138: Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 2, episode 7 “Those Old Scientists"

https://youtu.be/drAzpIcU9zk

Matt and Sean talk about timey-whimey crossovers with Star Trek Strange New Worlds and Star Trek The Lower Decks (the animated show). How well does it work to see animated characters in a live action show?

YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/trekintime

Audio version of the podcast: https://www.trekintime.show

Get in touch: https://trekintime.show/contact

Follow us on X: @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf

★ Support this podcast ★

Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell 🐨

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Trek In Time?

Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.

In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're going to talk about what happens when those old scientists don't match our expectation of what is true. That's right, we're talking about Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Season 2, Episode 7, Those Old Scientists. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time. We're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological order.

According to Stardate, we're also taking a look at the way the world was at time of original broadcast. So we're currently talking about just last year, 2023. And who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I read some sci fi. I read some stuff for kids and with me as always is my brother, Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

And Matt, how are you today?

I'm doing great. I, speaking of science fiction, cause we're talking about Star Trek. I don't know if you've watched it yet or started to watch it on Netflix. There's the three body problem. And

I've seen the ads for it. Yes. Yeah.

I, I've read the books and my wife and I have been binging the show and she never got through the books because she was kind of like boring halfway through and just stopped reading.

I read them all, loved them all, and I'm watching the show and I'm loving the show. And guess what my wife is doing about halfway into the show? She's like kind of going. I like the first three episodes, not liking the last few episodes. I don't, I don't know if I, I don't get it. I'm like sitting there going more, please, more.

So it's, it's definitely going to be a divisive show, but I'm really enjoying it.

It's pretty well done. Yeah, it looks, it looks really intriguing and I want to check it out, but I'm torn because I would like to read the books first. So I find myself in a quandary of how will I find time to read the books when I don't even have time to read anything right now.

It's like too much, too much is being put on the back burner and I don't have enough front burner to make things work. So I need to, I need to come to terms with that one. Before we talk about today's episode, we always like to revisit comments from the previous episode. So Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week?

It's going to sound like we have just our regulars comments because we have, it's kind of the AJ Chan, PaleGhost69, and uh, Dan Simmons show here. But there were some interesting comments that were dropped over the past week. Um, for episode 137 Lost in Translation, which was the last episode that we did, uh, AJ Chan wrote another bottle episode except for a few shots in the VR quote volume to show the station.

I'm generally a fan of this season and series. The default is that it's a bottle episode unless otherwise stated. And I, I think that's true. It feels like there's more kind of bottle episodes than not. And for me, I'm enjoying the final episodes the most, personally. The other one was from PaleGhost69 wrote, Matt's over here talking about episode 9, but I'm more worried about episode 8.

It took me half a dozen tries to get through it. Hell, I almost bailed on episode 7 before the Lower Decks crew got an intervention, which was nice because it's perfectly explained why I don't like the Lower Decks. I was cheering Una on during that whole scene. And then Dan Sims wrote in response to that, Oh man, I love the Lower Decks.

It's become the show I put on to fall asleep at night. I'm excited for next week's episode. I'm with Dan. I was a lot, I was a late comer to the Lower Decks. Like people were telling me, watch Lower Decks, watch Lower Decks. I was like, I don't know. That doesn't look like it's going to be for me. Yeah, I like Rick and Morty, and this is kind of like the Star Trek Rick and Morty, and it is hysterical.

I love it. It's so much fun. We'll be talking more about that in today's episode for sure. Yes, we will. And then, uh, for wrong guesses only, as Sean always calls out the next episode's title and says, wrong guesses only, what do you think it is? Uh, PaleGhost69 wrote, Those old scientists. Data is playing poker on the holodeck with Einstein, Newton, and Hawking when the self aware Moriarty materializes himself into the new program, joins the game, and cleans house.

I would watch that episode.

Yes, so would I.

I would watch that episode. That Moriarty was a character that I always. Wish they had gone back and revisited that. And they almost do in the version of the doctor from Voyager, where like effectively the self awareness of it is, is that kind of, um, experience.

