SNW 407: Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass

Strange New Worlds delved into yet another gimmick this week. Are we sick and tired of gimmick episodes yet? Yes, I dare say everyone not on staff in the SNW writers' room is well and fully sick of them and would like for once if the gimmick they chose was to write a Star Trek episode.

The gimmick this time is soap operas. And in the midst of this silly, deliberately overdramatic, parodic sendup of soap opera tropes, there is a real story trying to get out. And while using the soap conceit is a way to get to it, I doubt it's anywhere close to the best way.

Let's get into it.

Episode 407: “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” | Written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff | Directed by Anna Dozoka

★½

Captain Pike awakens in sickbay with an anachronistic gauze wrap around his head and is immediately confused—why is he there? Why is the lighting so bright? And...slightly blurry? Much of the room is in soft focus for some reason. He's told by Dr. M'Benga that he'd been in a shuttle accident, one he survived only because of his exceptional history as a test pilot. And, M'Benga says, his last memory is from two weeks prior, meaning he has ... (dramatic pause) ... cosmic amnesia!

Pike is having none of this, he can't figure out why all the melodrama, and not for nothing, but has Spock been in that next biobed this whole time?! M'Benga and Chapel (dramatically) tell Pike that Spock was also in the shuttle accident and is in need of ... a living heart transplant! Pike is incredulous about it all, so M'Benga relieves Pike of duty for exhibiting unsound behavior. Pike then goes to his quarters and consults the computer, asking for scans for anything odd, any anomalies either aboard or in the vicinity that would affect people's behavior.

No dice there, and as more strange behavior from more crew members—including the heretofore unknown ship's therapist, Dr. Chivers, and Ensign Uhura, who arrives with the surprise revelation that she is actually...Captain Pike's daughter!—causes Pike to voice frustration, a voice from the ether booms in: COULD CAPTAIN PIKE PLEASE STICK TO THE SCRIPT?

Pike recognizes this as the same sort of chaos that they dealt with last season at the Federation Day celebrations and demands an audience with the "fancy coat god ... guy." Sure enough, it's Trelane again, doing his junior Q style mischief, but this time with a purpose—he's conducting what amounts to a school project, which he is being graded on by a more senior Q (we presume), observing from a short distance away in Trelane's TV control room. Trelane explains, "What you are witnessing now is my Great Human Experiment. Of late, I’ve been studying your breed in a more formal capacity. And during my erudition, I fell in love with an art form that explores the raw, unrepentant beauty of human emotion. It is… body cleaning theater." Trelane leaves—and announces a commercial break—and then, despite attempts to leave the room, Pike is coerced into a "family therapy session" with Chivers and Uhura.

Meanwhile, La'an is on a mission to find a donor for Spock's transplant and has found...Spock's evil twin, Sybok! She is bringing him to the Enterprise, or trying to, until Sybok turns the tables on her and takes control, opting instead to take them to a colony of V'tosh Ka'tur Vulcans instead. There's a verbal struggle loaded with melodramatic innuendo that eventually convinces Sybok to be the "living donor" for Spock and they set course again for the Enterprise.

In the rec room (or, from Trelane's perspective, "camera four"), M'Benga confesses to Number One that he is concerned about being able to operate because ... he has ... space madness. Ortegas overhears this and contrives a reason to send Number One to the bridge, then tells M'Benga that she, too, has space madness and that he can work through it. When La'an and Sybok arrive, the operation begins, and though M'Benga is successful in saving Spock (somehow), Sybok isn't so fortunate. Which makes sense since he was donating his heart.

Pike's family therapy leads through some convoluted steps to Uhura showing him a recipe book that shows he intended to cook a specific dish with his daughter, then Pike notices something in the book and becomes quite disturbed. He leaves the room, surprising a watching Trelane, and goes to ask Dr. Chivers how "something can be both real and not real?" Pike's upset is because the recipe book referred to Juliet, not Nyota. Juliet, who was Pike's daughter with Captain Batel in the fantasy sequence we saw pieces of in last season's finale episode "New Life and New Civilizations." When he returns to his quarters, it isn't Uhura there ready to cook with him, but Juliet. They have a nice moment, though Pike still doesn't know what to make of it all; Juliet tells him, though, that "just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it wasn't real."

Pike's interaction with Juliet lets him begin to process a unique kind of grief, mourning a person from his memory that never actually existed; this is a bit of a breakthrough for him and thus satisfies Trelane's project parameters. His supervisor Q declares the project surprisingly successful, thanks Trelane "for bringing these ants to our attention," and gives him a satisfactory grade. "In human terms, a solid B-minus."

