Finally managed to catch up with this thread...
As others have pointed out, Spock in TOS has been notoriously secretive of his family.
Hypothetical discussion in Journey To Babel:
Kirk: We had that entire episode that took place on Vulcan when you went through Pon Farr, and it's only now that you tell me your father is the Vulcan Ambassador?
Spock: I didn't think it was relevant.
SPOCK: Sorry Jim, but this one's on you. I've mentioned to you before that my mother was an Earth woman and my father was a Vulcan ambassador. Put two and two together, man! It's simple logic! Besides, didn't you read up on my background before making me your first officer?
I enjoyed the episode a lot, but the final reveal was confusing. The internet tells me it was Burnham's mother? It looked like a mangled/scarred future Georgiou in the glimpse we saw.
For a split second, as someone else in here said, I thought it was meant to be an older Burnham. Then I thought,
oh no wait, it must be her mom, who we now know was developing the suit to begin with, and whom Burnham may not actually have witnessed die! (Last season in "Will You Take My Hand" [DSC], she said:
"I couldn't see, but I could hear everything. They killed my dad first. That was quick. They took longer with my mom..."—which I took at the time as a veiled allusion to rape, yet might now be cast in a different light.)
Almost simultaneously, Michael delivered the clincher:
So I can't say I found
that aspect confusing.
As to the temporal mechanics of it all, worthy as any of a Janeway headache, I do echo many of the same questions others have raised, but I think I'll refrain from discussing that side of things until the story finishes playing out.
Hopefully they've thought it through, and it will all make something close enough to sense by the conclusion. I don't mind if it proves obvious they changed horses mid-stream with the showrunner turnover, so long as they stick the landing in the end. We'll see. At this point, suffice it to say I don't think we yet know that it has in fact been the same person in the Daedalus suit for every appearance—that was only a supposition made based on incomplete information, which included some other faulty assumptions. Michael's bio-neural scan may suggest she will yet indeed don the guise of the Red Angel, either to finish something her mother began, or perhaps rather to
undo whatever she's already done, or in response to some other further development.
Also, the discussion of sexuality was a little odd. Maybe it's because I've grown up with the idea that Trek was beyond sexual labels in the future (I recall the first ever same-sex relationship depicted in a Trek novel, they were asked not to use any defining label) that to hear today's labels applied seemed... off.
It must be noted that this had long been a source of complaints, including from within the gay community, that it implied an
erasure of these identities, and the sense of pride found in them today, in that future.
It would obviously be vastly unfair and demonstrably false to say any iteration of
Trek offered
nothing in its stories and sentiments addressing subjects many LGBTQIA+ people might find compellingly representational of themselves on one level or another. But by the same token, I'd consider it more than fair (especially in retrospect) to view previous attempts at maintaining some pretense of being "beyond sexual labels"—while at the same time depicting nigh-exclusively cishet relationships and attractions among its characters, with even aliens in weird makeup all
too occasionally excepted, and far too long beyond the point where to do otherwise would have been subject to censorship or public controversy, if contemporaries are anything to judge by—as one of
Trek's greatest missteps over the years. (Sure, "gay pride" as a movement grew to prominence largely in reaction to repression and oppression of homosexuality, which would be
ostensibly lessened in
Trek's future. But the according suggestion, intentional or otherwise, that this would render
gay culture an obsolete irrelevancy is dubious at best, and wildly offensive at worst.)
Personally, I found this scene delightful, and not for that reason alone.
In addition to the long-overdue acknowledgment that not only do
homosexual relationships exist in the future, but so too does some recognizable form of the
gay identity as we know it, and to simply being a fun and memorable exchange between the actors, I also liked that it directly addressed the longstanding impression that Mirror counterparts of characters can be of different sexual orientations than "our" versions,
without overreaching and going so far as to suggest
everyone in that universe is pansexual, and/or that everyone here is, and just doesn't realize it yet, or whatever. (Incidentally, this reinforces that it remains entirely open to interpretation as to whether Sulu-Prime is gay or not.)
I know Spock acts like it's a big deal they can now "go anywhere, anytime" in the time travel of 'Naked Time' and 'Tomorrow is Yesterday'. But I took that more to mean that conventional warp ships without a time crystal were now suddenly capable of time travel (instead of tech actually designed for it via time crystal, like the suit), not that time travel didn't exist before.
A hypothetical example would be the way we would marvel at how a car could suddenly be modified for air travel and space flight, but we wouldn't find air/space flight anything new in itself.
