All Access Star Trek Talks Reno Nicknames, Western Tropes, And Crash Landings In “Far From Home”

All Access Star Trek podcast episode 12

Anthony and Laurie discuss the latest Star Trek news: the official announcement of Discovery season 4, new visual effects tech, what to expect in season 2 of Lower Decks, STLV’s transformation into the 55-Year Mission Tour, and the shake-up at Viacom/CBS. Then they review “Far From Home,” the second episode of season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery. 

Links to topics discussed in the pod

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Renewed For Season 4, Production Starts In November

Doug Jones And David Benjamin Tomlinson Talk ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 3 Hints And Season 4 Prep

Star Trek TV Productions To Add AR Wall To Create Virtual Sets, Like ‘The Mandalorian’

Mike McMahan Explains Why ‘Lower Decks’ Has So Many Star Trek References; Plans To Go Beyond TNG In S2

Variety: ViacomCBS Streaming Shake-Up

Other mentions:

Sue Sylvester from Glee

Sawyer’s nickname generator from Lost

Enterprise-D saucer crash-lands in Star Trek Generations

Trekbits:

Laurie: Neil Shurley’s Star Trekking newsletter and artist Lee Sargent on Twitter

Tony: Gene Roddenberry’s 1965 letter to his agent (web cached)

Let us know what you think of the episode in the comments.


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This episode was boring for me but not a deal breaker. It does have some good parts.

My biggest issue with the episode is Georgiou. Michelle Yeoh is a wonderful actor but her character Georgiou is one son of a pickle.

I hate Georgiou so much I would vaporize her with my phaser pistol.

Anyway, season 3 is not a lost cause yet so that’s good.

Weber is totally going to be back. He’s too good of an actor. I see him being like Mudd.

On the pre-released stills the scene of hin and Space Hitler looked like a complete rehash of the post-season 1 bonus scene recruiting her to S31, but boy is this guy miles ahead of Leland (both the actor and the character)!

I appreciated they didnt write him as the usual dumb vulgar villain but on the contrary verbose and clever (figuring out the time travel stuff and details of Discovery) . One review called him Sherlock Holmes meets Space Pirate ;)

Its just sad KurtzmanTrek, like AbramsTrek, always needs the villains commit the most gruesome torture murders to sonehow make them more menacing. If the villain is well written and acted, this is not necessary!

Anyone remember how Moriaty took Dr. Pulaski hostage and the mere threat of hurting her seemed credible enough?

That VS has been an issue for the franchise for the past two decades.

I’m hoping that there will once again be a place in the market for implied threat vs proving the horror , but post 9/11 American television has gone in a really grimdark place.

The link for the letter from Roddenberry to his agent is broken.

That’s strange. It was there yesterday. We have updated the article with a link to a Google cache version of that page.

Wait… Space exploration is hard… snoozefest/bland TNG is no more.. people have to work together on resources and talk freedom… the universe is full of the unknown…. HURRAY!!!!
Dare I say it… this might be better than Strange New Worlds!!
My only wish is that they lost the Discovery but recommisioned a Connie (or it was the 1701 that had come into the future) – man that bridge set pales compared to their work on the 1701.

It would be strange to say the it is better than Strange New Worlds when that show does not even exist yet, so there is no basis for comparison.

Salt, he said “might be.”

He’s been anticipating, as a huge TOS fan, that SNW might respond to what he’s been seeking.

But he sounds delighted that Discovery in the 32nd century is taking on some of the things he’s been missing.

I think its a bit premature to say that, 2 episodes in. Voyager had the same promise, but they settled on TNG 2.0 early on (which was fine by me, because that is exactly what I wanted, but not for many people including actors and writers who have worked there, as we know)…

Good podcast, but I got a different opinion on some of your interpretation of things:

Detmer: No way this was just a set up for showing that she doesn’t cope with the situation. There is more to it. It probably has something to do with her implant. Maybe there is residue of CONTROL inside her implant.

Linus: Linus got laid by Georgiou, just like the Orion stripper on Q’onos.

Spurs: Don’t you know the had to replace warp drive by Spur Drive after the Burn? :-)

Fedraysh:Pidgin vernacular sounds and feels a lot like Belta Lowda pidgin used in the Belt on The Expanse.

Zora: It’ll fit… it’ll fit…

Enterprise: So true. They should have used physical transporter capsules as some sort of permanent pattern enhancers instead of usual future transporters.

I’ve seen that Detmer theory elsewhere too. I am hoping they’re done with the CONTROL storyline for good, and I know they’re been wanting Culber to be in more of a ship’s counselor role, so that’s why I’m sticking to my PTSD theory! She didn’t seem possessed (like Airiam), she just seemed overwhelmed. Then again, Nhan did mention Airiam, so maybe that was for a reason? Hmm…

Yeah; I’d rather not have the CONTROL plot continued either but maybe they’re going to wrap that up nicely, just like they wrapped up S1’s Klingon plot in S2. Or maybe her state of mind has got to do with the Burn. Maybe she can feel / see / is receiving backround noise of what has happened. But no, it’s not just simple PTSD… That’s not very sci fi-ish…

I think they are interested in PTSD. It’s a topic they meant to touch on with Tyler and L’Rell but they never really dug that deep. So I do believe it’s still on their agenda. But she does have that implant and we haven’t gotten to know much about it. We’ll have to wait and see!

I just thought it strange that as the ship was coming down, Detmer’s words were “Losing Control” – twice. Did other people notice that?

That does seem to me like a very reasonable thing for the person at the helm to say when the ship is crash-landing.

