It’s all status-quo-restoration all the time! I had been afraid that the second season would twist itself into a pretzel to restore the status quo, and while they did to an extent, they did at least some of it in a way that is hilarious and perfect for Lower Decks. Unfortunately, there are other elements of the story that make for a good sitcom plot, but don’t actually work in any kind of Star Trek context.
So about like usual for LD, truly…
SPOILERS AHOY!
Okay, let’s start with the good stuff. In the mess hall, Rutherford is shocked to see that Shaxs, who sacrificed his life to save Rutherford (and the ship), is back from the dead! Rutherford is stunned, but Mariner and Boimler are much more blasé about it. “Bridge officers are always coming back from the dead.” And apparently, it’s very much a faux pas to ask formerly deceased bridge officers how they came back from the dead. Rutherford wants very much to find out how it happened, but when Lieutenant Cody does so, Billups angrily kicks him out of engineering for reassignment.
However, Rutherford is a big ol’ nerd, and is also carrying around a ton of guilt over the circumstances of Shaxs’ death, so he finally asks—still wanting to know even after Shaxs gives him a warning. You see, the bridge crew don’t share that sort of thing with lower decks folk, not because they’re jerks (Mariner’s theory), but to protect them from horrible knowledge they might not be able to handle. Sure enough, Rutherford is pretty stunned by what Shaxs tells him. (Off camera, of course.)
This is the sort of thing that LD does really well: take one of Trek’s many lazy-writing, realities-of-television-induced clichés and hang a lantern on it and make fun of it. The fact that so many characters have come back from the dead is a particularly tired Trek cliché, but since it’s a reality of the universe, I love the way this episode just casually has Shaxs back on board.
Best of all: MORE SHAXS! I love Shaxs…
In addition, we get a pairing that we’ve never actually seen on the show before: Mariner and Tendi. And the story is about how it’s a pairing we’ve never actually seen before, which is, again, the perfect meta commentary. T’Ana is cranky and irritable and her fur is a mess, and she assigns Tendi to go to Qualor II to fetch a family heirloom from a storage unit there.
This plot works nicely, though it once again proves that Mariner is an awful person. Mariner and Tendi get into all kinds of trouble, and every single bit of it is Mariner’s fault. If Tendi had asked Rutherford to go with her, it all would’ve gone smoothly.
From a character perspective, this plotline is beautiful. Even though they’ve served together for over a year and been hanging out in the mess hall together and so on, they don’t really know each other. Mariner had no idea that Tendi even has a first name (it’s D’Vana) or that she’s into Klingon acid punk music, while Tendi had no idea that Mariner had a lengthy career in Starfleet before serving on the Cerritos, nor that she has a thing for bad boys. (Tendi assumed Mariner was interested in Boimler, to which Mariner responds with a lengthy “ooh ick” tirade.)
The actual story progression is a tired sitcom plot of cascading disasters, but my main issue is how it starts: Mariner being awful. She insists on opening the large box, which has a Caitian Libido Post inside it. And of course, they break it when trying to put it back.
Mariner being Mariner, she has a friend at the Bonestell Recreation Facility who can fix it, but to pay him, they have to hustle some Nausicaans at dom-jot. Said Nausicaans accuse them of cheating, and run them off the planet. So they go to one of Tendi’s cousins in a pirate enclave, where we find out that Tendi has a past. She assumes a very dominant affect with the cousin, insulting him, kicking him, and ordering him around. He gleefully does so, referring to her as the Mistress of the Winter Constellations, an appellation Tendi is horribly embarrassed by and is only using because she doesn’t want to screw up her mission for T’Ana. This leads to a running firefight when it’s discovered that Mariner (who’s been spray-painted green) isn’t a real Orion. Amid shouts of “FALSE GREEN!” they chase both of them offworld.