Quite so. The discovery made in "The Naked Time" (TOS) is that an untested intermix formula—the origins of which are not divulged—unexpectedly yields a novel method of time travel, much as in the case of the Guardian in "The City On The Edge Of Forever" (TOS). Nothing is said of time travel being thought unachievable
by any means hitherto. Further, as with cloaking, ENT confirms that Starfleet has encountered forms of it before, even if they weren't yet able to initiate it themselves.
In any case, it seems clear that Section 31's little project was
secret, so it really need have no effect on anything with respect to TOS. I do wonder whether we might be gaining some insight as to the genesis of the Department Of Temporal Investigations from "Trials And Tribble-ations" (DS9), and ultimately the Temporal Prime Directive and associated machinations of Braxton's future Starfleet in "Future's End" (VGR) and "Relativity" (VGR) here, though. (As it did others, the theory about time travel being potentially, but not necessarily, responsible for certain technological leaps definitely struck me as a callback to "Future's End"—not to mention a nice meta-comment on the continued debate over whether
First Contact and ENT's Temporal Cold War might be responsible for things "looking more advanced" than TOS, and so forth.)
There was a time when "retcon" was a less fraught term... when it merely referred to retroactive continuity in the sense of adding new information to past events, not changing, contradicting, or undermining them. Alas, the latter definition seems to have become predominant.
I take, and to an extent sympathize with, your point here. But the thing is, to wax philosophical a bit, even just adding new context to a previously-established element
is a change, and will inevitably contradict
someone's prior preconceptions about it, and thus undermine that person's according interpretation thereto. Whether one finds the results of a given addition (or subtraction, or whatever other more complex operation, as case may be) positive or negative in terms of enjoyment or annoyance is an opinion that will
always vary among individual viewers. But whether it's being changed it in a
manner you prefer or not, so long as the fiction is running, it will never stop changing. All continuity is retroactive, in a sense.
Nick Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn make some pertinent observations touching on these subjects in their commentary track for TUC:
MEYER: I heard a very interesting theory, one of the few theories that's ever actually caught my fancy, which is that in art, in literature, and in experience, everything is leading up to the present moment—in other words, when you read a book, or see a film, or view a painting, the sum total of all your experience of world history and art is contributing to your understanding of that painting...but the theorist went on to say, and this was his point, that it also works backwards, that what you have seen now will inform things that you go back and re-read and review, so that if you look, he said for example, at early Star Trek television series, you will find them immeasurably enriched by the movies that came after them, because you bring your consciousness of those films to the original episodes, and the original episodes get better, more dense, more complicated, because you are bringing to them your experiences from subsequent films and world events, everything. It all works backwards.
FLINN: One of the interesting things about the whole Star Trek canon is that other literary sagas, like Sherlock Holmes and Lord Of The Rings, are created by a single person...but Star Trek has developed through any number of different pens and ideas over the years. It's resulted in a broader mythology than other sagas have. That makes it fun, too, I think, for the Trekkies and fans—so many more different issues and ideas.
One viewer's "immeasurable enrichment" is another's "undermining"; what one sees as the "fun" exploration of "different issues and ideas" within the "broader mythology" may be viewed by another as brazenly "contradicting" previous writers' takes on it. To borrow some terms from another franchise, there will always be a necessary push and pull between
"all of it; it's all true" and
"let the past die; kill it if you have to." Splitting the difference, we generally arrive at
"true, from a certain point of view" when the dust settles.
So, we want it to be more like Star Trek except without all the bad stuff that was a part of Star Trek?
Yeah, that's essentially what I want as a viewer and a fan. And I don't think it's too much to ask.
As above, it rather is, when there is unending disagreement among us over what exactly constitutes "the bad stuff." Whatever one of us means by it, to someone else, that's the
good stuff. Look through just about any thread here and you'll find different people reacting to the very same story/character/concept in any number of disparate ways, at the very same time. We all have our preferences, and we should each keep in mind that to whatever extent ours are being indulged by TPTB at a given moment, it's the same extent to which another's are being thwarted. The only way they could ever hope to please us all is by pleasing
none too much, or for too long.
When Tilly said the Angel's brain patterns matched Michael, I did wonder for a moment if it was going to turn out to be the Mirror version in the suit, and she was actually manipulating the crew. But I think it's more likely that our Michael will use the suit later in the series, resulting in Airiam's info.
My wife stopped the episode at that point and asked me basically the same thing, if it could be Mirror Burnham in the suit.
