.”
You know, and maybe also kind of getting to your point earlier, Greg, about like, what is the world of Star Trek as opposed to and Venn diagramming with the authors? You know, are we seeing the world? Are we seeing the authors? The way the modern writers have been able to introduce complexity in a way that is interesting has made the works much richer. Like, I’m very fond of Animated Series, and I hope that you both can see why after watching these two episodes. Got your little weird, shouty children that don’t know how to voice act and terrible little outfits and so on, and critters that you could never do in the, in the live shows, but the writing is just as pained and just as stuck because of this type of, these limitations they have put on themselves to try to keep things simple enough.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:32:04
Something Star Trek never does with aliens is we could just have lines where it’s like, “Yeah, Spock is from Capital City on Vulcan, and this is how the people of Capital City tend to do things. And yeah, obviously not everyone in Capital City does that, but, like, this is, you know, this is the Ohio of Vulcan.” Basically everything else could be the same just with a passing acknowledgment that, like, yeah, there’s another side to this planet where folks do things differently.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:32:31
Yep, I think we might get that with Tuvok a little bit?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:32:37
Interesting.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:32:38
And you definitely get it in books, because I know what city Spock is from.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:32:43
Oh, interesting.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:32:45
And I know a couple of things about other Vulcan cities, and I must have gotten them for books, but I can’t remember to what degree Tuvok gets kind of grilled on for one, why are there dark skinned people? You know, like, people had all sorts of questions when, when Voyager started. But yeah.
Lucy Arnold 00:32:59
Your discussion is reminding me of feminist writer Chimamanda Adichie. She has a really well known TED talk called the “Danger of the Single Story”, which if you haven’t listened to, I do recommend that you just give it a, give a little listen. Because she talks about being raised in Nigeria and reading all these stories about white children and never seeing herself reflected in those stories and then, you know, finally encountering characters who were like her was, you know, sort of revolutionary for her. And she talks about the ways that when you reduce a group of people to a single story, I mean, you’re reducing, you know, your own experience with humanity. And she also has a terrific novel which I recommend too, called Americana, which is about a Nigerian who immigrates to America. It’s fiction, but I mean, I think it has elements of memoir in it because that’s certainly her experience as well.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:34:11
Yeah. One of the things that happens as a result of the way Vulcan is set up in Star Trek, through Spock’s viewpoint and these sorts of, you know, this sort of stratification and structure we see is that when you meet Vulcans later, there’s kind of the, “Are you the kind of Vulcan that bullied Spock, or are you the kind of Vulcan who could have been his friend? Are you the kind of Vulcan who was running on the Council, you know, running things?” Like, there’s kind of this perception of categorization of people that is also very scoped to that monoculture where the roles seem clear and your perspective is primarily Spock’s and especially with bad-dad Sarek being so prominent in early Star Trek.
Lucy Arnold 00:34:58
Speaking of bad dads…
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:34:59
Mm-hmm.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:35:03
Yeah, well. Well, yeah, I’m gonna talk about paternalism. So this… Both of these episodes had, like Qpid, something that shows up a lot in Star Trek, which is like a godlike being. I think that, I don’t know if you planned this, Lissa, but it worked out well where, like, we actually have…
So, a little behind the scenes peek. We have roles marked in our planning document for, like, who’s doing what this episode. And they’re named Guardian, Prophet, and Caretaker after three different godlike being types in Star Trek. And so the Guardian Forever is like this gatekeeper of time, right? Guardian of Forever is this entity that controls this portal that lets you go back and forth through time and is generally pretty cool about it. Like, the Guardian Forever almost always just kind of lets you through is the vibe that I get, at least from this episode. Later, the Guardian Forever gets used in the Time War and goes off in hiding and so on, but still seems like kind of a cool, friendly person.
And then we’ve got Kukulkan who is like, I don’t know, I’d probably say a Caretaker type? Is a “I’m a god who’s going to take this culture or group of cultures and like, protect them and make sure that they do things properly.” And that’s sort of the paternal godlike figure. We talked about, like, Lucy talked a lot about children and like, the way we treat literal children. But paternalism is also this sort of broader ethical… not framework, but like, ethical thing that you can do, right? It’s this pattern in politics and morality and so on.
Paternalism generally is when you restrict someone’s freedom or autonomy for their own good or for what you perceive as their own good. And there’s a lot of, a whole lot of questions about that. Lucy talked about—both, I think Lucy and Lissa talked about people protecting children because children don’t know any better. And that’s one of the big questions of, like, how paternal should you be? Is like, when is knowledge important?
So I think that generally everyone would agree that there are some cases in which paternalism is good. It is good if someone doesn’t realize that they’re about to walk into a live firing range to put out your arm and stop them so that they cannot enter the line of fire, right? That’s, that is paternalistic. That is saying, “I am going to use force, physically stop you so that you don’t get hurt, because I know that you don’t realize that you’re going to die if you go out there.”
