Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x08 - "The Elysian Kingdom"

I think it was. If it hadn't happened at all, M'Benga wouldn't have known what the hell happened to his daughter. Making her an adult allowed us to acknowledge she wasn't doing this as a child, but as a being with mature agency. As I wrote above, I'd have been happier if it had been some strange phenomena (such in WNMHGB) rather than an unknown and untrusted alien (imagine if she'd hooked up with Trelane), but c'est la vie.

 

Of course. They would have had to have done it that way on TOS, for budgetary reasons.

 

@ LaxScrutiny

That was the leap of faith which for me would have made the decision all the more powerful. He’d spent his every waking moment trying to solve this and then he just had to let it go. Maybe the writers were trying to tie it into what it’s like to live with someone who’s terminally ill. It dominates your every moment - awake or asleep and then suddenly, it’s gone.

We’d seen in the moments M’Benga had spent with his daughter that she was getting restless; the situation was taking a toll on them both. I think that formed the foundations for a mature discourse between father and daughter and clearly the sentience was powerful enough that it could have caused them all great harm if it had wanted to, so I didn’t really worry about the issue of trust. So for me, I didn’t need that extra bit tacked on the end, but it’s clear we all took different things from it and that’s cool. I’m glad the ending worked better for you. It wasn’t a deal breaker for me. Honestly I would have preferred a more grounded resolution to this storyline than ‘god alien does M’Benga a solid’, but hey-ho!

 

Thing is, there was no decision. Not at all on M'Benga's part, it was out of his hands, and the alternative was his daughter ending her existence, so the child didn't have much of a choice. The entity wasn't a part of the story until the last few minutes, a literal deus ex machina.

As far as it "working for me," it didn't. I'm not sure how many more ways I need to word that.

 

That’s not true. There were hints as to the entities existence throughout and we heard “Boltzmann Brain” way before the last few minutes.

 

Yep.

 

No, if I needed all that t-crossing and i-dotting in fiction I'd have never gotten into Trek at all.

 

Just thinking on it, but the entity was brought up pretty early on by Hemmer, when he said it was unpleasant to communicate with it. It was seeded very well. Pretty much the opposite of a deus et machina, ie: something that just turns up out of the blue and solves everything.

Then there's the fact that the entity didn't solve everything. It was a pyrrhic victory for M'Benga who still essentially lost his daughter in the process of saving her.

I like that we saw Rukiya grown up. It's a great shorthand just to let us know that despite M'Benga's pain and sacrifice, she's having a whale of a time and it was worth it.

It's a funny one this. Maybe I was too harsh a page back. I did find parts of it fell dead flat but the parts that didn't made it into something special. More than any other episode this season I find my thoughts returning to this one. I suspect on a rewatch it will grow on me, but not yet. Too much other stuff to watch.

 

It made me really angry that he let her go. With so many other possibilities to find a cure, and the slow aging of the transporter, i'm sure that "running out of time" could still have been dragged on quite a lot. No more storytime; just unzip her and rezip her in a fraction of a second, keep the pattern solid, and stretch if out indefinitely.

I assumed that he would eventually save her, and going to be with her / help her would be his reason for leaving the Enterprise.

I would never have trusted that situation, regardless of all the wonderful promises from the god-thing.

knowing that it is there, and that he could bring her back there at the last minute if it was called for, would have been enough.

the real test would have been, what would the entity have done if he said no, we are leaving?

Other than that, I quite liked the campy / fantasy portions of the episode - just disliked the resolution.

When they said she was beamed somewhere that no one could find - I thought SHE became the neural net in the nebula, tbh.

 

Let’s hope it’s not the MCoy situation. He lets her go and a week later a cure is found.

 

It just seems to me like they had a great idea ("let's stick M'Benga's kid in the transporter buffer!") and didn't think to come up with a proper resolution, so they just threw something together.

 

But at least it was a happy resolution and now she doesn't have to be a story anchor. It was one of the weaker subplot solutions of Season 1 but at least now M'Benga isn't worried about keeping his daughter alive.

 

Almost like a fairy tale.

 

That kid was never real. It was all in his mind

 

Other people saw her

 

If SNW featured Enterprise going on an actual deep space mission, the kind of thing where you don't get home easily, this issue might not have been so unresolvable... they could just have M'Benga finally find the cure he needs at some point, allowing Rukiya to leave stasis, but there's no way to get the kid home now that she's well. Other Treks had kids in the ship's company and made them work. As long as they didn't go around saving the ship three times a week...

 

Geez, this one was rough - the worst live-action modern Trek episode written by someone other than Beyer.

Christina Chong was hilarious but seen far too briefly, the others ranged from unremarkable to outright painful.

I just did not buy the ending at all, either. M'Benga has been desperately clinging on to his daughter for years, he just got some assistance in making progress on a cure in a recent episode...and then he gives her up to some completely unknown entity? More ridiculously, he lets a young child make the choice? It's just absurd and does not fit with what we have seen to date. I can see why they tacked on the flash-forward to an adult version, because it needed the confirmation that it was the "right" choice in the face of it plainly not being that.

 

Yeah, no.

 

This isn't even the worst episode with the letters "E," "L," "A" and "S" in its title.

 

Reminded me of "the ones who walk away from Omelas". But technically, that isn't an episode title.