This was a possibility that occurred to me as well, at the outset. As with Lorca-Prime, we still don't know what
really happened to Mirror-Burnham.
I have been reading the Memory Alpha page about
Stigma (I didn't watch the episode) but, judging by the summary, it seems to me a little vague about the subject of prejudice based on sexual orientation...
Isn't it about HIV? That's what I got out of it, at least, but they do leave it somewhat up for interpretation.
BTW, It doesn't work very well as an allegory about HIV, because in the real world everyone can be infected, not only homosexuals while the Pa'nar Syndrome can be contracted only by the minority who was engaged in the prohibited practice of mind melding.
That was part of the allegory. At the time when HIV/AIDS initially presented itself as a major public health threat in the United States in the early 1980s, many of the first outbreaks were among gay men, and it was erroneously perceived by many as a "gay disease." In fact, an early synonym for AIDS was GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). Societal homophobia played a distinct role in shaping (and slowing) the earliest responses to the mounting crisis.
Anyone remember when "Rejoined" was about creating the first artificial wormhole?
I certainly remember that it being described as
"the galaxy's first artificial wormhole" and
"the first artificially-created wormhole in history" made no sense, even just in terms of DS9 itself, because it had been established from the very first episode that the Bajoran Wormhole was artificially created!
First STABLE artificial wormhole.
Here again, the one central to the premise of the entire series had already been described as
"the first stable wormhole known to exist" in "Emissary" (DS9) and "In The Hands Of The Prophets" (DS9).
Of course, in spite of their exaggerated phrasing, we may presume that in "Rejoined" (DS9) they must be speaking in the context of Federation feats (and further that all records of Section 31's will be suppressed, along with those of the organization itself). Moreover, as the intention there was explicitly to create a wormhole
both stable
and large enough for ships to utilize,
"micro-" may constitute an important distinction here, as it did in "Pathfinder" (VGR)...
BARCLAY: We've got our itinerant pulsar. We've got our Inter-dimensional transponder array. How do we get our wormhole?
HOLO-TORRES: This one could keep us up all night.
BARCLAY: We know we can produce gravimetric energy, but can we do it at levels high enough to create the singularity?
HOLO-KIM: We're talking about a massive subspace reaction.
BARCLAY: Maybe that's the problem.
HOLO-CHAKOTAY: Reg?
BARCLAY: Maybe we need to think smaller.
HOLO-PARIS: You're losing me.
BARCLAY: I mean, how much bandwidth do we really need? The average wormhole is huge, but if we compressed the data stream...
HOLO-TORRES: ...we wouldn't need a conduit anywhere near as big.
HOLO-JANEWAY: What's your idea?
BARCLAY: A micro-wormhole.
Stamets explicitly mentions that the microwormholes the RA suit makes are unstable and need a graviton beam to keep them open and tethered.
The Federation artificially made a wormhole back in TMP just by activating a dodgy warp drive.
An unstable wormhole which they use a graviton beam on to... make it stable. Thus making it a stable wormhole, otherwise of course the suit's time travel feature would be useless.
The way the suit works is described thusly:
"To keep the wormhole open, the suit generates a membrane, a protective layer that travels with her, and one end stays attached to her starting point in the future—an anchor. When she wants to go home, it snaps her back like a rubber band." It was a method of safely navigating an
"inherently unstable" phenomenon, which
"would close on its own eventually" if not held open. (The purpose of the graviton beam wasn't to stabilize it, but rather to
"force it closed immediately" before the AI could make use of it.)
This alone would seem disqualifying under the definition of "stable wormhole" as applied in "The Price" (TNG)...
BHAVANI: There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the first and only stable wormhole known to exist. It's yours, for the right price.
[...]
PICARD: Captain's log, stardate 43385.6. We are orbiting Barzan II, which is entertaining bids for control of what appears to be a stable wormhole, which could provide a permanent shortcut to the distant Gamma Quadrant.
[...]
RIKER: A wormhole is there one moment, and then gone the next. A stable wormhole is unheard of.
And in "Captive Pursuit" (DS9)...
TOSK: How long does it last, this anomaly?
SISKO: It's stable. You can return whenever you want to.
Unless I've overlooked something, we also don't yet know enough to determine whether the suit is capable of traveling back and forth between the
same two points in time and space repeatedly. Perhaps only one bite at a given apple is permitted? If such be the case, the results wouldn't seem to meet TNG and DS9's criteria for stability on those grounds, either. (The Barzan Wormhole ultimately
wasn't considered stable, because even as one end remained fixed, the other wandered.)
-
MMoM