And then there are more complicated questions about the blurry areas. If you’re… Should there be laws to make people wear seat belts, right?ffs Like, people know that you can get into a car crash and die. People who don’t wear seat belts are consciously choosing to forego an action that is culturally acceptable for convenience, usually, or for rebellious feelings. And like they probably should because it’s in the interest of everyone and the individual to wear seat belts. But then the question is, so does that mean you throw people in prison if they don’t wear seatbelts? It’s a whole complicated moral situation.
And this is something that isn’t explored with particular amounts of nuance by… especially How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth is the one where we really see paternalism examined, right? It’s. It’s very unexamined in Yesteryear. They, it’s sort of like, “yeah, dads get to tell sons what to do and sons sometimes rebel against that. And then it’s the job of weird time cousins to save the kid.” That feels very automatic to us, although I think that we’ve questioned that a decent amount already. But in, in the case of, of Serpent’s Tooth, it’s much clearer. Kukulkan decided that all these creatures were unsafe and saved individuals of them, right? Did not save species. Saved individual creatures and decided that humans were dangerous because they were attacking each other and so set them an elaborate Zelda dungeon historical puzzle prank, which presumably once… if the Mayans had succeeded in building the beacon and turned it on, Kukulkan would have come back and just put them in virtual reality forever?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:39:45
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:39:45
And like, this is, this is like extreme paternalism. This is, “I am going to make sure you never get hurt. You never feel sad at the cost of everything, at all of your choices, all of your even ability to perceive the world accurately.”
Lucy Arnold 00:39:59
Did you notice or think about that, this is what Picard did on Next Generation to Moriarty, too?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:40:07
Yep. 100%. Yeah. He puts him in a, in a VR world where he thinks everything is good. And this is sort of the lotus eaters trope, although I think that lotus eaters, it’s people who are in a bad situation choosing to not feel pain and not feel their torment, whereas this is someone in a perfectly safe but fake situation, this illusory world. This is more of a, this is something that happens less in scifi, where, like, there is not really a dark side to Kukulkan’s actions, except that he is keeping a zoo.
A thing that I always think of in this, this sort of conversation of, like, how do you stop people from doing bad things? In the, the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia, there is a parable called the Sermon on Ethics and Love where someone calls up to the Goddess and says, “Hey, can you help us stop warring? Can you help us stop hurting each other? Can you help us stop neglecting each other?” And the Goddess says, “What’s the matter with that if that is what you want to do?” And the human says, “But nobody wants it. Everybody hates it.” And the Goddess said, “Oh, well, then stop.”
Lucy Arnold 00:41:20
She’s got a point.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:41:22
Yeah. Like, that’s a case where paternalism reveals that it is a tactic and not a principle, right? Paternalism lets you stop people from doing a bad thing in certain circumstances. But at some point, you’ve got to decide. You’ve got, people need to decide for themselves whether to do good or, you know, keep themselves safe and so on. And I think… The thing that makes, one of the things that makes this a really hard thing to wrap our minds around is our fixation on individuality. Like, we imagine that we are these individual beings, you know, flying through the world under our own power. And that, like, all interactions with other people are these deliberate things that are that are a narrow band. They’re like, when I… The way I interact with someone is I see them with my eyes and I talk to them, and then I interpret their words and their facial expressions and use that to improve my own understanding of the world.
And, like, that’s just not… Science has demonstrated that’s not how we work. We are social animals. We are creatures who are heavily affected by all sorts of things in our environment. We pick up things that we don’t consciously realize. We are operating off of a playbook that was supplied to us externally exclusively by other humans and I guess other animals, right? Other things in our environment taught us how to be and how to act, and we’re still operating off of you know, something our parents told us when we were seven, right? That, like, periodically that sentence pops into our head and without even realizing it, we are like, oh, make sure to put your hands behind your back when you’re in a store so you don’t knock anything off the shelves.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:43:13
Oh, is that why?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:43:14
That’s a thing that I still hear. Like, I still hear like, “oh, hands in pockets”. And like, sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. But, like, we do not exist as individuals. We cannot, we are not, we cannot do the baby in the cardboard box experiment and, like, find out what a person is like on their own. And so many paternalism questions are, how much do you want to restrict this individual person’s autonomy in order to keep this individual safe? And it’s the society doing this to an individual. And a lot of paternalism questions kind of dissolve into different kinds of moral questions when you think about society doing a thing for itself. There’s this idea called libertarian paternalism, which I think is sinister as fuck.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:44:00
Yikes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:44:01
Which is the idea of like, well, you don’t use force. You can, you can avoid using force if you just use nudges. If you, like, change the environment and change the affordances that are available to make people more likely to do good things.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:44:11
That sounds like something from the Bell Curve.
Lucy Arnold 00:44:13
Oh, my god. That’s what, my dad must have read that. That’s what that, he was like. My dad was always like, “You should learn reverse psychology so that you can talk people, like, convince people to do the things you want them to do.”
