Kevin: Hello.
Welcome back to Subspace Radio, and it's wedding day in subspace.
Rob: Happy wedding day.
It's a joyous day.
The bells can be heard a-ringing around the subspace.
Kevin: Hi Rob, how's it going?
Rob: I am well, Kevin.
Um, what a momentous episode to just sneak in four episodes in to
an animated version of a franchise.
Not only do we get another wedding, but it is on a planet we
have never, ever visited before.
Kevin: We are of course talking about Lower Decks season four episode four,
Something Borrowed, something Green, in which D'Vana Tendi is called back to Orion
in order to attend her sister's nuptials and, Something Borrowed, Something Green,
it was pretty clear this was going to be a wedding to do with Orions, and I
thought, Oh, no, is it gonna be Tendi's secret, betrothal to someone on her home
planet, just like Spock in Amok Time?
Oh yeah.
We've been engaged since children and I, I thought for sure this was gonna
be, does Tendi get married or not?
But it was not, it was her sister.
Rob: Yeah, that was focusing more on Tendi dealing with her connection
with her Orion heritage and with her connection with her family.
And how, her desire to go to Starfleet goes against everything
that she's been brought up to be.
And it's gives us a bit more of an insight into this character who is...
a joy and a wonderful presence within the show, but we've always been
alluded to this mysterious past of hers, but to finally just have it
laid out before us, is was a delight.
Kevin: I'm happy we went back there as well because we had that previous
episode where they went to the Orion Colony and all of the Orions
there were like deferring to her and calling her by that honorific.
And Mariner was intensely curious, but we didn't get to learn the details, and
I'm glad now we came back and got to learn the details, because I was worried
they were going to leave it mysterious.
So yeah, this was very satisfying, I think, to get answers to many of
our questions about D'Vana Tendi.
Rob: Yeah, there was a little bit of repeating for me.
It was, like, a couple of seasons ago with where we found out Billups's past and he's
like this high ranking royal member of his
Kevin: Yeah, Mariner even called it out.
Do you live in a castle like Billups?
Rob: Calling it out doesn't really make up the fact you're, yeah, doesn't really fix
the fact you're repeating the same thing.
A lot of different types of things, like Billups is royalty, whereas Tendi is
more like a high ranking member of the, a wealthy member of the Orion Syndicate.
But there was definitely the repeated thing of...
For me, in many ways, it's just a case of, oh, okay, just a lowly
member of the crew is, actually has, comes from this higher stock.
But yeah, it, and again, but explains a lot about Tendi's striving to be
humble and down to earth and focus on the, the high principles of Starfleet.
Kevin: Lots of connections to past like Orion stuff that has
appeared in passing in Star Trek.
I saw references to Enterprise episodes, Borderland and Bound.
I saw some visual references to the animated series, The Pirates of Orion,
where they were all wearing scuba suits.
Rob: Yes.
Kevin: They paid off some bits of that and uh, even some uh, passing references
to The Cage or The Menagerie, where Pike was bamboozled by Vina in Orion form.
Rob: In Orion belly dancing outfits.
Kevin: right.
Several of the visual features of the "hump dungeon" in this episode were taken
directly from that scene in The Cage.
Rob: There was a particularly good moment when they focus on like the certain
females within the Orion Syndicate can release pheromones to bewitch the males.
And when they're cleared up by Tendi, three of them just go, Oh
man, we're in another hump dungeon.
Kevin: Not again.
I got a lot of laughs out of this episode just the name D'Erika was hilarious to me.
They and her father's name is B'Rt.
Just that, playing with that Star Trek thing of your name is
a letter, an apostrophe, and then something normal was just hilarious.
And yeah, I love that stuff.
Mariner getting stabbed repeatedly in the same hole was a great visual gag.
It made me laugh every time.
Rob: I was about to mention that was, that was my highlight of the whole
episode and they did the rule of three, one, two, how is that even possible?
