Kevin: Welcome back to Subspace Radio and welcome back Rob.
Rob: It's a pleasure to be back, uh, one week off.
It felt weird.
It's like we were on a mainstream Australian television and they're
programming Star Trek on like late at night and there's no regular dates
and they've, we've skipped a week.
Kevin: I loved the visit from our special guest, Jason Snell, and thank
you again, Jason, for doing that.
But, uh, I felt a little, I have to be honest, I felt a little guilty recording
without you, Rob, I was sitting here very conscious that there was an episode of
Star Trek that you were being, robbed of the opportunity to share your thoughts
Rob: Look, look, um, yeah, Kevin, we are at that point where I can reveal,
you know, just a little bit of the ego took a bruise when I'm there going,
well, they just can't do it without me,
Kevin: Can't do it without me.
Rob: and, and they're, Oh no, we can bring in, um, someone.
Kevin: I was a little too quick to suggest that I could replace you.
Is that what you're
Rob: And we can get the upgrade.
So, yeah.
Um, so not only did you find a replacement, you went up a league.
So, um, That's fine.
That's, that, that's fine.
Um, uh, welcome back to the gutter with Rob Lloyd.
Kevin: Uh, irreplaceable, Rob.
Irreplaceable.
Rob: Well, thank you Jason for joining
Kevin: Jason will do in a pinch, but I'm glad you're
Rob: Well, it was a pleasure to, to, have Jason in, in, in my stead.
And, uh, and you got to talk about, um, you know, Peanut
Hamper in all her deceitful glory.
Kevin: What a series of episodes we are going through here.
I feel like every week I am coming to the table agog at how good a
half hour of Star Trek we have just
Rob: Well, well, Mr.
Kevin Yank, I think we have come to our first impasse.
This most recent episode, I wasn't all that impressed with.
Kevin: Oh, Crisis Point 2 didn't do it
Rob: Crisis Point 2 did not do it for me at all.
I was a little
Kevin: That surprises me because you are square in the target audience of
so much of what this episode was doing.
Rob: There was a point at the end where I'm just there going, the big
twist that they did telecast in their usual Lower Decks type of, Oh, I hate
those type of twist, uh, cliffhanger endings, and they gave us one.
But that cliffhanger ending for me took away all the work of the episode, and it
gave me that case of, what's the point.
Kevin: Wow.
Well, uh, no wonder we are here to talk about characters who died but
then didn't because, I think that is gonna be a theme of, does the
resurrection rob the death of its weight?
I think we're gonna talk about that extensively here
Rob: Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin: But let's dig into the episode proper before we
talk about the twist ending.
Rob: Of course.
Kevin: Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus of course, a follow up to the Crisis
Point episode that we had where Mariner worked out her demons by,
playing holodecks with the crew of the Cerritos as supporting cast.
In this one, it's, uh, Boimler who wrote us a movie and it starts like something
right out of a late TNG era movie with the Sovereign class ship swooping in,
obscuring the sun and saving the day right in front of a Romulan Warbird,
one of those, one of those sleek, new ones that appeared in Nemesis.
Rob: Right.
Everyone remembers Nemesis, right?
Right?
Nemesis?
Kevin: Of course,
Rob: Tom Hardy, anyone?
Kevin: The summary for me is that we, we basically got two Star Trek movies, here.
We got the original movie that Boimler wrote where Tendi got to role
play being a captain and realized that she wants to be a captain.
And then we got the, the, um, generated movie that the holodeck made for Boimler
when he, disillusioned by the death of his transporter clone, veered from the
path and started following the nonsense that was procedurally generated for
him by the computer, uh, which took him to, some revisits of some, um, less
memorable Star Trek movies, I will say.
There were references to the Star Trek V rock monsters that weren't,
on the planet of Shatanari uh, which is like Sha Ka Ree but Shatner.
Rob: Right.
Yes.
Kevin: We had, uh, the Kitty Hawk reveal, which was a replay of the V'Ger
Rob: The V'Ger and it didn't make any sense whatsoever,
which, which Boimler pulled out.
