Future BFFs?

I think Michael like for all that she is she is definitely an anthropologist like I think she takes a very great cultural lense before a scientific

you know, i think you are absolutely right! thank you so much for bringing this up! i wasn't even thinking about her academic specialties when i wrote this post. her first question being about "praying" could very easily just have been the way she was trained to meet alien peoples where they are first before obnoxiously being like "what is that, tho"

and, to your point about the cultural v scientific lens:

for better or worse, i'd say star trek collapses the boundaries between a lot of academic disciplines. "hard" v "soft" science doesn't seem to be a distinction in the star trek speculative world, where linguistics and anthropology are as much about physics and biology and no one is going to pretend like learning languages is a different kind of Study to learning chemistry. this sometimes does not work, imo, because sometimes the writing will accidentally slip into an unexamined essentialism with the alien cultures, which renders the whole of the allegory sort of silly and potentially all kinds of offensive. but it sometimes does work.

discovery, from what i remember of the first two seasons (i'm only just now starting the third, bc i lost my cbs account between 2 and 3, alas! etc), seems more able than other series to collapse the distance between disciplines and walk the line between what is cultural and what is material culture informed by biology. like saru constantly talks of his alien species and how their history of being hunted on his planet manifests in a perpetual anxiety and tamed-curiosity for him but also lends a level of care and sensitivity that he excels in---all of which fleshes out the character while giving him the awareness and consciousness to know why he may be acting a certain way compared to others and why he shouldn't ever be demeaned for it and where his body and his body's millions-of-years-old natural history can be challenged with that consciousness and how his consciousness can be valued precisely for its origins.

the klingons and vulcans, while not as sophisticated as the character saru, also seem to be largely cultural products that are informed by their specific biology. michael, somewhat caught between the cultural product and her own biological reality, can affect vulcan mannerisms and is very often portayed as thinking like a vulcan, while remaining very recognizable to us. her phrasing and her pattern of speech, while not monotone, are normally utterances that move from established fact to logical conclusion. I have nowhere to go back to...the only thing I can do right now is trust something, she says, upon being thrust nine-hundred years in the future. it's the statement of a stoic philosopher (probably one of the "vulcan" influences). she is concerned with what is material and what is real and what is real to others.

which is why i really like what you pointed out about her anthropology expertise--culture is real and often naturalized to those who live in it. michael is definitely someone, what with her studies and how she was raised, who is intimately aware of how the alien can be made familiar, how bodies can't be denied but you can learn to know them, how consciousness is strange and existence-in-causal-time stranger, and how people (all creatures included) are never all one thing or another.

obviously there's no perfect speculative fiction creating speculative cultures. the hurdles of making a sell-able show and the ingrained biases and limitations of the writers are not insignificant. but the storytelling here is engaging with conceits concerning the preciousness of life and the immutability of that preciousness--even if you don't understand it.

(also i just love michael burnham with all my heart. don't think it was a coincidence she was named after the angel who carries a sword.)

They have my heart and even more. 🥺

pic source goes to @janewaystolemyheart

I love your blog!

Oh yeah btw i am mad that they’re cancelling Discovery just as it was really getting good. Was it perfect? No. But at least it was trying to do something new during the last 2 seasons and actually moving the Star Trek universe forward in time instead of endlessly dwelling in the nostalgia zone. I like Lower Decks and SNW but you have to admit that all ongoing Trek shows now are endless nostalgia bait and “omg are they going to have a cameo by a legacy character”. It’s just yet another huge symptom of an entertainment industry no longer having the courage to try something even the littlest bit new and weird

a list of Trek things that I’d literally sell an organ to experience for the first time again:

-spock’s death scene and funeral in wrath of kahn

-the subsequent kirk-spock switcharoo that AOS trek pulled at the end of Into Darkness

-speaking of aos, when Spock Prime shows up in the ice cave in 2009 (no bc I literally SCREAMED like the sound that came out of me was insane)

-when Pike showed up in Discovery

-the sickbay scene where Kirk turned out to be alive in Amok Time (smiley spock🥰)

