Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

But across all of Trek, how many main character deaths have there been?

TOS: none I can think of that didn't get rapidly reversed (Spock in TWOK, McCoy in Shore Leave and JJ Trek Kirk).

TNG: Tasha (and if Denise Crosby really wanted, that would have been retconned), Data after the entirety of TNG, four TNG movies and part of Picard. And even now, if they really wanted to bring Data back, there would be some plot-consistent ways to do it. Brent Spiner has said he won't play the part again, but at some point they could just throw money at him (or eventually his estate) to use CGI to reintroduce Data, or recast him with a new actor.

DS9: Jadzia got killed off (wasn't it another issue with Terry Farrell?). Sisko was with the Prophets but could come back at any time. Everyone else survived just fine.

VOY: Harry Kim was killed off once or twice, IIRC, but it didn't stick. Belanna had some sort of near-death experience too. As far as we know, everyone else who could be considered a main character lived.

Ent: Trip was unceremoniously and stupidly killed off according to the holoprogram Riker ran. Everyone else was fine.

DIS: Actually quite a few people have been killed off, so good for them. Real Ash Tyler, OG Georgiou, Airiam, maybe a couple I'm missing. Culber got killed but it didn't stick.

PIC: No main character deaths that have stuck yet. Elnor's death got ret-conned.

And the novels ret-conned that away.

Same with Anakin. You knew he'd be fine. Better, actually, than he started out.

Elnor not being dead was the biggest gut punch after the plot of season 2.

I wonder, too, if there's an analogy to "passing" in that scene. La'an resenting Una because they both live in a society that shits on them in the same way, but Una had a way to hide the characteristic that would make others respond to her with bigotry, while La'an didn't ... it would be easy for La'an to feel that Una let her suffer to preserve her own cover.

If this kind of storytelling is going to be typical of SNW, it means that SNW will do the same kind of commenting on contemporary human society that TOS and TNG always tried to do ... but with way more subtlety and artistry.

The character depth on Enterprise specifically was as shallow as a kiddie pool for nearly everyone prior to season three* and it's mildly amusing to see many of the same people who tore that show a new one for it's hollow characterization shit bricks over nuTrek at least trying to do the exact opposite. I'd rather have Burnham crying about actual real shit every other week than the nothing we got from Sato and Mayweather, who could be replaced by cardboard cutouts in most episodes with no noticeable differences.

Like, the development of the characters was so shallow, I distinctly remember TrekBBS getting excited when during season 4 Sato got a whopping three lines or so about her home life. I couldn't even tell you what it was about or what episode this was in and I'm too lazy to pull up P+ to look it up.

That was my introduction to Trek and frankly I'm surprised I stuck around after my crush on the Trek fan I started watching it for faded. But I'm here and I'm glad it's learning from Berman's many, many mistakes.

*Granted, Tucker's sister bit it during the Xindi arc but that all amounted to being a way for neuropressure (and resulting excuse for T'Pol to be naked) to get introduced and one episode way late in the season to address it before never being mentioned again. Pretty in line with the rest of Trek to that point.

Phlox had the racist son he was disappointed in, but I wish we'd had a whole episode about that instead of him telling a story about it to the one alien guy.
Show, don't tell, y'know?

It definitely has echoes of that in there, now that you mention it. And it reminds me of how much more shit my brother took growing up from teachers and classmates being a light skin kid that they couldn't fully place in one camp or the other than I ever did because my dad happened to be Wesley Snipes black (dark pigmentation and the ability to escape being sunburned until I was in my mid 20s are the only things of value he ever gave me )

I legit forgot about that, although given Berman and Braga were still at the helm, I'm kinda glad they didn't. While there are a few cases of folks from fairly liberal homes being radicalized, most people learn that shit at home and no one wanted to have that conversation in the early 2000s. They still don't, honestly.

God, remember when there was an entire episode about Sato trying to figure out that Reed liked pineapple?

I liked this latest episode, too.

If we're going to compare Trek series, it was the weakest episode of SNW so far this season (and we're only three episodes in!) but it was still better than pretty much everything we got out of Discovery last season and better than 80% of Picard.

Ah yes ....the episode that was responsible for 90 percent of the Reed/Sato fic out there

I read it as an allegory of DADT for Una, and bullying based on perceptions for La'an.

@Spaceturkey, do you think this latest episode has something to do with DADT?

I'm unclear from your posts.

A couple other things about La'an ...

I think she is the first canonical evidence that Khan had a child before being exiled ... is that true?

I wonder if there is a backstory behind why neither she nor any of her descendants chose to change their last name.