And then the third one, oh no, I'm hiding behind here, and lowering down,
and then the ricochet, and get, oh god.
Kevin: Oh, come on!
Rob: T'Lyn was welcome as well, I think she's really, I mentioned
this a couple of episodes, three, four episodes down and she's been
in three and she's just seamlessly embedded herself into the crew.
Kevin: Yeah she's very much filling that Seven of Nine role of like,
kind of a late addition, feels like a guest star a bit, but has slotted
straight into the crew and has a purpose in every episode she appears.
Rob: Now, my favorite moment of the whole episode though, the stabbing of
Mariner in the same spot three times is very good, but we have to go to our...
B plot, where we, I I got to a point where I'm there going, what the hell
am I watching, where we have Rutherford and Boimler, who have their perfect
existence living as flatmates is ruined by their dealing with their bonsai tree.
So they deal with the, they deal with it the only way they know how, going
into a holosuite and getting obsessed.
And they end up both showing up as Mark Twain.
And both of them doing Mark Twain accents.
And that solves all their problems.
Kevin: It was so funny.
Rob: It was frigging hilarious.
Kevin: line had me in stitches.
And just the setup of, oh yeah, of course, Mark Twain is a
recurring character in Star Trek.
How have we not played with that already?
Rob: That's right, yeah, he appeared in Next Gen?
Kevin: Yes, absolutely.
Guinan knew Mark Twain personally.
So when we went back in time...
in Time's Arrow, we meet younger Guinan on Earth, who is rubbing
shoulders with Samuel Clemens.
And uh, the crew of the Enterprise have to hang out and make quick
explanations for where they're from.
Rob: I do declare um, very, very, very funny, just absolute oddball crazy.
Kevin: I want to know who knew for sure this was going to work this well?
Like, when they were writing it, did they already know that those actors could...
make this level of gold out of it?
Or did it come alive in the recording booth?
But, ah, this is a highlight for the season for me,
this, the, the Twain scenes.
Rob: And then for that to be brought back in to solve the uh,
Kevin: Which was ridiculous.
I know how to solve this, Captain.
Let's invite the angry alien to the holodeck and dress him up as Mark Twain.
Rob: And he goes, you've got to speak in the southern accent.
I am from the southern region of my planet.
This is our southern accent.
And then of course he sees the the bonsai tree and eats it, which is
Kevin: Yes, great.
That alien was a Chalnoth, and that is an alien we've seen once in an episode
of The Next Generation called Allegiance, in which Captain Picard is abducted and
put in a prison cell with a bunch of aliens and one other Starfleet officer
who's an Andorian, if memory serves, or Bolean, yeah, I think she's a Bolean.
But anyway, they are being experimented on.
We could have talked about this in our in captivity
Rob: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Kevin: The experiment is, will they work together in order to escape, or
will this situation tear them apart?
Chalnoth in the room is the only one who cannot eat the supplied
food, which is a disc of jelly.
So it is, it is a recurring theme now that Chalnoths are picky eaters.
Rob: Yeah.
It was great.
We had a return of the, it was a very Orion centric episode.
We had our pre title, cold opener scene.
We've had the Klingons be destroyed, we've had the Romulans be destroyed,
and now we sadly had an Orion ship destroyed by this mysterious ship.
Kevin: Yeah!
I didn't particularly love or dislike that that cold open.
I thought it was another of those and it established, for those who
might not remember, who the Orions are and what they're like before we
go and visit them on their planet.
So it filled a uh, purpose, but I didn't think it was.
especially strong.
Rob: The writers didn't have as much fun as they had with the Romulans.
I think they've had the most fun with that scene.
Kevin: Right.
Yeah.
The mentions of the more senior Orion getting metal plates stuck to her
head, that's a reference to Enterprise.
Some of the Orion pirates in Enterprise had pieces of metal stuck to their
skin and it was part of the costume.
And so yeah, they're calling back to that.
And the pirate ship that they're on has grabby arms hanging at the bottom.
