(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you ever wanted proof that the writers of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are masters of a stunningly good variety of narrative approaches, then look no further than the fact that the seriously intense emotional drama of episode 8, “Under the Cloak of War” follows hard on the storytelling heels of last week’s light and bright, though not without some emotional weight, “These Old Scientists” which saw two of the crew from Lower Decks transport into older TOS-era times.
Whereas last week was all wit and comedy improv, this week delves deep into the searing way trauma lingers within, and how all the “I’m fine” affirmations in the world cannot compete with a soul broken by war, loss and unending grief on an almost daily scale.
In this episode, the famed ambassador for peace, Dak’Rah (Robert Wisdom) is being hosted by the Enterprise as the Federation attempts to seal a tentative peace deal in the long-at-war Prospero System.
This would be, on any other day, a garden variety jaunt for the crew of the Enterprise but the complicating factor here is that the ambassador in question in a Klingon but not jus any Klingon, the infamous “Butcher of J’Gal”, a one-time ruthless general who oversaw the deaths of many Starfleet soldiers and even many of his own fighters.
To Klingon War veterans, Doctor M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), he is a scarring reminder of the horrors visited upon in a conflict which left 100 million Federation dead and a galaxy teetering on the brink of rolling trauma and death.
While Pike (Anson Mount), Number One, Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and security chief La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) take Dah’Rah at his pacifist word – he is at pains to point out that his experience of war showed how futile it is and how empty his race’s militaristic culture is – the three veterans cannot, despite their best efforts with M’Benga in particular struggling, physically and emotionally, to even be in the same room as the monster who made his life hell.
Rather brilliantly, Strange New Worlds doesn’t definitively come down on the truth in Dak’Rah’s heart – though the man seems earnestly sincere about his love and admiration for peace and his repudiation of war, it’s left dangling that he may be bluffing or, and this is the compelling thing, he’s being framed that way by the lingering, suffocating trauma of M’Benga and Ortegas in particular – and spends its engrossing time exploring whether it even matters who he is now and whether he has grown and changed.
Over an episode that ends in a way that will shock but not necessarily surprise you if you’ve been paying attention to the roiling pain of our three battle-scarred veterans, what is established beyond a doubt that while ideals of peace and moving on to a better future are admirable and should be pursued over the bloody alternative at all times, actually doing that isn’t simple and can take everything an survivor has to take part in, if they can manage it at all.
“Under the Cloak of War” beautifully and movingly dives deep into the fact that while we all want to heal and move on and get back to life as it was, that’s not possible, and that not even the Federation’s vaunted ideals are enough to salve the souk-excoriating pain of PTSD.
It’s a finely calibrated and highly affecting episode that never resorts to melodrama or histrionics, relying simply on telling the story of peoples’ pain affectingly and with great empathy and establishing that while we all want better, peaceful and more idealistic futures, achieving that comes at a cost and might take everything we have to realise.
Coming up next … yet more glorious tonal and thematic differences from anything that’s gone before which is just another reason to love the storytelling marvel that is Strange New Worlds …
FOUNDATION S2, E3
(courtesy IMP Awards)
One of the most striking things about Foundation, and which pushes me to finally and belatedly read Isaac Asimov’s masterful work, is how emotionally intimate the show is, even when it’s at its most epic.
The odds against any intimacy being present in a story that charts the fall and the fall of an empire, and the possible rise of those standing against it – how successfully is yet to be determined – is great – there’s simply too much BIG story you would think for any sense of close connection to slip through, much less affect you.
And yet in episode three of the show’s second season, “King and Commoner”, written by Leigh Dana Jackson and Jane Espenson, what we get is an up close and personal look at how great events and political machinations of immense scope and effect all find expression in the lives affected by it.
One of the most touching is that of political prisoner Bel Riose (Ben Daniels) who is brought back, long beard matted and covered in the grime and dirt of penal servitude, from the planet Lepsis where the onetime leading general of the empire has been reduced to just another prisoner fighting for survival (though notably he still remains a man of integrity and principal).
His return from a disgrace not of his making – he was consigned there by Empire aka Brother Day aka Cleon XVII for political sins of the kind only autocrats full of fear and paranoia can justify – is driven by the dawning realisation that the titular Foundation might actually pose a threat to the existence of the empire and that only a man of Riose’s strategic talent and nous can truly chart just what that chart looks like.
He is restored to his ship, his devoted crew, and his name, all of which is very impressive in size and scale but what really hits home, and is emblematic of the raw, intimate humanity at the heart of Foundation is when he is reunited with his husband, Glawen Curr (Dino Fetscher) who has also been used as a pawn in Empire’s ceaseless, coldhearted games of politics and power.
Each had been told the other was dead and their coming together, though marked by lingering trauma and loss, is a thing of starkly human and richly emotional beauty, underscoring again that at the heart of this show about the immense things that characterise Foundation is the very humanity that drives it and which will ultimately determine what happens to whom and when.
There are some other plot-impelling moments such as when the two Foundation monks for want of a better word, though they are religious in a way that founder Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), track down a con man by the name of Hobor Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas) who somehow has a predicted hand in the fate of the galaxy, and Seldon acquires a body again through near-magical, inexplicable means to the shock of Gaal Dornick (Lee Lloubell) and Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), and they are enthrallingly beautiful to watch, but what really hits home in yet another exquisitely done episode is that while empires rise and fall, people are at the heart of them and it is people who will ultimately determine what happens next and how.
Foundation is currently streaming on Apple TV+