Kevin: And then, just to sweeten it all, we had, uh, a
cameo from Captain Sulu at the
Rob: That's right.
We did have the return of George Takei and, uh, hearing that beautiful,
soulful voice, um, and saying, uh, the calling his horse Horsey at
Kevin: Yeah.
The horsey is going to bite you
Rob: Want to feed the horsey?
Kevin: Uh, I really want to have been a fly on the wall in the pitch meeting
in which they sold George Takei on the idea that he would be feeding
a horse on the Kirk Family Ranch.
Rob: Yeah, look, that was, that was one of multiple things
that kind of annoyed me a bit.
It seemed to be doing a bait and switch for no reason.
Kevin: That to me seemed to be a reference to the, the offscreen disagreements that
the two actors have and, and playing that for laughs within the universe.
Rob: Yeah.
For, for me, I'm just there going, if you're gonna bring
back Sulu, embrace that.
And it's, and I, for, for me, it's sort like, you know, well done
George, for taking it, but it seemed to be lessening his appearance, um,
Kevin: I agree.
It took me until the second watch to actually like, listen to the advice that
he gave Boimler in his heat struck haze.
And it was actually beautiful advice of how, how shall I put it?
The seeming randomness of death reflects the randomness of joy
that we find in our everyday lives.
And if we spend our entire lives trying to understand the the why people die, we will
miss the random joy that comes our way.
Rob: That is literally just what I said.
For me if it just, if it opened on the, the futuristic streets of
San Francisco where Sulu was born.
He's got his, you know, apartment or, you know, and he's just, you know,
living the high life and go as he should and go straight into that.
It's sort of like lessened his appearance for me by flicking
in a, a Kirk bait n switch.
Kevin: Hmm.
I agree.
Rob: So yeah, it's sort of like going.
Have respect for, for Sulu all right.
Um, for me, that was it.
I mean, he did get to say the line horsey and the Horsey's going to bite you now.
Yeah.
But yes, and so all those type of things that would have endeared me in the
episode, I kind of went, Oh, alright.
So yes, I did notice it's a movie episode, so they did digitally
add in the grain and the, the loops like film I there going, Eh.
Um, I felt Rutherford was really frigging annoying this episode.
Kevin: Oh, you were on Tendi's
Rob: I was with Tendi.
I didn't think he deserved when he just flipped and went, Oh, of
course you'd be a great captain.
Yeah, you do that.
I'm going, No, Rutherford you've been a dick this whole time.
Um, and kind of takes away from
Kevin: Take a hint.
Rob: Yeah.
And also
Kevin: that your friend is, you know, taking this seriously.
You shouldn't need her to spell it out.
Rob: The whole process of, uh, a holodeck within this universe,
no matter how artificial it is, everyone takes it seriously.
So that case of Rutherford so leaning into, you know, let's steal the Australian
punk's outfit and steal his pants.
Saying really corny lines when the doctor hologram dies and all that type of stuff.
Rubbed me up the wrong way.
I dunno why.
I dunno.
I've watched the episode twice and it's, and it solidified
for me, that type of stuff.
I don't know why this episode in particular, cuz I didn't think
it did anything outside of the usual references and stuff.
Maybe it felt because they'd already done it before, uh, sort of like felt
a bit more hamfisted as opposed to some more seamless ways of doing it.
Kevin: Something I noted was the things that made me laugh the
loudest this episode were less funny lines and more sight gags.
The stepping over the black letter box in order to exit the holodeck because there
was a movie going on on the holodeck.
When you watch it the second time, You realize they telegraph that by
when Boimler leaves, he, the letter box is out of frame, so you don't
see the gag, but as he leaves, he kind of looks down and goes, Whoop.
And, and it is not explained until later what that was.
So just that little attention to detail delighted me to the
point of laughing out loud.
The other one that really got me was when they were watching the Star Trek II
computer simulation of what the McGuffin was gonna do, the, the side bars that
were there to make it wide screen were the exact same side bars that we get in
Star Trek II we're watching the Genesis probe simulation, uh, on Regula I.
So yeah, just the moment it cut to that and the sidebars were
there, I laughed and laughed.