And that's a visual reference to the animated series
appearance of the Orion Pirates.
But yeah a serviceable cold open, but yeah, not as good as the Romulan one
that I'm still chuckling about from
Rob: That is, yeah, that has been the highlight of all
those, those little scenes.
But yeah, we're four episodes down and it's been quite solid this season
and the, there's, they're really still keeping it very Star Trek and honouring
all that stuff, but they're throwing in some amazing curveballs that I
never thought I would see before and using a holodeck with not only two
Mark Twains, but four Mark Twains.
Kevin: I also enjoyed the end, the wedding ceremony, the gender reversal
of having the groom walk down the aisle with the father and and
have Mariner go, he looks radiant.
That was fun
Rob: There've been little hints of that.
Kevin: Yeah, there have been, yeah they're a matriarchal society.
That is very well established now.
And seeing that play into the wedding ceremony was nice.
I was a little worried about that at first when it was.
Established that bridal abductions were a thing, and I'm like, oh wow, so
leaning into the damsel in distress trope does not feel very matriarchal to me,
but they brought it around in the end.
Rob: Many levels.
The Orions are many different shades of green.
Kevin: Ha ha ha!
They are literally!
When they're standing next to each other, I was like, wow, there's
a lot of different greens here.
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I noticed that as well, going like, like the tone and
can we just talk about the drinking game with the spider slug thing?
Kevin: The murder bug drinking
Rob: Murderbug, yeah.
Kevin: I was enjoying it.
I was, I remember laughing through that scene at just how, again,
what the heck am I watching here?
That was what I was feeling through that because I was going, does
this game make any sense at all?
And I'm not sure it did, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Rob: You've gotta finish the drink and put it back in its slot so
the protective shield comes up.
Kevin: That's right.
And, and so ultimately it is a drinking game to the death, but what
kills you is the bug that you don't protect your hand from in time.
Rob: And how, yeah, and how was it for you to see this iconic species in the Star
Trek universe that sort of appeared early on in a little bit, but then disappeared
and has only been brought back in.
Like the Lower Decks crew have really leaned into showing a lot of Orion
stuff, like we didn't get any, we didn't get any Orions in Deep Space Nine or
Voyager or Next Gen, I don't think.
They've definitely, and of course they were brought back in Enterprise.
Kevin: Yeah,
Rob: But yeah, how was that,
Kevin: I agree with Boimler.
It was a treat not to be missed.
And as they were like taking the shuttle down and we saw the planet laid out below
and there was some score going on at that point that felt to me like an Orion motif
coming in and I thought wow it's been a while since I've felt a new race, a new
civilization come alive in Star Trek and get some real world building around it.
So yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Rob: and for that to happen in an animated, uh, series shows a lot of
belief in Lower Decks, which is great.
It's no longer what it started out to be, going, oh, come on, it's the
hokey animated thing with a bit of, that meta humor, to going, yeah, they
do that, but they're also, fiercely dedicated to their Star Trek lore.
Kevin: Yeah.
I still need to go back and decipher all of the Orion script.
There were several like conspicuous signs and the Mariner gave us a bit of a decoder
key by naming the bar and the sign was written in Orion, but she said the bar
is slit throats or something like that.
And that gives you a whole bunch of letters to go on.
I think from there we can decode what the pedestal that they're carried
around on says, and yeah, I can't wait to pull that stuff apart and
see what laughs are hiding for us.
Rob: I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you translate.
Kevin: But we've got a topic to drill into, and it seemed pretty obvious to
us that uh, we should be talking about weddings and wedding traditions in Star
Rob: Most definitely.
Most definitely.
Why not?
Let's let's embrace all things matrimonial in the world of the Trek.
Kevin: I have picked a little itty bitty scene in Next Generation.
What have you got?
Rob: I've got an entire episode from the greatest Star Trek TV show of all time.
Who would have thought?
Kevin: Alright, so we'll start at TNG before we go to DS9.
Rob: Yes.
