Logline
La’An travels back in time to twenty-first-century Earth to prevent an attack which will alter humanity’s future history—and bring her face to face with her own contentious legacy.
Written by David Reed
Directed by Amanda Row
Note: This is a second attempt, as technical difficulties were preventing people from seeing the original discussion post. Apologies to the people who were able to comment in the original.
Kirk gets a mysterious call in the middle of the night from a woman he’s never met asking weird questions and his response is to ask her out
10/10 Kirk behavior
@buckykat @ValueSubtracted
“Why is it always so sexy around this guy when we see what Kirk is up to? It’s not sexy like this in different times, and now we know it’s not like this in nearby places. Does this guy give off a pheromone, or what?”
The more I think about this episode the more impressed I get. There’s so many small moments where they could have taken the easy, obvious choice and it would have been fine, and instead they were just a little more thoughtful and a little more creative and it shows.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who’s very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise…just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she’s one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
They could have had the Romulan agent just be a cold, ruthless assassin from the future who’s here to get the job done, and that would have been fine. Instead she’s this slightly unhinged woman, trapped out of time, stuck undercover on an alien world for thirty years on a mission that she’s not sure exists anymore and I love the way she starts losing it at the end, that she just wants to kill this kid and be done with it.
They could have cast Khan as a hot 20 something available in the Toronto area and had him to a Ricardo Montalbán impression and give us a tense standoff, and I would have been annoyed at that, but it probably would have been fine. Instead they show us an actual child, and remind is that Khan was a horrifying monster, but he was created by a world with monsters of its own, monsters who built a child in a laboratory and raised him in a basement, and suddenly its a piece of implied context made explicit that I didn’t even know I wanted.
And of course they could have just had Kirk agree to fix the timeline because its the right thing to do, or because he loves La`an, or because…honestly, because the plot has to happen, this is something that so many stories would just gloss over to keep the story moving. And instead we get one line, “Sam’s alive?” and my heart jumped to my throat a little bit and immediately we understand why he’s willing to go through with this.
I’m really really impressed with the writers on this episode.
They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who’s very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise…just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she’s one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.
It’s not just fun–but it speaks to a different demographic than most shows speak to.
It’s telling older women that it’s not too late to change and grow and learn. Here she is, obviously having already lived a long life–but then we learn she hasn’t ALWAYS been an engineer from the start. She did not begin as someone obviously fascinated by science.
She realized later in life. And then she was able to SUCCESSFULLY pursue her career and become an expert. Just because she wasn’t a child prodigy didn’t mean she couldn’t learn and grow. There’s SO many stories focusing on people who have things 100% right immediately out of the gate. Top grades in school, top performance at work, accolades, reccomendations from the time they were teens.
But this story is of an ordinary eccentric retail worker…who goes back to hit the books and succeeds with her change.
This lesson will go over 75% people’s heads…but in true Star Trek fashion, even if it elludes many, it’ll hit home with the demographic it’s meant to talk to. Older women who feel like they’re too old to change. That they shouldn’t even try. It’s talking to THEM like so many other characters in Star Trek talk to other overlooked people.
And that makes this detail–one out of many in this excellent episode–top Star Trek.
Wow. You get my first Lemmy upvote on this post! Thank you for pointing out all these details.
Although it does remain very funny that they’re doing this much work to make us care about Sam Kirk, a character who’s fate is to die off screen to a brain parasite before the episode even starts. Sorry Sam.
I think it’s more that they’re introducing Kirk sideways, by way of humanizing him through how he cares for Sam.
Did she leave that gun with that little boy?
Lucky for us this boy is not going to be a genocidal maniac.
What could go wrong?
More importantly, she brought the watch back with her.
She left the gun that had shot Kirk in plain sight to be found be the security team she believed were on their way.
And in fact we heard the footfalls of the team running towards the room just as La’an hit the button and vanished. She didn’t even have time to get herself out of young Khan’s sight.
That genocidal maniac little boy…
@Tired8281 @ValueSubtracted That was all I could think about while she was trasnporting back to the Enterprise. Especially since she talked at lenght about Khan’s murderous crimes…
Wait what’s this? Star Trek writers can still create a time travel story that wraps up in an episode (or two) instead of lasting a whole 10 episodes of nothing?!
And they can weave in minor plot points from previous episodes to give it continuity without feeling forced?
