Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Geeks explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
NüTrek: Star Trek Discovery and Section 31, Part 1
Is Star Trek Discovery in canon? What exactly is NüTrek? Just how bad was Section 31: The Movie?
In this episode we lay down the ground work and history that lead to today's Star Trek, for better or worse. Join us for part one where we show you just how we got here.
Band names are so interesting really.
Speaker 2:No deep, that's some real philosophical shit right there.
Speaker 1:Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds.
Speaker 2:Are they in the proper approach pattern for today? Negative, all weapons Now.
Speaker 1:Charge the lightning field. Favorite non-federation alien warship.
Speaker 2:Well, it's really hard to beat the Borg cube Fucking rules. Yeah, the utilitarian nature, the size, the scale, the weird wonderment and mystery behind it Because the Enterprise is sort of built on human concepts of aerodynamics so they wouldn't matter in space, yeah, but it's easier for us to think about that was so alien and so strange. It's like that's really really hard to beat. I think some of the Romulan ships are cool as hell. In canon there was a technology exchange between Romulans and Klingons. That's why they both have birds of prey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that always threw me off. Yeah, growing up I was like wait, they can't both have birds of prey.
Speaker 2:They do. So. The birds of prey that we know as the Klingon birds of prey were Romulan designs. That's why they look more like birds. The original bird of prey was that sort of like teardrop shape with the nacelles on the side and the bird painted underneath Caw Exactly the strength of the crow. That's why he keeps coming back. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's why he puts teardrops underneath the portholes on the that's because of all the people he killed in prison. Hey, it's Klingon prison. It's tough, it's a repent day, man.
Speaker 2:I hate most of the Dominion ships. They just look like bugs and I know they did that on purpose. I'm just like, eh yeah, I don't really care about those. A lot of the ships that they use in one-off episodes, both in DS9 and TNG, are one design that they just keep retrofitting for different aliens. For instance, the Uridian shuttle is used for like a thousand different alien races, just with different doodads and greebles on it. You know, and then, Ah, doodads and greebles, that should be the name of our show. Oh, by the way, this is Dispatch HX.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm observing Ensign Jake.
Speaker 2:Observing Ensign, Not even acting Ensign. You're just watching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I gotta figure out. Am I gonna get into Starfleet or not?
Speaker 2:I don't you know I'm Cuckold Ensign Jake.
Speaker 1:This is my cuck chair that is on the it's on the bridge.
Speaker 2:That's the one Deanna usually sits in. So today we're going to be tackling New Trek and that's new with umlauts. Originally we were just going to talk about Section 31,. And we are going to talk about Section 31,. The movie quote unquote movie. The TV movie yes, made for streaming. Movie the 2B original.
Speaker 1:I actually make that reference later.
Speaker 2:Okay, would you please explain to the audience and to me exactly what new trek means so new trek, which is not commonly but sometimes referred to as third wave star trek, the first wave, of course, being the original series leading into the movies, the second wave being beginning of TNG and the subsequent spinoffs of that, which are DS9, voyager and, technically, enterprise. And then the third wave is after Star Trek, nemesis, essentially beginning with Abrams' Star Trek, culminating in what we have today, that is, third wave or new Trek.
Speaker 2:Okay, in what we have today that is third wave or new Trek. Okay, the descriptor is basically to I don't want to say discredit, but show a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the current state of Star Trek. I think so. When it looked like the original series of movies, or, better stated, the movie starring the original series cast, looked like it was about to wrap up, it had reached its financial, its box office and broad appeal peak with Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home, directed by Leonard Mouy. After that, of course, there was going to be another Star Trek movie and Shatner kind of strong-armed his way into directing and controlling his vision of Star Trek and honestly, I guarantee it, the only reason he did so was because Nimoy got to direct three and four.
Speaker 1:You let that prick Nimoy direct a film. It's my turn now.
Speaker 2:He just sounds like an AI chatbot. Now, that's what somebody needs to do is do an AI chatbot with William Shatner's voice so that the stilted speech doesn't sound weird.
Speaker 1:Your turn is coming up.
Speaker 2:There'll be no uncanny valley problem because you just go. Oh, it's William Shatner.
Speaker 1:You're fine, it's fine. Your destination is on the right.
Speaker 2:After a very long pause where you missed your turn. You missed it, you missed it.
Speaker 1:Basically William Shatner's complete narcissistic pet project, star Trek 5, was. You can just see William Shatner's narcissistic pet project. That's everything that runs the gamut.
Speaker 2:Well, it does, but there is another narcissistic William Shatner project that I'm going to refer to soon, sorry.
Speaker 1:So we need to differentiate, we need to delineate these multiple.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, but because it was a critical failure, except for Gene Shalit on the Today Show who loved it. For some ungodly reason it's Gene Shalit. It was Gene Shalit, yeah. So after Star Trek V though still relatively okay in the box office, was a huge drop off from Star Trek IV. Famously, in the original pitch meeting Shatner entered the room and Nimoy and Harv Bennett. Harv Bennett was brought on as a co-writer after Star Trek the Motion Picture basically when they got rid of Roddenberry, which we'll talk about here in a bit but was considered a good writer and a good punch-up guy and a good showrunner-type guy who could come in and reign everybody in and make it viable for Hollywood, just like Kasdan did for Spielberg and Lucas mostly Lucas and so Harv Bennett was a co-writer with Nimoy going forward with Star Trek III and IV, and so I remember reading an interview with Bennettennett when he said that in their pitch meeting and shatner comes in, the first thing he says is I want to meet god. But it was like we knew we were in trouble and so they had to figure out how to, how to pound out a script based on shatner's pitch that was even worth putting on celluloid, and they probably did the best they could, because there are, you know what, as bad as that movie is, there are some interesting themes in it that I think carry over from some of the other films that are worth revisiting and I mean kind of get counteracted later by Ronald Moore, of all people. But it's a bad movie and it's the worst. Well, it was the worst star trek movie. Interesting, well, I'm into darkness is gonna give it a run for its money, but it was widely I want to say universally considered the worst star trek movie.
Speaker 2:But uh, when all that happened, there was this feeling that the movie franchise was dwindling, especially since they were all getting older and everyone kind of wanted to move on, especially you, you know. Like Nimoy had found his path as a director, obviously not Star Trek related and relatively well received, like Three Men and a Baby, which say what you will about it. It made a lot of money, but the writing was on the wall that it was coming close to the end and the studio was kind of conflicted as to whether or not they wanted to continue on with that, wrap it up or a reboot. One of the biggest ideas that were being pushed at the time was a prequel film which would follow the original series characters during their time at Starfleet Academy. Gene Rodbury was actually the first one to pitch this, based on an idea he had in 1968, the first time Star Trek got cancelled In the 1980s. It was then sort of reformulated and reproposed by Harv Bennett as a possible plotline for what would eventually become Star Trek VI, the Undiscovered Country, but it was rejected in favor of the other projects that contemporary Roddenberry wanted. One reason for that, in particular, was that Roddenberry had been sidelined by executives almost immediately after the premiere of Star Trek the Next Generation for being too hands-on, kind of a nuisance and, quite frankly, full of bad ideas. I mean, he really is a Lucas analog in a lot of ways, but Star Trek's 25th anniversary was upon us and they couldn't simply cut Gene out of the franchise during their 25th anniversary was upon us and they couldn't simply cut Gene out of the franchise during their 25th anniversary. Plus, it was understood that the film would be the last voyage of these actors.