Um, but I don't know if that, the fact that those were the
laugh points to me meant that the episode was less funny in the text.
Uh, or, or if it was just exploring another kind of comedy.
I felt like the characters were playing a lot more earnest, this
Rob: Boimler especially.
It was interesting to see Boimler in such a defeated, state of mind and it was
nice to see Mariner be so sympathetic.
Instantly supportive and always played that whole hurt thing.
There wasn't that really, I didn't get a sense of there
being this antagonistic thing.
Mariner's there going, What?
What's going on?
And so when she instantly finds out, they're just, there
going nup Let's, let's do this.
So I really appreciated that.
Um, but yeah, to, to quote The Castle, it was the vibe maybe just
was— Maybe I'm still riding on the highs of, uh, of Deep Space Nine.
Kevin: The go back in time and assassinate Kennedy thing was another
reference to not something that happened in Star Trek, but something that
happened off screen around Star Trek.
That was the, one of the original pitches for Star Trek II by Gene
Roddenberry was we would make an uh, movie in which the, the climax was
Spock having to be the shooter on the grassy knoll taking out Kennedy.
Uh, and everyone thought that was a ridiculous and terrible
idea and it did not get made.
Rob: Well, there's a, um, a famous episode, uh, for me,
it's the only good episode.
It's the first episode of, um, the much marginalized season seven of Red
Dwarf, a great, uh, comedy, another great comedy, uh, sci-fi show where they
come back after, uh, six, seven years off the air with, uh, ticket to Ride.
Um, and, uh, the final sequence is, uh, JFK has to go back and shoot himself.
Kevin: I feel like I watched that, but I have no memory of it.
Rob: Yeah, It's, it's, it's the only, for me, it's the only good episode in
season seven, which is a lot of hard work.
Kevin: Uh, I feel like I would be remiss my journalistic duties if I
didn't ask you for a verdict on the Australian accents in Sydney, 1982.
Rob: I was actually quite happy with the Australian accents.
They were actually quite good, putting them as punks, uh, I do that in inverted
commas uh, gives you a bit more leeway so you can be a bit broader with the accent.
So, um, so it did come across as a harsh bogan esque type of accent.
But, uh, yeah, not even the thrill of going, Oh, we're
finally in Australia in Star Trek.
We got close, where Tom Paris is in New Zealand.
Um, but, yeah, the accent was okay.
It was all right.
They only, they, they mercifully only gave them like two lines or something.
Kevin: Yeah.
All right, so let's deal with the, the rug pull of it all, that the, the
emotional heart of this episode was Boimler finding out his transporter clone
had, had died for no reason, suffocated by Neurocine Gas in his quarters.
And, uh, the reveal at the end of the episode is that he is actually
alive, that this was a, faked death so that he could join Section 31.
Rob: It isn't the Defiant, right?
It's a similar model designed to the Defiant.
Kevin: I suspect we are yet to find out.
But, uh, the, Defiant class ship is certainly an echo of the last time
a transporter clone went rogue.
And Thomas Riker in Deep Space Nine returns and hijacks the Defiant
in the episode titled Defiant.
Uh, so yeah, it's, it's all there.
Um, I just, I guess I'm feeling like reserving judgment to see
what they're gonna do with it.
But I have to say my hopes are not super high.
Like I, I think I've had enough of Section 31 and, um, the prospects of a
Section 31 based show do not have me super
Rob: They were, they were trying to do that, weren't they, as
like a spinoff from Discovery.
Kevin: Promise is Georgiou, the reason she has, she went forward in time
and now has been sent back in time is that she is going back in time
in order to be the lead in a Section 31 show set where she came from.
But, uh, yeah, I don't know.
Rob: Giving us the show that, that none of us wanted.
Kevin: What if Starfleet was terrible?
Rob: We can just watch Picard for that.
Kevin: Okay.
Rob: Or Discovery season one.
Kevin: Yeah.
Well, we'll see.
We'll see.
But uh, it did lead you to suggest that our topic for today could be times
characters seemed to die but didn't.
Rob: Yes.