But I always loved that episode with Moriarty. And I also love the card playing episode with Isaac Newton, Hawking, and Einstein. So compare merging those two. I absolutely love that idea. That's a, that's a good one. So we're going to be talking about Episode 7, Those Old Scientists, directed by one, let me read the name here.

What is this? Jonathan Frakes. Who?

Written

by Catherine Lyn and Bill Wolkoff, originally broadcast on July 22nd, 2023. And our cast is Is, and this is again, uh, kind of bottle-y. So it's our main crew, Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Melissa Navia, Rebecca Romijn, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, and Babs Olusanmokun with Tawny Newsome as Ensign Beckett Mariner and Jack Quaid as Ensign Brad Boimler.

And the world on July 22nd, the description, Sean. Oh, let's go back to the description. And I was really looking forward to that too. That's right. That noise you hear in the background, that's the read alert, which means it's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description, which I almost skipped over this week.

Damn it. Matt, take it away.

In the 24th century, Ensign Brad Boimler of the U. S. Cerritos is assigned to investigate an ancient portal. The portal, which is powered by the rare substance horonium sends him back in time 120 years where he is taken aboard the Enterprise. Boimler struggles to contain his excitement at meeting his heroes and also to prevent polluting the timeline with his knowledge of the future.

The portal is stolen by an Orion ship and Pike, uh, trades grain supplies to retrieve it. They attempt to return Boimler to the future with the last remaining horonium, but Ensign Beckett Mariner comes through the portal instead of a rescue attempt. Spock and Boimler unsuccessfully try to synthesize horonium so they can use the portal again while Mariner and Uhura work to translate engravings on the portal.

Boimler realizes that horonium from the hull of the previous Starship Enterprise was incorporated into Pike's Enterprise. They use this to send Boimler and Mariner back to their own time, while the Orions agree to accept credit for discovering the portal in exchange for allowing Enterprise to continue peacefully.

I love that last sentence, because It's not a sentence. They allow the enterprise to continue peacefully. To continue to peacefully what? Episode 7. That's right. I've already gone through the credits, so we will skip that part and jump directly to what was going on in the world at the time of the original broadcast on July 22nd, 2023.

Matt, I know you were heartbroken when you had to leave behind Morgan Whalen's last night a couple of weeks ago. Guess what? Good news. That's right. Last Night is back as the number one streaming song with 28 million downloads. I think you were approximately directly responsible for 29 million of those.

You do the math. And in movie theaters, the number one film this week would be Barbie. Earning a paltry 162 million in its first week, breaking multiple records, including a record held by The Hangover Part II for highest weekend debut of a live action comedy, Captain Marvel's record for highest weekend debut of a female directed film, and the record held by Transformers Revenge of the Fallen for highest weekend debut for a film based on a toy, and the record held by The Dark Knight Rises for the highest weekend debut of a non 3D film.

So it also had the highest weekend debut of any film in 2023. And on television, we've been talking about streaming shows, and a lot of them have been older shows that have continued to capture an audience in our current era, and this week is no different. Previous weeks has been Suits, Bluey, NCIS, Grey's Anatomy, Cocomelon, The Big Bang Theory.

And this week at number seven is Gilmore Girls with 153 episodes. It has a total of 25 billion minutes viewed. It is available on Netflix and Gilmore Girls is of course a dramedy centering around the relationship between a 30 something single mother and her teen daughter who live in Starr's Hollow, Connecticut.

Created by Amy Sherman Palladino, it's original run was in 2000 to 2007 with an unofficial sequel called A Year in a Life, broadcasting on Netflix in 2016. And there is still large fan base interest in yet another work. Go around with the show, I think that the audience here would like to see the occasional every 10 years resurfacing of where are they now and kind of follow the characters forward in time, which I think is an interesting proposition.

And in the news, the New York Times on this date, July 22nd, 2023, news articles included the naming of a date of May 2024 The trial in the Trump documents case, an article about the judge in that case, who is an untested judge and is in fact a judge who was appointed by then president Trump, an article about the black sea and Russia's use of.