Speaker 2:Following the critical and commercial failure of Star Trek Nemesis from 2002 and the cancellation of Star Trek Enterprise, the franchise's executive producer, rick Berman, who replaced Gene Roddenberry, and screenwriter Eric Jenderson, wrote an unproduced film called Star Trek, the Beginning, which would take place after Enterprise. It was supposed to be a war epic, modeled after Band of Brothers and set during the Romulan Federation War. That was completely abandoned After the separation of Viacom and CBS in 2005,. Former Paramount Pictures president, gail Berman, unrelated convinced CBS to allow Paramount to produce a new film. I'll get to the reasoning behind that in a second.
Speaker 2:So two Hollywood writers with geeky backgrounds Roberto Gaston Orsi not making it up. You're going to love this. No one writes shit like Gaston 100% true, and you're going to love this. No one writes shit like Gaston 100% true, and you're going to love this. It gets better. Roberto Gaston Orsi and Alex Hillary Kurtzman Lock her up. Were approached to write the film they were notorious for writing, obviously the pinnacle of nostalgic geek IP Transformers and then later, of course, the seminal Amazing Spider-Man 2. But before that they had cut their teeth in the world of syndicated television in Universal Television's Action Pack. Do you remember Action Pack at all?
Speaker 1:No, I don't remember Action Pack.
Speaker 2:I actually do, and that's more on me for wasting my entire life watching television. But Action Pack was what is, in the industry, called a wheeled series. So a wheeled series is an idea that was used, but publicly not well understood, part of television programming that originally started in 1955 with Warner Brothers Presents. A wheeled series is where two or more regular programs are rotated in the same time slot, the most glaring example of which would be the NBC mystery movie which included McCloud. Mccloud, macmillan and Wife and the mercurial Columbo. One more thing about Trek, just one more thing about Star Trek. So Columbo specifically which, by the way, great show, let us pray it never gets remade. Do you remember when they tried to reboot Kojak, the Tully Savalas vehicle, with Ving Rhames? I pray to God we don't do that with Columbo. Leave Columbo alone. It was great and they were doing those until like 2008.
Speaker 1:I mean, come on, there are discussions about a colombo remake starring mark ruffalo.
Speaker 2:I do like mark ruffalo, he's just ruffled enough, you know the more I think about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now that you say that, I kind of like it.
Speaker 2:I gotta do too. Fuck now, I don't know. I hate myself for liking it, but it's not actually not that it doesn't sound that bad.
Speaker 1:Well, let's see what happens.
Speaker 2:So Columbo is really interesting too, because if you didn't grow up on network television like we did, and you're more in the current era of television, which also includes things like streaming but also back catalogs of other TV shows, all TV used to follow like a specific structure. You had seasons, you had time off, then you had another season, you know, and traditionally in America a season was well after Star Trek. Each season was like 30 episodes, but after a certain point seasons were 22, 26 episodes. Shorter seasons or half seasons were like 13 episodes and Columbo, no matter what Tooby tells you, was not structured that way because they list Columbo by season.
Speaker 2:But that's not really how the show worked. That's not what a wheel series was. A wheel series was basically a series of TV movies that rotated every two, three, four weeks. Action Pack was a lineup of essentially pilots in the form of made for tv movies. The original lineup included william shatner's desperate attempt to create his own sci-fi universe, tech war oh man, yes, his other narcissistic passion project, tech war, which spawned comic books, action figures, obviously novels, because that's kind of where it started and the made-for-TV pilot. It also included Smokey and the Bandit, the series Not to be outdone. Midnight Run the series. Oh God, why? A show called Vanishing Sun and wait for it? Hercules, the Legendary Journeys. The sobofurcation of media commences for it.
Speaker 1:Hercules, the Legendary Journeys, the sorbofrication of media commences.
Speaker 2:The pilot of which was presented as a made-for-TV movie called Hercules and the Amazon Women. It starred the legendary actor from Fellini's Lestrada and zorba, the Greek Anthony Quinn as Zeus, but, more importantly, a little lady named Lucy Lawless. Hercules was produced by the great Sam Raimi, and this was a surprise hit of the bunch. Raimi was the one who gave Kurtzman and Orsi their big breaks as writers. Coincidentally, the popularity of the show wasn't the reason for its initial spinoffs. Pause, I just remembered Kevin Sorbo after Hercules then went on to do a Gene Roddenberry not Star Trek project called Andromeda. Oh yeah, so that's a weird tie-in. Anyway, coincidentally, the popularity of the show wasn't the reason for its initial spinoffs. That we know today. In fact, it was because the raging MAGA head, kevin Sorbo, suffered a stroke. Really, yes, he had a massive stroke. Was that God's will? Is that what that was? You'd have to think so, right. So Kurtzman and Orsi were challenged to continue the Hercules universe with minimal input from Sorbo. Their solution A spinoff in name only, starring a character from the very popular Hercules and the Amazon women, xena Warrior Princess, played by the New Zealand icon Lucy Lawless, later to go on in Battlestar Galactica. This proved to be arguably even more popular than the original Herc lore and earned two 24-year-old writers the prestigious positions of showrunner huh. Did not know that they were 24.
Speaker 2:Then, in our story, enter hollywood wunderkind jeffrey jacob abrams. Abrams essentially grew up in the hollywood system. He was the son of a veteran television producer, gerald Abrams and Carol Ann Abrams, who in her own right, was a Peabody Award-winning television executive producer, as well as author and law academic. Gerald worked at CBS in midtown Manhattan, but in 1971, they relocated to LA. Jj attended Palisades High School, which I don't know. Does it exist anymore? It probably got burned down. That's what I'm saying. It might not be there anymore. The Palisades is pretty much gone. And at the age of 16, he wrote the music for Don Dohler's 1982 horror movie Night Beast. All right, I'm not going to fault you for that. Okay, but he was 16. I'm not going to fault you for that. Okay, but he was 16. He wrote all the music for a film that's nuts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:They knew who he was, so he already had a leg up over everyone else in the industry. Obviously, after graduating he originally planned on attending art school, but in the end he went to Sarah Lawrence College back in New York. In college he successfully wrote the treatment for what would eventually become Taking Care of Business for Touchtone Pictures starring Charles Grodin and James Belushi, and he was producer. He was a senior in college. He then wrote Regarding Henry, forever Young and Gone Fishin'. If you remember that one, I most certainly do. Oh, what a classic. In 1994, he joined a group of Sarah Lawrence alum known as the Propellerheads not the band who were trying to get in on the ground floor of the field of computer animation. That led to work on the DreamWorks gamble Shrek. In 1998, he was tapped to write the screenplay for a little Michael Bay joint called Armageddon and later that year created the early WB staple Felicity with future, the Batman and Cloverfield director Matt Reeves. Then came the founding of his own production company, bad Robot, with collaborator Brian Burke. After that came Alias and eventually Lost with Damon Lindelof. I'd love to do a whole thing on Lost, I really would.
