It’s Trek Talk Tuesdays, and I’m super excited about this one, because Mrs. Know-It-All has feelings. That’s right, feelings. She’s not a Vulcan.

Quick housekeeping first. The last couple of weeks at my quote-unquote day job have been very, very busy, so obviously we need to grow this channel fast so I don’t have to have that day job anymore and I can focus on doing these. Anyway, we’re knocking these out.

Everybody joked when the episode titles for this show came out. Why are these names so long? Clearly you guys never watched the original series. The original series had crazy paragraphs for titles. This episode follows that same tradition. It’s literally called “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,” and it’s the perfect title for this episode. One of the characters tells you where it comes from: there’s a poem, a saying on their world.

The premise, very quickly. It’s a Pike episode, which I love. Pike re-meets an old flame, who’s pretty cool, and who’s part of a very xenophobic species that keeps other species at arm’s length. You find out why in this episode.

A Difficult Episode, Because It Was a Child

I asked Mrs. Know-It-All what she thought, seriously, and she said it was a difficult episode for her. Very difficult. I get it. It was a child. That’s the rough part of it all.

We actually talked about it right after the episode, how it sits in the same place for her as something like The Purge. She’s seen none of the Purge movies because of what they stand for. She just can’t do that. And here’s a show telling you this child is going to save an entire planet.

Star Trek at its best always presents you a moral quandary, and it’s not always cut and dry. It isn’t always somebody with half white, half black painted on their face, where you go, oh, you guys are all the same people, shucks. Sometimes it’s a very heated discussion where Pike is saying, how could you do this, and Alora says to him: are you trying to tell me nobody suffers on your planet? That no children suffer in the Federation? And then she goes, the difference is we don’t turn from it. We acknowledge it, and all of us pay respect to it.

Man, that’s a tough call, bro.

There’s no disease on their planet. There’s none of that. I was kind of confused about where it came from, because I thought I heard that the planet gave them the technology. Mrs. Know-It-All straightened me out: the founders. Their species is probably thousands of years old, and the founding people who built their society created a system that requires the neural pathways of a child. And the child suffers. Pike flat out asks. Is the child going to suffer? And she goes, yes. He’s appalled.

Where Pike Is Coming From

On its face, we all understand Pike’s position, because that’s literally where we live. We live in a society that, and I don’t care what your feelings are about this, was started and built on Judeo-Christian fundamental values. In the beginning, regardless of whatever people stand for now. So what I’m saying is we built our world on a moral foundation, and I get where Pike’s coming from. Respect for life. Respect for children in general. This is the most innocence there is, and in our society we protect that, or at least we’re supposed to. So Pike’s standing there like, what are you doing? You can’t do this.

And then she tells him he chose this willingly.

So you’re dealing with a society that faces what it’s doing, and a society that’s handing this to a child. Now mind you, I’m willing to go down the road that says children today aren’t the same as children ten years ago. By that I just mean they’re smarter, there’s more involved. I didn’t have iPads growing up. Baby Know-It-All is 16, and if I think about how it was ten years ago when she was six, it’s nothing like how it would be now if she was six. And that’s only ten years. When I was 16 it was nothing like this.

They try to imply the little boy is somewhere in that nine to ten range. Double digits, I think.

How Mrs. Know-It-All Got Through It

She felt for the father. His son is the one who decided, hey, I want to do this, I want to help my planet. She gets why the father wanted to stop it, and it’s why he moves on to that other moon.

The way she put it, it was tough for her to understand because it’s a child, taking on all the suffering and all the pain of that planet. But they’ve leaned so far into it. They accept it. They know how it is. That’s why they’re not part of the Federation.

Where she landed is that this would be no different than an adult. We’ll say Christ, for example, whatever your religion is, agreeing to take on the Christian sins and take that suffering on. There’s allegory there. Oh, absolutely. So this little boy says, I want my planet to be happy, I want it to be safe, I want it to be healthy, I’m going to do this for all my friends. That was her thought process to be able to digest the fact that this little boy just casually walked up to the chair. Which blew my mind.

You only ever saw two points of fear in that boy’s eyes. When the little casket came out, and when he first sat down. And it was more the fear of a child going, I don’t know what’s about to happen. The way they’ve set the stage, he’s already confronted the death part, the suffering part. That’s reality now. It’s just how is it going to happen. He sits down, the thing closes, okay, here we go. And then you see the body there, and any kid would be freaked out with a body there.

She appreciated what this episode did, and the ways it made her question herself. What would you do in that scenario? If Baby Know-It-All came up to us on that planet and said, this is what I have to do? She said she’d be like the father. That’s my child.

The Episode Where the Show Found Its Voice

Mrs. Know-It-All walks in and out while I’m watching the original series or re-watching Picard, and she’s seen both seasons of Picard. She told me this was one of the best Star Trek episodes that felt like Star Trek since she started watching with me.

I agree, and I said something similar in my review. This felt like the episode where Strange New Worlds, as a Star Trek construct, found its own personal voice.

It’s the same thing for me with The Orville, which we need to start watching together. So many things to watch. The Orville found its voice outside of the Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy style comedy it started with at episode three, the one where Bortus and his partner have a child.