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:44:25
Like, one example of this that stuck in my head is you can encourage kids to make healthy eating decisions by putting healthy food at eye level in school cafeterias, and putting unhealthy food below it. And that’s somehow good because the person is making choices. It’s like, no, just only give them healthy stuff. It’s like, there’s a question of, “do you let them bring junk food to school?” Fine, fine, fine. But, like, don’t give them stuff that you think is bad. You’re not teaching them to make good decisions in that case. If you want to teach them to make good decisions, go through a teaching process.
Lucy Arnold 00:45:01
You’re not giving it to them. They’re buying it. That’s why they do it. It’s because they’re making money off of the French fries. I mean, anyway, capitalism is bad.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:45:10
Yeah. The… I think How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth takes the right moral decision at the end that it is not good to keep people in virtual reality forever. But I don’t know that it resolves that, that fundamental issue of: Kukulkan is one dude who is like, “I know what’s best for the species. And what’s best for the species is for every single one of them to be locked up so that none of them can make bad decisions.” And really, like, he didn’t actually do anything to try and change the species, which is the, the unit of sapience that he was actually thinking about, right? He was thinking about humanity and decided to do things to some humans in order to change humanity. And instead, if he thought about, “how do I help keep humanity safe?” maybe he would have given us penicillin earlier or something like that, right?
Lucy Arnold 00:46:08
You’re reminding me of the beginning of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which says that people were always moving around small green pieces of paper to try and be happier, when on the whole, it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:46:22
Yep, exactly. Yeah. If you want to help people be happy, look at what makes people happy and safe. Removing dangers, removing the broken glass from the floor is only part of helping people not cut themselves.
Lucy Arnold 00:46:38
You know, a piece of media that really does grapple with this issue in an interesting way is a little anime called Hunter x Hunter where you I’m not gonna to spoil the Chimera Ant arc, but you do have a, a child who is extremely powerful and dangerous, and people have to figure out what to do with that, right? That’s a question I think that Hunter x Hunter asks is, “What do you do with a very dangerous child?”
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:47:09
Yeah. And that child says, “Hey—” or one of the, one of the many dangerous children you could be talking about—says, “humans are dangerous but valuable, and so we should keep them in a place where they can be safe.”
Lucy Arnold 00:47:22
Right, Right.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:47:23
Yup.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:47:24
That all said, with the main topics covered, it is time for a lightning round of the other interesting things we spotted. Lucy, did you have something?
Lucy Arnold 00:47:32
Yeah. So we were just talking about paternalism and it makes me think of something that I am thinking about constantly right now and which y’all are probably tired of hearing me talk about, which is assessment.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:47:49
Never.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:47:50
Never.
Lucy Arnold 00:47:50
I’m writing a book—
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:47:52
I love it.
Lucy Arnold 00:47:54
—on assessment right now, and people who listen consistently could immediately identify that the task set for young 7 year old Spock was an assessment. And it’s a performance task, right? Because he’s given a thing to do in order to perform Vulcannness, right? What does he say? “It is difficult for a father to find less than perfection in a son.” Fun. “If you fail, there will be those who call you a failure for life.” He goes on to add, “You will not disappoint me. Not if your spirit and mind are Vulcan.” So, speaking of high stakes testing, it turns out you can have high stakes performance tasks in addition to multiple choice tests, as we do today. So since I’m working on my own project about assessment, I’m reading a book right now by two of my dear friends. Shout out to Will and Steph and their co writer, who’s not my friend, but I’m sure she’s awesome too.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:48:57
You know them, they’re just not your friend.
Lucy Arnold 00:48:59
Yeah, well, no, I don’t know. I don’t know them at all. But I know the book: Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment. And this book is really, they’re taking a lot of inspiration from Jack Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure, which I am 100% certain we’ve discussed previously on this show, which is like talking about queering the idea of failure. But I thought the book that my friends wrote really sets it up really nicely. So I’m just going to share a little bit of what they wrote about it.
If everyone were successful in capitalism, who would do the work? If everyone is the CEO who is working the line? If the worker at an amazon.com distribution site is earning the same pay as Jeff Bezos, why is one working the line and the other continuing taking joyrides into space during a global pandemic? The bosses of capitalism rely on workers who fail every day to become CEOs of their own companies. In the digital gig economy that has emerged in the last two decades, for every Facebook, Uber, and Instacart, there must be hundreds of bankrupt startups that go nowhere. If not, success has no real meaning. Under capitalism’s elitist yoke, success must remain elusive for the masses, which makes failure the endless and persistent work of most of us.
So they’re trying to talk about how under capitalism, success is only for an elite few, right? That’s one of the big problems about the way we view success. And they’re gonna continue to talk about this in terms of assessment. And I’ll just paraphrase, I guess, or maybe reframe it from my own perspective a bit and say when we make an assessment, right, that assessment is determining what’s being valued and what being successful means. So a lot of times in order to be successful on an assessment, you know, you might have to accept an identity that’s not your identity, right? You might need to sound white, you might need to sound masculine, you might need to sound straight, you might need to sound cis in order to be able to perform the identity that’s necessary to be successful on that assessment.