Defeated, they head back to the Cerritos, where Mariner rams the ship with the shuttle (it bounces off the shields, doing no damage), saying there was a bee in her eye, which gives Tendi cover to say why the Libido Post was broken. Except, of course, T’Ana doesn’t care about the Post. Like any good cat, she cares more about the box it came in, and climbing into it makes her feel so much better. So Mariner winds up in the brig for ramming the ship, which she did for nothing. But hey, she and Tendi got to bond!
And then we have the titular plotline involving Boimler and a visiting Tom Paris (voiced, of course, by Robert Duncan McNeill), which is pretty much a disaster.
We start with Ensign Boimler back on the Cerritos and right there we have our first problem: Boimler’s a lieutenant junior-grade. Yes, he was transporter-duplicated on Titan, but his promotion came ages before that. There is no reason, none, for him to be demoted. In fact, there’s every reason for him to be promoted, what with having saved the away team’s lives and all.
Even if you keep him at lieutenant, there are fun story possibilities here, which are ignored, because the status quo is being hammered back into place, and not to humorous effect (like Shaxs being back from the dead), but just because they want to restore the old dynamic. If that’s the case, you never should’ve promoted Boimler in the first place…
And then the ship refuses to give Boimler his food, and the doors don’t respond to his approach because of “new security measures” because of all the Pakled attacks. There is no level on which this makes anything like sense. Look, for 55 years, quite possibly the most consistent thing we’ve seen on Star Trek has been that when you approach the doors, they slide apart, no matter who you are. And the replicators have never had any kind of security on them, at least not for food. Any random schmuck who wandered onto the Enterprise or Voyager or the Defiant or even one of the runabouts or the Delta Flyer was always able to get food and have the doors slide apart when they approached them.
This is yet another example of taking a 21st-century office plot—the transfer hasn’t made its way through the computer system yet, an issue that truly most of the people watching the show can empathize with—and crowbarring it unconvincingly into Star Trek. I just didn’t buy that any Starfleet vessel would behave like that short of a major malfunction.
Which is too bad because the other aspect of Boimler’s plot—he has a full set of Voyager commemorative plates, and Paris’ is the only one that isn’t autographed—is hilarious. Because the doors won’t let him in, he’s reduced to crawling through the Jefferies Tubes to get to the bridge, but he has all sorts of issues getting there, including hallucinating the plate talking to him at one point. That bit is funny as all get out (indeed, was my favorite part of the season two trailer a few months back), it’s just getting there that doesn’t work.
This show still has the same problem it had last season: when it’s a Star Trek comedy, it works. When it’s a 21st-century office sitcom transplanted onto a starship, it doesn’t. I was hoping season two would fix that issue. Sigh.
Random thoughts:
- T’Ana is established as being a Caitian, a word that has never been spoken on screen before. While the character of M’Ress from the animated series has always been assumed to be a Caitian (based on the Lincoln Enterprises-published biography of her in 1974), that word was never used in the series, nor have any of the other felinoids we’ve seen (The Final Frontier, the 2009 Star Trek) been identified onscreen as Caitians—until now, anyhow. Now if we can just establish whether or not Arex was an Edoan, an Edosian, or a Triexian…
- Boimler and Mariner provide an impressive laundry list of ways Shaxs could’ve come back from the dead: a “transporter pattern-buffer thing” (Picard in “Lonely Among Us“), a restored katra (Spock in The Search for Spock), revived by the Genesis device (ditto), a “Mirror Universe switcheroo” (Georgiou in “What’s Past is Prologue“), rebuilt by the Borg (Neelix in “Mortal Coil“), a future offspring from an alternate timeline (Yar/Sela in the “Redemption” two-parter), and trapped in the Nexus (Kirk in Generations).
- There’s a Quark’s Bar on Qualor II, which continues the Secret Hideout shows’ establishing that, post-DS9, Quark’s has become a franchise. (There’s also a Quark’s in Stardust City.) In addition, Vic Fontaine is advertised as performing on Qualor II.
- Qualor II was established in TNG‘s “Unification” two-parter as, among other things, the home of a supply depot.