Air attacks to batter Ukraine's ability to export grain and also ongoing pressures on the Biden campaign regarding AI as companies agree to guardrails on the new tools, which when first released showed to have zero regulation around them. On now to our discussion about this episode, I think there's a, not a huge elephant, but still an elephant nonetheless that we should talk about before we get into the discussion.

Matt raised this to me via text just a few nights ago. It was not something that I had remembered, but once I got his text, I did recall this is in fact a two parter and we have been very clear in the past. We would deal with two parters. As a one episode thing. So what are we doing this week? Well, we are not in fact doing that.

My way of thinking about this, this is a two parter in spirit, but not in actuality. Watching this episode did not leave any kind of cliffhanger y moment. And I think that needs to be our rule, is if you end an episode with a dot, dot, dot, what happens next? You know, we're not going to watch Best of Both Worlds Part 1 and say, I guess Picard's Locutus now, uh, we're going to go on and watch Part 2 to be able to talk about the whole thing intelligently.

I think that this episode demonstrates this. It concludes, and then that's the end of it. And as far as chronological order, though, because it's 120 years in the future, and it fits within the chronological order from another angle, which is it's a two parter in spirit, but it is two different programs. So for us to lift one episode of a program that we have already decided we are going to talk about, but in a very particular way, because it's an animated series, If I remember correctly, our plan is to kind of fold conversations of the Lower Decks into Next Generation because it's that era.

So we'll do that at that point. When we get to that point, and I think if I do the math real quickly. That might be three years from now. Uh, we will then decide whether we're going to do a full blown episode about this one or not. But for now, I think treating this episode of strange new worlds in isolation and dealing with the second part of this story in the future.

Makes sense to me. I hope everybody in the audience agrees.

But we will be talking about Lower Decks as a thing right now. Oh, absolutely.

Yes. Yeah. We're not going to ignore the fact that this is like in my notes, I have, I have bullet points of what I want to talk about. I want to talk about, um, this as a part of an animated Exploration of Star Trek.

I want to talk about animation in Star Trek in general. Uh, and I want to talk about the fanboy ness of this episode. I think it's got a lot of different levels to it. For being a comedically focused episode, I think it has a lot of interesting layers to it and could spawn a longer conversation than one might expect.

Um, I think it's interesting that in the comments. Some of our viewers have already shared this episode was hard for them to get through this like I, I don't agree with that. I found this very easy to get through. Um, so I'm just going to say a couple of things like big picture, and then I'm going to invite Matt you for you to jump in with anything particular that you want to talk about.

First, I just wanted to say kind of big picture. I am very open to animated Star Trek. I was a big fan and remain a big fan of the original animated series, which I think is a tremendously strong follow on to the original series itself. I, unlike, like, when we talked about how are we going to handle the animated shows previously, I was all for actually treating them as standalone episodes of this program.

I'd be happy to do that. Matt was like, I don't know if it fits within what we actually are trying to do. So we're going to fold those in to original series comments as well, or episodes as well. Pulling back from this as a Animated series, I think that the inclusion of a future perspective on this show's setting, I think they wrote it from a perspective of what is our hardcore fanboy audience looking at when they look at Strange New Worlds and what is the criticism we are receiving.

I felt like this was an episode in which they embedded in a very upbeat. Lighthearted way without any harsh pushback, a kind of, we hear you all complaining that this show isn't true Star Trek, but why isn't it? And I think it handles that beautifully in the fanboyness of Boimler showing up and Spock doesn't smile.

I must have broken something like all of those, all of those elements in this are for me, them taking a meta look at the show. In a really interesting and fun way. So I really enjoyed this episode. Just like, like I'm just painting a really big brush right now. Just to say, I really liked this episode. I thought it was very well done.

