Antimatter Pod

134. Android Butt (TNG 1.13)

"Hey, someone left a naked disassembled android lying around! We should definitely rebuild him!" Anika and Liz, minus their evil twins, discuss "Datalore" … with some Picard spoilers along the way. 

• Skip to 00:49 to avoid the big spoiler and also Liz singing
• (Liz actually pronounces French words even worse than she sings, so, um, apologies to France)
• "I apologise to everyone for comparing Beverly Crusher to Darth Vader, however…"
• This is an episode about family, and not just the Soongs
• Breaking down the "Shut up, Wesley" scene
• Picard spoilers from 26:03 to 26:15
• And again from 27:05 to 27:32
• If you are a Wil Wheaton who was forced to participate in the "Shut up, Wesley" scene, you may be entitled to compensation
• But seriously, fandom's treatment of Wil was NOT OKAY and it's alarming how little has changed (from alt.wesley.die.die.die to Facebook comments complaining that Bella Ramsey isn't playing a sexy 14 year old)
• Very, very mild spoilers for Picard from 41:49 to 42:11
• Bigger spoilers from 45:06 to 50:24
• "It's almost like they can't understand women as something that are unrelated to men." THIS APPLIES TO EVERY ERA OF STAR TREK (except Discovery)
• "I mean, just because something is bad doesn't mean you can't love it. We're Voyager fans!"
• #SynthIntensifies

Extra credits: this episode uses a drop created by Adam Ragusea for The Greatest Generation (go listen), and portions of compositions by Ron Jones. We're calling it fair use since we were discussing those pieces.

133. Fandom Unicorns

It's Valentine's Day! Or close enough. Anika and Liz settle in with chocolate, champagne and a list of their favourite OTPs. And OT3s. And … look, we have so many ships, we're practically a navy. 

• Picard/Crusher: our first OTP
• Gwyn/Dal: #OTPCatboots
• Fifty years and all it took to make Anika ship Spock/Chapel was letting Christine have a personality
• Anika's favourite Star Trek rarepair will SHOCK and SCANDALIZE 
• Janeway/Kashyk shippers: there were dozens of us in 2000!
• Has Janeway/Paris become a rarepair? That's definitely not going to stop Anika from shipping it! (We respectfully disagree with this essay.)
• Janeway/Chakotay: Liz knows she shouldn't ship it but she cannot stop
• "Speaking of war crimes…" (Or, how to segue into Cornwell/Lorca)
• Anika has a LOT of femslash OTPs
• Janeway/Seven has gotten more complicated now we're adults
• Sometimes, shipping problematic things is … good
• Vulcan polyamory is logical
• Big shout out to the Captain Georgiou/Commodore Paris shippers
• Please go and read Anika's Palpatine-as-the-sex-candle-ghost fic, it's so much better than the premise deserved
• We can ship Kathryn Janeway with everyone, and we will ship Kathryn Janeway with everyone
• (We will also ship Katrina Cornwell with most people and we are not sorry)

132. In A Hole (TNG 1.21)

Anika and Liz get chased by some drones, fall down a hall, and take the opportunity to discuss the first season TNG episode "The Arsenal of Freedom"...

• For a first season TNG episode, this is … not bad at all
• Is season 1 of TNG really season 4 of TOS?
• TNG went all-in on the anticapitalism in season 1 (it's just a shame they brought the antisemitism along for the ride)
• Riker's whole job is to keep Picard out of danger. He's gone for LESS THAN AN HOUR and Picard is beaming himself down to the death planet.
• hurt/comfort dynamics
• Beverly, that's not how xenobotany works
• Tasha was killed off just as they were figuring out how to write her
• Deanna Troi singlehandedly invented the "let's stop in the middle of a crisis to talk about your feelings" scene
• Is Logan the worst chief engineer of every single Enterprise ever? Yes!
• "The Beverly that came back isn't the same as the Beverly that left."
• (Yes, it's because no one was left in the writers room from season 1, but LET'S SPECULATE WILDLY REGARDLESS)

131. Fortune Cookie Therapy

Anika and Liz don their blue shirts and do a deep dive into depictions of depression in Star Trek. (Please note this includes discussions of suicide and self-harm.) 

• The early years: 
  • Dr Elizabeth Dehner
  • Badmirals
  • Spock's stories can be a metaphor for a lot of things, but the emotional repression to depression pipeline is definitely one of them
  • (Anika has a whole THING about The Motion Picture and Spock's arc, it's amazing)
• The 90s: 
  • A counsellor on the bridge
  • Stories that are explicitly about mental health
  • Lwaxana Troi
    
  • Sometimes the problem is not the depiction in the series, but the (ableist) reaction of fans
  • Anika presents a very strong argument for B'Elanna having an anxiety disorder
• Post 9/11 (ENT and the Kelvinverse films)
  • Liz says T'Pol was the first female Vulcan character when clearly she meant first female Vulcan regular, don't @ us
  • ENT reverts to a very masculine type of story: men deal with feelings through avoidance and sex, while T'Pol is literally too emotional
  • ENT and the AOS era: a time of magical healing vaginas as substitute for mental health care
• The Trek Renaissance
  • Discovery and Picard tell explicit stories about mental health, with varying levels of success
  • Prodigy and Lower Decks tell implicit stories
  • SNW takes us back to the manly man stories of the ENT era
• Harmful and helpful depictions
  • fandom ableism
  • Liz has an UNPOPULAR OPINION about the depiction of Seven in Picard
  • "I'm gonna say something mean about Katrina Cornwell."

