(courtesy IMP Awards)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2, E9-10
Episode 9 “Subspace Rhapsody”
At first glance, the idea of a totally musical episode of any Star Trek show might seem a little frivolous and fanciful. After all, some avowedly comic episodes aside such as The Original Series‘ “The Trouble With Tribbles”, Next Generation‘s “Ménage a Troi” and Deep Space Nine‘s “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang”, the franchise is generally earnestly intense and idealistic and doesn’t waste its serious sci-fi capital on something fripperous like crew members breaking out into song. And yet, not only did the genre-flexible delight that is Strange New Worlds go deep into Oscar and Hammerstein territory, with a galaxy of luminously arresting songs by songwriting duo Tom Polce and Kay Hanley, but it made the idea seem wholly gloriously justified and affectingly wonderful. Like almost all musicals do, “Subspace Rhapsody” is some hard-hitting truth and brutally honest honest emotions wrapped in a sugary, candy-coated outer shell, meaning that you’re seduced by the effervescent vivacity of the music before the lyrics lay you with the reality of some starkly human moments for all our characters. In this case, its affairs of the heart, mostly romantically but not exclusively, with Captain Pike (Anson Mount) grappling with letting himself get closer to Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano), Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), who gets some career news that will change everything, and Spock (Ethan Peck) at a troubling crossroads and La’an (Christina Chong) wondering how she can confess her feelings for Kirk (Paul Wesley) without blowing her futuristic NDA. Linking it all is Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) whose inspired idea to use the Great American Songbook to test how fast a special fold in space can speed up comms transmissions through the galaxy backfires when the crew of the Enterprise, twelve other Starfleet ships and even some hip-hop savvy Klingons (who find the whole things amusingly awkward since it doesn’t do their tough guy cred much good) all burst into soul-barring song. It might sound silly but the superlative good songs aside, and they are delightful and enrichingly good, “Subspace Rhapsody” packs quite an emotional punch and proves that there is nothing this brilliantly creative show cannot do.
Episode 10 “Hegemony”
Switching gears completely, and we mean completely, goes cliffhanger-heavy dark, this episode takes us to a colony just outside Federation space which is all small town America bucolic and lovely until the Gorn attack and turn the whole place into a blood-spattered feeding ground for their young. The kicker here is that Pike’s beloved, Captain Batel, who commands the USS Cayuga which was in orbit to do good neighbourly Starfleet things like vaccinate children etc, is on the ground, putting her and her crew and 5000 colonists right in the path of some very hungry, sharply-teethed mouths. The Enterprise races to the aid of the colonists and the Cayuga but arrives to find spaceship wreckage in abundance, and a signal jammer in place so powerful that you can’t use comms or transport anyone anywhere. Which means Pike, Ortegas (Melissa Navia) who finally gets her longed-for away mission (but what timing! Yikes!), Dr M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte) and La’an have to go planetside into a festering hellhole that is best desribed as a flame-scattered The Walking Dead meets Alien vibe. There’s no sign anyone is left alive, including Batel and Chapel who was onboard to get a lift to a temporary new assignment, and every indication the colony and the people who lived happily in it are now Gorn embryo fodder. But wait, and yes ———- SPOLIERS!!!! ———- there are no Ensign Fodders here among key characters meaning that in short order Pike finds Batel, a few hundred survivors and – SURPRISE!! – one Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) who’s found a nifty way to shield the survivors from the predatory Gorn kiddies. There’s a lot on the line, complicated still further by the fact that the Federation, to avoid pissing off the Gorn, has ordered the Enterprise to stay out of things. Clearly they don’t but while events go there way at first, later in the episode, there’s a huge decision to be made, directly influenced by whether Pike is willing to do the right thing even if it means directly defying orders. It’s a fantastically heavy episode that still manages to give some sense of forward momentum to the romances of Pike and Batel and Chapel and Spock, and while the narrative convenience is massive and glaring, you don’t care because the raw humanity on display rips your heart open and keeps it bleeding profusely and likely well into 2024 or maybe even 2025 depending on how long the writers’ strike and how long it takes for season 3 to arrive on streaming screens.