I'm a fan of Lower Decks. I haven't watched as much as you probably have. But I've always appreciated what they're doing and how they're doing it. And I love that this crossover now hard bakes in Lower Decks as canon. And one of my favorite elements of that is it means that the opening Sequence of lower decks.

Those are all canon events. Meaning at some point the Cerritos showed up at a Romulan Borg fight and turned around and left. At some point it accidentally flew into an ice capped mountain. At some point it got pulled toward a black hole. Like all of those elements done clearly for comedic Impact were are now Canon and another aspect of this that I absolutely loved.

I love that they redid the strange new worlds as an animated intro. I loved all of that. It was, I thought it was beautiful. So for me, this is like a love letter from the show makers to themselves. And I think that there's a certain place where that kind of. Energy should be, um, embraced by the audience because it's a reminder to the audience.

We love this as much as you do. And I appreciate that when I get a peek behind the curtain of like, Oh yeah, they're all doing this because they love it too. That's the starting point. So Matt, is there anything in particular about this that you wanted to jump into? Was there, we have, let me, let

me, let me say my high level, which is.

I've seen all of the Lower Decks. I came to it late, but once I started, I like beelined the entire thing. So I've seen every episode of Lower Decks. I love, love, love that show. It is super subversive. It takes the piss out of Star Trek. Like it makes fun of Star Trek from the perspective of a fan, which is one of the things I find so charming about it.

And it also is, you've got these Slackers, that are the main, like, cast, where it's like, how are these guys, Starfleet? It's like, Starfleet's supposed to be like, the Picards and the Rikers of the universe, the Kirks. And these guys, it's like, they're not at that level, but it's like, not everybody can be at that A plus level.

There are going to be B level and C level folks, but when it push comes to shove, and this is what I love about the lower decks. They always come out as, no these people do deserve to be here. They are Starfleet. They really are the best at what they do. They just happen to be kind of goofballs or slackers and they only really stand up and do their thing when the push comes to shove.

So it's like, you can see that they genuinely do deserve to be there. So it's like, even though they're kind of taking the piss out of Star Trek, They're doing it in a way that's kind of, like you said, a love letter, and it was fun to watch this episode. And the reason I love this episode of Strange New Worlds is they brought that sentiment to the live action show.

So it was taking the piss out of themselves and making fun of themselves and like making references to all over the place, fan references. And so that's probably where I'd want to start. Getting detailed, which is like directed by Jonathan Frakes, Commander Riker. Yeah. There's a line of Boimler swinging his leg up over a chair to sit down.

And as he's doing it, he yells, Riker! And then sits down. I love the fact that Jonathan Frakes, who has a great sense of humor, is making fun of himself. He's making fun of his character. He's recognizing that there have been fan takes on YouTube that you can go watch. All the Riker maneuvers of him swinging his leg over chairs.

It's like, that is a thing in the community. And I love the fact that they recognized it and they do tips of the hat like that constantly in lower decks. And it was really fun to see them do that. on the live action show. So it's like, there was just constant references and you brought up Spock's smile.

One of my favorite parts of this entire episode was like, every time he would smile, the camera would do that slow like zoom on his mouth and it would play like this ominous music and then would show Boimler getting freaked out. And it was really, really funny. It was like, so well done, but yet it didn't feel out of place.

in Strange New Worlds to me. It felt like it belonged there. Yeah. Because here's these characters are kind of goofy. And so we're watching it through their eyes. And I would say to anybody that thinks that this is out of place, watch any Barkley episode from Next Generation. Yes. That's what I was going to say.

Yeah. Barkley is a goofball. And whenever it's a Barkley episode, you're watching it through his eyes. And so there is weird stuff that happens in those episodes that's goofy, slapsticky, because he. Attracts all that weirdness because he's a weird guy. And so it never felt out of place for me when Barclay was an episode.

And this is the same thing here when Boimler is there. It's fine that it's goofy because it's all through his perspective. So for me, it felt true. And the, I thought they, they, I was, when he announced they were doing this, I was concerned because I was like, how the hell are they going to pull this off? Oh, let's get the guy who actually voices Boimler.