And leads into the broader spectrum like we mentioned, of whether, you
know, whether this return in some way, shape, or form lessens the impact of
their, their passing to begin with, and ultimately, what's the frigging point?
Kevin: I feel like we need to start and at the obvious place,
which is Spock in Star Trek II.
Rob: Yes.
Good choice.
That is a, a good starting point because, you know, his, his sacrifice at the
end, which is, set up so beautifully with the, the mantra that is sticking
with Star Trek to this day, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of
the one, he put his, uh, mantra into practice by, uh, sacrificing himself so,
the crew of the Enterprise could live.
And an incredible death scene where you just see the sheer brilliance of,
um, Shatner and um, Nimoy at work.
Kevin: Lovely moments for, for Scotty as well.
He's dead already.
Just colors of those characters that we never saw any other time.
Rob: Of them holding him, the, him and, uh, McCoy holding him back.
Yeah.
Incredible.
Kevin: I have this in my hand here, this book called The 50 Year
Mission, the complete, uncensored, unauthorized, oral history of Star Trek.
And I went looking for the section on Spock's resurrection, and I'll just read
two quotes, both by William Shatner.
The first is,
"I don't know whether the Star Trek series could have gone on without Spock.
It certainly would've been different and probably not as good.
The Spock-Kirk interrelationship is really the key to so much for
the way the stories are told."
On the one hand, lovely to hear the acknowledgement from, from the lead
that Spock was a necessary element.
Rob: Why do I feel there's gonna be a big but around the corner?
Kevin: Also by William Shatner in a completely separate interview, I gather,
"Bringing back someone from the dead loses validity.
I think that as a dramatic device, a time warp does the same thing for me.
To go back in time is to rob you of the essential jeopardy.
It should be life and death, and if it's death, it should be death."
Rob: Oh, the many layers of William Shatner.
Kevin: Yeah.
I mean, what ends up on screen in Star Trek II is an ending that I think walks
the line so deftly that if you are, if you don't know what's coming, you will
watch it and you will feel the death.
You will feel the loss.
You will cry with Spock's crewmates for his passing and believe he's gone.
But, once you watch Star Trek III or once you're told what's about to happen next,
you go back and all the signs are there.
Rob: Remember.
Kevin: The lore of of the franchise tells a different story, but when you
look at what's actually on screen, we have the very prominent quote
to Saavik, who has experienced the Kobayashi Maru, Spock saying there are
always dot, dot, dot possibilities.
Um, the Remember moment of course, which I was reminded last week with Jason who
talked about the season three episode Requiem for Methuselah, in which Spock
wipes Kirk's mind of the painful memories of his girlfriend by saying, Forget.
He, he does a mind meld and says, Forget.
And here in Star Trek II it's played the opposite.
Remember.
Uh, which is a beautiful mirror.
And then the final moments after they send the photon torpedo down to
the planet with Spock's body in it.
There are lines, he's not really dead as long as we remember him, says McCoy.
And, uh, I believe the final monologue from Kirk saying, If
Genesis is indeed life from death, I must return to this place again.
It feels almost on the nose how clear it is that they're bringing him back.
Once you know it is
Rob: Yeah.
It ends on hope.
After losing his best friend, after one of my favorite sections in any movie,
let alone just a sci-fi movie when earlier in the film, you know, Kirk is
there at the bottom of, of, of the rung.
And um, uh, Carol Marcus asks how he feels and he goes, You know, there's
a man out there who I haven't seen in decades trying to kill me, a
son that I never even knew I had.
Old, I feel so old, worn out.
And then at the end of the film, after all this, you've got, you know, Carol Marcus.
You've got McCoy, you've got McCoy, grinning like a Cheshire cat.
Kevin: It's so weird when you think Spock is dead.
You're like, Why are you also cheerful?
Rob: And then Kirk says the line, Young, I feel young.
It's, it's, it's clearly setting up.
You know, do not mourn.
We are leading towards hope.
And for me, the death of Spock and his redemption is hard fought and
that type of stuff I'm on board with.
It's not, it's like, like I said, we had to go through the hell of Star
Trek III that I won't watch again.
Kirk had to lose so much.
He lost his ship.