Speaker 2:So fast forward to 2006, when Abrams was tapped for his directorial debut with Mission Impossible 3, written by Kurtzman and Orsi. This was around the time that his clout landed him a meeting with Paramount, where the studio proposed a wild idea to do the unthinkable and reboot a tentpole franchise in Star Trek, reasons being Paramount and CBS famously split as a parent company and, with the divorce, split the Star Trek baby in half. Cbs I know, I know it's the only thing I can think of CBS would have the rights to produce any future projects, but only on TV. Paramount had the movie rights, so this included caveats like the prohibition of a new Star Trek series within a certain number of years of a Star Trek movie and vice versa. Now that, right there when Paramount and CBS Viacom split, I think is the actual origin of the Kelvin universe, if you really think about it. Now, kurtzman and Orsi were said to have gained inspiration from novels they read, and this is based on just some of the cursory research. I looked at Graduate school dissertations on the subject. What Star Trek? What are you talking about? Did you write them? Did you just hear them? Please give me more information, as well, of course, as the original series. Now, you and I, by the way, were at Comic-Con and we were at the Star Trek panel where they announced all this stuff and they gave us those t-shirts for free that had the date of the premiere of Star Trek, which was supposed to be Christmas of 2008. It did not come out Christmas 2008. So those, I would imagine, are collector's items now. But so now it's 2009. Star Trek is out.
Speaker 2:The film opens on a Starfleet vessel, the USS Kelvin, in the year 2233. Kelvin was JJ Abrams' mother's maiden name. Hmm, all right, that makes more sense. The Kelvin encounters one of the dumbest lines and every time I hear it it's like chalkboard scratches in my brain A lightning storm in space. What the fuck are you talking about? You say it once and you're like oh okay, it was just like a random description, but they keep using it as if it's one who knows what that is.
Speaker 1:As just watching any Star Trek for any length of time, they come up with all this wild technobabbles. It doesn't mean anything, but it gets from point A to point B and it sounds more technical. It does sound more technical as opposed to just like electric stuff going on in spaceland.
Speaker 2:Well, even starting with the original series and moving forward, they would have a room of writers and then they would leave spaces blank for these kinds of issues. We're explaining a phenomenon. They would leave it blank and we would say, like Trek talk or Trek, no babble in the script. And then they'd send it off to a panel of consultants, usually who were physicists or engineers, who actually would figure out a way to justify the narrative. That was normally great and was seamless, except one glaring example. I can think of a sadly rare bad ds9 episode where luck and chance oh yeah were being manipulated and they were like oh, it's reverse neutrinos, uh, okay, what you can tell? That was just like a blank space in the script that these guys were like fuck, I don't know't know. What do we say? I don't fucking know. And then you know, digging through all these like scientific papers, being like how does this? I mean probability, I don't know. Fuck, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Reverse neutrinos there it is. Yeah, the atoms are spinning backward and I'm I don't sure.
Speaker 2:Because Doctor who had already cornered the market on reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. So you couldn't really do that, I guess. So they just I don't know reverse neutrons All right. So 99% of the time it works. That's how we get temporal rifts, which is what you could have called it instead of a lightning storm in space.
Speaker 1:It's what they should have called it. It was a spatial temporal rift, exactly.
Speaker 2:What happened to just using the word anomaly. It was so much easier, it covered so much ground. You know, that's where you get like quantum filaments, which is one of the greatest episodes of TNG, the Poseidon Adventure episode. But no, they went with lightning storm in space which, like I said the first time, you say it OK, fine, fine, but the Kelvin runs into this lightning storm A, as we find out, romulan ship, the Nerada, which is a utilitarian mining vessel retrofitted with Borg tech by increasingly desperate Romulate and we will get to why. The current stardate that they cite is stupid, makes no sense and about an ambassador Spock whom he does not recognize. So then the Narada's commander, nero, played by Eric Bana, kills him and resumes attacking the Kelvin. George Kirk, the first officer, played by Chris Hemsworth, orders the ship's personnel, including his pregnant wife Wionna. I'm sorry Wynonna. I'm sorry Wynonna. I'm thinking Wynonna.
Speaker 1:Wynonna, it's not a thing why.
Speaker 2:Who knows? It's a question. There's a question mark at the end of her name.
Speaker 1:Why own a wife when you can get the milk for free? It's funny, but it makes no sense. You get the shitty gist.
Speaker 2:The gist. Oh yes, no sense you get the shitty gist the gist yes, his, including his pregnant wife, winona judd, to abandon ship while he pilots the kelvin. On a collision course with an errata. Because the kelvin's autopilot is disabled, kirk sacrifices his life as winona gives birth to james tiberius. Kirk honestly heart-wrenching part of that movie, genuinely. Even watching it last night I was like, oh, that really sucks.
Speaker 1:It's a great opening to a film where they like thrust you into what's going on. You get invested in these characters. It's action-packed, it's visually dynamic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are some flaws in it if you're looking through the lens of Trek stuff, but for the most part, especially if you've never watched Star Trek, that would really draw you in. It's very well done. So then, to explain some of this, in Star Trek's main continuity, which is referred to as the Prime Universe, nero had been the captain of a mining vessel which operated out of the Horbus star system in the Beta Quadrant, because Romulans and Klingons are both based in the Beta Quadrant. If you don't know how Star Trek delineates quadrants, obviously there are four Alpha, beta, Delta, gamma, and Earth is the meridian. Essentially, the Alpha and Beta Quadrants start and stop directly down the middle of Earth, and the Alpha Quadrant is everything that the Federation controls or influences, and the Beta Quadrant is everything the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Breen people like that, the Borg, are in the delta quadrant, the Dominion are in the gamma quadrant. So Horvath, being one of the oldest stars in the galaxy, had become increasingly unstable and was reaching its final phase. Abruptly, the star went nova, but in a sort of unusual way. The event did not dissipate as normal supernovae do. Instead exponentially expanded, potentially threatening much of intra-galactic civilization.
Speaker 2:On stardate 6433.4, the crew of Narada who were mining Horbus I for decalithium, a rare variant of dilithium and key material in producing something that will come up later. It's ten times the lithium, folks. Yeah right, I mean. That's essentially. Yes, I mean it's ten times dilithium, or well, not ten times, it would be five times dilithium, or ten times lithium. Well, yes, I know, even though in Star Trek, dilithium, like the name, has nothing to do with the actual element, lithium.
Speaker 2:So Spock, who had been named ambassador after the psychological decline of his father, had been working on the possibility of the reunification of the Vulcan and Romulan people. See, vulcans and Romulans share an ancestry, they were both the same species and they were extremely violent and warlike. Violent and warlike. And there is a huge near civilization ending war, much like in Star Trek Earth experience during World War Three. And in the outcome there was a I won't say religious, but a philosophical movement by Vulcans, who do experience emotions in a more intense way than humans do, which is why they were by a philosopher named Surak, who proposed the implementation of a quasi-religious practice of using logic as their governing principle, both on a personal level and then basically as their guiding principle period.