I was wondering about that also. If she had so much trouble growing up because of her last name why didnt she just get it legally changed?

And why, for hundreds of years, did none of her ancestors get it changed or maybe adopt a maternal last name instead?

That’s like if Hitler had kids and hundreds of years later his descendants are still keeping the surname.

Not all dependents of … bad people change their last names. My brother’s second wife’s last name was Hussein. She was a 6th cousin of Saddam. But, neither she, nor anyone else so far removed from Saddam considered changing their name.

I still don’t like Enterprise and to this day I’ve never been able to sit through a whole season. I’ve seen random episodes here and there and its mostly forgettable. Supposedly it got a little better in season 4 but then they had the godawful series finale.

Voyager is mediocre/average but still more entertaining to watch. I regularly watched the show and didnt miss an episode until season 5 when I realized the show was just going in circles and rehashing TNG. It has its moments though and I have a somewhat better opinion of it now then I did 10-15 years ago. I’d much rather watch Voyager reruns than Discovery or Picard.

Hussain is a fairly common name in that part of the world. I can’t see millions of people changing their names over one guy.

Actually, both Khan and Singh are extremely common Indian names so it doesn’t make sense that people would automatically associate Laan with the notorious figure from hundreds of years ago.

She could just as easily be a descendant of Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan or Indian singer Arjit Singh.

I dont recall ever hearing of anyone else with the last name of Hitler.

So, we agree.

I agree those are common names.

But it still seems unlikely that she wouldn’t just change her name if she was being bullied or attacked because of it…

Or if she hates Augments and genetically modified people because of her name.

She could even just drop the middle name.

I’m sure its not difficult to do stuff like that in the 23rd century. Just go to the local Federation court assigned to your district or sector or something? You could probably even do it online. Pay your 20 dollar processing fee and get assigned a new ID card.

There’s lots of things people could do to reduce their negative interactions and happenstances. But they dont, both in the real world and in fiction. In fact, much of the drama in any fiction story starts with something the character could have done differently. Call it lazy writing if you want, but there it is.

You forgot about "O'Brien must suffer", he had all sorts of random fuckery happen to him.

So my co-worker pointed out that the FX of the light beings entering Una looked like the Pah-wraiths. I think it’s just a coincidence, I doubt they’re introducing an origin story for the Pah-wraiths.

From what a few of my teachers have said, it wasn't entirely uncommon of a last name before WWII, but everyone who had it couldn't change it soon enough and although his surviving four nephews all claim they never made a pact to not have children, the fact that his entire family tree will with die with them is too much of a coincidence.

Hypothetically, Khan didn't have to have had a child or La'an to be related. Khan could have had a sibling who had children, or an embryo could have been created with some of his genetic material.

Although they are not direct descendants of Adolf, there are still people with the last name Hitler.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yvqx8x/meet-the-hitlers-matt-ogens-interview-183

I was focusing on things that happened to the characters before their experiences on the show. Obviously, most of the characters get put through the wringer during the course of the show. But O'Brien's childhood as far as we know was reasonably happy eating his mom's mulligan stew and building model ships. We know he served on the Rutledge and saw some shiznit while fighting the Cardassians. But relatively speaking, the writers didn't start to fuck with him until he was on DS9.

My longstanding thesis on these matters:

There are alternates that are so designated up front that we KNOW to be alternates - Kelvin, the one they just had in Picard and the Mirror (one could argue there are alternates of this alternate but lets not go down that road)

AND

There are likely a plethora of very mild alternates resulting from all the gallivanting through time in all the various Treks (not counting "City" because the Guardian specifically said "all is as it was"). Any of these might have inadvertently caused a minor differentiation that magnified enough over the centuries to create some noticeable difference from "canon"

In this case

I maintain that the Enterprise>Discovery>SNW flow is a variant line caused by First Contact. No really important deviation - except different, better tech development and different aesthetic choices for some reason. None of this is actually important to enjoying (or not) these shows, it's just a warm little head canon blanket I wrap around those discrepancies so as to dismiss them.

speaking of names - if we consider that given what we learned about Una means that her "English" surname is something she basically made up....

who would make up "Chin-Riley" as their fake name?

I have a friend who's now "Clarke-Chung" since getting hitched, so...

She might have concatenated human approximations of her own parents' names. Or Una Chin-Riley is a human approximation of her actual name, like they did with Mackenzie Calhoun in the novelverse.

Pffft. Amateurs.

This is the funniest hyphened name, ever:

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/wendy-hearder-moan-269b46a0