He lost his, we find out later, he lost his respect within Federation,
but he loses his admiralcy, and he lost, most important of all, his son.
He lost everything that was important to him, everything that made him who
he was, just to get his friend back.
And as he said, and they bring it all back with, you know, um, where Spock
says to him, Why would you do this?
And he flips it around and goes, Cuz the needs of the one
outweigh the needs of the many.
And you just go, and then that carries on, you know, he has to go through
two films and to get himself at a point where Spock is back to himself.
So he's going through his own healing process and finding his
personality again through Star Trek IV, which is a wonderful thing.
He, the humor of it and the drama of it, and it's always that heartbreaking
thing when Spock is emotionally distant, like in Star Trek The Motion Picture.
It isn't until like he goes and mind melds with V'Ger and he's smiling
and he looks at him and looks at the captain and just goes, Jim, you know.
You love those moments where, because Nimoy was such an incredible actor,
when you get him back to accepting that humanity, um, yeah, it's not like
a quick fix and ooh he's back, now.
You know, Kirk especially who made that choice, lost everything
and it's so heartbreaking.
Kevin: So you're saying.
As someone who famously despises Star Trek III, the resurrection of
Spock is not the reason for that.
That is something that you feel like they did well.
Rob: Yes, the fact that it wasn't an easy thing and the fact that they took so much
away from Kirk and he like, because again, he was sort of like, in many ways the,
the superhero that no one could touch him.
Kind of one of the reasons why I was so annoyed with Mariner
at the start of Lower Decks.
You know, nothing, you know, nothing would, would fix itself to, to Kirk.
So to have Kirk.
You know, do his usual rebellious thing.
You know The word sir?
The word is no.
Therefore I'm going anyway.
Um, but then you go, Okay, no, no, no.
This has consequences.
Real consequences.
You want your best friend back?
You are gonna lose your ship, you're gonna lose your position,
you're gonna lose your respect.
You are gonna lose your son, and you have to go.
All that hell plus go back through time, find humpback whales,
bring them back, face trial.
You have to go through two movies of hell so that you have your friend
back to the position where they were, you know, two movies ago.
It's that type of balance.
I, I, I can get on board with.
Kevin: It doesn't rob death of its stakes in the Star Trek universe either.
It's not a question of, Oh, we, well, we figured out how to bring Spock back.
Now no one has to die.
Rob: Exactly it.
It, no, it's not just,
Kevin: It's not a repeatable, uh, formula.
Rob: Exactly.
And it gives, and for me, in many ways, it gives that death more weight
because, Kirk and the others had to sacrifice so much more to get him back.
So they'd lost more, really, than they had gained.
They get their friend back, but there's a lot that, you know, sure
they get a replacement Enterprise, but nothing can replace David.
So, yeah, that's a good one to start off with.
Cuz for me, I'm okay with that because it's two movies of hell that he has to
get through to, to get to that position where he's on a ship as captain with
his, with his, uh, number one back.
Kevin: Instead of going in chronological order, I'm gonna suggest, because
we've started with what is perhaps the best death and resurrection in
Star Trek, is there something that is anywhere near that in terms of the,
the level of execution, the level of storytelling, how well it is done?
Rob: Look, to be honest, to be honest with you, Kevin, no.
Cuz the ones I've been putting down, I've been kind of have kind of shit me.
So you,
Kevin: So we're jumping straight to the shit list.
Rob: Is there any more that you can think of that matches that type of
Kevin: Not, not really.
Uh, me neither.
Here's, let's just go back and forth naming characters and
we'll see who runs out first.
I'm gonna go Philippa Georgiou.
Rob: Georgiou, okay, I didn't have Georgiou.
I went a big, I went Data.
Kevin: Data.
Got it.
on my list.
Um, Hugh Culber.
Rob: Yes, Yes.
Yeah.
That was hard fought and, and having to go into spores
dimensions and stuff like that.
Yeah.
And then, and then ages of not recognizing.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, I got, well, Tasha Yar.
Kevin: Oh good.
Yes.
You had mentioned Tasha the other week and I had forgotten about her.