How can this be?
If you’re referring to Discovery, I think the whole time jump saved the show. I really struggled through the first couple seasons but now I look forward to new episodes. It’s still not peak Trek, but I’ve been waiting for something that doesn’t center around Kirk or the Kirk era (similar to Star Wars and the Skywalkers) but instead jumps further ahead than previous eras for decades now.
I believe that was referencing Picard Season 2, which this episode has a strong resemblance to.
S02 without the borg crap
What bugs me about discovery is that they ruin the efforts of all of my favorite characters in all of my favorite series by wrecking the federation.
Tolkien decided to not write a sequel to lotr because the happy endings were too well earned, even if mankinds nature is to become complacent with ‘good’, it’s frustrating to restart the struggle.
I agree with your sentiment, but I wish they would have done it differently. In my head cannon, I accept later seasons of discovery as one possible future, but hopefully not the prime timeline.
I have to ask how many millennia you expect the Federation to endure without periods of fragility?
The Federation isn’t wrecked forever in Discovery.
A half a millennium is a long time for human societies to stay stable, especially given the out-and-out full scale Temporal War that targeted the Federation.
It’s also important to keep in mind that it’s the Federation’s enduring values that allow it to be restored.
It was closer to decimated than fragile… And that makes me sad was all.
The amount of culture and history that is lost is on par with what could happen if we don’t get our act together in the real world.
Trek has underlying optimism most of the time but there wasn’t enough of that to redeem discovery for me. You bring up good points and highlight a silver lining. It’s just thinner that the one I wanted.
I think I could have accepted it with a better setup, too. Some unavoidable disaster that made sense, but the ‘burn’ was flimsy.
Okay there was a lot that worked for me in that episode. The amazing decision to have Pelia knowing nothing about engineering to being a veteran warp core engineer in 200 years. Going for child Khan and really leaning into the fucked up reality that these children were science experiments kept locked in basements for the first time in the franchise? The reminder that Toronto is actually pretty damn photogenic when it’s not shot on a CW budget.
And you know what? Paul Wesley doesn’t have Kirks voice, and the script still doesn’t quite sound right, but he’s got the Kirk delivery really nailed. He doesn’t sound like Shatner, but he sounds like Kirk
I thought this episode was fantastic.
The pacing was good, the interactions between Kirk and La’an were fun, and the closing acts were a real gut wrench. Being forced through such a traumatic situation and completely unable to talk with anyone about it is a piece of the time travel/Prime Directive secrecy that Star Trek hasn’t really dug it’s teeth into before, and there’s clearly something very powerful to work with here.
Also, hilarious use of their immortal chief engineer. In retrospect, no surprise that someone in that position wouldn’t maintain exactly the same hobbies and skills throughout the centuries, and also no real shock that this particular individual got her jollies stealing priceless artwork. And then arguing statute of limitations when she is challenged on it centuries later? Brilliant.
I do not give the slightest of damns about a TOS one-liner placing Kahn in the 1990s. This is a good story which wouldn’t work properly otherwise, and that was a poor choice from writers who couldn’t have possibly known better. Absolutely do not care, and so much happier for it.
After a fairly meh first episode, SNW S2 has reeled off a pair of real bangers. Looking forward to the next installment.
But they also managed to explain the moving of the Eugenics Wars as the result of time hijinks, some of which we’ve seen on screen. I think this is a credible explanation Star Trek can use for TOS retcons without being too dismissive of canon.
I would like to see a Short Trek of what went down during that 16hr+ road trip with Kirk & La’An
Lots of talking, probably. They probably spilled everything about their histories, and not just their personal histories, but the histories of their own universes. Thinking about that makes the ending all the more heartbreaking.
Kirk was superb, I don’t think I could have accepted the car scene if it was anyone else. It’s Kirk, of course he’s going to drive like a nutter. I was genuinely shocked when he got shot. I thought there couldn’t possibly be a way for him to make it but they still got me.
La’an has grown on me so much, she was the one I was most dubious about in the early episodes of season one. I felt really sorry for her at the end, losing Kirk and being unable to talk to anyone about what she’s experienced. She’s gone through some pretty serious trauma already due to her genes and name and now she’s had to go through this pure insanity. I wonder what the significance of the watch is.
She was discount Camina Drummer for me at first. Now I see her as her own character with a lot of potential.