Speaker 2:The ones who didn't embrace that, because of course not everyone would. They left en masse and went off-world and founded a planet called Romulus. And they founded that because it was a planet in a faraway system that also had a sister planet in a near-synchronous orbit that was rich with resources, specifically dilithium. Is that Remus Remus exactly? Ironically, that wouldn't matter, because eventually Romulans stopped using dilithium altogether, but it was resource rich and so they basically colonized and subjugated the population of Remus into a proletariat workforce and all that which you see in Star Trek Nemesis.
Speaker 1:That's why the Remusians look so much different Reman Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they were already there. The Romulans just came in, took over this quote uninhabited planet and then subjugated the neighboring planet. That's why they settled there, because there was a neighboring planet that had a.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a question for you. Why do the Romulans appear to be Vulcan-esque and being able to hold their emotions in check if they did not go through the same methods as the Vulcan brethren?
Speaker 2:was just one approach, because in Star Trek it becomes more nuanced later, but initially all alien races in Star Trek are just different aspects of the human condition Frankie, greed and exploitation. The Cardassians are fascism and authoritarianism. The Andorians are paranoia. Vulcans are logic and reason. Romulans are imperialism and colonialism and reason. Romulans are imperialism and colonialism. And then Cleons are warrior caste sort of Viking archetypes.
Speaker 2:And I think that the Romulans just kind of proved that the embrace of logic in the way that it is wasn't the end all be all. And I think the commentary in that is, yes, vulcan prospered, it came together, it worked together, but it didn't have to do the extreme measures it did to achieve relatively similar goals. And so while Vulcan embraced one idea, romulus embraced another. That having been said, vulcan wasn't a colonial power and didn't exploit people, romulus does. That's their entire setup. I mean they are a stand-inin. For I don't know if you've heard the roman empire, what wild I know, which is funny because a lot of klingon myths actually are roman myths, and then so there's all sorts of mixing and stuff in there. If you've seen any of the tng, and then later, yes, night stuff with wharf they talk about like the founding of the klingon empire was two warring brothers, one who kills the other and then founds the empire, which is exactly the story of Romulus and Remus.
Speaker 1:I will hear nothing of this sir. Yeah, it turns out, when you're just using human analogs, things get muddled Well it works when you do the archetypal like this is the first idea of this race. But when you decide to expand those people out over decades and multiple shows you kind of have to, you know, move past that basic framework.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you're going to give them, like I don't know, agency depth, you know anything that doesn't make them just reactionary forces but instead characters of their own.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But their origins are just in human myth. Weird, there's crossover. It's really strange, isn't it? So that's why Spock devoted his post-Enorge and the Daystorm Institute built by the Vulcan Science Academy to deploy an equally experimental MacGuffin called Red Matter. No explanation as to what that is in the movie. It's Red Matter, obviously it's red. It's matter, it's Red Matter, it's Red Matter. Hard to argue with that logic.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Vulcan, he does so to halt the progress of the supernova by artificially creating a black hole, but because of the bureaucratic delays by the Federation, the reluctance of Vulcan to share its technology because they were the ones who actually researched and developed red matter and skepticism of the Romulan Senate. Spock was too late to save Romulus, because Spock had gone to the Senate and been like dude, if this star goes, nova, you're fucked. And they were like what do you know? Get the fuck out of here. So because of that he couldn't save Romulus. It was destroyed, along with most of the governing infrastructure of the Romulan star empire.
Speaker 2:Spock did end up stopping the whole thing. He was just too late. That meant very little to Nero and his crew, who saw the deaths of their families and loved ones firsthand. So Nero's crew immediately tracked down Spock in pursuit of vengeance. They found him right as he detonated the red matter. But while the artificially created singularity that red matter creates apparently did its job, it resulted in the creation of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or a wormhole I'm correcting Abrams' star trek, at least terminology here which led to the year 2233, and, uh, an electric space hole. Well, they say black hole, and then black hole on the other side, they call it a lightning storm in space okay
Speaker 2:yeah, watching it again, there are plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through in this fucking movie, but we don't care because it's okay, it's a good movie and you're like, okay, I'll forgive it, or whatever. So there was a lot of fill-in stuff though, and we'll get to some of that too. So the wormhole led to the year 2233 for the Narada and then reappeared again in the year 2261 for Spock. Both ships were drawn into the wormhole. Narada's appearance led to the split from the prime timeline and created the Kelvin universe, a separate timeline of events. It's my speculation that the Hobus supernova was as powerful as it was because of the system's concentration of the aforementioned decalithium. I say that because its sister material, trilithium, could be used as a devastating explosive in the Die Hard episode of TNG Okay, do you remember that one Vaguely, where the ship is docked for repairs or whatever? Everybody's on shore leave and this group of mercenaries breaks in to try and steal Trilithian.
Speaker 1:One of those is the.
Speaker 2:Tim Russ, who plays Tuvok later.
Speaker 1:There's also one of the women that plays in multiple episodes in TNG. She's in Babylon 5 as Helipath. Yes, she goes with the Vorlon.
Speaker 2:Yes, 100%. Yes, you are correct. In fact, that whole crew is basically just reoccurring star trek actors. Yeah, speaking of colombo, just reusing the same actors over and over again, which star trek does in spades. Did you ever see the documentary? That guy that was in that thing? No, I don't think I did.
Speaker 2:It's really great. It's a bunch of character actors like d list character actors, right and it covers. So they go through this thing where they follow around all these d-level character actors that you've seen in a thousand things, one of which is actually in abram star trek, and there's a point in the movie about three quarters the way in when one of them just goes well, we all do star trek. And then they do an entire like montage of each and every one of those and how each of them has played like 15 different characters in Star Trek. The only thing that ties them together is that they were all just in Star Trek, over and over and over and over again. It's really funny.
Speaker 2:So yeah, like I said, this is all my speculation, but because of Decalithium's sister material, trilithium could be used as a devastating explosive, like in that TNG Die Hard episode, if detonated, or to inhibit nuclear fusion, if detonated within a star which is the plot of Star Trek Generations causing a nova. So it's my speculation that the reasons that that supernova, which they still even in the tangential non-canon stories they don explain, that nova of the hobus star was so threatening to everyone else because of the rich deposits of decalithium which would have amplified the effects of that supernova, and that's based on what we know about trilithium and I guess in some ways dilithium. If you really want to dig down, which I do do but I don't have time for and unfortunately, a lot of this, a lot of these gaps that I'm filling in here that are not in Abrams' Star Trek, comes from the unseen backstory of the film's plot as laid out originally by IDW's official comic book tie-ins, specifically Star Trek Countdown.
Speaker 1:It happened. Don't tell me it didn't happen. I saw it happen.
Speaker 2:There are about like six times in this script where I'm expecting one of us to make that quote.
Speaker 1:I know, I was like waiting to do it.
Speaker 2:That's probably the most appropriate, honestly, because Star Trek Countdown was at least designed to be in canon. There are things in it that aren't, because there is.
Speaker 2:at one point they run into captain data yeah so that doesn't work, but it was designed to be in canon and so, when it comes to at least where we are in this movie, this is all the unsaid but hopefully implied parts that fill in these plot holes here. But either way, the film was a box office success. It really did well, grossed over $385.7 million worldwide, even though its budget was only $150 million. So it did pretty well.