- Interestingly enough, despite the apparent resurrection of Shaxs, Kayshon’s still on the bridge. He doesn’t have any dialogue—which is disappointing, it would’ve been amusing to have him converse with Paris in Tamarian metaphor—but I’m glad he’s still around. Let’s hope they do more with him after his disappointing intro last week.
- When Tendi mentions that T’Ana’s probably in some manner of heat, she likens it to Vulcan pon farr, with this show making the mistake that lots of tie-in writers have made over the years, acting like the pon farr is common knowledge.
- The Bonestell Recreation Facility on Starbase Earhart is where Picard, Batanides, and Zweller went to hang out after graduating the Academy waiting for their first deep-space assignments, as established in TNG’s “Tapestry.” Mariner and Tendi playing dom-jot against cranky Nausicaans was a tribute to that episode, where Zweller hustled the Nausicaans and accused him of cheating. The ensuing fight resulted in Picard being stabbed through the heart, which is why he had an artificial one.
- The Orions were established in the original series as pirates in “The Cage,” and seen thusly in “Journey to Babel” on the original series. That first pilot also established that Orion women are sexy as hell, seen again in “Whom Gods Destroy.” The Enterprise episode “Bound” turned it on its ear, showing that Orion women actually control things with their nasty pheromones. Tendi has fought back against the Orion stereotypes, but this episode shows that she has a more complicated background than expected.
- In an obvious dig at Discovery and their “DISCO” T-shirts, Boimler refers to Paris’ former ship as “Voy.” I laughed my ass off at that one, and I say that as someone who is the proud owner of my own DISCO T-shirt…
- FALSE GREEN!
- Apparently, Mariner served on Deep Space 9 at one point, and broke Worf’s mek’leth. But she fixed it without his knowing about it, supposedly.
- Okay, they’re releasing a Tom Paris commemorative dish, which will go nicely with all those TNG commemorative dishes they did in the 1990s, nostalgia for which reportedly motivated Boimler’s plotline. But the piece of merchandising I really want to see from this episode is an album of Klingon acid punk, please and thank you.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also writing about Tom Paris a lot in his rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager, which appears on this site every Monday and Thursday.
Cranky me continues to insist that, although it is quite true that in canon Trek pon farr is treated as if it is some dark secret, this actually makes no sense. If Lower Decks is going to retcon this, I’m all for it.
It does remind me of one of my favorite exchanges from Voyager, which went approximately like this:
Doctor: For an advanced species, Vulcans have a Victorian attitude toward sex.
Tuvok: That is a very human observation.
Doctor: All right, I’ll give you a Vulcan observation: it is illogical to withhold information about a normal biological function.
I liked this one. A lot of nice character-building for Tendi, and some good universe-building too. Klingons listen to something other than opera! Tendi is “not that kind of Orion,” which helps reconcile the super-pheromonal “Bound” Orions with the ones seen elsewhere that don’t seem to have any such abilities (like Gaila and, of course, Tendi). “Caitian” is finally canonized!
On the other hand, it has too much of the usual fannish continuity nods, but at least it makes sense that people would geek out over Voyager given all its exceptional adventures. I wish they hadn’t referenced the salamander thing, though, since I preferred to treat that as apocryphal. (Or maybe they could’ve mentioned it and Boimler would’ve said, “Oh, that never happened, that was just one of the holonovels the EMH published after they got back.”)
I can buy Boimler’s security lockout. Ransom said they put in new security measures recently, so we can assume those new measures are more extensive than normal, perhaps overzealous. Also, multiple people said that Boimler simply needed to talk to Billups to get his ID updated, but Boimler was too stubborn to do it.
I’m not quite convinced by the “bridge crew always comes back from the dead” thing. It doesn’t happen as often as the episode implied. Usually it’s either a quick reversal of a fake-out death within a single episode, as with Scotty in “The Changeling” or Neelix in “Mortal Coil,” or it’s a temporary revival, as with Tasha Yar in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” or Kirk in Generations, and doesn’t lead to the restoration of the old status quo. With Georgiou, her Mirror self is a very different character who simply impersonates the original. What happened here with Shaxs, a permanent resurrection and status-quo restoration after a passage of time, has only ever really happened with Spock. Within canon, disregarding tie-in reversals, most lead-character deaths have stuck — Tasha, Data, Jadzia (though not Dax), Trip Tucker, Kirk’s actual death on Veridian III.