Kevin: As I was watching this I was thinking, Oh, it would be interesting
to talk about all the different wedding traditions in different
alien cultures, or Star Trek.
But when I started looking, the first one I found was this sweet
little scene between Data and Worf in Data's Day, which is The Next
Generation Season 4, Episode 11.
In this episode, Miles O'Brien and Keiko are getting married.
So yeah, this has a DS9 link for you, Rob.
This is when they get married.
And of course Data is playing the role of father of the bride.
And learning a lot, learning a lot about humanity in the process.
And one of the things he has to do is buy a wedding gift.
He goes into...
this gift shop set that we've never seen before or again in Next Gen, but it's kind
of a room with replicator pedestals in the middle of it, and Worf's already there
shopping for a gift, so they trade banter, and what they talk about is how strange,
or unusual human wedding ceremonies are.
So this Is a treat of seeing humanity have the, mirror turned
on itself from the outside.
Data asks if he can get any advice for picking a wedding gift
and Worf says, Oh, of course.
I have attended human weddings before.
And he's, the tone of voice is like this strange thing called human weddings.
Don't worry, I'll guide you through it.
They go through the catalog and they stop on a pair of crystal glasses.
And Data says this is a traditional wedding gift?
Worf says, Yes, my adoptive parents often give these… things at family weddings.
A human custom.
And Data asks Worf if he's ever participated as a member
of the bridal party, and Worf goes, No, oh god, are you crazy?
He says, It's an honor perhaps, but human bonding rituals often involve a great
deal of talking and dancing and crying.
It's so good.
I watched this scene twice because there's a lot of moments of them
like just quite in silence, taking a beat and staring at each other.
It's quite a funny scene.
Um, so I recommend it highly.
And it was a reminder to me that not to take human wedding
ceremonies as a normal baseline.
From the outside, they might be just as weird as anything
else we might talk about.
Rob: Excellent, excellent stuff.
I of course went to um, I would go as to say one of the most iconic weddings.
Kevin: Is this you Are Cordially Invited?
Rob: You, Mr.
Kevin Yank, are cordially invited to my bringing up of You Are
Cordially Invited from Star Trek Deep Space Nine Season 6 Episode 7.
That's right, Season 6.
We are firing on all cylinders.
This is Deep Space Nine at its friggin best.
Kevin: When we were still happy.
When we could still have nice things, Rob.
Rob: We could still have nice things before, everything went to crap.
Yep, Season 6, Episode 7 early on at the start of Season 7, they've just
gained back control of Deep Space Nine.
Sisko is positively giddy, schoolboy giddy, walking around, going up to Kira,
going, it's so happy and I'm so nice, it's so good to see you, and she goes, it's
so good to see you, so much better saying hello to you every morning as opposed
to Gul Dukat, it's so happy to be here.
He's positively giddy, it's great seeing Sisko like that.
And Martok has been given a position of high authority, which he, as
he says beautifully, I do not like all the excessive paperwork.
Heh.
And so we go down to see Worf and Jadzia hanging out with Alexander, who has
become a bit of a good luck charm within his ship with the Klingons, because
any stuff up he does means that they survive, so he's a good luck charm.
And he's ingrained himself within the The Klingon ships that he's working
within, which he's been finding hard to do over the last however many years
he's been alive, poor old Alexander.
Kevin: Great, great to see a bit of Alexander, too.
Not enough of Alexander in the canon.
Rob: And he's very good in this episode.
It's beautiful to see him here.
And Jadzia just off the top of her head goes we should get married now.
This will probably be the last time you'll see Alexander in a long time.
I know the war's on and stuff like that.
I know we had plans but let's do it now.
He is here.
And so they throw together a wedding in less than a week.
Quark, obviously takes on the role of running it all from his bar.
And the process begins, but then the drama begins as well.
Worf wants it done a particular way.
Jadzia has to gain her approval, because she is an outsider within the house of
Martok, from Martok's very austere wife.
Kevin: Sirella.