Speaker 1:Which, in comparison, like what had been the last Star Trek film, which would have been Nemesis, a good seven years before you know did like $43 million, yeah, which is a huge difference from all the you know, $250 million in the US.
Speaker 2:I remember when you and I went to go see it in the theater, we were like standing in line waiting to get in because there were lines forming and we were like, oh cool, everybody's gonna come to see star trek. And then we found out that the line was actually for it was jennifer lopez, I think it was made in manhattan. I think it was made in manhattan, yeah, I think it was. That they were all there to see that. They were in line to see that. Not Star Trek, yeah, it was Made in Manhattan, which obviously is now a staple for every household in America. Come on, kids, gather around, we're gonna watch Made in Manhattan.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's June 7th again, yay, woo.
Speaker 2:Weirdly, I think more people remember Nemesis now than people remember Made in Manhattan.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, at least Nemesis had Tom Hardy in it and Ron Perlman as a, and Ron Perlman yeah.
Speaker 2:As a Reman and, weirdly enough, Bryan Singer as a quote-unquote redshirt who dies in the battle scene. Really yes, because he's a huge Star Trek fan and we will never see a Bryan Singer Star Trek movie, for better or for worse.
Speaker 1:It's Hollywood man. I For better or for worse, it's Hollywood man. I would never say never.
Speaker 2:Ooh, I don't know. I mean, there are certain people who ain't coming back. You think people are lining up at Roman Polanski's door now. I mean, come on, remember, we had that whole episode about he's free to come back to the US. Now they dropped those charges. Great, yeah, great, good job. Hollywood. Or legal system, or culture, how about culture? Yeah, that's the real problem there.
Speaker 2:The fundamental issues surrounding what we call New Trek stem from what we can, I think, safely call original sin. So Abrams was a Star Wars guy. Everything that he did was sort of through. You know, when he grew up. He's older than us, but he's like 15 years older than us. So he grew up watching early Spielberg stuff. He grew up during that great era of the 80s with sci-fi and fantasy and all that kind of thing, and Star Wars was a fundamental influence in his life. And so, because Star Wars isn't science fiction, it's fantasy, but ironically everything sci-fi was sort of like filtered through that lens of Star Wars, because that's just kind of how he sees the world, you know, through that lens. He didn't really understand Star Trek, he didn't get it and he had never watched it and he especially had never taken into account how much Trek gestalt came from the animated series, the movies TNG, ds9, and Voyager, much less so Voyager. Thus the production leaned heavily on Kurtzman and Orsi to take care of pesky continuity and fan service and I'm calling it that as opposed to credibility, because that's all it is is superficial fan service. To their credit, though, to Abrams' credit, and Kurtzman and Orsi made Spock a more pivotal character rather than a simple supporting one to Kirk.
Speaker 2:I think that's great Because, as culture changed, society, especially the geekier, often more progressive sci-fi fantasy subset, moved away from embracing womanizing bastards like Kirk and more toward the stoic, intellectual masculinity of guys like Spock. I mean, both still had appeal, but the Spock types had certainly been elevated. Spock, specifically, was focused on because of his internal conflict, being both human and Vulcan. I think that's one of the things that really drew Abrams in. One of the main themes of the original series and especially subsequent movies was the bond of friendship, you know, fraternity, fellowship, all that. The Abrams crew smartly keyed in on that, but they missed a fundamental element of this dynamic. The fellowship that made Trek good wasn't simply between Kirk and Spock, it was a triumvirate Kirk, spock and McCoy, and this is where I would love to make a detailed argument that these three could be seen as abstract representations of Aristotelian definition of philosophy as logic, rhetoric and dialectic, of Aristotelian definition of philosophy as logic, rhetoric and dialectic, and I think I'm onto something.
Speaker 2:However, I am not equipped or prepared to write a comprehensive philosophical dissertation, especially as a layman and without years of academic study. So instead I use these characters as abstract analogs of Aristotle's elements of characters, as abstract analogs of Aristotle's elements of. Let's just use rhetoric, logos, facts and reason, spock, pathos, emotional appeal, perhaps speaking the voice of the common man, mccoy, and ethos, the front-facing credibility, sometimes summation, kirk or, if you like, if this is an easier analogy or perhaps a more fitting one, the id, the impulsive, pleasure-seeking part of the personality. Kirk, the superego, the judgmental part focused on morality and fundamental good and bad. Mccoy and the ego, the logical go-between, spock. I've thought about this for years, actually In a broader debate. You could actually make the argument for each of these archetypes being each of these characters, and you can rotate them and make good arguments for each of them. But that's good, that makes them a good set of characters or to use in a narrative. That's what makes Star Trek good. When it's good, perfect example Star Trek 2, the Wrath of khan.
Speaker 2:When all three watch the explainer video for project genesis, it's a great scene and a perfect example of why they work together. You know they watch the scene. They turn to each other. Jim's like what do you think looks to spock? And spock's like uh, fascinating, it's life from lifelessness, you know. And then, and bones is like good god, do you realize what you're doing here?
Speaker 2:According to myth, earth is created in six days. Watch out, we can do it in six minutes. And he's talking about, like, the moral implications of so. Spock interjects you know some sort of logical reasoning or whatever, um, but with no moral framework. And then they bicker. And then kirk is sort of the deciding factor that, like you're both right. Despite all that, we have to deal with this. The fact that they fit into these archetypes proves that they're good characters and that together they work. And if you know how to write them, if you're a competent fucking writer, you can write stories around these characters or use these characters to create a narrative and tell this story, and they tell something true and honest about the human condition. Unfortunately, kurtzman and Orsi don't seem to get it Shocking from the writers of Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Speaker 1:You mean the best one.
Speaker 2:Putting that aside, their approach to Trek is markedly superficial. Even in a movie in which 80% of it they do well, with emotional weight and character development, or at least the character dynamics and things that work, whether it's true to those characters or not, that movie still does work, but it's also still full of these flaws which will become more prominent than good storytelling as these movies progress. A perfect example is the introduction of Dr McCoy, which we talked about recently. He tells Kirk he has nothing because his ex-wife took everything in their divorce. He has nothing left but his bones and that's why Jim Kirk calls him Bones. This one just makes me sad. How stupid this is. It's bullshit. He was called Bones because that term is the truncation of a common slang term, Bones because that term is the truncation of a common slang term, sawbones, which refers to doctors who often performed amputations with a bone saw.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, this is really easy to figure out, yeah you just got to look in the ring and realize that bone saw is ready.
Speaker 2:Bone saw is ready baby.
Speaker 1:Now is this stupid, yes, but dissenting voice here ready baby. Now is this stupid, yes, but dissenting voice here, hmm, interesting. I think bonesaw is one of those extremely antiquated terms you mean sawbones.
Speaker 2:What'd I say? You said bonesaw, because a bonesaw is just a thing. You could still get a bonesaw. My grandparents used to have a bonesaw.
Speaker 1:No, no, it's called the mega cutty cutty. Now that's what Starting kid cutty, I think. Saw bones is an extremely old term and we're talking, like you know, civil.
Speaker 2:War era.
Speaker 1:1830s is when it first appeared in the American Right and I think when Trek originally came out was one of the first episode of Trek air 66.
Speaker 2:All right came out was one of the first episode of truck air 66. All right, we're jumping 50 years, 45 years from the civil war it was 100 years, exactly right.