Also, the bit about how the circumstances of lead-character resurrections are so horrible that they need to be kept secret seems like a lift from Agents of SHIELD rather than Star Trek.
I have trouble believing a shuttlecraft could travel to so many different star systems in a single day. Modern Trek has completely abandoned any sense of distance and duration in space travel. Plus Tawny Newsome mispronounced “Bonestell” as “bone-stell” instead of “BAHN-uh-stull.”
On pon farr, I can buy Tendi knowing about it as a medical officer, and of course Mariner knows everything that people aren’t supposed to know.
Incidentally, Mariner said she’s not just into bad boys, but bad girls and bad other gender categories. Though whether the show will actually depict her having pansexual relationships rather than just nodding toward it in dialogue remains to be seen.
Christopher: Thank you for mentioning that about Mariner being pansexual, as I meant to mention that and forgot. That is a nice step in the right direction. At the very least, the Secret Hideout shows have been way better about that sort of thing than their predecessors.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I visualize Klingon acid punk music as being something like the bastard child of the Dead Kennedys and Metallica, with maybe some 80’s era Roger Waters thrown in.
Vulcans are one of the founding and majority species of the Federation, so most people in the Federation (at least the people who spend any length of time dealing with species other than their own) must be aware of the broad facts of their biology. My headcanon is that the whole “pretend Pon Farr doesn’t exist” business is a point of Vulcan etiquette that other Federation members generally respect.
Yes, I know there’s very little onscreen support for that headcanon. It’s headcanon. It doesn’t need support.
No! Just no. I am sooo done with this show. Season 1 ended with a decently strong episode No Small Parts, the death of Shaxs actually leading to some good character moments and actual growth and emotional investment in this show. 3 episodes into season 2 Shaxs is suddenly magically, mysteriously brought back with no explanation given (and mostly done for laughs). Way to go writers undoing every thing you accomplished in the season 1 finale.
Also bringing in sooo many legacy characters (Q, Riker & Troi, now Paris), it seem like this show is all fan service and capitalizing off what has already been done, instead of being itself and finding its own identity.
By the way, I forgot to mention that the resolution of the Dr. T’Ana plot was easily predictable to any cat lover. As soon as they had to abandon half of the post to escape the Orions, I said to myself, “Oh, it’s going to turn out that T’Ana’s happy with just the box.”
@6/JC: “it seem like this show is all fan service and capitalizing off what has already been done, instead of being itself and finding its own identity.”
That’s a large part of it, but I’m enjoying the little ways that it fleshes out the universe, showing us things like “second contact” missions and the everyday bureaucracy of Starfleet, the Collectors’ Guild, Klingon acid punk, etc. It does rely too heavily on “Hey, here’s another reference to a familiar thing,” but it’s also adding new things.
The bit with T’Ana reminded me of the extended plot in Star Trek Log Ten where M’Ress basically went into heat.
@@.-@. wiredog: a Klingon music video might look something like this:
Steel and Flame
Supposedly Mary Chieffo really enjoyed herself in the studio.
(6)
That’s been a bugaboo for me with a lot of these longstanding franchises, the tendency to make too many cute references to things we know, or should know in order to get the joke. It’s like being with a person who constantly talks about themself or being with a group of people who constantly make inside jokes you don’t immediately catch. It’s sort of cliquey and narcissistic in a way.
Some thoughts:
1. I was half-expecting the Doctor to come out from the turbolift smoking with Shaxs buttoning up his uniform. They had some ship-tease before and that was the other way to resolve it.
2. I think Mariner is officially a Dominion War veteran and about 10 years older than Tendi at this point, especially if her academy mate is a Captain. Worf was only on DS9 during the war.