Let's color his hair purple. So he still looks like he's from the cartoon. Let's have Mariner, the actual voice of Mariner come on the show. Let's bring all that goofiness in. And it's like the straight man is all of the Stranger Worlds cast. And the goofballs are Mariner. And you know, it's, it's the way they handled it was just like, for me, a chef's kiss, funny as hell.

And yet still felt very Strange New Worlds to me. It was, I thought they, they did a wonderful job with this

kind of stuff. Yeah, I, I really, one of the things I really appreciated, and this is something that made me think about how they handled spoilers and time travel and interaction with people from the future in Enterprise.

I think Enterprise's big mistake, looking back on it now, is they took it too seriously with that time traveling agent that meets Archer. I feel like, What if they had taken the approach, like in this, every time future information is shared with the crew, they are hearing details about themselves that they should not know.

Mm-Hmm. and the sh and in the context of this episode, they treat it with a hand wavy, almost like I no longer know that, even though I just heard. It doesn't, yes, matter. So, the seriousness of, you can't contaminate the timeline, means you can't have fun while you're telling this story. And this treats it almost like Doctor Who.

Where Doctor Who there. We recently watched here in my home. We watched one of the Doctor Who specials where they introduced the new doctor. And before they get to the new doctor, it's a David Tennant story. And they meet Sir Isaac Newton briefly in which they say to Sir Isaac Newton, Oh, you're about to invent the theory of gravity.

And then they leave and he goes, what was that word they used? Mavity. And from that point on, when people use the word gravity in these specials, they say gravity or mavity. They use both interchangeably. They just, they've introduced a paradox within the reality of Doctor Who that the word mavity is now used interchangeably with gravity and people know what it means.

In this very goofy way. And it's fun. It's, it's fun. So like this, I felt like whenever they refer to like Una Chin-Riley, you're like, you're the poster girl for the Federation. And it's very moving that it is the legal argument that was used in defense of her is used as the poster for Enlist in Starfleet and her recognition of the meaning of that for herself.

is deeply moving, but it's not treated with any kind of like, you shouldn't have told me that I'm like accepted by Starfleet in the future. There's none of that. There is a brilliant scene in this one where they are tap dancing very awkwardly around the, we can't tell Pike that he winds up in a wheelchair, terribly scarred.

Yeah. While right in front of him. And he's like, I know what you're talking about. Cause I already have knowledge of that. And they're like, Oh, good. But they're also like, wait, how? Yeah. How? And he's just like, don't worry about it. I already know what's going to happen to me. I know about my future. And they're like, well, who that relieves that pressure.

All done with Uhura, but you're Uhura, you are meaningful, you are important, and that's one of the layers where I felt like they are talking to the audience about the show, about the characters. This Uhura has no idea what the later Uhura means. But what the Later Yuhura actually means to the fan base is she was the first black woman as a lead character in a TV show on primetime, and she was there as an actress because Martin Luther King Jr.

said, you've got to stay on that show because you are putting a face on it. Into people's homes to let them recognize what we can do. That is what Uhura means. And I feel like the show is within the confines of the show saying Uhura is important to Star Trek. And then outside of the confines of the show is Uhura was important to the country, to the civil rights movement, to all people's individual experience of what it means to live in this world.

And I found myself watching this and being like, they're talking at so many different levels. Using these cartoon characters in such a smart way, and do you agree with me, there is no plot here. The plot is not important. The plot is, this is MacGuffins of all of this stuff. It's

about the experience. It's all MacGuffins too.

It's, it's, it's the journey. It's the jokes that come along the way. It's not the actual thing that they're doing that matters. And that's one of the things they structured this show like an episode of Lower Decks. Which is what I find so charming to see it actually works in live action as well. It's not just because it's an animated series, it's because it's very clever comedic storytelling.

It's, it's the journey,

not the destination. I also really enjoyed the inclusion of a couple of the other Lower Decks characters in the, the framing at the beginning and the end. Uh, their friend who's an Orion who makes the argument. Orion's actually found this and she's both right and wrong and Boimler is both right and wrong.

