Antimatter Pod

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

125. Woke Borg (Prodigy 1.12)

Hey, that's a nice cube. Let's steal their stuff! What could possibly go wrong?! Anika and Liz discuss Star Trek: Prodigy's "Let Sleeping Borg Lie", including…

• Nodding to past Borg stories while also doing something new
• There's a fantastic synchronicity between Lower Decks's second contact concept and Prodigy's foundation being the Federation's apparent failure to follow up after a first contact
• All of Janeway's assumptions are wrong, and it's GREAT
• We take a few minutes to be a Tolkien podcast (Rings of Power spoilers)
• It turns out the real collective is the friends we made along the way
• Anika has SO MANY FEELINGS about redemption, atonement and forgiveness
• Prodigy has a very clear morality: it's a place where it's safe to be wrong and then do better, and you don't have to be powerful or important or a member of a quasi-military space force to do good in the universe

123. The Very Slow Tiger Of Anxiety (Prodigy 1.11)

Anika and Liz are rolling up to a starbase in a stolen starship, putting on our un-earned cadet uniforms and discussing the new episode of Star Trek: Prodigy and children in Star Trek in general!

• The chase is on!
• Lieutenant jg Barniss Frex is THE WORST
• Starfleet needs to start recruiting career bureaucrats who LIKE being assigned to sit in an office in space and do paperwork. Like … us!
• We don't actually think Dal is a Janeway/Paris salamander baby, but we have a lot of thoughts about how it would be great if he was
• It would be terrible if the Diviner has done something to Gwyn to also make her a weapon. Absolutely awful. We wouldn't enjoy that one little bit. Honest.
• Rok-Tahk is safe to learn and make mistakes
• If kids go from "Hey, Murf is a Mellanoid slime worm, let's watch the only episode of Star Trek where those are mentioned," they'll watch "Coming of Age", the episode where Wesley fails to get into the Academy (and that's okay). Coincidence? Maybe!
• Liz wants to be happy about finally getting the J/C hug she's been waiting for since she was 14, but Robert Beltran's making it hard
• Anika has compiled some stats about children in Star Trek generally, and they are fascinating
• Like, TOS had FOUR episodes about kids taking over the ship! Out of nine across the franchise, and that's not counting Prodigy!
• In fact, you can kind of track social attitudes towards children via their presence in Star Trek, which makes it alarming that SNW keeps killing them

123. Hostile Enthusiasm (NYCC 2022)

Anika went to New York ComicCon! So we're catching up on all the news, including…

• PLUSH MURF! An oasis in a quality merch desert! 
• Discovery season 5: this looks FUN
• Callum Keith Rennie's Captain Rayner sounds like Lorca 2.0, and we approve
• We already love L'ak and Moll, even though Liz is already planning a barrage of Australian puns
• Prodigy season 1.5: OUR CHILDREN ARE BACK
• Liz can tell the difference between Jameela Jamil and Ella Purnell, honest.
• From shipping Janeway/Janeway to making it WEIRD in record time
• Picard season 3: it's us! The only people in fandom who think this looks awful!
• The misogynoir starts in the trailer, and Michelle Hurd and Michael Dorn deserve better
• We're here for the Picard/Crusher, but also, we watched season 2, soooooooooo…?
• If they've killed off Laris, we're going to find a table and flip it
• For all our complaints about Picard and the way it dominates the conversation (and marketing budget), the future of Star Trek lies with the people who came in with Discovery and Prodigy, and that's wonderful.

122. Girlboss, Gaslight, Gatekeep (Kai Winn deep dive, part 3)

Anika and Liz are letting their hair down and ... giving themselves to the Pah Wraiths? This seems like a bad idea...

• Remembering Louise Fletcher
• All Star Treks should end before they have a mediocre seventh season that undermines everything that came earlier
• We do not care for the Pah Wraiths as a concept
• Make sure you're sitting down because Liz has something nice to say about Rick Berman
• Kira is a Jewish Bajoran and Winn is a Christian Bajoran
• It turns out that if you watch all the Winn episodes in a short space of time, her season seven arc arc does not make sense at all
• Winn/Dukat is a textbook abusive relationship and it's troubling that fandom doesn't see that or thinks she deserved it
• The similarities between season 7 of DS9 and Revenge of the Sith are actually fairly impressive
• RIP Solbor, the only person who cared about Winn (and he didn't even like her)
• It's possible we're meant to find Winn's sensuality repellent (so once again Liz and Anika are Doing Star Trek Wrong)
• The intimate partner violence of it all

If you'd like to see our notes for this episode (which include screencaps and shouting), you can click here.

121. Utilising Girl Power (Kai Winn deep dive, part 2)

Winn's back! And she's … First Minister? Anika and Liz put on their robes, dig up an ancient Bajoran city and discuss…

• Winn wants power, but she's not good at using it
• Why is Shakaar interesting right up until he becomes a love interest for Kira?
• Winn thinks she and Kira are playing good cop/bad cop, and Kira's like, "Wait, I don't wanna be a cop!"
• As a portrait of a white church lady on a power trip, Winn has aged VERY well
• We are going to generously assume the Federation is a democracy
• Winn's desperation for power is a trauma response, because the entire planet of Bajor has PTSD
• She has actual character development (and ceases to be an antagonist to Sisko) in "Rapture"
• The Prophets seem to hate Jake Sisko specifically, which is just further proof they're not good people

It's the episode where we compare the Federation to the British Empire!

120. Live, Pagh, Love (Kai Winn deep dive, part 1)

Put on your best Opera House hat and join Anika and Liz as we dive into the first of a three-episode deep dive into Kai Winn Adami. This week, we're looking at her rise to power -- covering the episodes "In The Hands Of The Prophets", "The Circle", "The Siege" and "The Collaborator." And along the way, we discuss...

• If you only watch the Winn episodes, and maybe even only the Winn scenes, DS9 is a really amazing show about two women fighting about religion and politics
• "In The Hands Of The Prophets" - just because Winn is wrong doesn't mean the Federation is right
• Winn asks questions the writers should have thought about themselves: why is a human the Emissary? Why should Bajor join the Federation? (Why is this botanist with no teaching qualifications running a school?)
• Winn is the target for so much misogyny, and it says a lot about how fandom perceived and still perceives women in power.
• Minister Jaro and Shaxs: the only sexy Bajoran men in the entire history of the planet (also we do not agree on how to pronounce Frank Langella's surname, but Anika's version is probably right)
• Contrary to popular belief, Winn has integrity: she hates the Cardassians even more than she loves power, and is loathe to collaborate with anyone -- even the Federation
• Unfortunately we have become Winn/Jaro shippers
• "The Collaborator": Kira becomes the Vimes to Winn's Vetinari
• Winn as a maternal figure for Kira, which is GREAT except when you think about what happened to Kira's actual mother and then what happens to Winn…

It's the episode where we realise we don't NOT ship Sisko/Winn...