Rob: Yes.
And the process carries on that way.
We have a great inside look into the the traditions of the Klingon people for
their processes that we call a buck's night, their process, and there's a great
moment where they use the holosuites, obviously, so it's Worf, Martok, Sisko,
O'Brien, Bashir, and Alexander go off to do this, this rite of passage
to lead on into the, to the wedding.
And, as Jake's talking to Quark about it, Quark goes, It's a Klingon bachelor party.
Use your imagination.
But it is the exact opposite of what everyone expects.
Instead of drinking and partying and beating each other up, it's a
solemn, beautiful, operatic stages of breaking everything down and putting
yourself through pain and blood.
And beautiful singing um, Klingon opera in two part harmony.
And while Jadzia is doing what Jadzia does, she has dancing islanders with
flaming poles, and flirting, and all this type of stuff, and tension of whether
Jadzia is worthy enough, and a lot of things about you're not a Klingon, so
you'll never be accepted and it's all wrapped up to have an extended wedding
ceremony with beautiful passages about, love defying the gods and being more
powerful than the gods themselves.
It's, yeah, it's a beautiful episode to, sorta like, invert what you
believe a Klingon wedding would be and there's some wonderful stuff in there.
And it's Terry Farrell at her absolute best.
This is like, watching it again, you know that by the end of this season
she's gone and it's a crying shame because she should have been able
to stay with the show to the end.
And she's just, after her initial tension of how she starts in this
character in season one and two, this is Jadzia firing on all cylinders.
She in, she has the Curzon elements there.
She's got the young, vibrant elements.
Her, she's got this great scene with Sisko right at the end where they flip
back and forth where he's talking to her like a young woman in her 20s, but then
the next sentence he's talking to her like he's like a 60, 70 year old man that
they've known each other for decades.
And they're just flipping back and forth.
It's masterful writing by Ronald D.
Moore and it's a great insight into more traditions about Klingons.
And we've talked about it before, you know, Worf became like the...
Whenever it was a Worf centric episode, it's let's give it a
little bit more about the Klingons as opposed to him as a character.
But, it just shows how beautiful Michael Dorn is with his characterization of
Worf and just how, deeply poetic and soft and thoughtful he is as a character.
And how...
He's lived on the outside for so long and he takes these traditions
so seriously because he was never connected to it when he was young.
And yeah, just beautiful stuff in there.
Kevin: You can see why he sneered with such disdain at those crystal
goblets, when he knows what a real wedding tradition looks like.
Rob: Exactly.
Exactly.
And there's even a scene at the start where he is drinking blood wine.
No.
Yeah.
He has blood wine with his son, and his, uh fiancé, so no prune juice there.
Kevin: I think uh, there's a, there's a episode or two in Voyager where B'Elanna
Torres and Tom Paris are planning their wedding, and there's mentions
of how Klingon is the wedding ceremony going to be and B'Elanna's like, don't
worry, I'll spare you the pain sticks.
And here we get to see in, in, a lot more grand detail exactly
what she was referring to there.
Rob: And look, the painsticks are just like big ear buds, really.
They, they would not be, they would not be unwelcome on the set of American
Gladiators or something like that.
And it's a great moment at the end where just Miles and and Bashir.
They're going, do we do it now?
And Martok goes, Hold.
Do we do now?
And the final shot is fading to black and you hear them, YAAAAH!
Whacking poor old Worf.
Kevin: Yeah, it's really good.
Both, both Worf and Jadzia, I think, were high difficulty characters,
not just for the actor, but for the writers to what it was.
And yeah, you're right, this is perhaps the culmination of both of those
difficulty curves of, yes, it was hard to get started, but the rewards
for getting to the place they were going with both those characters is
on full display here in this episode.
Rob: And you can really see that they didn't expect it as writers,
they didn't expect it as actors, just how the two of them clicked,
Terry Farrell and Michael Dorn.
You just go, this is magic, absolute magic.
