Notes: Disco 2.02 - "New Eden"
Jan. 26th, 2019 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeGuys, I hate not liking things, but I am very mixed about this episode.
Rewatching Voyager, one of the questions I keep coming back to is, "Is this a story which could only be told on this version of Star Trek? Could it only be told with this set of characters, in this particular situation?"
It's not necessarily bad if the answer is, "No, this is pure, generic Trek." But too many episodes like that, and you end up with ... well, Voyager.
The planetside plot of "New Eden" is a story which could be told by literally any version of Trek. It has been. Many times. And it's yet another entry in the tedious old genre of Star Trek Does An Episode About Religion, Written By People Who Apparently Have No Experience Of Religious Faith.
A lot of my beef comes down to worldbuilding. Here we have a world populated by humans, who were abducted by aliens -- along with the church where they were seeking shelter from the bombs of World War III -- and who, in response to this miracle, combined all of their religions into one vague spiritual cludge.
Despite lip service given to the influence of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shinto and Wicca (...I can only assume the writers decided to skip over Sikhism in favour of something a little more white), the end result naturally looks like Protestantism with a dash of Catholicism.
This is, of course, absurd. If you think even the three Abrahamic religions, which all worship the same God and have some overlap in sacred texts and key figures, can coalesce into a whole, then I have a very nice bridge in Sydney to sell you. And the notion that these disparate faiths can combine, but the end result essentially looks like Christianity -- well, that's some Christiancentric bullshit right there.
And then we have the tedious old "science versus religion" debate, which I had hoped would be left in the '90s.
Fun fact: despite the best efforts of creationists when it comes to prehistory and the Catholic Church when it comes to anything relating to sexuality or reproduction, religious people are not inherently anti-science. Nor are they incurious about the mechanics of how the universe works. Or universally unable or unwilling to consider scientific answers alongside or instead of purely religious ones.
(Disclaimer: I am biased, because the last Catholic school I attended was run by feminist nuns with science degrees.)
And science is not a religion, but a tool, a way of thinking, and a strategy for finding answers. Treat it like a religion, and you end up with edgelord douchebags like the guys on Reddit currently declaring this is Discovery's first good episode.
And THEN you have the Allmother, the religious leader of the community, who actually seems quite nice, but she constantly speaks in this sing-song voice I associate with poorly delivered liturgies, and people who have never actually attended a church service but assume that's what they all sound like. And she uses that tone in every single scene she appears. It felt less like a performance than a caricature, which is strange, given that the character herself only had to deliver exposition and be nice to the "visitors".
In short, not a single bit of this worldbuilding worked for me.
And that's a shame, because a lot of the other stuff was really good! For example:
- Pike's father was both a science teacher and a something-or-other in comparative religion, a combination which he seems to have found rather overbearing. But he's also familiar with religion -- he's been in churches before, he's familiar with how they work, and when the Allmother says, "Peace be with you," he automatically replies, "And also with you."
- I have to assume that, as soon as the words left his mouth, he was thinking, "FUCK, it's 'And with your spirit', now they're gonna know I haven't been to Mass since the new translation was released. Oh fuck, I just mentally dropped an F bomb in church."
- Or is that just me?
- Owosekun grew up in a Luddite collective on Earth, which I rolled my eyes at a bit, because there's always someone who grew up in the "traditional" style, with a nuclear family where Dad worked and Mom stayed at home to raise the kids and cook meals from scratch. On the other hand, the specific label of Luddite suggests an active philosophy behind it -- maybe akin to the Amish, although Owosekun's parents were atheists? Anyway, at least we have a glimpse of Earth that goes beyond San Francisco.
- Michael goes in all gung ho atheist edgelord style, but she's actually having a crisis of no-faith about the "angel" she saw last week, and is overcompensating. And she's flexible enough, now, to pull back when she has to. She's such a good character, you guys.
I feel like I can copy and paste my whole planet rant above into Wordpress and be done, but I'm still unpacking everything that happens shipside.
Tilly sees dead people. Paul does not, and he's bummed about it.
Is Tilly's headperson a manifestation of the Red Angel? Or the mycelial network via the spore that entered her body as they returned from the Terran universe? Both, interacting somehow?
Or has she just had way too much coffee?
I adore Tilly, but I'm ready for her to settle down and step back from her post-promotion overcompensating. Which I think she's ready to, but it's not a moment too soon.
Saru as mentor is THE BEST, and I enjoyed his anecdote about his overcompensation in the form of learning 90 Federation languages.
I feel like Detmer's "I've had my pilot's licence since I was 12" line was a bit shoehorned, even though that is useful information to have. I like learning more about the bridge crew, I just want it to feel organic.
Pike has a ready room! But ... not the same one as Lorca? The room where he keeps his desk, his couch and his doodads opens onto a corridor, whereas the actual ready room opens onto the bridge. Was Lorca's ready room too small for all his whatsits, or is it haunted by the ghosts of fortune cookies past? Is it Pike's quarters we're seeing, or has he claimed a lab or office for himself? (Which I could see -- a place to meet with his officers away from the formality of the bridge. That seems like a Pike thing to do.)
