Antimatter Pod

Discovery season 3 might be Voyager 2.0, but it still only takes them three episodes to get home to Earth. Downside: turns out you can't go home again.

Anika and Liz discuss:

• the narrative language of Star Trek
• Michael's year on her own
• Adira: Wesley Crusher but make them non-binary
• Pronouns!
• Earth's moral failure in the face of a crisis
• hugging CGI trees
• capslocking about Keyla, or, Discovery has a problematic history with trauma stories and we want them to do better this time

Check out antimatterpod.tumblr.com for more detailed show notes!

Like season 3 of Discovery, Liz and Anika are a little bit delayed but totally worth the wait. We hope!

We're discussing the first two episodes of Discovery's third season: "That Hope Is You" and "Far From Home". And, along the way, we talk about...

• Grudge, a good catte
• Cleveland "Book" Booker, a Jedi and a Disney princess
• Aditya Sahil, the bureaucrat who waited
• We ... kind of maybe don't care about the Burn, except to the extent we've decided it's Jonathan Archer's fault
• Nhan/Georgiou: we ship it
• The breakup of Yugoslavia (it's relevant!)
• Westerns, and characters who don't know the genre of their story

 

Liz and Anika revisit "Balance of Terror" and "The Enterprise Incident" -- the only two TOS episodes to feature the Romulans on screen. 

We discuss: 

• parallels and contrasts
• honour, duty and espionage
• Romulan fashion
• why do we like the Lenard Commander so much when he killed so many people? 

And more!

We take a deep dive into episode 8 of Enterprise's third season: "Twilight", and discuss: 

• how much we love this episode (A LOT)
• we kind of maybe ship T'Pol/Archer here
• Rosemary's Baby, feminism and psychological horror
• the fascinating things this episode does with gender
• storytelling through costume, hair and make-up
• the destructions of Earth and Romulus
• it turns out that JJ Abrams is a hack????

It's the episode where we ask, um, are we meant to find Phlox attractive here? Because, wow, baby!

Halfway through its first season, Liz and Anika revisit Lower Decks. Spoilers, we still like it! BUT...

• it really is awfully heterosexual
• and isn't it weird how, out of all the modern Trek series, only one actively pursues queer representation and the others just fall into a heteronormative default?
• is the solution ... a letter-writing campaign???

But also!

• this is still a Beckett Mariner stan podcast
• is Boimler ... you know, that type of fan?
• the Lower Decks characters and classic Mary Sue types

Anika and Liz select characters, concepts and ideas which, if copyright law didn't exist (and also they controlled Star Trek, which, for some reason, they still don't), they would bring into the Trek universe. We're talking about...

• the value of retelling stories
• Star Trek: SVU
• a Tal Shiar Red Room (the Black Widow kind, not the Twin Peaks kind, but Liz is actually thinking of Amazon Prime's Hanna)
• Star Trek: Scandal
• Daria Morgendorffer on the USS Cerritos
• Beastars, whose anthropomorphic animals would be equally at home on Deep Space 9 or the Cerritos 
• Miles Vorkosigan (and an accompanying rant about the depiction of Little People in Trek, and also fandom ableism)
• Bella Swann BUT IN SPACE
• does Starfleet need more cannibals?
• what do Cardassians taste like? 

It's the episode where we reject wholesale the end of Rogue One!

Hey, remember two weeks ago, when we were like, "Well, maybe Star Trek: Lower Decks won't be for us, and that's okay." 

SPOILERS: WE LOVED IT. 

• This is now a Beckett Mariner stan podcast
• We want to know a lot more about Rutherford and his prosthesis
• (Attention mad scientists: if you need a test subject, Anika volunteers)
• Corridor bunks? Corridor bunks!
• Liz has a pitch for the season finale
• Tendi: Is she fanon!Gaila? 
• Boimler: He is definitely a character who exists

Anika and Liz discuss the news out of this year's virtual San Diego Comic Con. And ... there's not much of it! 

• We understand the reasons, but we're still disappointed at the lack of release date for season 3 of Discovery (three days later: 15 October!)
• We're keen for Star Trek: Prodigy
• Maybe Star Trek: Lower Decks won't be for us ... and that's okay!
• The All The Star Trek Ladies panel, which has some tie-in novel news we found very exciting

And, in the spirit of our traditional digressions, we also talk about Hanna (the movie and the Amazon Prime series); Star Wars: The Clone Wars; Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN by Susanne Daniels and Cynthia Littleton (a book whose title Liz has been misremembering since 2007); and Mo Ryan's Vanity Fair piece "'This Was Abuse': The Fall of a CBS Showrunner".

 

It's almost unheard of for a network to reject a pilot, only to request a new one. But Star Trek always was a bit special. Anika and Liz are here to discuss "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second -- and successful -- Star Trek pilot. And we have to ask -- is this real Star Trek, or just a generic action-adventure story wearing a Starfleet uniform, a shameless money grab, a blatant jumping of the shark? 

• But seriously, this is a strangely violent and callous episode!
• Anika points out the ways it revisits ideas from "The Cage"
• Gary Mitchell is THE WORST; he's also, essentially, fanon!Kirk
• #ElizabethDehnerDeservedBetter
• Anika's paean to Chris Pine, The Best Kirk
• Was Tilly at the Academy with Kirk and Mitchell? (Yes.)
• Is this all an elaborate plot by Spock to replace Gary Mitchell as Kirk's BFF? (Also yes.)
• Can we make this decades-old episode all about Admiral Cornwell? (Absolutely.)

It's our 50th episode! And we're celebrating with silliness: we've come up with 25 questions each, and given the other 60 seconds to consider important issues like: 

• why does Anika blame Jonathan Archer for everything that's wrong with the Federation?
• can Liz narrow down a single favourite violation of the Prime Directive?
• whisky-flavoured chewing gum: yes or no?

And that barely scrapes the surface!