She sorta comes back
Rob: Alternate version.
And then, uh, a Romulan
Kevin: on.
Rob: Yes.
Kevin: Yeah.
Elnor.
Rob: Yes.
Yeah.
I had Morn.
Kevin: Morn?
I forgot Morn died.
How did
Rob: Morn died.
He just like faked his own death and then just came back.
Kevin: Of course he faked his death.
I forgot about that.
Uh, Jean-Luc Picard.
Rob: Yep.
That was a big one for me.
Jean-Luc Picard.
At the end of season one, I was sort of like putting all the good will
I can into season one of Picard.
And it just went lower and lower and lower in my expectations, but
I kept on going, It's still good.
It's, and, and by the last episode I went, That's it.
I've given you everything Picard.
And now you just go, and now he's a robot.
Hooray.
Kevin: Uh, obviously Shaxs.
Rob: Of course, yes.
Shaxs died and nobody's talking about it.
Or when somebody does want to bring it up, Shaxs then, you know, gets angry.
Kevin: You know, it is intended as a joke.
I doubt it will ever be referenced again in star Trek canon But the joke they are
making is that there are, um, dark arts at work in Starfleet where they can bring
people back from the dead when they wish.
Uh, and the less you ask about it, the better for your sanity.
But that seems to me as like the ultimate end game here, and this is
why Lower Decks does it this way, is that if death is reduced to a minor
inconvenience and can be reversed, offscreen, without explanation, then
there are no stakes to a death onscreen.
Rob: Exactly.
And like in, like even in Star Trek The Motion Picture, when we have the
horrifying transporter disaster, um, they are horrified for about 30 seconds.
But then, Oh, okay, well that gives way for another Vulcan to get on the ship.
And you're going, Oh, that's uh, that's a.
Kevin: We're back to the red shirt problem, Rob.
Rob: Yeah, exactly.
Kevin: I, uh, I kind of want to judge these by their weight, like regardless
of, of whether the ultimate return robbed the death of its weight, which
I think in many slash most cases here it does, in the moment when the
character died, did you feel the death,
Rob: Cool.
Kevin: is an interesting question.
Rob: Uh, let's start with like Data, because Data for me, Data's
death I do in inverted commas in Nemesis, doesn't seem earnt.
It seems like they're trying to recreate a, um, a Spock moment,
like literally trying to do that.
Um, and Brent Spiner is sort of like flexing his muscles a bit going, well
if Nimoy could do it a couple of decades ago, um, I'll do the same flexing.
Kill me off.
Kevin: Yeah.
This is a category for me, I think, is that regrettable deaths, that that they
were written, I'm gonna say cheaply, that's the word I'm gonna use today.
And that the audience sort of rejected it.
And the writers ultimately had to find a way to backtrack it and create an
honorable end for the character or an honorable future for the character.
Hugh Culber falls into this category for me as well.
Shock death on screen, uh, used for impact that I can only read as the
writers assuming the character was disposable and that the audience was
not emotionally attached to them, so they could use it as a tool where
the point was the impact it would have on Stamets in the, in the series
Rob: Especially with Hugh's passing, uh, with a lot of issues within
Discovery's first season for me, is that they were infusing so many of
these modern elements of television storytelling, with these shock deaths
and violence and gore and stuff that has become commonplace with shows like
Game of Thrones and stuff like that.
So it seemed out of place.
And so therefore the audience rejected even more.
Same with the swearing and issues like that in Picard.
Um, there seems to be that type of rejection of that type of
bold, cruel type of, uh, death.
And there, cruelty and death.
See, I've talked about a lot in Star Trek III, but there's that
build up to it as opposed to just a sudden do it for the shock of it.
Kevin: Another category of death that I'm gonna suggest here, death and return, is
the, uh, having your cake and eating it too death, which is that I think death—
In pop culture stories at the moment, death is becoming increasingly like the
one thing that an audience will feel.
Especially in a science fiction universe where so much is possible and like
injury can be reversed almost without, uh, limits and that these characters
are nearly superhuman, the idea that they meet their death is, almost the
only thing you can do to a character that an audience will respond to in
feeling as it is an irreversible moment.