Um, her argument of not all Orions are thieves, but the first time that they actually do meet Orion scientists, they just steal what they want to research. So I love that element. Uh, and the depiction of the Orion captain I thought was very charming. It was like, that's all I've ever wanted. It's just like, I've just wanted to be seen as a scientist.

That's all I've ever wanted. Uh, so it's like, he's living down to the lowest expectations, which I think is a nice message for the show. Like you can, you can influence a person's actions by not expecting good of them. And I think if the show has a overriding theme for all the characters, that to me resonated as the biggest theme of the characters of the, uh, of the element of the story, but the.

Time travel device, the reminiscence of the portal from the original series, the Keeper of Tomorrow, like all of that stuff. I found it all just very charming, very cosplay, very fan fiction, but it works in ways that kept me going. I liked the experience of the Orion scientists stealing what they wanted to research.

I liked the inclusion of the original Enterprise. There's the meta conversations from Boimler where he refers to TOS, those old scientists. He refers to the first enterprise. Well, technically the second, but you know, like, like going through all of those stages of referring to the programs in that way, I thought it was just so much fun.

Well, the, the references, what I've, I loved about it is that they're geeking out and near the end of the show, when they're geeking out in one of the rooms, they're trying to brainstorm what to do and they're revealing that the original Enterprise had that material that they needed. Boimler makes the comment about like, you know, with the grapplers and like Mariner's like, they don't care about the grapplers.

And then Erica Ortegas goes, I love the grapplers. And he's like, right, I know, right? It's like, it's just fans geeking out about like the original Enterprise show and how we thought it would work. Hey, the grapplers, that's kind of a clever way to get around, like, you know, they don't have this technology yet.

What would they have done? Oh, grapplers. So, it's like, it's fun that they're kind of showing that they're fans of this stuff too. Yeah. And they're just kind of geeking out about it. One of the things I did want to bring up, there's like, there's so many kind of like one liners and gags I thought worked super well.

And one of my favorite ones was when I brought up how like, in Lower Decks, it's like these goofballs, how are they Starfleet? And then they, when they push comes to shove, they do a great job. There's a scene with Boimler. on the bridge when they're like, we have no way to track them. He's like, oh, I can track them.

Like, but you, we, you know, you can't give us knowledge that we're just supposed to have. He's like, he's like, well, maybe you just don't look. And then the next shot is the bridge crew facing away from Boimler as he's ripping cables out and doing stuff. And so it's like, this is what I love. It's like, here he is, he's actually doing a good thing.

Like he's, he's doing stuff with this old technology and making the sensors work in the way he needed them to, to be able to do it. But I just love the fact that they're all standing there going like. Is this like legit? Like what are we doing here? Yeah. And then there's also the reference, um, where Pike at one time comments about Boimler as saying when he says, I feel like I'm trying to stop a toddler from knocking over furniture.

Yeah. This is like the humor and the gags and the way the characters were acting all felt true to like who Pike is in a goofy environment. Yes. Who Ortegas is in a goofy environment. Who Spock is in a goofy environment. So it never felt like they were. Acting in a way that they shouldn't be acting. So the comedy worked super well for me.

Yeah. Spock

with the experiment that he runs with Boimler and Boimler is like, is this dangerous? He's like, Absolutely, it is like clicks it into place. Something is going wrong. Should it be making that noise? No, it should not. And then very calmly turning and walking to get out of the blast radius of this thing.

So that's about to blow up. And even the inclusion of the protective eyewear I thought was great because it looked like it was modeled on the protective eyewear that Spock would occasionally wear in the original series. So here he is wearing these goofy glasses. And I was immediately geeking out about that.

This gave them the opportunity to play with some of the goofier elements of the original series right in front of us. In a way that made sense where it was like, look, they've got these badges. You click this, it's the communicator. Isn't that amazing? Like a clicky thing is the most fun. Like, well, like that's the fun part.