So part of queering assessment is about saying, like, other kinds of identities are still, are super valid and so there’s a way in which failing is great if what it means is you’re accepting some aspects of your identity, right? That even if those are not supported by whatever institution, you know, you’re operating in that assessment under. And I thought about it in that whole scene with Spock, because, right, to fail means to not be fully Vulcan, right? And that is so. So I really feel like, in a way, this episode encapsulates this idea about queer assessment, because in order for him to succeed, what success means is the acceptance of this identity, right? And it is not actually Spock’s identity, right? Like, his identity—he is half human. So I thought it was really interesting and it, like, it made me think about my own project and this book that I’m reading and, and go buy my friend’s book.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:52:41
It is published? I wasn’t sure if it was a… okay.
Lucy Arnold 00:52:44
Yeah, yeah, it came—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:52:45
It’ll be in the show notes.
Lucy Arnold 00:52:46
Yeah. 2024. If you’re interested in assessment, it’s terrific.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:52:52
One way that I like to think about this is that you don’t fail in a vacuum. You fail at a thing. And you can fail at a thing that’s a bad thing, right? Like you can fail to present yourself as someone other than your own identity, right? You present, you can fail to do something that is harmful to you or, or just you can fail to do a thing that’s like, why the fuck do they care about this shit? So it’s, you know, it’s not always bad to fail. There’s certain kind of people who are often, who’re going to fail things more often because success is defined as being a certain sort of person, often.
Lucy Arnold 00:53:28
100%. And to me, Spock’s greatest success in that episode had nothing to do with that assessment. I mean, to me, it was really wild. You know, when Spock grown up, Spock stays behind with I-Chaya, while I-Chaya is suffering and dying, and his younger self is the one who runs back. So Spock really has to radically trust his younger self in that moment to go and do what he needs to do. I thought. I actually thought that was pretty profound for me. Like, I was like, “Oh, would I be able to do that? Would I be able to send my young self off to do something really important?” Yeah, I like that a lot. And it really didn’t have anything to do with the task, you know.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:54:18
And he could probably predict things like the healer being very resistant to believing Spock, right? So I didn’t put it in the summary, but the healer was like, “I’ve heard you like to play pranks.” And Spock’s like, “I played a prank once two years ago, you son of a bitch.” And the healer’s like, “Would you wake me up for fake things?” Like, there was this whole back and forth that you could tell why I didn’t put in the fucking summary. But like, that before Spock gets this doctor to come out to look at this damn pet. And adult Spock probably knew that there was, you know, he knows the way his city perceives him as a child, so. And he trusted him to handle it, to be stubborn enough. to be convincing enough to get help.
Lucy Arnold 00:55:04
It’s pretty cool. Like, actually.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:55:05
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:55:10
Well, Lissa was lamenting something earlier, and I think it’d be remiss not to talk about the, I don’t know, Eurocentrism that we see especially in, in Serpent’s Tooth. So How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth, there’s a character, the character Walking Bear, who’s the Comanche guy. He sort of serves as a guide through the episode because he happens to have studied this other culture, right? He happens to have studied the Mayans, which are the specific culture from which we get the name Kukulkan. And the show has trouble imagining that Kirk or McCoy could know about Mesoamerican mythology, which is weird, right? Because Kirk grew up in Iowa. If Walking Bear grew up, maybe Walking Bear grew up in traditional Comanche land. I don’t know. But, like, probably pretty close to each other based on just accent. And so why would, why does Walking Bear know more about Mesoamerica?
I mean, because obviously, because he’s Native American. And, and, like, that is not only, like, a convenience of writing. That would be true in our world, too, probably, right? Like, you’d be more likely to, if you’re an indigenous person, know other indigenous cultures, if only to be able to be like, y’all are talking about this thing, and it is not my folks. Like, that is, that was hundreds of miles away.
And when we hear a list of Kukulkan’s attempted cities, I think it’s in Mayan culture, it’s in Egyptian culture. So, like, the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan temples, maybe Aztec. And I think there’s one more that is like east, you know, Asian or something like that. And like this is, I would say Orientalism. We are talking about indigenous Americans, but it’s this general framework of Orientalism and Eurocentrism where European culture—and that includes like white American culture—regards, like, the Other as exotic and so is like, “oh well there are, there are people who are not us and they believe weird things.”
So like that is a framework in which the pyramids of the Mayans and the pyramids of the Egyptians are the same kind of thing and are nothing like any of the pyramid shaped architecture or mound shape architecture that showed up in, say, the UK. And so we’ve, we’ve already got this thing of like, well, this dragon, this flying snake, Kukulkan visited the Egyptians, visited the Mayans, did he visit England? Did England try to make a city? Did he visit Russia? Did he visit Australia? Conveniently visited or is mentioned to have visited specific places that have ruins that we find cool as people steeped in American and European culture that are not, you know, British ruins.
This is obviously interacting with the ancient astronauts concept. There’s… it built out of a bunch of people. I’m pretty sure we’ve mentioned it here before. The big dude is Von Daniken who wrote Chariots of the Gods?. And his kind of argument was basically ancient aliens visited us in antiquity and taught us a bunch of things. And notably Von Daniken is like: there’s, there’s aliens all over throughout history. Like the story of Ezekiel has a clear alien in it. Stonehenge is clearly a thing used to signal aliens. And this dude is like, yeah, you can see aliens all throughout history.
