Are you referring to Mara? Spock offered to take her back to the Enterprise, she declined thinking it would lead to too many questions from Kirk and Kang.
Yes! But I still found it weird that there was absolutely no discussion of her safety... I felt that part was a bit rushed. (Still, a great read overall.)
It was established in the dialogue that by that time, Spoiler: Harm’s Way ending all of the Chwii in the immediate vicinity were in retreat and at least many kilometers away. Mara was in no immediate danger when the Starfleet landing party departed.
Thank you very much. I must have missed this; the audio form makes it a little harder to revisit fragments one might not have devoted enough attention to. Thank you for writing this book, and I hope more are coming :-)
It seems to me that the novel is trying to be consistent with Vanguard and with Strange New Worlds: Doctor M'Benga's first name is never mentioned.
I meant the first name wasn't mentioned in the novel in order to be consistent with Vanguard which calls him Jabilo and with SNW which calls him Joseph.
I'm only about seventy pages in, but found Kang's use of Terran military terminology such as "as you were" and "make a hole" somewhat incongruous. "Out of my way, you scurvy Targ pups" might have been better. A small nitpick, to be sure, but it did sort of leap out at me.
Joseph was his first name in an unproduced TOS script. Clearly the SNW writers decided to canonize that.
I'm surprised they opted for the English given name, myself. I would think in the interest of IDIC, even among Human populations, the other name would hold sway.
Different first names open a back-door to a new explanation of his being CMO in SNW, but not-CMO in TOS: Perhaps there are two Drs. M'Benga. Perhaps medicine is the M'Benga family business.
What, perhaps their dad is a liar and has multiple families on different planets? That'd be an interesting dynamic Trek hasn't explored. It would be interesting if he had stepped down from the top job for some reason like (maybe only perceived in his mind) loss of his captain's confidence or less responsibility after some harrowing incident.
I mean, this is the team which considers 'Ash Tyler', 'Charles Vance', 'Jenna Mitchell', 'Christina', and 'Kyle' to be good character names for performers of South Asian, West Asian, and East Asian ancestry on top of denying a South Asian performer yet again for a North Indian Sikh lineage. From where I stand, their interpretation of IDIC is a...specific one.
There must be an awful lot of adopted babies in the future...either that, or names don't follow lineage...that is, giving your child their own first and last name is a popular thing in the 23rd century.
My thoughts exactly, heh. Every time I hear Paramount+ Trek get another accolade for 'representation', I grumble inside because I have had an entire lifetime of experience being one of few Asians in the room, also teaching myself about the real details of other Asians because I respect them for who they are, and I see little to none of that for us in current Trek. And I'm not saying Sonequa Martin-Green et al. aren't doing their jobs well to the delight of fans, but it's pretty annoying how this team cast Christina Chong in light of the Benedict Cumberbatch controversy less than a decade prior and then topped that off by ludicrously having said character whine about being oppressed for her infamous heritage name when it doesn't make sense that she would not resort to a simple legal name change in the 23rd century Federation.
Well, there are plenty of people in real life with Asian heritage but Western names, like Jessica Henwick or Yvonne Chapman (of The CW's Kung Fu series). And casting Asian performers as characters written with Western names shows a willingness to cast without regard to ethnicity. But I agree it would be nice if they'd exercise more creativity in the naming department in the first place. As for Charles Vance, I don't think he belongs on the list. Though Oded Fehr was born in Tel Aviv, he's of European Jewish heritage, though he has a bit of Turkish ancestry on his father's side. As for La'an, who's to say how much of her lineage is Sikh? She's more than 250 years removed from Khan -- that's enough generations that she could plausibly have zero genes inherited directly from a given genealogical ancestor, although in that case it would be weird that they kept the surname that long (not to mention the bizarreness of using Khan's middle name as part of La'an's surname).
And that reliance on biracial Asians winds up falling into a trap like the Kenya Barris scenario. I reject that reasoning because the show spent time exploring how La'an was specifically a descendant of Khan. To me, it constitutes poorly-executed fanservice which detracts from the show's attempt at seriously tackling the bigotry against Una Chin-Riley stemming from Khan's infamy. But this is a bigger issue which I will take over to a new thread in another forum to avoid detracting from the topic at hand of Harm's Way. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/my-...nd-character-naming-in-paramount-trek.312978/
Who said the characters had to be biracial? There are a lot of ways people can acquire surnames. An ancestor of theirs may have been adopted, or changed their surname upon immigration. No, the problem is simply that the Trek franchise has an odd overdependence on names of British Isles or European origin, no matter how diverse the casting ends up being. You're kind of getting it backwards by assuming that the writers decide what ethnicity they intend the characters to be. It seems more like they're just creating characters and leaving the casting open to actors of any ethnicity. Which is how it ideally should be done, of course. Sometimes shows change character names to fit the ethnicity of the actors they end up casting, but sometimes they don't. For a show set in the future, when different cultures have presumably blended a lot more, it seems less essential. But by the same token, a diverse culture like that really should have a broader selection of names than the Trek franchise generally uses. Also, I have no idea what "the Kenya Barris scenario" refers to. Oh, I'm no fan of the concept behind the La'an character, and actually giving her the surname "Noonien-Singh" as if it were hyphenated is bizarrely wrong. I'm just saying that it's shortsighted to assume that any direct descendant of Khan's must be genetically South Asian. He was, in Spock's words, "absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world, from Asia through the Middle East." Rulers like to create dynasties. He could've had dozens of concubines of many ethnicities, had numerous biracial children. And after he was gone, there's no reason why his children would've limited themselves to marrying and procreating with people of South Asian origin. So his descendants 250 years later could be of literally any ethnicity, and as the link I provided demonstrates, it's highly likely that most of them would have few or no genes directly inherited from Khan (which is why La'an is not an Augment).