Now I've gotten my feelings about the religious and planetside stuff out of the way, I can start to think about all this properly!
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Date: 2019-01-26 01:17 am (UTC)Clearly the liturgy got re-revised after the third world war. :P
The return to the "science vs. religion" debate... is a trope that I could definitely have done without Disco embracing quite so wholeheartedly or so much in the way we've seen a bazillion times before. I didn't actively want to bang my head against walls through it, and the syncretism... pff. Well, it's magical sci-fi syncretism in that way always winds up leaving me with a "They didn't think this through..." feeling, but at least it was well-intentioned. I'm amused we both had the same "Shouldn't Sikhism be in before Wicca?" reaction, because, well, yes. Considering the number of idiots here in America who think Sikhs are Muslim, I'm disappointed but not surprised.
I liked the B plot, the A plot just... failed to annoy me as much as I'd set myself up to expect, so I wound up rather more pleasantly disposed to it than most people, I think. Low expectations for the win!
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Date: 2019-01-26 01:42 am (UTC)NOT JUST YOU
There was also that moment when, sitting in the theatre watching the first new Star Wars movie in decades, someone onscreen said "May the Force be with you" and I heard someone close by automatically mutter "And also with you" -- which I was struggling not to do myself.
....we haven't seen this ep yet, but I have the feeling my physics geek atheist OT-Trek-loving husband is gonna needlescratch at all the religious stuff. Hoo boy.
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Date: 2019-01-26 01:47 am (UTC)That makes me think of the brilliant "HE'S NOT A SIKH HE'S A MUSLIM YOU IGNORANT LITTLE (CENSORED)" in Sleeper Cell. (I knew Sikhs were not Muslims only because I grew up in Santa Fe, which is close by a big resettlement community in Española, and the Sikhs in NM have what has become a huge security company, Akal.)
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Date: 2019-01-26 08:42 am (UTC)I thought that Owo's (loved the nickname, using it) family collective was more about a way of life that rejected modern technology than being a specific nuclear family thing? Although that may well have been a part of it, who knows. But I liked that she was the one who managed to save them all by going "ohhh, it's a slide bolt, gimme a sec" and then magnetising them out of there while the two who grew up with tech stood there like it was the coolest thing they'd ever seen.
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Date: 2019-01-26 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:57 pm (UTC)Pike's father was both a science teacher and a something-or-other in comparative religion, a combination which he seems to have found rather overbearing. But he's also familiar with religion -- he's been in churches before, he's familiar with how they work, and when the Allmother says, "Peace be with you," he automatically replies, "And also with you."
I have to assume that, as soon as the words left his mouth, he was thinking, "FUCK, it's 'And with your spirit', now they're gonna know I haven't been to Mass since the new translation was released. Oh fuck, I just mentally dropped an F bomb in church."
Or is that just me?
Not entirely. I mean, I'm an Anglican/ Episcopalian so while I noticed Pike doing that automatically, the response hasn't changed for us, so I just put him down as an Episcopalian.
Your points about the Christianocentric bullshit of the religion are well made, but I did like the way that Pike immediately went to looking at the stained glass as a quick and dirty way to get an idea of what the community values. (I'm not impressed with the fact that the church was sufficiently Christian in form that he could do it, but while the Doylist decisions are annoying, on a Watsonian level it was a good reaction from Pike).
The bit of the religious rite we saw felt a bit Wiccan to me, but I am not a Wiccan and therefore not well placed to judge that.
My feeling is that *someone* in the writers' room is either Catholic or Episcopalian, at least in terms of how they were raised, (or maybe something else mainline Protestant, but I think the former is more likely), because *bits* of the religious stuff were quite good and suggested more of a familiarity with some kind of actually existing religion than a lot of Star Trek's Very Special Religious Episodes*, but much of it wasn't, and it made it oddly uneven.
*DS9 was mostly better than this, but not always.
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Date: 2019-01-26 02:33 pm (UTC)And this episode was just terrible IMHO. It made me wonder if the current writers actually ever watched TOS,TNG, DS9 or any other Star Trek for that matter.
And I'm with you 100% on the science vs religion debate. The two things are not opposed science is a way of learning about and understanding the world. God gave use curious brains so we could try to understand the world around us and him better. I know the idea that religion is anti-science exist for a reason but there are plenty of us that love both.
I did like the ship-side story even if I felt it was resolved a bit too quickly. You thought Paul wanted to see Hugh again? I found myself wondering if he did want to see Hugh again because it made me wonder if he would want to stay in the network if he did, hmmm???
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Date: 2019-01-26 08:27 pm (UTC)Glad it's not just me...I thought Babylon 5 handled religion well, and I loved that there were Trappists that were fairly decently portrayed. But even that fell into the "everyone on this planet has the same culture/religion" trap that Star Trek often does.
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Date: 2019-01-27 06:16 am (UTC)I loved Saru mentoring Tilly and sharing his own stories of overcompensation. I did not love crew member who we've never seen before being Tilly talking to dead people now.