3. Mariner really is a terrible friend and the “bee thing” is showing she’s had no growth since Crisis.
4. Indeed, I hate the “reset button” being applied to everything relationship wise.
5. I’m calling it as the computer not recognizing Boimler as it detecting differences from his baseline self and that he’s the Wimpy “Good Kirk” version of himself. Titan Boimler is probably a badass by now.
6. I wish they hadn’t mentioned anything about how he was resurrected, just left Rutherford traumatized.
7. I like to think the Borg resurrection is a reference to Shatnerverse rather than Mortal Coil despite being a solid Neelix episode.
8. I’m sad it wasn’t Freecloud.
@11/CT Phipps: “Worf was only on DS9 during the war.”
Only if you’re counting the Klingon-Cardassian conflict as part of the Dominion War. While that conflict was engineered by the Dominion as the first major step in their conquest, the Dominion War proper didn’t begin until the end of season 5, two seasons after Worf arrived.
@@.-@ – how ’bout instead of 80s era Robert Waters, 60s-era Roger Miller?
Krad, actually the name “Caitian” was uttered out loud by Lt. Connolly, the unlucky U.S.S. Enterprise science officer who bit the dust by way of asteroid in “Brother”, the Discovery season two premiere back in 2019. Right before he died he relayed the information of how his roommate at the academy was part Caitian.
@14/garreth: I’d forgotten that, but since that was a reference to an unseen character, this episode is still the first time that the name “Caitian” has explicitly been established onscreen as the name of the felinoid Federation species.
NOw I wanna hear Klingon Acid Punk.
Course, what if Klingon Acid Punk is some akin to human country folk music?
garreth: good catch, I’d forgotten that. But, as Christopher said, that was a reference to a character we didn’t see, so this episode is still the first visual confirmation of Caitians. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Also: we heard a bit of Klingon Acid Punk in the episode itself, when Tendi was talking to the guy at the storage unit.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think they played more acid punk at the end of the episode as well.
Loved this episode, because of the look into Orion society, however brief, and Tendi’s background; as well as the Tendi/Mariner interaction. They seem to be moving towards making Mariner more of a group player, and that’s a great thing. And the Dr. T’Ana scratcher/box joke, as kinda predictable as it was, was still hella funny.
I hope they explore what happened to Shax, beyond the “stuff lower deckers are not supposed to know”. Oh, and the VOY stuff was music to my kid’s ears.
“Not all Orions are thieves or pirates. But I have a cousin who works as a thief in a pirate outpost.” I laughed out loud.
@krad: Far be it from me to tell you what to enjoy or not, but I think the 20th century office sitcom shenanigans have to be taken like that, jokes, stuff done for the viewer. The same way we don’t see the delay in universal translator speech, or we hear everybody speaking in English. Stop sweating it, and take the show as it is, because it works great that way… IMHO, of course.
@1 – Mark: Yeah, it’s probably common knowledge by then. Vulcan’s are not a secret, minor race, they’re one of the major species in the Federation, they’re everywhere, so it has got to have gotten out by then.
@2 – Chris: I also appreciated Mariner’s mention of her sexuality.
@11 – CT: This episode showed relationship growth between Mariner and Tendi, you can’t call it a reset.
So… what are the official uniforms for Starfleet at this time? The Admirals look to have uniforms closer to the Cerritos design but ever since the Titan appeared, any non-Cerritos Starfleet Personnel appear to have the late DS9/TNG movies (except Generations) uniforms.
I did get a kick out of the fact that the starbase Earhart scene implies that the bar owner finally repaired the Dom-Jot table after Picard’s impalement decades prior.
I honestly wonder what eventually lead Mariner to be stationed on the Cerritos to begin with, maybe she had some PTSD from the Dominion War that lead her to want to remain “lower decks”.
It’s not the first time we see multiple uniform designs being used at the same time. It’s also something that happens in real life military organizations (even though Starfleet is not 100% military).