Trelane's project over, everyone's behavior returns to normal, but they all remember the experience. Except Spock, who it turns out was actually asleep for the whole thing and was never even in sickbay; La'an actually never left the shuttlebay and never met Sybok, who isn't Spock's twin anyway, and M'Benga and Chapel reiterate that they do know that there is no such thing as a "living heart transplant." Chapel also explains that she doesn't really have "secret backups of everybody’s brains stashed in the supply closet," which is evidently part of the soap opera we didn't see.

Our final wrapup scene is of Pike sitting down for a real and raw therapy session with Dr. Chivers, who we now realize is real and not a figment of Trelane's project. Pike explains the experience with Batel and Juliet and we fade out on a crying captain grieving his unique grief.

There's some value in this episode, but you have to forgive a whole lot to see it. I applaud wanting to delve into Pike's trauma from the end of last season, and spotlighting his fantasy experience with Captain Batel—one apparently given to him by her right before she let herself be turned into a prison guard statue (man, did that episode suck)—is a good way to do that; it may have been lazy writing to do a cheap copy of Captain Picard's experience in the episode "The Inner Light" on The Next Generation, but it's now part of Pike's character and having him deal with it is good for his development. So, as a goal of this dumb script, it's laudable.

It's everything else about the episode that I didn't care for.

Had every other episode this season not also been based on a gimmick that apes some other form of media, it might be tolerable in the way that, say, "Qpid" is tolerable as an episode of The Next Generation. A silly, goofy romp that departs from our sci-fi norm. "Qpid," though, is one of 26. This episode is the seventh of seven episodes based on such "departures," which makes it even harder to forgive as a silly romp.

I do like Rhys Darby as Trelane/junior Q, but this story wasn't written because someone had an idea for a Trelane story. It was written to do a soap opera gimmick and Qs are easy solutions for any situation that calls for something completely ridiculous or unexplainable by rational means. His part of the story was invented to justify what they really wanted to do, which was a stupid soap opera sendup.

Maybe it plays better with actual soap opera fans. I don't know what the Venn diagram is for Trek fans and soap fans, I don't imagine there's a ton of overlap but there must be some. For me, though, even though I recognize the soap opera tropes used here—the amnesiac, the evil twin, the surprise paternity reveal, the hidden illness, the tease of a love triangle involving siblings—I just don't care about them, no matter how well they're parodied/homaged. In fact, I find them to be a lot dumber here than in their "native environment."

Like "Level  Five Transporter Accident," this episode doesn't work as a Star Trek episode so much as it works as a Saturday Night Live-style skit making fun of both Trek and, in this case, pick-a-soap-opera; in the case of "Level Five," The Muppet Show. In that context, these both might be brilliant. As real episodes, though...they're both colossal failures.

Other notes:

• There are post-credits bits in this one, the first being an opening credits montage in the style of Days of Our Lives or some such thing; the second is Trelane hosting a commercial for breakfast cereal that he identifies only as a "shaky box." Neither is as funny as the writers apparently thought they were.
• Dr. Chivers is played by Diedre Hall, who I guess is a soap opera star of some repute and thus a sort of in-joke to that small portion of fans in the Venn diagram overlap.
• "Sybok" foreshadows his older self by invoking lines like "gain strength for the sharing" of one's pain; in the context of this stupid soap opera schtick it's fine, I guess.
• There's an attempt after Trelane's project is finished wherein La'an engages real-Spock in a conversation intended to give their former intimate relationship some closure; it sort of works, but it also gives openings for fanfiction writers everywhere to reconnect that pairing.
• The senior Q acting as Trelane's proctor is dressed in the judge's robes worn by John de Lancie's Q in TNG's "Encounter at Farpoint." This is strictly because the producers wanted a visual cue for the audience to further equate Trelane with the Q Continuum, but it makes zero sense in-universe for a Q to be outfitted in a late-21st century Earth judge's garb when it's just here that they are becoming aware of "these ants."
• When M'Benga is performing the "living heart transplant," the graphics on the biobed show him to be operating on what would be Spock's intestines, not his inner right rib cage where the Vulcan heart is. We can chalk that up to Trelane's ignorance.
• Others around the Interwebs seem to like this episode a lot more than I do, but I have to think it's because those folks are grading on a curve—there's more depth in this one, such as it is, than in "Level Five Transporter Accident" and less in the way of incongruities than in "A Case of Chiaroscuro" and less unexplained shit than in "Human Best Friend."
• As much as I disliked this one, Ethan Peck and Christina Chong seemed to enjoy their opportunity to chew scenery as melodramatic soap characters. So...at least someone had fun with it?