And the way that that gets condensed into popular culture is, well, the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens. The Mayan temples were built by aliens. And people forget about or tend to disregard the Stonehenge-y aspects of it or you know, the biblical aspects in order to say—and Star Trek does this all the fucking time, right? Star Trek will make any God from, from Earth history into an alien except Yahweh, Jehovah, Jesus, Muhammad, usually. Like any, any Judeo Christian individual is not an alien. Maybe, maybe not Buddha, maybe not Confucius, I’m not sure. But like we don’t call specific human beings aliens. But oh, winged serpent, yeah, that clearly an alien, right? Even though like there is a real historical person named Kukulkan, like we’re pretty sure that he’s not the original Kukulkan. Like, it seems like there was a human being who got named that at some point in history and got talked about a bit.
But like, you know, this story doesn’t even do that, right? The story doesn’t do the Stargate thing of saying someone came, heard about Kukulkan and is like, “I’m gonna look like that guy”. And then you see like the Vulcan culture that’s produced. For once, Vulcan is not like, here’s this Earth culture, this exotic Earth culture, but alien, right? There’s, there’s various influences on, on Vulcan culture, including, I mean, I guess the most prominent one is Judaism. The Vulcan salute and a few other things come from, from Judaism sort of indirectly through, like, childhood experiences of Nimoy and stuff like that. But like, the Vulcan world is not presented as Oriental. It is not presented as this, this exotic culture. It’s presented as an alien culture, which is different, right? Like Vulcans are a different kind of person than humans and they have weird, cool, I think, I think the background art in this episode is really cool, where it’s like all the architecture looks weird and alien. It’s great. They did great. The outfits look weird and alien. It’s good.
And they’re not like… Notably gods visited Vulcan and came away smarter, right? Gods visited Earth and taught us things. Gods visited Vulcan and at least according to Vulcans, learned things from the Vulcans. And like, why should, you know, prehistoric Vulcan be any different from prehistoric Earth in terms of our capabilities to like, build, know that if you put a pile of rocks together, it’ll stay up better, right? Like the, the principles behind the pyramids are: big at bottom, small at top, stand up long. Like, we got that. You don’t need aliens to help.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:02:12
And I, I think—I didn’t track it closely because I knew it would make me mad. I think this has some of the very American way of brown people’s gods are myths and legends as opposed to gods. Whereas if it’s a Christian-based thing, it can be a god, right? Or you know what I mean, kind of playing in that space where there’s a, the sanctity of Judeo Christianity. I think there’s some of that happening here where they repeatedly refer to Kukulkan as a legend and a myth, whereas they would not say that about God, capital G. You say that in America, you get fucking punched. Promise, right? So yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:02:53
Yeah. I think Orientalism is generally a problem that Star Trek has wrestled with that sometimes does better and sometimes does worse. I think it’s relatively harmless in Serpent’s Tooth. I don’t think that, like any Earth cultures come across as bad because of it, right? It’s kind of harmless, but it’s still sort of unexamined. They don’t… You know, no one is like, “oh, yeah, the, the layout of London also is based on this.” That they easily could have done.
Lucy Arnold 01:03:26
I didn’t feel great about Ensign Walking Bear.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:03:30
As soon as they said Walking Bear on the bridge, I was like, “Fuck me, whatever. What did I do?”
Lucy Arnold 01:03:35
I don’t. It gave me a, it gave me an ick.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:03:38
Yeah. I didn’t. I have not checked on Walking Bear’s actor, so I don’t know. In fact, let me just do that—
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:03:44
No, no! Hold on. I got you. I got you later.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:03:50
Okay. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Lucy Arnold 01:03:52
Welp. Bad news.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:03:52
Look at my show document. Great. Well, I guess all I’ll say is… so that’s next.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:04:03
I knew it immediately.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:04:05
But Star Trek often has. Often is the Planeteers, right? Often, especially original Trek was like, there’s a Russian, there’s a Japanese American, there’s an American, there’s a Black lady, there’s one alien. It’s very in keeping for there to be one indigenous person.
Lucy Arnold 01:04:24
You’re not casting aspersions on Captain Planet, are you?
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:04:27
Captain Planet is also a story where there’s one person, one distinctly ethnic person from different areas.
Lucy Arnold 01:04:34
Captain Planet, he’s our hero. Gonna bring pollution down to zero.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:04:38
Yes, yes, but, but also has a kind of a simplistic, if I can engage in some Orientalism, Chinese menu approach to ethnicity.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:04:52
Oh, no.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:04:53
But like, Walking Bear comes from a specific culture. Walking Bear is Comanche. Walking Bear has a name that at least kind of sounds Comanche. He’s no Chakotay, right? Chakotay comes from a fucking made up native culture based on the advice of someone who lied about being indigenous.