Speaker 1:But I think they were trying to find a new way, a new, updated way to keep nickname but make it something a little more relevant to a newer audience who wouldn't maybe understand the reference of Sawbones.
Speaker 2:But you don't have to reinvent the wheel. All it would take was a line referring to a doctor as a Sawbones.
Speaker 1:Again, this is a devil's advocate. This is not saying, this is the right way to go? I think there are better ways to explain that and to tie it into the totality of trek and actual.
Speaker 2:You know the sawbones nickname right I understand and it just feels like a conceit that well, it's just one example, but I think it's a telling one to me. It shows either a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject matter or an underestimation of the audience. You know, know what I mean. All they needed was like a line or two or an exchange, and it's not a phrase that's out of our lexicon at this point. It's not, it's still in our like people know what that means, unless they watched the show Bones, which don't, but there is a precedent for that name. I understand and you're correct. That is one approach. I think it's a bad faith approach, honestly. And yeah, not everybody knows what it is, but it's not that hard to look up. I mean, there are so many other idioms that we use in American slang that are probably even used in that movie, that are just as obscure the salad days, sure, the salad days, Don't Sure.
Speaker 1:Well before the podcast, we were literally talking about the term salad days and its origin. It was like, oh, where did that come from? Why did we use that?
Speaker 2:But that's even hundreds of years older than this. It's not that far in the past and doctors still use bone saws to amputate.
Speaker 1:They are they're ready, they're always ready, they are always ready to cut that leg off, baby, just ask them. They'll do it. You don't put a bone saw next to a Slim Jim you just don't do it.
Speaker 2:They'll snap man, they'll fucking snap right into it Either way. Like I said, that's just one example. There are actually worse examples. That's just one that really really stuck in my craw and neither of those to me are good. The abrams trek movies are chock full of these kinds of examples, like the comedic approach to the kopiashi maru test. The kopiashi maru test opening of star trek 2 is phenomenal, and then they go out of their way to make spock the guy that created it, why there's no precedent in there that says that there's no reason that sp created that other than only within the confines of the story they're telling. You know why? Because it's in your grandpa's trick. This is new trick. Yes, this is the Fred Durst of Star Trek.
Speaker 1:Spock did it all for the Nuki, as it seems.
Speaker 2:He just would have break shit man. Another great example Changing star dates.
Speaker 1:I mean the star date. It's a whole problematic changing star dates.
Speaker 2:I mean the star date. It's a whole problematic. It is problematic, it is weird, it is difficult to pin down and there are myths, there are untruths, there are things that are partially true about those because they were changed, often by different producers and different showrunners and things. But the original concept was that stardates were a version of the modified Julian date system, which is a real thing and still used to this day by astronomers. That'd be fun to go down that rabbit hole but we don't really have time for that. They changed it to just being the current year, followed by a decimal point, which means something, I don't know what, because it couldn't mean day. But that goes directly in the face of original series canon. Because in the original series star dates were four digits and at the beginning of the original series Stardates were four digits and at the beginning of the original series it started with one. In Abrams Trek, just opening on the USS Kelvin incident, their Stardate starts with two and is four digits. So already you have put yourself in conflict with official canon and because, for the reasons that you understand completely, you can kind of hand wave, but at the same time it is directly in conflict already with the original series.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, there's the entire movie of Into Darkness, which is just a series of references to a movie that they hope you've seen, and without those references is nothing. It doesn't exist on its own. I mean, they do the whole torpedo thing where they're like we're going to do surgery on a torpedo, why Not? Because it matters in the plot all that much or that it is an interesting thing to do. No, it's because of a line in Star Trek six, great and Khan. They completely ruined the Khan thing because they wanted the second movie to be about Khan, just like Star Trek II was the Wrath of Khan.
Speaker 2:And it's baffling. It's just references for the sake of references. It's an entire movie and it's not different from the first one in this sense. But it's an entire movie essentially going hey, I've seen Star Trek, you guys, you like Star Trek, I've seen it. Check it out, I can prove I've seen it here. Look, I've seen it. I referenced the thing. That's not a movie that doesn't make it good. Making it good would be doing new things, you know.
Speaker 1:New in you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, the only thing that really does a good job of this is the IDW continuation of the Abrams universe, because they actually do episodes of the original series as if it were in the Abrams universe in, like how things would be different. And a lot of it is actually good writing and it's like oh yeah, okay, yeah, I could see that we recognize that the universe has changed. Some of the events will remain the same, but we're going to approach it from a new and modern way Great, fine, awesome. One of the fundamental flaws I think about at least just these movies is the complete coincidental nature of a lot of the stuff. They find Scotty on Delta Vega and it's like's like okay, first of all, delta vega is not in the vulcan system. Nero abandoned spock on delta vega and then he watches vulcan explode, like if you're that close, you're closer than the moon is to earth, you're. And on top of that, delta vega is not in that system. It's like way far away. They established it. The motion picture. You're just putting in names that people recognize when you could just make it a different thing.
Speaker 2:There's no reason you can keep the same fucking plot and not use the references. You know what I mean? It's just reference for reference sake. And more overarchingly, I really hate in that movie all of these characters come together, not for the reason. You would think it's all just coincidence. It just feels like cheap writing which is an easy fix.
Speaker 2:All you have to do is make some sort of statement about predestination, even if this is another timeline, these things were destined to happen. You were destined to meet each other. All you would have to do in that scene where old Spock meets new Kirk, you know, and they mind meld and they give you a fucking expo dump. All you'd really have to do would be like, yes, these things were meant to happen. Because they were meant to happen, then a lot of those weird idiosyncratic fallacies. I'd be like whatever you explained it, fine, I'll go with it, but what are the odds of finding Scotty in a weird outpost on Delta Vega, by the way, populated with huge carnivorous monsters? Why would Starfleet ever put a fucking depot there? Why does that exist? And then just happen to bring him aboard the Enterprise? That's just lazy writing, when all you had to do was be like well, these things were always meant to happen. You at least understand how sci-fi works or fantasy works Great, okay, but they don't seem to know that either. But that wasn't even in my script.
Speaker 2:The audience pushback of the film was met by snotty and curt responses by roberta orsi in public. Apparently he was a dick about it while he was originally in line to direct what would eventually become star trek. Beyond his reactions and rumored infighting with Damon Lindelof, who Abrams had just brought on board as like an idea guy, likely led to Orsi being pushed out of the franchise and an official split with Kurtzman, mostly, supposedly, orsi himself had written 18 different scripts for the third Star Trek film, all of which were rejected. 18? 18. How nuts is that? At some point, just give up, dude. He was so invested that he was supposed to okay. This is also weird. He was supposed to direct that reboot of Power Rangers. He left the project to direct star trek 3, which he also didn't get, so he missed out on two movies. Just stop. You know what I mean. How many times do they have to tell you no before you realize that you're not welcome?
Speaker 1:maybe 18 different pitches I get, but like spending time writing entire scripts.