Once again, T’Ana nailed the humor for me. First the Medical Boulder(tm), now her Box. (Ok, that came out wrong.) Yes, it was pretty obvious that the statue would not be vital as soon as they broke it, but I still laughed out loud when she jumped into the box. Man, that’s one great T’Ana moment per episode so far. (“Read the sign!”)
For once I got to agree with Krad about Mariner. I have enjoyed her bad habits, seeing them as enjoyable character flaws. But this was a classic ‘I’m going to screw everything up’ episode. I was hoping for a little more chracter growth this season. Come on, therapy works. But Tendi real got to shine here. And that’s always good.
I just realized that Beckett Mariner is essentially a latter-day Sergeant Bilko, always dragging people into her wacky, illicit schemes and trying to get out of her duties. Though judging from that Wiki entry, she’s more like the early Bilko who had an altruistic side than the later one who was written as more purely mercenary.
I did not know they were actually making a Tom Paris plate. That makes this episode a whole meta-homage to “Is There In Truth No Beauty?,” doesn’t it? I’m surprised Boimler didn’t take the plate out of a box marked “Lincoln Enterprises.”
I enjoy this show a lot. Yes, all the canonical quibbles Keith raises, but, really, come on now. ;)
I have to admit that my response to Mariner’s little battering ram gambit was so loud my poor old Dad was quite alarmed (he only heard the noise and didn’t realise I was shouting “BAD Mariner! BAD!” … I really ought to have added “No biscuit!”), but this episode is definitely a win for the show – though not for the character progress of Ensign Reckless – not least because of the absolutely delightful resolution to the Itch-scratching post storyline (Quite definitely the most innocent and the most hilarious resolution possible to that plotline).
Also, it was nice to see VOYAGER get some love (and was that a Kelpien in the bar where Tendi & Mariner don’t quite manage to hustle those Nausicaans? Nice to see DISCO get a shout-out; now we just need some ENTERPRISE to complete the set!), though I too am rather disappointed poor old Boimler didn’t come back with his promotion intact, all the better to add a new angle to his dynamic with always-an-Ensign Mariner.
It was, however, absolutely delightful to see Ensign Tendi get a chance to shine – and slightly alarming to get such a glimpse of Orion mores at work (hopefully that particular society includes the notion of a Safe Word if that’s how a Mistress is expected to behave towards her menials).
@11. CT Phipps:-
1 – That might have been amusing, but you would have to tear me away from the more innocent fun of The Doctor Box with a bulldozer.
3 – Sadly true; I remain convinced this is a good episode for the show, but the worst for Mariner’s character development so far (hopefully she won’t regress TOO far).
Also, I’m mildly surprised she didn’t run with something like “The box was bugged!” in reply to Commander Freeman’s line about bees in space.
ADDENDUM:
– Was it just me or did anyone else get the suspicion that Mariner just might have made some mischief with the Cerritos computer as a welcome home prank on Boimler? (Hence his ongoing difficulties, rather badly exacerbated by his bullish disinclination to ask for help).
I’m re-watching the episode, and when Tendi says they’ll go see her cousin, she says “she’ll be able to help us”, but then when they go see this cousin, it’s a dude. Is her cousin gender fluid?
And oh, the Kazon bit was HILARIOUS. Speaking of Paris, we get to see him wearing a First Contact / later day DS9 uniform.
@26 – Ed: No, I don’t think that’s a Kelpien, the ears are different. And yes, Mariner could have messed with the computer, but she’d laugh about it behind Boimler’s back. Or to his face.
@11: CT Phipps 2. I think Mariner is officially a Dominion War veteran and about 10 years older than Tendi at this point, especially if her academy mate is a Captain. Worf was only on DS9 during the war.
I think it will turn out she’s way older than that, perhaps even stretching to the TOS era or having served multiple times (like Tuvok), or having a very long civilian life before deciding to give Starfleet a try. They keep giving her more and more backstory and why not let her have a part of Trek history if the story is right for it? I’m guessing she (and by extension her parents) are El Aurian, but just a bit more sociopathic than most of the other ones we’ve seen. Who knows, maybe she was even off-screen in the evacuation done by the 1701-B depicted in Generations. And we don’t know her past, but the Dominion War timing actually works out nicely– if she had a prior stint in Starfleet, she might have been in the reserves and called up to service or just reenlisted because she thought the AQ was worth fighting for.