This does bring up an interesting observation… The Temporal Agents apparently have no qualms about coming to not only take back their gadgets and gizmos after someone from the past uses them, but seems to just drop in on the past and cryptically hand out missions to those same ancestors out of literal nowhere! This time travel stuff can be so mentally damaging that even those agents trained to directly work with it (Captain Brackston, for example) can mentally break. Whatever stress La’an was shouldering at the start of the episode has now surely compounded.
You would think that Starfleet of the future would have put together some form of “Temporal Psychology” department, or something. People who’s jobs are to go back to ancestors emotionally effected by time travel, and help them deal with any trauma. Telling La’an to, basically, just “shut up and suck it up” is a horrible way to deal with someone who, essentially, just saved your existence. I get she can’t talk to any of her contemporaries, but surely someone from the past could pop-in and act as a counselor of some sort.
IDK… I felt the temporal agent’s cold response to what La’an had to deal with was rather un-starfleet.
Maybe they know that she has Pelia there to comfort her?
La’an couldn’t tell Pelia the details around Khan or the Romulan incursions, but if Pelia recognizes her and asks after the handsome young companion she has with her in the 21st century, she could at least offer comfort for his nonexistence in this presence. I doubt Pelia could see La’an with this universe’s Kirk and not put her memories together.
Yes I was thinking the same thing, like “Lady you’re acknowledging how difficult this is to bear, could you offer like 6 free therapy sessions at least?”
Use discount code “temporal shenanigans” for 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com
Did anyone else catch what looked like an unspoken, knowing look from Pelia when La’an appeared on the bridge after returning? Does Pelia somehow remember their prior encounter on Earth? Is it explicit, or more like the way Guinan would have an intuition, or a subliminal feeling? Or did I imagine that?
I feel like it was a “aha I remember when you wore that outfit.” I was kind of hoping they would have a conversation at the end. Instead we got the DTI 😄
Actually thinking about it that might be why the line “I’m awful with faces” was there …not just to explain away why 21stC Pelia didn’t recognise why la’an knew her but she didn’t know laan, but also why 23rdC pelia doesn’t remember a meeting 200 years prior
I imagine she will take a few episodes to figure it out. This definitely seems like a thread that hasn’t spooled all the way out yet.
The focus on the watch at the end suggests there’ll be a future plot point revolving around Pelia and the watch and La’an. Although it also seemed a bit ominous, so it might also pick up La’an getting into some eugenics-related trouble later, as I imagine those threads are also not spooled all the way out as you put it so well.
Yeah I was really expecting pelia to come in and lift the watch back up at the end and comfort laan
Pelia remembers it, that meeting was before the timelines diverged, so it happened in the current timeline.
I’m sure Pelia had a flash of recognition, but she is not the same type of high and wise immortal as Guinan. 200 years is a long time, and perhaps her memory isn’t perfect. La’an didn’t tell her explicitly that she was from the future, so she might just be having some serious deja vu and wondering about the resemblance of this security officer to that weirdo who showed up at her door in 2022.
It’s unfortunate that the writers didn’t plan this beforehand, so we could have had some foreshadowing a few episodes beforehand with a first meeting between the two where pelia acts a little weird (because she remembers her from 200 years ago).
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I love that Kirk had to die saving his own worst enemy so that the Federation could exist.
and subverting the “hero goes back in time to kill a mass murderer” trope, with “hero goes back in time to save a mass murderer”
I actually thought the plot of Picard series 2 was going to be something like this, Picard has to ensure WW3 happens, dooming millions to save his future. Instead we got, well what we got.
Seems to me that they are merging the eugenics wars and wwiii together in canon. Maybe the eugenics wars are the catalyst for wwiii or something like that?
Makes sense to be fair. The Augments take advantage of the War to seize a portion of the planet in all the confusion.
Random thoughts as I watch (cross-posted from the old place):
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Wow, first that outburst, and then Spock jams too much. Truly in his wild child phase.
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BTW, was that a Denobulan?
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Pelia totally worried that this whole utopia thing just a passing trend. And hilariously having to prove (?) she isn’t a thief.
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They really are taking advantage of Babs O’s Jiu-Jitsu training this year, aren’t they?
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Captain James T. Kirk, the greatest menace of Temporal Investigations!
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Oh boy, alternate timeline where the Federation doesn’t exist time!