Speaker 2:Because Kurtzman and Orsi were the official writing staff. Apparently, orsi and Lindelof butted heads constantly and Lindelof was like JJ Abrams' best friend and so he always deferred to Lindelof. And so what happened was Orsi basically just got fired and they kept Kurtzman Because he was a yes man to both of them. So when Paramount and CBS re-merged, kurtzman alone was eventually tapped as the new overseer and steward of the Star Trek franchise. That role may have gone to veteran Star Trek writer Brian Fuller, as CBS brought him on board to helm a new flagship show in the franchise, as CBS brought him on board to helm a new flagship show in the franchise, discovery. Now Fuller got his start writing on TNG and then later on Voyager. He was a Rick Berman underling. He didn't work on DS9, but that shows the weird split between those two camps. Brian Fuller audiences may remember from Pushing Daisies Dead Like Me, wonderfalls, hannibal. He was an established writer and so they brought him back on board. He had cred, he had clout. I thought at the time, great pick and I still think is a good pick. But unfortunately Fuller clashed with executives over his extremely ambitious vision for Discovery, its tone, its aesthetics, and because he fought tooth and nail to cast Seneca Green Martin in the lead role. Unfortunately, she was still shooting the Walking Dead, delaying production of Discovery and fraying tensions even further For that reason, and all the others, fuller left to concentrate on Neil Gaiman's American Gods TV show adaptation. Bad news for Brian Fuller, not only because of Neil Gaiman, but because he eventually got fired from that production as well. Nice, yeah, good stuff. So that show Discovery struggled to establish cohesion like at all, picking parts of Fuller's vision, but rather scattershot.
Speaker 2:One element that made it in was probably the show seemed remarkably not Star Trek like. Was that Discovery's Captain Lorca, played awesomely by Jason Isaacs, which is one of those guys who are like, of course he's in Star Trek. Jason Isaacs being a captain of Star Trek is one of those things like I remember when they casted Scott Bakula, I was like, well, yeah, obviously, after the precedent set by Patrick Stewart and AV Brooks, and even Kate Mulgrew to a certain extent, like how that one time we talked about how, like why hasn't Rip Torn been in Star Trek at any point, doesn't he seem like he should have been? Jason Isaacs is just one of those guys. I could see him being a villain in a Star Trek movie or something. It made sense to me, but it turns out that Jason Isaacs' Captain Lorca was actually his Mirror Universe counterpart Dun dun dun was actually his Mirror Universe counterpart Dun-dun-dun.
Speaker 1:Before we go further, could you explain how and where Discovery fits in the Star Trek universe?
Speaker 2:Yes, so Star Trek Discovery specifically exists 10 years before the start of the original series, so about 2255-56,. Essentially Now, is that the new original series or the original as in the Kelvin timeline, or the original Prime?
Speaker 1:universe. I believe that's vital for the audience to know.
Speaker 2:That's fair. Discovery exists inside the Prime universe, the original universe, so the events in Discovery are supposed to happen within the original Star Trek universe. Nimoy the Shatner, nimoy Right. So Brian Fuller really wanted a different approach to the Mirror Universe than had been previously depicted, even for the most part really well done in DS9. Because we've seen a different Mirror Mirror Universe.
Speaker 1:In case someone doesn't understand the original Mirror Mirror Universe in the original series. In case someone doesn't understand the original Mirror Mirror Universe in the original series, they travel to an alternate reality where humans are ruling the universe.
Speaker 2:Refresh my memory, kirk. Human race embraced its warlike, colonialist, imperial vision and created an empire that would eventually conquer most of its part of the galaxy. And, as depicted in the original series episode Mirror Mirror, there are villainous analogs for each carrot on the show. Well, how it's easy to tell their evil versions is that they have goatees. Yeah, the ultimate evil. What if everybody was just this? But evil was the original concept. He's not the ruler of the empire, right? No, no, he's captain of the enterprise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's captain of the enterprise, which sets it at a certain level. Okay, it's just reverse image of the Trek, we know.
Speaker 2:And then and this is a good distinction. It's not just that it's an alternate timeline per se, it's presented to us as doppelgangers. Yes, abraham Lincoln talked about doppelgangers. That's a long story that we should get into at a different point, because that's really interesting the idea that you are yourself but the opposite of who you are now. You've achieved some of the same things and we've gotten to some similar places, but everything's wrong, everything's bad. But there's no context for it in the original series episode. Why they are, why they're all together the same people. We don't know why they're all together at the same time. But this kind of goes to my point earlier about predestination. It would be more interesting if you knew why they all got to where they were, at the same points in the same place, under different circumstances. Ds9 does a really good job. The Mirror Universe appears in one original series episode, isn't it two? One Mirror Mirror, that's it, and was not addressed again until DS9.
Speaker 1:Because there are alternate universe episodes in TNG that are similar, Right but not Not the Mirror Mirror universe which they actually address.
Speaker 2:I hate to say this, but they do address that point in Discovery that it's not an alternate timeline, it's a completely different reality. Both have own alternate timelines of themselves but are equal, but opposite, like DC and Marvel Right, which I know doesn't make any sense. I mean it's weird.
Speaker 1:This all feels like fucking Obi-Wan being like well from a certain point of view.
Speaker 2:Well, actually these episodes could have used that. Even in the stuff that I like, in the Kelvin stuff, they do a mirror Kelvin version. When that timeline split off, it also split off a mirror version. So like, no matter what happens in the Prime universe, it's not just an alternate timeline, like in that episode in, like I want to say, season six of TNGng, where wharf goes to that batleth tournament and he's like on the shuttlecraft and he comes back and everything's weird because it's a different timeline and then, like it turns out, there's like multiple timelines that he's like shifting through. None of that is in the mirror universe. The mirror universe has its own other multiverse, right. It's a different version of reality, it's a a separate multiverse. Now would we consider the mirrorverse?
Speaker 1:akin to the Kelvin timeline.
Speaker 2:No, because the Kelvin timeline has their own mirror universe. Okay, this is not good, but this is the only analogy I can think of. I mean it's a good analogy? I don't think fundamentally it's a good idea. It's DC's dark multiverse Woof yes which is bad and dumb and stupid and it goes against everything about what a multiverse is. But that's what it is. It's been set up especially by Discovery. They're the ones that actually set this precedent.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, alright. Comic-wise, all these alternate timelines are issues of what-if, but the Mirror Universe is the ultimate timeline.
Speaker 2:Actually, yes, that is good. Okay, that Is the ultimate timeline. Actually, yes, that is good. Okay, that's right. It exists on its own and it has its own what-ifs. Yes, theoretically, but then, of course, later the ultimate timeline gets mixed in with the multiverse.
Speaker 1:Just like the Mirror Universe.