Star Wars is high adventure fantasy sci-fi. This style of sci-fi puts a moral dilemma in front of you. It shows you the universe a few hundred years in the future so it’s separate from you, and that gives you the ability to look outside yourself and say, what would I do in that moral scenario? It’s such an interesting thing to do, and Star Trek does it so well.

Right now the show’s been member-berrying us, and I’m very much about seeing where this series goes. I was thinking to myself that the only episodes we’re missing are a time travel episode and one where everybody’s in normal clothes. The shore leave episode, “Spock Amok,” was very close to that. You see people in suits and things like that. But what I mean is a time travel episode that isn’t as convoluted as Picard season two was. The classic Edith Keeler, “The City on the Edge of Forever” style. Golly, can you imagine? Anyway, just watch Discovery if you want to see the Guardian of Forever again.

The Verdict

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,” is a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

I couldn’t find a flaw with it. I really liked it, and I’ve really enjoyed what this show is doing so far.

Mrs. Know-It-All was going to go with a nine, because she doesn’t know what a 10 looks like. And if this is what a 10 looks like, then we can discuss her rating next time. But she really liked it.

From the Comments

Southpaw says: “Nice review. It reminded me of the original series episode ‘A Taste of Armageddon,’ where war had been sanitized to the point that it was conducted as a simulation and the citizens voluntarily reported for extermination. When Kirk and the crew realized they were caught up in the horrific process, they ruined the war games, causing the aliens to panic about the horror of war and how it would be on Kirk’s head when their planet was thrown into it. Kirk gave a brilliant speech. He basically said that’s the point. If they had to experience the horror and suffering of a real war, they would find a way to end it. The choice he gave them was agree to peace. Obvious, but it needed to be pointed out. So much for the many critics who argue and moan about Star Trek canon being violated. The original series violated it any time it meant a conflict between human morality and a fixed rule.”

I love you, sir. Right on. I’m assuming Southpaw is a sir, forgive me. I’m right there with you.

Steven Seaver Sr. says: “I really like the way you two interact together on the big show.” Thank you very much. We appreciate that.

Lily Mack says: “Having been an RN for 30 plus years, I see the evolution of Chapel as a metaphor for the evolution of professional nursing. Although Halloween is the apex of insulting images, things are better than back when nurses either gave their seats to physicians or slept with them. This Nurse Chapel is a scientist, a nurse as nurses have to be, and practices autonomously, also as RNs do. Thank you for this.”

That’s an awesome comment. Way to go, Lily. Our Baby Know-It-All is debating between being a nurse or being a doctor right now, and I think she’s leaning more towards nurse at this point.

Kenneth Jamison Parker says it’s good to see us both and hear our reactions, and then adds a P.S.: “Did you catch that Spock’s Vulcan self in the ‘Spock Amok’ dream sequence was dressed almost exactly in the same attire Leonard Nimoy’s Spock is in when he returns to the science station aboard the refitted Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? I may be wrong, but I think this may be the first time that we’ve seen that outfit or a variation of it since.”

You know what, I think you’re right. I absolutely think you’re right. Mrs. Know-It-All says I’m going to have to show her.

Next Week: Pirates, a Laser Net and a Prediction

We watched the trailer for next week on my phone. The sector is the quadrant’s version of the wild, wild west, the pirates are outsiders, and there’s something that looks like a net made of lasers. Mrs. Know-It-All doesn’t have an opinion yet. There’s just a lot going on, and she’s looking forward to it.

About six seconds in, you start seeing a kind of laser cage being built. I’m very much of the mindset that it looks like Tholian technology, so I’m going to make a prediction right now: these pirates have stolen Tholian technology. The Tholians were the ones in the original Star Trek who built something similar with their ships, very slowly, around the Enterprise. Don’t know why the Enterprise didn’t fly out of it. Whatever. It looks dope, and it looks very action-packed.

At 16 seconds in, I thought I saw a Klingon woman. She has no head ridges. She’s not a Klingon. I’m looking for any sign that they’re going to retcon Discovery’s crazy Klingon weirdness. Mrs. Know-It-All hasn’t seen season one of Discovery. It reintroduced Klingons, but they don’t look like any Klingons we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t make it better or worse. It’s just one of those things where I go, well, that’s a choice. Later on, when they revisited it, there’s a female character who has the hair again. So I’m interested to see if they go back to an earlier version.

For those of you playing at home: in the original series, Klingons were the human-Klingon hybrid, which they did on purpose to infiltrate. They looked like guys in blackface with mustaches, and they just looked rough. It wasn’t until the movies, The Motion Picture, that they introduced Klingons with forehead ridges, and you find out later on that there’s a whole explanation for it. As Worf from The Next Generation said, we don’t discuss it with outsiders. That’s in “Trials and Tribble-ations,” where the Deep Space Nine cast goes back to the original series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” and gets layered into it, which is awesome. Mrs. Know-It-All hasn’t watched that one yet. She still has to watch the others first.

I can’t wait to see some of the new characters they’re introducing. There’s this dude who looks like he’s straight out of World of Warcraft. He looks like an orc, so he’s probably an Orion. He’s got green skin, a Scottish-looking beard, and this Mad Max, Furiosa thing going on with his garments. I’m interested. I’m down. I think it’s going to be good.

What did you think of “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,” and what would you have done in the father’s place? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.