Totally reasonable in real life – tho it brought me out of the moment because I was looking at that scene to see not just if they made it through the wormhole but also if the crew was checking whether or not they had successfully defeated Control. It will be cool if Detmer ever has a chance to say something exactly like Sulu would have – as if they took some of the same flight navigation courses.

It looked very much from the outside like Detmer is dissociating – a classic manifestation of PTSD.

I have no idea what it looks like visually from the inside. However, Erika Lippoldt is a neuroscientist. I suspect that the writers and director got that right.

Laurie mentioned Tyler above, and I will add Lorca to the mix of characters they did a total bait and switch regarding PTSD. So I’m with Garth here: not with THESE writers is this an earnest, straightforward exploration of PTSD…

As GWB said: fool me once, try again… ;)

Well, they DID try it with Tyler and L’Rell. I think they just ran out of time for that particular story and needed to move it forward with the drama of the baby and everything else. And Corwell’s assessment of Lorca was based on an incorrect premise, which was that he was the Lorca she knew, so he wasn’t actually supposed to have PTSD. Hey, I could be totally wrong, but my money’s on the PTSD story and CONTROL staying in the past. I think the point of this season is a clean slate, so digging back into last season’s big storyline would not help with that!

“Well, they DID try it with Tyler and L’Rell.”

I’m not so sure of that. They tried to obfuscate the story twist about Tyler being Voq with the appearance of PTSD, just the same as for Lorca (that tearjerker about blinding from the Buran explosion etc.) Let’s just say I’m burnt with this kind of storytelling so I have a hard time believing they would be earnest this time. And no, that doesn’t mean Control is back necessarily (God forbid, we just had that same storyline again in Picard!), but there’s some other twist waiting here beyond mere PTSD, as others have suggested.

Fair points! You may be right. I still think it might be tied into getting Culber into a bit of a ship’s counselor role, but I wouldn’t discount something with her implant at all.

Hey, it could be BOTH! :)

Agreed!

Part 2 is the season finale.

Overall a good episode. I really liked the direct western genre references. It’s a tradition with Trek, from TOS Spectre of the Gun, over TNG A Fistful of Datas to ENT North Star…
But I still wish they’d return to the sterile, towned-down portrayal of former Trek shows… That eye-bleeder weapon was once again a little too intense for my taste and the cleaning of the Spore chamber just felt out of place. We saw that Leland disintegrated into tiny mechanic grain last season finale, not into a pool of steaming flesh. I’m also not too happy with all the blood in sickbay. I guess it’s what people expect these days from “mature” TV, but it’s a tad too intense and tasteless for my taste.
But I’m quite happy that Saru defused Tilly’s f-bomb just in time.

Its not just that the gore is too intense and gratuitous, it backs them narratively into a corner when they release a torture murderer like this week’s villain. THIS is Starfleet justice?

It also makes the crew look like hypocrites preaching about “this is not wbo we are” when Georgiou just snapped some necks and St. Michael blew up tons of guards in the interest of animal conservation last week… Phasers set on stun was not just about saving on special effects, but solving the moral dilemma of how to resolve action scenes without lethal force and betraying the so called moral evolution of mankind!

I enjoyed this episode much more than S3-E1, mainly because I’m not entirely sold on the Burnham character, I just don’t know who she is, she’s just all over the spectrum, she’s been raised on Vulcan, raised and taught to control her emotions and view life through a logic prism but she’s seemed to entirely forget her upbringing, becoming uncontrollable, violent and completely overly emotional, I can understand that after serving with humans for the first time and confronting emotions that she’d have to find her balance between logic and emotion but she’s just way over the top. S3-E2, to me, felt much more like a classic Trek episode, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Burnham has served with humans for several years. She was on the Shenzu for 6-7 years before the events of the pilot. Her Vulcan “upbringing” only affected her late childhood. She grew up with humans as a little child and joined the Academy. If her nature is very emotional, her Vulcan nurture only covers some of it. Her cartoon character as a child was very emotional…

Garth Lorca, I parsed the information in the Vulcan Hello quite differently.

Burnham had experienced trauma twice during her childhood – the Klingon raid and the strike against the Learning Center. Since she was fostered on Vulcan she never appropriately resolved the traumas. They were still lurking in her backbrain. Instead she learned to use Vulcan logic to suppress and overcome strong emotions.

She maintained her reliance not only in her pre-TOS and teens, but it was also reinforced at the Vulcan Academy which she attended rather than Starfleet Academy. These are very important years for the development of the foreman that provides executive function and emotional regulation.

So, she was wired to use Vulcan logic to deal with or just surpress her emotions, But all those human emotions were still under there and she never learned a mature human middle way to manage them.

After years as a Starfleet officer, this had not really changed. Captain Georgiou herself says in the Vulcan Hello that she had hubris to think that she’d really got Burnham past her Vulcan upbringing.

It’s only the new traumas of seasons one and two that bring all those emotions out in their human expression.

The result is we see a lot of teen age human self-absorption, over-the-top expression and getting stuck/looping even while she’s trying to do the right thing.

It makes sense, but I haven’t enjoyed it as it accelerated in the second part of season two.

In particular, I lost respect and empathy watching Burnham as a an command-level officer leading a mission get stuck / emotionally paralyzed into inaction the way she did in Project Daedulus when she couldn’t do what Airiam asked (accept her sacrifice) and completely lost track of her injured colleague (Nhan).

Thanks for the podcast. I’ve just listened to it this afternoon here in the UK having watched this episode last weekend. Your conversation and comments are a great companion piece to the episodes themselves and you often pick up on things that I’ve missed. Best wishes and thanks again.

Thank you so much. So glad you’re enjoying it!