Speaker 2:No, actually it never really gets mixed in with the multiverse. That's the thing Star Trek never does, that Star Trek doesn't actually go back on like turn it back into the multiverse, which would make more sense. Well, very complicated. It's very complicated With Star Trek Discovery. Fuller really wanted a different approach to the mirror universe. Instead of simply having hand-wringing evil versions of each character, fuller wanted to show that they were the same people, just in a universe defined by different events, decisions and circumstances Quote. So there was something in the mistakes made by Burnham decisions and circumstances Quote. So there was something in the mistakes made by Burnham in the Battle of the Binary Stars discovery that had this ripple. But the mirror universe was always meant to be an exploration of a small step in a different direction. So it wasn't necessarily the mirror universe we know from all the other series. That's a caveat that's kind of important to know. It was something that was closer to our timeline and experience, so you can still recognize the human being and go what did I do? How did that seem like a good decision for me in that moment and how do I continue forward with my life? And everything was sort of an extrapolation out on that. So there were things that I wanted the mirror universe to function in, a narrative exploration of like, oh fuck, if I didn't just do that one thing, everything would be better, as opposed to I don't recognize that person. I don't know who that person is because they're the diametric opposite of who I am. End quote. He was trying to just bring it all back in, unfortunately, when he was kicked out, that's when Discovery decided that they were going to say that no, it's not a different timeline, it's a separate multiverse. So eventually Discovery brought back Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou, who died very early in the show, first episode, right? Yeah, I mean it's the beginning of the show. Yeah, I guess it is In the form of her counterpart, the sovereign of the Terran Empire. She became stranded in our universe, eventually utilized by Starfleet in ending the First Klingon War and eventually becoming an asset for Starfleet's darkest element, cia.
Speaker 2:Analog, section 31. Section 31 was an organization which claimed to protect the security interests of the United Federation of Planets. Well, first the United Earth and then the United Federation of Planets. The organization claimed to be justified by the original Starfleet charter, article 14, section 31, of which allows for extraordinary measures to be taken at times of extreme threat. It's a very patriot act in that sense. Now, if done right, section 31 could be a powerful commentary on post-World War II America and the dastardly things the US did to control the destiny of the entire world, to protect what it saw as its interests and the head of the CIA, which was how it was formed later. During the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'etat, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, mkultra and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. As a result of that he was fired by John F Kennedy and there were about a thousand things we could talk about that he did. That are war crimes.
Speaker 1:Well, it's also an organization that thrives and is meant to do war crimes. Sets them outside the rule of law.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in its original intent by law cannot function. Within the United States, though they did, and they were the ones that did exjudicial assassinations and it's crazy to think, but jfk had to be the one that goes you can't assassinate people, dude, you just can't do that.
Speaker 1:I wonder what happened to him.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's almost like something happened as a direct result of those decisions you can't assassinate people.
Speaker 1:Cia, hold my beer, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know what it's possible? It was just Oswald, but Oswald was not a conspiracy theory, a CIA asset.
Speaker 1:I don't follow, Skip. What's the connection? A CIA asset? If you need to repeat what we just said, just get on your phone and go from the cursor back and to the left.
Speaker 2:I was just thinking, thinking like speak closer to my corsage. Here's the cia also occasionally subcontracted the mafia to pull off some crazy shit due to its influence and shady network of rapscallions rapscallions, that's a very fanciful term in cuba, even because they had shady networks. They, you know, smuggled drugs and they did all sorts of things that the CIA wasn't privy to, didn't have access to. So they actually fucking hired the mafia, the mafia. Interestingly, do you know who started the process of breaking up the mafia? Robert Kennedy. Nothing happened to him, right? He worked out just fine.
Speaker 2:Really weird how that is, isn't it? This isn't even the conspiracy part. That is all fact. That is all acknowledged, recognized, publicly recognized by the American government. The conspiracy part is filling in the gaps.
Speaker 2:So anyway, during the mid 23rd century, section 31 were considered a critical division of Starfleet Intelligence. By the 24th century they were believed to be a rogue organization or they didn't even exist, which, for the first part of the existence of the CIA, the American government denied that the CIA exists. They had a central intelligence organization, but what we think of now as the CIA in its international black ops networks, they denied existed. So that's the commentary they're making there. So in the 21st century, they were considered either a myth or a rogue organization, but were still technically part of Starfleet intelligence. And now we come to the reason we were doing this episode is discovery in canon. And how bad was Section 31? We could just be like well, section 31 sucked, and here's why, which would be fine and we'd probably have some funny things to say about it. But we also wanted to talk about if discovery was in canon, which, by the way, I hate to tell you is all right again.
Speaker 1:We'll need to get into more of that because I was told that some of the stuff isn't it. It's been retroactively removed. But I might need someone who knows what's going on better than me to explain it to me. And if I need explaining, just imagine what the general public needs.
Speaker 2:That's the reason I wanted to lay groundwork so people knew where we were coming from and what this whole thing was. You know, for people who aren't necessarily hardcore Trek guys, they don't know the difference between DS9 era and Voyager era and new Trek and they're probably not even sure where the Abrams movies fit in, or they just go oh, it's its own thing, which it is, but it isn't Right and we had to talk about if it's in canon and if it is or isn't in canon, we had to explain like why and who behind it and why is that how it is that?
Speaker 1:was a good part of the episode.
Speaker 2:I really liked that. I think that's one of those things that you and I bring. That's unique. Other people don't talk about. Even Star Trek podcasts don't talk about that kind of stuff. The reason we're doing this is because we have unique things to say and are more well-informed. Who do these kinds of shows? I want us to be more like the hardcore history of geek culture than just glossing over and talking about stuff. Right, I guess we'll have to wait for next time to answer the questions, because canon's important in Star Trek, which is why it always attracted me. That's why I like DC. I used to like DC when DC was good when I was growing up. They share very similar characteristics. They are all about canon and what is and isn't true. And then, as time goes on, the lines get blurred and then Marvel and Star Wars both have the same problems and then it turns out they're not really all that different in the long run, like they're owned by the same company.
Speaker 2:I mean, star Wars and Disney are not too different than Star Trek and DC. Canon became super important to Star Wars fans as well, right, eventually. And now you're like which Star Wars shows are in Canon? Is Solo in Canon? I don't know, it's kind of the same shit.
Speaker 1:Well, all of pop culture has been mashed into the same clay at this point.
Speaker 2:It's really baffling, but that's where we are, yeah, so we'll dive more into that part in part two.
Speaker 1:Dispatch Ajax. Section 31, part two Wrath of the Plot. Yeah, wrath of the Plot. Well, we hope you've enjoyed so far. Please do come back for the second part where we get into more of new Trek and Section 31 itself. If you have enjoyed what you've heard, please like, share, subscribe, if you wouldn't mind leaving us five evil goatees on the podcast app of your choice, ideally Apple Podcasts. That's the best way for us to get heard and seen and we would greatly appreciate it. Until electrical storm in space opens again Skip. What should they do, the cadet's?
Speaker 2:logic is sound, Is it? Kurt comes on the bridge and he's like that same event a lightning storm in space was seen on the day of my birth, and therefore it's Romulans and then Spock's, like that logic is sound.
Speaker 1:Huh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Huh, is it though.
Speaker 1:I beg to differ for the uh machinations of this fast moving plot. I believe so, sir.
Speaker 2:Let's get to the action let's just skip over this part where we have to like hand wave all of it. Don't think about too hard. Move, move, move, but don't hand wave our show. Please make sure you have cleaned up after yourselves to some sort of reasonable degree, make sure you've paid your tabs, make sure you've tipped your cages, your bartenders, your waitstaff, your podcasters, and don't forget to support your local comic shops and retailers. And from Dispatch Ajax we would like to say Godspeed, fair wizards, engage, indeed, disengage, disengage from that ending.
Speaker 1:Please go away, Disengage.