Like, yeah, I agree. That is the fun part. So it's like elements both forward and backward in time pointing to all the different series, all the things we've watched, we were watching characters who were effectively from next generation era coming back and critiquing and being critiqued by. Everything. And we haven't really seen that spirit before because it's always been done seriously.

But there's also the fact that, like, as a fan of Lower Decks, I was geeking out about seeing like Jack Quaid. Yeah. Live action. Do the role that I know so well from the show. And there's aspects of that character, like, he has that very classic yell that he does on the show. That like, whoo! Like, he has that high pitched freak out that he does all the time on the show.

And it was so fun to see him do that on this episode, numerous times live. And there's even a scene where he does, he gets freaked out at Una. in the hallway and turns around and just books away. And he had this weird sashay to the way he was walking away. It looked like it was right from the animated show.

So it's like, I really enjoyed that they were able to bring those elements in. Because if you're a fan of Lower Decks, you're It gives you another thing to geek out about. It wasn't just about them commenting on Next Generation Original Series and Enterprise and all these other things. It was also they're geeking out about their own show.

So they're geeking out about Lower Decks and it was kind of fan service for even them. Uh, I, I really

enjoyed that. Yeah. It's as valuable to see Spock give the Live Long and Prosperous salute as it is to see Boimler's response. To the salute. The salute. It's the first time that we see Spock in a long time say live long and prosper.

We haven't seen that much in this program where it would be seen all the time in the original series. So seeing it here kind of stands out as like, Oh yeah, that's a great moment. It's an equally great moment. The Boimler's response is like, well, you, okay. Yeah. You too.

Live, live, live long. Yeah.

Like just the nerdy, geeky response in that moment is as much fun as the, uh, original series.

Shout out. So. Well done from both perspectives. I, and I want to close on their closing, which I thought was brilliant. The animated sequence at the very end, revealing that the experience of being animated is born of being drunk on an, on a alcohol that when they are introduced to this special type of. of drink.

Um, it is suggested that a replacement has been used, but at the end of the episode, when they actually have the original recipe in action, they are seeing themselves as animated and remarking on, are my eyes really big? Why does everything look like this? Until finally we have Dr Mbenga just shout out what the hell is in these things, which I thought was a fantastic closing line.

I loved it. I thought it was terrific. Yeah. So I invite, I invite, I invite our audience to jump into the comments. Do you also enjoy this episode or like we already know from some of our viewers and we won't, uh, there's no judgment if you weren't able to get through this and you didn't like it, we are perfectly fine with that, but let us know what you thought.

Also don't forget we have next week coming up episode eight under the cloak of war. So. Jump into the comments and share your wrong answers only summary of what that one will be about. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you'd like to remind our listeners about what you have coming up on your main channel?

Uh, we're actually, the week that this comes out, we're actually taking the week off from publishing a video, but the one that's going to be coming up after that is about the rise of analog computers. Um, they're making a kind of a comeback right now because they're really good at at AI and differential equations, and they use far less power.

And my brain has been having a hard time wrapping around. How the hell does that work? So I think of, you know, computers, you're thinking of like the 1950s, all these cables get plugged into jacks and stuff like that. They're very different, uh, for what's being done today, but, uh, it's making a comeback and it's, it's going to probably, we're going to see a lot more hybrid systems that are kind of digital and analog combined and using the best of both worlds.

So we did a deep dive on

that. Interesting. I look forward to viewing that one and talking with you about it. As for me, if you're interested in finding out more about my books, please go to my website, seanferrell. com or go to your local bookstore or public library. My books are available everywhere. If you'd like to support the show, please consider leaving a review wherever it was you found the show.

Don't forget to subscribe and do share it with your friends. All of those are great ways to support the channel. And if you'd like to support us directly, you can go to trekintime. show, click the become a supporter button. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the hard, hard business of talking about spaceships.

All of that really helps support the show. Thank you so much for your time watching or listening. And we'll talk to you next time.