Kevin: It's interesting to me comparing to, we had the we had the engagement
ceremony earlier this season with Spock in Strange New Worlds, um, where he as a
human temporarily pretending to be half Vulcan, his, like he runs this gauntlet
of challenges to prove is he Vulcan enough, and it's quite similar to this
episode where Dax is has to run this gauntlet of ceremonies to prove that
she is Klingon enough to marry Worf.
It's a recurring theme of that purity test before you marry
someone outside your species.
It's an interesting sci fi thing.
Rob: And all the levels of how physically strong you are, how your endurance is,
and also your knowledge of the family.
And when Jadzia starts biting back, going, well actually, this is the true
facts, oh, but you want me to just keep up the myth, the family myth,
as opposed to what the reality is?
Oh, okay, we'll do that.
You go, ho ho ho!
Classic.
Kevin: Like it's a pretty obvious allegory to marrying across cultures,
across races you know, in human society, of are you X enough to join our family?
Are you Jewish enough?
Are you Greek enough?
Are you, you know, pick your, pick your social group that has its own
traditions and its own expectations of people who join a family.
And it's, just as it is in our modern human society, that can be a test for
a relationship that is taking that step into a permanent form, as it were, and
getting to explore that in maybe a a safer sci fi way through Star Trek and going,
Jadzia, can you recite the operatic verses sufficiently to join this Klingon house?
It's a fun way to explore that stuff.
Rob: And the history of my 28th great grandmother or something like that.
Um, Yeah, it would have been good to have a bit more Trill tradition,
like what, it's very much Jadzia's, yeah, Jadzia is very much a case of,
I just want to get married, I don't care about tradition or anything
like that, let's just get this done.
Kevin: Maybe that in itself is meant to say something about Trill society,
but we do see the Trill in Discovery, and they have some stuff going on.
Rob: That's one of the few moments that I really liked in Discovery as well,
the, that episode of the Trill with all the past lives and stuff like that,
and there's, touched on it a bit within some of the previous episodes of Deep
Space Nine, what with former lovers or wives or husbands of Jadzia from their
past lives coming in connection with each other, but yeah, it's very much
her… celebrations are just generic.
They have a Pacific Islander crew member who gets leave to come and
celebrate with flaming torches, which is amazing and incredible, but
Kevin: It's like you said, I think her culture is whatever's sexy.
Rob: And he's a very oiled up Islander and he is very sexy.
And she does the flirt.
And he falls asleep on Morn.
So that's a good night for him.
Kevin: Ah it was fun to revisit these weddings with you.
There are others in Star Trek history,
Rob: Yes, we didn't get to explore really the Betazoid wedding, which
is apparently everyone's nude.
Kevin: Yes!
Yeah, and, yeah, very prominent uh, early memory of TNG there of Majel Barrett
insisting that everyone needs to be naked and I think when I first saw that
as a fan, I was not across the fact that she was Gene Roddenberry's wife.
That, that was not something that I knew.
And yeah, just in hindsight, it's all strange.
I made a new TV show.
Do you want to get naked in the first season, honey?
Rob: Look she was bang up for anything in that show and god bless her.
Kevin: Yeah.
It was a fun, fun episode.
Absolutely.
Early, early days of Troi and Lwaxana uh, going head to head
about, mum you embarrass me because you make everything so awkward.
Rob: So yes, we we, there's so many wedding traditions
out there within Star Trek.
But we did want to focus on a little bit of Klingon.
A little bit of human reflection.
And a little bit of Orion.
Not a bad way to explore Star Trek.
Kevin: Thank you, Lower Decks.
I love the journeys you're sending us on.
Every new episode is a surprise.
Rob: It's going from strength to strength, four seasons down.
Yeah, will they go beyond the the iconic seven seasons?
We shall see.
Kevin: Alright until next week, Rob.
Rob: Until next week, you know what we're gonna do.
We're gonna see each other,
Kevin: around the galaxy.
Rob: Hehehehehehe.