Foundation S2, E5-6
(courtesy IMP Awards)
Episode 4 “Where the Stars are Scattered Thinly”
Nothing big ever happens on an epic scale; at least, not always. If you were to faultlessly believe Hollywood or any expansively overwrought storyteller, you’d think that all of life’s big moments relentlessly came to pass in big block caps with neon lighting. But the fact is many of the things that come to memorably define a person or an age happen in small but critically important increments; they may reach a loud and booming crescendo, all sound, light and unmissable fury but the path there is a decisive step here, a life-changing decision there, and all of it comes down to humanity’s capacity to build the huge from the seemingly insignificant. That is very much on display in this episode of Foundation, a show that it must be said, is very bit as lushly beautiful, resembling landscapic art as much as anything else, as it is emotionally complex and narratively thoughtful, composed of a thousand small words and features that together add up to something truly epoch defining. In this episode, though, on face value, it’s all nuance and small decisions with Hober Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas) spirited back to Terminus for a date with Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) and the Vault by Brother Constant (Isabella Loughland), who may want more than a religious epiphany, and Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir). They, along with Brother Constant’s father, Director Sef Sermak (Oliver Chris), who may, okay definitely does, like the trappings of power perhaps even more than the Foundation’s mission, enter the Vault to meet ———- SPOILER!!!!! ———- Seldon in a very large space (4D in a 3D space apparently which will delight all those maths lovers out there) and be given missions which may change everything. Or they may not. Even so, the meeting of him is pretty cool, if only because he, in typical Seldon style, pricks all the pompous and earnest balloons the Foundation true believers have and brings them back down to earth those with their eyes firmly on a big future. Meanwhile, there is plotting, or at least, investigating afoot with Queen Sareth I (Ella-Rae Smith) of the Dominion getting close to Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) even as she does her best to find out who murdered her family (pssst! In front of you … in front of you!) and enlists the help of a reluctant guard to do so. Even as Day’s (Lee Pace) general Bel Riose (Ben Daniels) arrives on Siwanna with his husband and 2IC Glawen Curr (Dino Fetscher) to find out more about Foundation and thus negate it as a threat, events are moving within and without the seat of power on Trantor, small but considerable steps that together will likely build to something cataclysmically big soon, as is the way of things in a world where epic and life-changing always start small.
Episode 5 “The Sighted and the Seen”
The fracturing of the certainties of life continue in an episode that like all of Foundation unfurls at such a luxuriously languorous pace that you could be forgiven, but only if you’re not paying attention, that not very much is happening. That is the seductive charm of this most beautiful and luxuriant of sci-fi shows – it moves like Queen Sareth I moving with determined poise, and some enthusiasm at times, through the palace grounds to meet her informant, a guard named Markley (Afolabi Alli) while unveiling some home truths that once again bolster the idea that big things from little things grow. Perhaps the biggest crack in the façade of the status quo is the fact that Brothers Dawn and Dusk (Terrence Mann), divergent form their genetically cloned forebears but keeping up the pretense of one unified ruling trinity, discover that Day is actively working them to splinter them out of any and all power sharing. It may not seem like much, but in an empire where everything has always emanated from a unified positioning of power – a way of ruling that has valued the known over the unknown and ultimately doomed Empire because it doesn’t allow new ideas or perspectives to enter leading to codification of rot and fossilisation – it is EVERYTHING, a splintering made all the more slowly ominous by the fact that Sareth is continuing to dig and dig and dig. She’s not the only one challenging the realities and assumptions of power or world-changing ambition, however. On the planet Ignis, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) and a flesh-and-blood Seldon (as opposed to the Vault’s digital one; ever wondered why there might be two Foundations? Well, now you know) find themselves in the company of telepaths, led by Tellem Bond (Rachel House) who are determined that there will NOT be a second Foundation. It’s all very cliffhanger-y and final and it suggests that however civilisation comes to an end, it won’t happen as either Day or Seldon, for all his mathematical genius expect because life in all its chaotic glory has a way of defying expectations and assumptions and charting its own fantastically unpredictable path. What we have in episode five, along with Seldon realising that Hardin is essentially his granddaughter (who’s her dad? Think about it), is the galaxy continuing to crumble in big ways and small, defying any idea that you can predict, affect or corral the future and bolstering the messiness of reality which has never paid heed to what is expected of it and likely never will.