Lucy Arnold 01:05:09
He’s portrayed by an asshole.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:05:12
Yes, portrayed by a legitimately indigenous asshole.
Lucy Arnold 01:05:15
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:05:16
Yeah. Walking Bear is a problem, but not as big of a problem. But I guess we might need to talk about that in a little bit more. In addition to the deep stuff, we are all big Star Trek fans, so let’s head to Ten Forward to start talk about stuff we geeked about. Melissa, who is the voice actor for the Comanche Walking Bear?
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:05:39
James Doohan, the voice actor for Montgomery Scott. Scotty plays Walking Bear, Arex, who is the sort of beige ET-looking motherfucker on the bridge.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:05:55
Three arms, right?
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:05:57
I didn’t catch how many arms. I just, I was so distracted by his weird head, and Kukulkan—
Lucy Arnold 01:06:02
Oh, wow.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:06:03
—In that episode.
Lucy Arnold 01:06:05
Put in some work.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:06:05
Doohan is like, a phenomenal voice actor in a lot of ways. If you look at the, the list of things he voice acted in Animated Series, the list is as long as your arm. He basically filled in for anything, everything that they needed, voice-wise, many of the aliens on the bridge. So he’s just like talking to himself in those episodes, right? And again, great work. They gave no fucks about trying to find somebody to fill those spots who might have represented anything about those characters. As soon as he started talking as Walking Bear, I was like, “oh, it’s Jimmy.” Like, I recognize his voice.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:06:47
Is Doohan Scottish also?
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:06:49
Oh, no, I don’t think so.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:06:50
Yeah, so he’s putting on an accent as Scotty as well.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:06:54
Yeah, it’s like a renown thing about Animated Series is how many roles he picks up. But yeah… they gave no shits. I mean, they put their budget elsewhere, right? Like, their budget was in getting interesting writers and directors and doing art and animation, you know, but yikes. Yikes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:07:18
If you haven’t seen the animation for Star Trek: the Animated Series, it is worth looking up. There will be some in the show notes. I may include the shot of, of Spock like, demurely putting a hand over his mouth as he becomes concerned about the people who disappeared. It’s very… how do you put it?
Lucy Arnold 01:07:42
I think it’s a bit minimalist, right? They rely a lot on blinking and eyebrow raises to communicate emotion where the rest of the face stays exactly the same.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:07:52
They do a lot of zoom-ins on people’s faces, close ups going from a whole wide shot zooming in onto half or one quarter of someone’s face to again maybe show an eyebrow or lifting or something like that.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:08:05
Faces are very gestural with bold lines.
Lucy Arnold 01:08:09
In that first scene when everybody had forgotten who Spock was and they have an Andorran first officer and it showed the Andorran and he does this blinky thing and I was like, oh, he’s up to something. Like, I just, I realized really quickly, like I couldn’t read anybody’s expressions on this show.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:08:26
There’s a lot of things that the show does to stretch one frame of animation into a second or two.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:08:33
Yeah. Oh, fucking James Doohan. That’s it. That’s all. I have nothing else to say. It’s just fucking James Doohan. You could just say that for everything about Animated Series is. This motherfucker is gonna pop up at least twice in every episode.
Lucy Arnold 01:08:46
Well, I’m just gonna share my unironic love for one part of the animation which was all the space monsters that we got to see in just two episodes. I assume on live Star Trek they don’t do as many space monsters because then we’re gonna get things… Oh, what’s the name of the monster from Original Series who comes back a whole lot on Strange New Worlds? The lumbering thing.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:09:12
The Gorn.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:09:13
The Gorn.
Lucy Arnold 01:09:14
The Gorn, yeah. Yeah. You’re gonna get a whole lot of ping pong ball eyes, whatever. They do that. But on the Animated Series…
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:09:21
Or even, like, a dog with a unicorn horn, which is a legit alien that shows up in the Original Series.
Lucy Arnold 01:09:26
Yeah. But these were legitimate space monsters. So we had the sehlat, which was Spock’s pet, and a very good boy.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:09:35
It’s the walrus bear.
Lucy Arnold 01:09:37
Yeah. And then we had the le-matya, which was the sort of green poison cat that kills I-Chaya. And then I included the Mayan god on my list of space monsters. Although I think he’s sentient, his design is very space monstery. And he is beautiful. Like, it’s, it’s definitely, it’s definitely appropriation in a bad way, but it’s beautiful. And then we met—
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:10:07
They do acknowledge the source of it, I guess. So, you know, that’s good at least.
Lucy Arnold 01:10:12
Yeah. And then he has a whole bunch of specimens like we’ve already talked about. I think the only one they name is the Capellan power-cat. However, Capellan power-cat is going to be the name of my next book, so.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:10:28
Is this the assessment book that’s going to be that?
Lucy Arnold 01:10:30
No, I guess that book’s already got a working title, so it’ll have to be the one after that. But whatever I write next is gonna be called Capellan power-cat, that’s for sure. I loved that cat. I thought it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:10:43
I like how both episodes managed, I think, to get an animal licking its paw, right? So you get that sort of lick, lick sound, which is one of my least favorite sounds in animated shows. But I thought it was adorable.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:10:58
When they tranquilize the Capellan power-cat, like, they take moments to have Enterprise crew be like, “oh, it’s a big cat!” it’s great.