Specific episodes we talk about include:

• "The Loss" (TNG)
  
• "Dark Page" (TNG)
  
• "Emissary" (DS9)
  
• "It's Only A Paper Moon" (DS9)
  
• "Night" (VOY)
  
• "Extreme Risk" (VOY)
  

130. Adopt, Don’t Shop (Prodigy 1.19 and 1.20)

Anika and Liz replicate a shuttle without seats and settle in to discuss the two-part finale of Star Trek: Prodigy's first season…

• Prodigy loves a Vulcan/Tellarite/Andorian trio
• COMMUNICATION is THE THEME
• Holo Janeway fulfills the dream of all Janeways everywhere
• Gwyn's big hero moment
• ALSO the Dal/Gwyn, we have been shipping it since episode one and we feel VERY GOOD about everything!
• Everyone should get a puppy (but especially Rok-Tahk)
• No offence but Zero looks like an iPod now
• What next for season 2?

129. Classic Hijinks (Prodigy 1.17 and 1.18)

Anika and Liz swap bodies and invade some holonovels as we discuss the Star Trek: Prodigy episodes "Ghost in the Machine" and "Mindwalk". And along the way, we touch on...

• Into the holo-verse
• Where is the Zero-as-Dixon-Hill story we need and deserve?
• Jankom Pog is NOT OKAY and we're into that
• Seriously, just a few weeks ago, we were like, "Jankom is the flattest character?" HOW WRONG WE WERE
• Murf. Just. Murf. What?
• It is OUTRAGEOUS that Paramount hasn't released Delta Heart: Magical Veterinarian as a phone game
• We do not dislike Dal's pirate game, but it doesn't really tell us anything new about him
• Liz is here to ship Control/The Living Construct. And also Zora/The Living Construct. Enemies to lovers but make it AI.
• Any time you can put Kate Mulgrew in a scene with herself, you get something good

128. F*ck Yoda (Prodigy 1.15 and 1.16)

Anika and Liz replicate some coffee, put on some classical music, and get into some backstory. And along the way, we discuss...

• Good news, Dal! We know who your family is! Bad news, they're the worst people in the galaxy. I'm sorry. You're a Soong.
• We continue to respectfully fangirl Aaron Waltke
• It's never too soon to introduce your children to bioethics
• Rok-Tahk is the anti Toph Beifong
• The Tellarites just took a DISABLED ORPHAN and THREW HIM INTO SPACE we are NOT OKAY and neither is Jankom Pog
• Now as much as in the '90s, the Kazon deserve better
• Like many people raised by abusive parents, Gwyn is incredibly aware of the emotional state of everyone around her
• IT'S JUST HEARTBREAK ALL THE WAY DOWN
• The Diviner: a bad person, should be stopped
• The Vindicator: she can have anything she wants, we support her
• (We ship it)
• We have a new theory about what Chakotay is doing, and if we're right (sometimes we're right!) it could justify his whole presence in the show and maybe even redeem the character from decades of racist writing

127a. Baby Yoda Lettuce (an Antimatter Pod mini)

Due to real life shenanigans (Thanksgiving, a state election), Anika and Liz were unable to record last weekend. But here's a mini-ep we prepared earlier - a long rant about the state of Star Trek merchandising that was cut for time/relevance from our last full ep.

Topics include:

• Disney knows when to merchandise a series, and more important, when not to merchandise it
• Paramount can't do either
• When your merchandising is dominated by spirits, wine, beer and drinking glasses, there's a whoooooole demographic you're excluding - and we say that as people who drink!
• Also, our predictions for episode 15 of Prodigy? So wrong. SO wrong!

127. Meta-Murf-osis (Prodigy 1.14)

Anika and Liz don their cutest Starfleet-issue hooded coats and beam down to an icy outpost in search of some fugitives, and along the way, we discuss Star Trek: Prodigy's fourteenth episode!

• "We have a plan but everything goes wrong" and "this could all be resolved if people talk to each other" are classic plots going back to Shakespeare and beyond, BUT that doesn't mean we have to like them!
• Liz spends an episode talking about Xindi Insectoids even though they are clearly Reptilians
• Stop! Don't split up the landing party! Don't leave Rok-Tahk unsupervised! Honestly, these teenagers and children are weirdly not good at planning.
• You'd think Holo Janeway would have said something, but she's also very young! And also, she can't get home until the weapon is resolved? And she's a Janeway, so that must be hard? 
• We are mystified by the ongoing presence of Okona in the animated Treks. MYSTIFIED.
• Antimatter Pod remains an unapologetically pro-Romulan podcast
• We need to know every single thing about Commander Tysess, especially whether or not he and Tuvok are BFFs
• Some decades-overdue worldbuilding for the Tellarites, yet it has been 50-odd years and we have yet to see a single Tellarite woman
• We engage in wild and baseless speculation about what season 2 will look like -- will the kids steal a different starship? Will Admiral Janeway adopt Rok-Tahk? 
• Murf's new appearance is a bit. Um. 

126. Shatner Voice (Prodigy 1.13)

Anika and Liz answer a distress call and wind up on the planet of the Strange New Worlds fans. We had some audio issues in recording and sound a bit like we're under flawlessly animated water, but we discuss things like…

• how Liz is explicitly banned from using her Shatner voice for the whole episode
• We have decided to ship Chakotay/The Diviner
• When entertainment becomes the entirety of one's culture
• How to be Starfleet (you don't need a uniform or a hashtag)
• Galaxy Quest, "Muse" and "Far Beyond the Stars"
• What better way to introduce young viewers to TOS than via the stage? (Just ask Anika!)
• We are NOT PREPARED for Murf to change! Yes, this is a series for young people and change is a fact of life BUT WE ARE GERIATRIC MILLENNIALS AND THIS IS ALL VERY STRESSFUL