This is a fun one. Much like last week – with Mariner having finally realized she has two valuable fellow crewmembers with real personalities other than Boimler, now we get a well-deserved girls-only adventure. Tendi getting some welcome development, and a deeper insight into Orion culture that I can enjoy. Of course Mariner would end up breaking the statue; all because she’s the most curious person in the galaxy. She can’t keep her hands away from a secret, she really can’t help it.
Meanwhile, we get the perfect Boimler plot. Of course a Riker fan like him is also a geeky Paris fan.
On the subject of the Rutherford/Shaxs subplot, I wish they hadn’t cut away so soon during Shaxs’ account of his ‘resurrection’. I liked where that particular monologue was going: The Black Mountain is a spiritual battleground where your soul goes. You have to fight three faceless apparitions of your father…. The over-the-top score had me convulsing. The whole thing sounds very much like a Klingon fantasy – one I’d pay to watch.
But I do I have one major issue with this episode: Nausicaans. Between TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and now this, I think it is safe to say Nausicaans have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. For a universe where races learn to co-exist in reasonable peace and harmony, I find it annoying that there’s still anyone out there who puts up with Nausicaan crap. Every time they show up, trouble happens! Why would casino owners keep allowing these thugs inside, if all they’re a 100% guarantee assurance of casualties and valuable property damage? At least Klingons have colorful personalities and drink their share of bloodwine and raktajino. If it were me, I’d put up signs: No Nausicaans allowed.
@29/Eduardo: Well, the Nausicaans have one redeeming virtue: They’re really big Miyazaki fans. They even named their entire civilization after his work!
It’s a little-known fact that they have offshoot sects including the Totorians, the Mononokeans, the Chihirons, the Porcorossans, and the Howleans.
I thought the Tellarites were the Porcorossans.
I was annoyed that Mariner and Tendi referred to themselves as “girls.” Even in the 24th century, adult females will refer to themselves with the noun for female children, rather than female adults? What the heck is wrong with the word “women”?
@32/Corylea: Nothing’s wrong with “women,” and nothing’s wrong with “girls.” It’s a free future; people are entitled to call themselves whatever they wish.
In DS9: “Trials and Tribble-ations,” Dax referred to the Temporal Investigations agents Lucsly and Dulmur as “you boys.” In TNG: “Tin Man,” Captain DeSoto made a teasing reference to “you Galaxy-class boys.” In TOS: “Spectre of the Gun,” Johnny Behan addressed the “Clantons” (i.e. the landing party) as “you boys.” It’s not unusual to use “boys” or “girls” to refer to adults. It’s not insulting, just a friendly diminutive.
Eh, men can refer themselves as “boys” without feeling its an insult. Which is because they have a position of privilege. Presumably it’s not a diminutive in the future.
Also, I think Pon’farr is believably a secret when only Vulcan-only vessels and Spock on the Enterprise were common.
@34/C.T. Phipps: And women in the present do often refer to themselves or each other as “girls.” Diminutives are not automatically insults. It depends on who’s using them toward whom. For instance, addressing a romantic partner or close friend as “baby” is a show of affection, while addressing a business subordinate or a passing woman on the street that way is demeaning. It differs depending on the nature of the relationship, the social context, whether permission has been granted, etc. So by the same token, it would be wrong for a senior officer (particularly a male one) to address Mariner or Tendi as a girl, but it’s another matter for them to address each other (let alone themselves) that way.
It’s like Japanese honorifics — whether they’re polite or rude depends on the nature of your relationship to the speaker. Addressing a stranger or a person of senior status without “-san” is an insult, yet addressing a close friend with “-san” can be hurtful because it’s pushing them back to a more formal distance.