Lucy Arnold 01:11:07
And you got to say that sentence, that is where you just say “Capellan power-cat”. There’s no way, there’s nothing that could happen in that sentence that’s not awesome.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:11:17
I think this is the power of Animated Series. This is what they get to do that they can’t afford to do on Star Trek unless it’s going to involve bad animatronics, bad CG, bad… You know what I mean? Like taping a horn to a dog. Like, whatever the fuck. This is what Animated Series gets to: interesting, sentient aliens on the bridge. On the fucking bridge! And critters they can just make and toss, right? They don’t have to keep them around and reuse them.
Lucy Arnold 01:11:45
It very much reminds me of animation that I loved from my childhood. Things like Thundarr the Barbarian and the Herculoids, like, that had all these really cool creatures and everything. And it like the animation is of an era, right? But it’s not afraid to be like batshit.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:02
Yeah.
Lucy Arnold 01:12:03
Honestly, I think more children’s TV today should be batshit.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:12:07
I think there’s some people doing some very good work making some really batshit children’s stuff right now.
Lucy Arnold 01:12:13
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too steeped in Sonic.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:12:17
You might be.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:12:18
I mean, we exist in a post-Adventure Time world.
Lucy Arnold 01:12:20
I loved Adventure Time.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:12:22
I would say that the Last Airbender has probably a rate of one weird monster per episode.
Lucy Arnold 01:12:29
That one seems less batshit to me. I give it to you on Adventure Time. Adventure Time is batshit. But I don’t know about the Last Airbender. That feels more…
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:12:37
It gets really batshit with its spirits. I think the Face Stealer is an all time great creature. Well, my Ten Forward item is something that’s much less batshit and is very grounded. It’s a phenomenon that I think has shown up three times on Before the Future Came. We saw it in the premiere of Discovery. We saw it in Star Trek 2009. And we see it here, which is a trio of Vulcan bullies yelling at a person that they’re human.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:13:09
Yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:13:11
We talk about monoculture and how Star Trek is a problem with monoculture. I personally get really fucking annoyed at the weird Vulcan ethnic supremacy that shows up. Where, you know, Spock being like, “aliens showed up and they came, went away wiser”. It’s like, is that the whole story, really? You just kind of taught them shit and they left? And I like that from at least from the Animated Series on, we had the concept of, yes, Vulcan is this place of logic, but it has shitty kids too.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:13:42
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:13:43
And it hasn’t figured out how to solve its shitty kid problem. Like, I think that we as a, as a human society can eliminate bullying. I think that bullying is a result of a bunch of social patterns and environmental conditions that we could just eliminate.
Lucy Arnold 01:13:58
Yeah. We could just put them in virtual reality and boot them off into space or option B, we could do a nuclear bomb.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:14:11
Or, you know, make sure that everyone’s fed and make sure that people are taught about consent and emotional regulation and all of that.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:14:18
Come on.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:14:19
Vulcan has an applied science of emotional regulation. Vulcan’s entire culture is… I say “Vulcan”, sorry… Oh, I guess it is called Vulcan now, right? At this point it’s Vulcan, the planet.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:14:35
Oh, you’re thinking of the whole Discovery—
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:14:36
Later it gets renamed. But yeah, yeah. Anyway, Vulcan hasn’t solved its bully problem. Vulcan has shitty kids. And all of Vulcan’s logic and emotional control fails when it comes to getting kids to not call each other names. And also the, the “haha” resolution of Spock’s bullying, is these going to go and physically assault them. He’s going to go and demonstrate that he learned the Vulcan neck pinch by neck pinching one of them, presumably. They call him barbarian. They say he’ll never be a Vulcan. Like, they do a literal hate crime. Like, they literally yell at and ostracize this kid for his ethnicity. And that’s just not a thing that’s solved on Vulcan. And I think that’s cool? I like, we, we see, we see cases of, like, the Vulcan superiority being fake everywhere, right? We see that all the time. Spock exists in order to say, “Well, it’s better to not have emotion”. And then Kirk is emotional and wins and is like, “See Spock, sometimes you have to have emotions”. But this is a case of Vulcan failing itself, right? It’s not that not everyone should be like a Vulcan. It works for Vulcans, but not for everyone. This is like, “Hey, your society’s broken. You believe in emotional control and rising above your baser instincts, but you can’t protect your own children from your own children.” I think that’s an interesting, like, little friction at the center of Vulcans for Star Trek.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:16:12
I think Vulcan ostensibly has the perspective that you have to teach children to become good people.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:16:19
So wild way to construe children.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:16:21
It’s a very common way to construe people.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:16:22
Oh, yeah, yeah. We do it all the time.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:16:24
Yeah, we talk about children not having empathy until they reach a certain age or some shit, right?
Lucy Arnold 01:16:29
“Boys will be boys.”
