Antimatter Pod

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...

119. Balance of Error (SNW 1.08, 1.09 and 1.10)

Anika and Liz put on some fancy costumes, murder some Gorn babies and agree: that was definitely a season of television.

But did we actually like season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?

Erm. Well.

• Remember when we were afraid this would be the Pike, Spock and Una show? It's definitely not the Una show, and we have different opinions on whether or not it's a Spock show!
• It's fascinating how season one of SNW shares a lot of problems with season one of TNG, but no one is out there arguing that TNG's first season was good
• Anika has to "well actually" Liz
• The Elysian Kingdom: 
  • We just want M'Benga to be happy, is that so much to ask?
  • It's 2022 and the depiction of queerness in SNW is roughly on par with DS9 in the 1990s (this is not a compliment)
• All Those Who Wander:
  • #GornRights
  • "Straight-up Aliens rip-off" is a feature not a bug for us, but the depiction of the Gorn is even more troubling than it was in "Memento Mori"!
  • PLEASE make Star Trek hire a disability consultant because the depiction of disability and mental illness in any Trek overseen by Akiva Goldsman is dreadful and offensive
  • Children, whether Gorn or human(ish), don't have rights in this series, and Anika finds that TROUBLING
  • Lifting a Spock/Uhura scene -- body language, camera angles and all -- from Star Trek (2009) but subbing in a white woman was … well, the optics aren't great, y'know?
• The Quality of Mercy
  • We don't often say this, but we hate everything about this episode!
  • Like, don't remake "Balance of Terror" if you don't understand Kirk, Spock, Romulans or the plot of "Balance of Terror"
  • It makes a good double feature with "These Are The Voyages…" but that isn't really a good thing
  • We have a new appreciation for Greenwood!Pike and the (relative) lack of ableism in his story 
  • The Great Man Theory of Star Trek history
  • The ending is … exactly the same as the ending of season 2 of Lower Decks? At least for once it's a white woman facing the Federation's capricious justice system?

118. The Ones Who Warp Away From Omelas/Talk Like A Space Pirate Day (SNW 1.06 and 1.07)

Content warning: We discuss school shootings, gun violence and child death a LOT in this episode, but specific time stamps are as follows: 

• Conversation about the Uvalde massacre from 4:30 to 6:26
• The coronavirus death toll: 8:42 to 9:01 but also Liz is very mean about the British to 10:04
• Back to school shootings, and also Kenobi, from 25:41 to 31:38

Anika and Liz don their finest catsuits to plan a jail break and discuss episodes 6 ("Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach") and 7 ("The Serene Squall") of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

• Is it possible we are being punked? Is everyone else getting a different, better version of Strange New Worlds?
• If you're going to rip off Le Guin, at least try and do a good job
• Everyone who called Discovery "grimdark" and "nihilistic" owes it an apology
• It left the sexism behind, but otherwise Strange New Worlds is very much the heir to Enterprise
• We are very concerned for M'Benga and Rukia, and also very mad about fandom's racism towards them
• Following last episode's strong anti-child-eating stance, we're going to take another radical position: maybe we shouldn't let children die?
• Anika will not stand by and let Liz criticise the Star Wars prequels
• SNW is like season 3 of Voyager: competent but not in any way groundbreaking or remarkable
• "The Serene Squall" owes something to How Much For Just The Planet? Except that was … good
• We've seen Our Flag Means Death, we have standards when it comes to comedy pirates
• Honestly, we would feel better about the trans/non-binary representation here if the writers were not cis and the writing was not so heteronormative
• (It's so heteronormative!)
• Anika has a controversial opinion: let's decanonise TOS
• Hey, remember when this series had two Black regulars? Where'd they go?
• Maybe they're in the same place as that emotional continuity we were promised?

117. Sex and the Starship (SNW 1.04 and 1.05)

Anika and Liz have put on our memorial pins and fishing hats (and briefly considered, then rejected, a body swap) to discuss Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episodes Memento Mori and Spock Amok...

• Everyone says SNW is a good show and we're starting to feel a bit gaslit…
• "Memento Mori" and SNW's whole depiction of the Gorn becomes uncomfortable when you look at "Arena" and realise they were conceived as an allegory for Native Americans
• Liz cites Finding Eliza by Larissa Behrendt as, among other things, an examination of the European preoccupation with cannibalism
• It's weird how Worf, Michael and La'an all have exactly the same backstory
• Anika is explicitly opposed to eating children
• We were promised that SNW would have serialised emotional arcs, so … why is La'an fine now?
• Ortegas will be getting a second dimension to her character any day, right…? 
• It's troubling how sidelined MBenga has been through this season, especially when you consider the racial dynamics and how Uhura gets one whole line in "Spock Amok"
• Clearly Spock/T'Pring is doomed BUT CONSIDER: movie-era Spock/T'Pring! Picard attended the wedding of Sarek's son in the early 2300s! THINK ABOUT IT!

116. La’an Skywalker (SNW 1.03)

Anika and Liz beam up through an ion storm and discuss the third episode of Strange New Worlds, "Ghosts of Illyria". Topics we cover include…

• This is a pretty mediocre episode and the character stuff is very hit or miss
• Do we need a log at the end to tell us what the moral is? 
• We love La'an and we want to know everything about her, but her story makes no sense here
• "I never think of you as a child," in the context of a character first encountered as a child, is a terrible line
• Somehow … Palpatine has returned (to our conversation)
• Has no one told La'an that she can just … change her name? People can do it all the time! Anika did it! 
• Don't sleep in your eye make-up, guys. This is an Antimatter Pod PSA.