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“Maple leaves, politeness, poutine.”
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Clever distraction.
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I wonder if 3D chess is a thing in the United Earth Fleet timeline, because Kirk is good at the 2D in it.
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Okay, I guess they do have 3D Chess.
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I generally try not to be like this… but goddamn I’d like to thank them for having Christina Chong in various states of tight clothing and undress.
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Good thing the time travel guy went to the ship Sam Kirk was on.
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Oh man, I was looking forward to driving across Lake Ontario to Toronto (presumably from Rochester or Buffalo or something, right?), which totally would be a logical economic and engineering choice, I’m sure!
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Mildly annoyed that Kirk doesn’t drive to Beastie Boys.
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James Discreet Kirk
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Soongs gonna break in even to the timelines and series they aren’t in.
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Jim Discretion Kirk
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OH FUCK ROMULANS
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We have gone (zero) days without Romulans trying to screw up the timeline.
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Probably the first time that DuckDuckGo has been mentioned in Star Trek.
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Yeah, Pythagoras is the worst, Pelia.
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Oh, so this is a predestination paradox where they make her become an engineer and as a result she is there to inspire La’An to go look for her later.
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KHAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN! KHAAAAANNNNNNNNN! (Or at least the institute for him)
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To be fair, this is like the third face that Captain Kirk has had.
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We have gone (ZERO) days without a time-travelling Romulan that had to ditch the ears.
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We have gone (ZERO) days without (a) Captain Kirk dying. We’re three-for-three on Kirk actor deaths, folks!
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KHAAAAAAAAAANNNN! KHAAAAAAANNNN! KHAAAAAAANNNNNN!
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THEY CAME UP WITH AN EXPLANATION WHY THE EUGENICS WARS DIDN’T HAPPEN IN THE 90’S! THE MAD LADS DID IT!
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Face to face with great-great-great-great grandpa Baby Genetics-Hitler.
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Oh, great, temporal investigations. No wonder they hate Kirk so much, even his alternate versions screw stuff around.
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Good ep. Way better than it sounded when I first heard about it.
I wish the Romulan agent succeeded but that led to a stronger Federation instead just to spite those meddling aliens.
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I liked Wesley in “A Quality of Mercy” but hot damn, he nailed it here. He is easy to recognize as Kirk and yet is borrowing very little from Shatner’s performance. Wesley has managed to “echo” Kirk in a way that Peck and Gooding haven’t quite dialed in yet for their characters.
It’s funny—given that in both appearances he has depicted an “alternate” Kirk, he’s had some built-in leeway to miss the mark and still be credible. He doesn’t need it. This man can play Kirk.
I included this in the Discussion Thread 1.0, but I agree - Wesley brought a unique charisma to Kirk that worked really well without being Shatnerian.
I really like Paul Wesley’s portrayal and the way Kirk is written. Honestly I can imagine this as a TOS episode with Shatner and co. Some more thoughts:
While I was not sure about the chemistry between the two main characters, I bought into their romance and I especially liked the final scene with La’an: it was an earned moment and the actress was very effective in her delivery. I wish the two had spent some more time talking about what reality they should preserve but I guess saving your brother’s life is a good enough reason to risk everything. I would’ve done the same, tbh. Time shenanigans needn’t be explained, honestly I can believe that the Augment Wars were so destructive that we don’t know many things about the period; could’ve been in the 90s, could’ve been in the 21st century, there are real life examples of such gaps in the historical record, after all (and don’t tell me Sarah Silverman was around for the rise of Khan). Still, a welcome reference.
I love Pelia, the accent, the delivery, the character backstory, it’s all really good and she is a very nice addition to the cast. I laughed when she didn’t know anything about engineering but it makes perfect sense. Imagine going back in time and asking a 10 year old Einstein to explain relativity to you!
With the positive out of the way, I have to say that I liked the first half of the episode more than the second for the following reasons:
I think they broke into that facility pretty easily. Why did the door open in response to La’an’s DNA? Isn’t Khan just a little kid? Can he enter and leave as he pleases? I thought he was like an experiment they are trying to keep under wraps.
I did not like the antagonist lady and I especially don’t like the suggestion that Romulans have been secretly trying to keep humanity from reaching greatness. I always thought that one of the most important messages in the franchise was that humans were able to rise above their flaws and create a utopia but now it’s the Romulans who were keeping us down and we managed to reach the stars even against these odds. How inherently great humanity is… Not a good message, imo, but perhaps the antagonist lady was simply exaggerating.