-the DS9 tribbles crossover episode

-every single time Spock swears in The Voyage Home

-when the enterprise rises out of the nebula behind Khan’s ship in WoK

-Chakotay begging Janeway not to do this to him and sobbing over her dead body in Coda (yeah I’m a masochist and???? what do you want from me)

-when Wesley showed up in S2 of Picard

~~Please add yours I wanna see~~

If Star Trek can un-dead an unnamed yeoman from “The Cage,” I sure as hell expect to get Katrina Cornwell back.

anyway.

season 1, episode 7

the long game

man i hope they cast this really cool up and coming actor, simon pegg, in the new star trek movies being spire headed by jj abrams who's only doing that so he can get his hands on star wars, and once he does, that simon pegg will have to write the third movie that actually very good but no one went to see it cos the previous film was so bad

good episode tho

finished season 2 of discovery. that felt VERY final but.... there are two more seasons???

??????

GIRL HOW......

I love media prequels that don't directly affect the main series but add a new layer. Maybe it makes a scene have a new meaning or a relationship have a new layer or make something within it just seem sadder while still standing on its own

God it hurts me every day that they bunked up the Kirk/Spock casting and characters so epically on Strange New Worlds that I can't ever get my TOS-adjacent needs met. Forget Spirk, can't I just have characterizations that don't chew up and spit out and then MURDER some of my favorite TV characters of all time? Is it too much to ask that they just leave these characters BE.

well that season finale sure was an emotional roller coaster

Saru and T'rina in the Trailer for Star Trek Discovery Season 5

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (2017-2024) season two | episode seven- light and shadows ↳ And in order to save our son, I began to read him a story about how to survive when up is down and left is right.

i think you can make a plausible argument that it was the cultural reaction to 9/11 that killed the star trek franchise for a long time. without rehashing the politics of the 00s too much, there were two possible reactions to something like 9/11, what we might term the "oklahoma city" reaction and the reaction we actually got. 9/11 could have been viewed as a major tragedy but ultimately a criminal act, one which had to be dealt with by the civil authorities like the mcveigh bombing or other notable incidents of deadly terrorism on US soil prior to that date. instead though it was largely conceived of as a foreign military threat, encouraged no doubt by an administration that wanted to pursue a more vigorous foreign policy, and we got, well--*gestures at the first two decades of the 21st century*

this really soured the national political mood--it made the cultural zeitgeist one of paranoia and violent revenge fantasies. it gave us 24, and Taken, and while I'm not sure it's wholly responsible for the reboot of BSG (there's a throughline there with Ronald D. Moore's other work) it certainly contributed to an environment that was receptive to it. and i think in that environment 90s end-of-history optimism about the future, though it should have been a welcome corrective to all that cynicism and paranoia, simply felt like an anachronism. enterprise did last a few years, but only four seasons in total, the shortest run since TOS. the only movie we got in that era before the big hiatus was Nemesis, a movie about terrorism and a foreign threat that just felt kind of weird and incoherent.

and that was the problem for star trek in that era: if you take the utopianism out of roddenberry's future, you're not left with anything interesting. utopianism is the whole justification for these guys exploring space and going boldly and whatnot, the whole reason why the federation is worth rooting for over any of the other guys. i think a big reason the jj abrams movies fail to have any real substance is that they try to make star trek an action-adventure thing, when that was never its strong suit--indeed, TOS fight scenes are notoriously bad!--and it really took until discovery before people were willing to make star trek qua star trek again.

but even then, there's a degree of pessimism at the core of (some of) post-hiatus star trek that sits uncomfortably with the show's original utopian vision. some of this is just the usual metastasization of conceits that worked better as one-offs or very sparingly at most, comparable to the way the borg got beaten into the ground by voyager. but the heavy reliance on elements like section 34 and the mirror universe and the postapocalyptic future and the crapsack alpha quadrant of picard all to me speak of a certain yearning for utopia--a nostalgia for the utopias of the 90s--but much greater cynicism about the relevance of utopian fiction to our day-to-day lives.