Um, it is the, in some ways, it's the only stakes that we have left
in a universe where technology makes anything else possible.
Rob: Yeah.
And in other shows they do it through magic.
A weird thing, a lot of these genre based shows are defined by death.
Like your Walking Dead stuff was all about which characters are getting
killed off and how high the regular body count is so you can't attach yourself.
Kevin: Yeah.
And I think at least a couple of times that I can think of, Star Trek wanted
to have its cake and eat it too.
They wanted to try to use a death to provoke an emotional reaction in
an audience, but immediately reverse it because the show felt like it
couldn't get away with that death.
So the two I'm thinking of are Picard and Elnor, most recently, where the entire
season of Picard is built around the idea that Picard is, you know, meeting his end.
He discovers he has a ticking time bomb in his brain.
It's this long promised defect that is finally going to catch up with him and
he's gonna die at the end of the season.
So he is taking one last ride and this season ends with, He dies.
Ah, it's so sad, isn't it?
Please cry.
Okay.
Are you done crying?
Great.
Now we're bringing him back right away.
Rob: Because we've got two more seasons to do.
We promised this, okay.
You know?
Yeah.
We're not gonna, we're not gonna just do one season with Patrick
Stewart playing this role.
We've got money to make.
Come on, we've got
Kevin: It literally felt like they had him step off the set for 30 seconds so that
we could all have the moment of the death.
And then he is like, Okay, great.
We're done with that.
I'm back now.
Elnor is likewise, I, I mean it's a bit more of a long running thing, but they
go into the parallel universe, Elnor dies and Raffi is broken up about it.
And if anything works about Elnor's death, it is the character
journey that it takes Raffi on.
But I don't think anyone bought that Elnor was dead.
Certainly if they had killed him, it would be like, what the heck
was the point of that character?
He sat in the wings of season one, got nothing to do except one cool sword
fight and then they brought him back for season two and immediately killed him.
Great.
Rob: Thanks guys.
Thanks so much.
That's great.
Giving work to an Aussie guy, but then put him on the sideline.
Kevin: So they bring him back briefly as a, as a hologram.
And at that point, for me, the writing was on the wall.
It was, Okay, cool.
The actor's still in it.
He's definitely coming back.
They just first story purposes needed to create an emotional journey for
Raffi here, and unfortunately, his part in the season suffered because of it.
But when he appeared on the viewscreen in the final episode, it was like, yep.
There that is.
It was not, Oh my God, he's alive.
So again, I'm gonna say just like Picard, it was a death that was almost
preemptively reversed, uh, so that it didn't really carry any weight to begin
Rob: No, and especially like, cuz they invested so much at the
start about like the loss of.
You know, the Romulan planet and the weight of that.
And it's so much so that it caused Picard to leave the Federation.
So this type of weight of sort of like this harshness was being brought in.
But there's no real consequences for that.
So, Yes.
Kevin: People from our list that we haven't talked about, Georgiou and Yar.
Do they have anything in common for you or are they different deaths?
Rob: Yeah, well, with Tasha Yar it was that case of like, like I said,
that was the big thing that turned me off, uh, Next Gen cuz I was so
invested in her as a character.
Kevin: And I'll be honest, it was, she was so briefly in it, like the original
Georgiou is only in it for the first two episodes of Discovery, and she was
there to be killed, uh, in order to, to launch Burnham on her journey, it seems.
But I loved Georgiou as a captain.
I loved the Shenzhou as a ship so much that, uh, when the Discovery finally
turned up in episode three, I was, I was almost disappointed that we weren't
going to get that series on the Shenzhou.
Rob: I mean, there's, for me, issues with, uh, Discovery one is like spending
far too much time in the mirror universe.
So they had that excuse to really lean into the violence and the,
the shock value of killing off characters and stuff like that.
And so bringing in that new version of, Michelle Yeoh's character to
show her range as a performer and how incredibly good she is at playing
evil as well as as well as good.
And then that arc of her redemption in season two.
Kevin: That does echo Yar.
Yar does not exactly come back.