Overall a good episode. Kinda lost me in the second half but the final scene was a strong conclusion. Honestly, I can see myself re-watching this in the future.
I think they broke into that facility pretty easily. Why did the door open in response to La’an’s DNA? Isn’t Khan just a little kid? Can he enter and leave as he pleases? I thought he was like an experiment they are trying to keep under wraps.
Seems Khan and all the other kids are probably derived from older Noonien-Singh DNA, considering the name of the facility.
I think it was less humanity’s greatness that allowed them to reach the stars in the alternate timeline and more of having no choice but to do so. Earth was a wasteland and they needed more resources beyond what was available in the rest of our solar system. La’an told Kirk at one point that he could be an explorer in her timeline, heavily implying humanity doesn’t do that in his.
Also it feels kind of significant that they finally dropped the word socialist on screen to describe the Federation? They’ve always danced around it before, but I’m glad they finally made it explicit, even in an off hand way. It helps make the Federation feel less “magical” and more like something that people who existed in history, connected to both the past and the future, had to actually build
Having Pelia say it, with the lens of historical perspective, is perfect.
The Federation may not use the word or describe its society that way, but someone who’d lived in the United States in the 20th and 21st century might.
I really really like Pelia as a character and a concept. I think its a very smart approach to immortality to have her be someone both used to and unresistant to change. The world happens. Time moves on. Over centuries kingdoms turn into empires turn into wastelands turn into spacefaring cooperatives and she’s not jaded nor stagnant, she just continues to grow and adapt and change as things change around her.
I do love also how she’s not some wisened genius race. She’s just old. Like maybe her people were space faring at some point in time, but given how long they live getting fast high end tech isnt necessary so they probably werent as advanced as most species we encounter in star trek.
But also even if they were it’s been a long time since they used their tech and even if they remember it it’s not like she would know how to build it. Like I know how to drive a car, and can do some basic mechanic work, and I know the broad strokes of how an internal combustion engine works. If someone asked me to build them a car they’d be out of luck.
I didn’t expect to like this episode as much as I did.
Wesley’s Kirk is growing on me, and I give the EPs credit for using the alternate timeline Kirk’s to let his performance coalesce. I also like the deft weaving of the crazy car driving, heartbreaker Kirk with the think five steps ahead genius that he also had to be.
The acknowledgement in-universe that the timeline and humanity’s development has been interfered with is entirely credible given the accretion of temporal incidents across every era of the franchise.
I’m not sure how I feel about it giving comfort to those who feel so strongly that this isn’t the same timeline as the original TOS one. (I see some chortling on this point elsewhere.) Likely the temporal physics of this is best left for a deep dive /c/Daystrom Institute discussion, but I prefer hold to a view that this is absolutely still the same Prime timeline but that the timeline itself has been perturbed repeatedly even if the key events have kept their integrity. In fact, the Romulan temporal agent, while not a reliable narrator, gave credence to the idea that the Prime timeline had proven unexpectedly robust against major intervention by humanity’s enemies.
I was delighted to see DTI show up and be named. It seems all of a piece of DTI’s rigidity that they would leave La’an alone to deal with the trauma. It does however mirror Pike’s own experience in sealing his future with the time crystal. One senses that there must be some kind of intersection or mutual revelation to come, leaving aside the Chekhov’s gun of the temporally dislocated watch.
Knowing that Anson Mount had to relocate to Toronto with his wife and newborn explains why episodes featuring others in the ensemble were front loaded for this season. He’d said before he committed to the show that creative conversations would be needed as he wasn’t wishing to repeat the production experience he had in Discovery season two. A creative conversation with the EPs that limits a principal character’s presence is fairly extraordinary, but Mount seems to have done it in a way that’s generous to the rest of the ensemble.
With an ensemble so strong, and as we didn’t see as much of Chapel or Una as we would have liked last season, I’m fine with waiting to see more Pike later in the season. It sounds as though we have a Spock focused and an Ortegas to come before some big ensemble pieces in the back half.
If anything doesn’t this prove that this does take place in the same timeline as TOS but that timeline is in flux due to time travel and interference?
That’s exactly it.
That really explains a lot. Kudos to the production for really playing well to their constraints like this.