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:16:31
Yeah, I think that’s the approach they take. But they’re still like, everyone expects Spock to have the emotional regularity of an adult, but the other children are exempted from this and permitted to commit, like you said, basically hate crimes, right? In every rendition of this, it’s that bad.
Lucy Arnold 01:16:53
I do think that part, like, resonates because, you know, those kids who are full Vulcans, right, they are less likely to be under scrutiny than Spock, who is half human. And, I mean, you certainly see that in our culture. I mean…
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:17:07
Yep.
Lucy Arnold 01:17:08
Right? You know, all the stuff that white kids can do, and then, you know, Black kid’Ss getting kicked out of preschool for something stupid.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:17:19
Yeah. Biting someone. I think that, I mean, this ties back into the paternalism and individuality, right? We say, well, children do not have the emotional regulation or empathy in order to xyz, and so we will allow them to be monsters to each other, right? Instead, we could say, given that children have trouble with emotional regulation and, and consent and all this, how do we construct a society in which they still won’t bully each other? That’s a very different way of looking at it. That makes it seem far more tractable.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:17:58
Right, right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:17:59
Because kids are also fundamentally nice and care about each other.
Lucy Arnold 01:18:03
They really are.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:18:04
Kids are really good at getting along, and so, like, they’re not fundamentally monstrous. And we, by our choices on how we treat kids and construct their environment, can affect that balance between the kid that always wants to make friends with any creature they meet and the kid who wants to call people names.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:18:27
Yeah.
Lucy Arnold 01:18:29
Okay. At the end of each episode, we pick the next thing we’re watching based on the connection from this episode… Oh, no.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:18:45
Your. Your tone.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:18:48
You want to try that again with? No?
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:18:54
I say we keep it.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:18:56
Because it kind of sounded like you don’t like the idea of picking our next episode.
Lucy Arnold 01:18:59
I am not super fond of the idea of me picking, but here we are.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:19:05
Oh, this is amazing. I’m so ready.
Lucy Arnold 01:19:08
So… this episode, particularly Yesteryear, had some timey-wimey bullshit, and both of these episodes had some… animation. So… next time we’re watching—
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:31
Cross fingers, cross fingers…
Lucy Arnold 01:19:33
We’re watching A Moral Star, Part One and Part Two, which are from Prodigy.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:40
Excellent.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:19:42
Excellent!
Lucy Arnold 01:19:43
I don’t know what episode numbers they are… I forgot to look that up.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:48
It’s not the Prodigy time episode I was hoping-hoping for.
Lucy Arnold 01:19:54
Oh, well, do you want to change it?
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:19:55
The time loop episode. No, no, no, no, no. I think this works much better.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:19:59
Okay. This is episode….Sorry, this is season one, episode nine, is a Moral Star Part one.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:20:08
And we’re doing part one and two?
Lucy Arnold 01:20:10
I think we should. I think it’s a complete story, but I have no problem switching it to the other, the time loop one. If you, I mean, I love a time loop.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:20:18
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I was just. I just. One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek, period, is Time Amok, so. But this is literally the next episode.
Lucy Arnold 01:20:28
I am excited to talk about Gwen. So Prodigy is basically the new animated Star Trek, ostensibly an audience of young viewers, children. I think season one is on Netflix now.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:20:49
Netflix, yeah. They, they took it off of Paramount.
Lucy Arnold 01:20:53
Yeah, there’s a whole lot happening with Prodigy. I know season two had a little bit of a, of a little bit of a snag in getting released.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:21:03
It was almost done and they canceled it and then Netflix picked it up. Yeah, I’m sure you can track down someone who’s willing to watch it with you who has Netflix or something like that.
Lucy Arnold 01:21:13
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:21:14
So next time we’ll be discussing the two part A Moral Star from Prodigy on Before the Future Came. You can find links and show notes at beforethefuture.space, including some pictures of animated monsters. We’d really appreciate it if you could rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts. You can rate us other places, but really Apple Podcasts is the place where the most discovery happens. Although if you really want people to know about the show, tell them about it. It, you know, post on Bluesky or whatever and say that you like the show. We would, we’d love to, to have more word of mouth listeners. You can send us comments on our website. You can contact us on Instagram and TikTok if you search for our podcast. And you can talk to us on Mastodon at @beforethefuturecame@trekkie.social. And if you’ve got a question you want to send via email, you can send that to onscreen@beforethefuture.space.
Lucy Arnold 01:22:11
I’m Lucy Arnold and sometimes blog at intertextualities.com I’m also now on bluesky at @zenlucymarie.bsky.social.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:22:23
I’m Gregory Avery Weir and you can find me at ludusnovus.net or on bluesky at @gregoryaveryweir.bsky.social.
Melissa Avery-Weir 01:22:30
I’m Melissa Avery Weir and I live at irrsinn.net and on Mastodon at @melissa.
Gregory Avery-Weir 01:22:37
Our music is Let’s Pretend by Josh Woodward, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Thank you for listening.
Josh Woodward (singing) 01:22:45
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