Just like Captain Philippa Georgiou does not exactly come back.
The actor comes back to play an echo of that character with a very different tone.
And it's the same with Sela, Yar's uh, we'll say daughter.
Rob: Yes,
Kevin: Half Romulan daughter.
Yeah.
Except that Sela is not redeemed.
She is ultimately undone as a villain,
Rob: It's a lot like, um, it's a lot like Dax as well.
Like we lose Jadzia and we gain Ezri but, um, but it, Ezri is a whole new character.
And that's a whole arc at the start of season seven of Deep Space Nine of
what this means to have the person back with the memories, but a new person
in that inhabiting that body as well.
Kevin: Hmm.
Anyway, many deaths, several categories.
Ultimately, none of them as good as Spock and, uh, I, I don't know about you.
I wish they would find some new stories to tell other than which of our
characters are we going to kill this season and shock you in the process.
Rob: It is interesting, you know, because we are coming up to, uh, 60
years of Star Trek, and you do get to that point of going, if you are
revisiting plot points or arcs that have been done before, are you limiting
yourself from the potential of what this franchise can do and what the original,
you know, statement of intention was?
And I'm definitely feel as if they're hamstrung by what they believe
audiences want Star Trek to be, as opposed to what it actually is.
Kevin: Because I do love to give our listeners old episodes to go back
and watch, this one definitely does not fit the brief, but it almost did.
This is Star Trek: The Next Generation season seven, episode 15, Lower Decks, the
name sake of our new series here today.
I think because Lower Decks the comedy is so comedic, this episode, I
remembered it as a comedy, but it is not.
It is a drama, but it's told with the same building blocks of this new series,
where it is a story of some of the junior officers on board the Enterprise
and how in their jobs they occasionally cross paths with the command crew.
They get glimpses of a story that's going on off screen, but they don't get
the whole story and they gossip about it and they draw their own conclusions, and
some of those conclusions end up wrong.
The reason I bring up this episode today is because it also ends
in the death of a character.
One of our lower decks crew, Sito Jaxa, in this episode— She's a return
character from a previous episode of The Next Generation called The First Duty.
Uh, and that's when Wesley Crusher is at the Academy and
is involved in a scandalous cover up of a training accident.
Picard in this episode, chastises Jaxa, calls her into his ready room and
basically tears her a new one and says, I don't know how you got on board my ship.
I don't have traitors on my ship and you're never gonna amount to anything.
And ultimately the character picks herself up and she tells off the captain and
says, It's not fair what you did to me.
And it was a test.
It was a test.
Captain Picard was trying to see whether she had the metal to go
on this dangerous mission to, uh, escort a Cardassian defector, who's
returning to Cardassian space as a spy.
She was posing, she's to pose as his Bajoran captive.
And she goes off on that secret, covert mission and dies.
And her lower decks crewmates never really fully understand what happened to her.
Although Lavelle is pretty sure he got a promotion because she died.
It is a heartbreaking, dramatic episode and it ends in the, death
of a crew member that we feel.
Going to the behind the scenes stuff here, I found a quote.
In early drafts of the script, Sito Jaxa's death was somewhat more ambiguous.
Jeri Taylor, uh, said, When I mentioned that to Michael Pillar,
who was running the show at the time, he said, Absolutely not.
She's dead.
She stays dead.
That would undermine the whole episode.
So there you go.
They do know how to do, a meaningful death on Star Trek, or at least they used to.
Rob: And, uh, in the exact opposite to that, I recommend an episode
I previously mentioned that, you know, shows that death means nothing
when you have who Mourns for Morn.
Deep Space Nine season six, episode 12, where they do a whole episode mourning the
loss of a character that we hardly knew.
Finding out so much more about him and then he just shows up at the end.
The quintessential, what was the frigging point of that entire episode?
Kevin: Indeed.
Well, thank you for, uh, for the stroll through the graveyard.
Uh, with me there, Rob.
Rob: Oh, look, thank you for having me back.
You know, it's, uh, I'm, I'm,
Kevin: Were you worried?
I wouldn't.
Rob: You know, the, the, the ego of a podcaster is a very fragile thing.