Telepathy has been part of the tapestry of Star Trek since the very beginning. Both pilots for the original series, “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” had telepathy at the heart of their plots. For the former, it was the illusion-casting Talosians; in the latter, it was the great barrier heightening the psychic abilities of crewmembers with “high ESP ratings.” (Ah, the 1960s.) It was later established in “Dagger of the Mind” that Vulcans were touch telepaths.
Over the years, Trek has introduced numerous telepathic species (Medusans, Ullians, Cairn, Letheans, etc.). Series regulars Spock (the original series, SNW), Troi (TNG), Kes and Tuvok (Voyager), T’Pol (Enterprise), and Zero (Prodigy) are all telepaths. So an episode like “Empathalogical Fallacies,” which crosses the streams of having both Betazoid and Vulcan telepathy driving the plot, was inevitable…
The episode primarily focuses on T’Lyn, who has proven to be an immensely valuable addition to the cast. Gabrielle Ruiz’s deadpan has proven to meld (sorry) perfectly with the generally very manic cast of LD to create comedy gold. We’ve already had her team up with Tendi (“Twovix”) and Boimler (“In the Cradle of Vexilon”), and she’s also been part of a group trip (“Something Borrowed, Something Green”), and this week she teams up with Mariner.
In addition we have three Betazoids coming on board. The trio come across as younger, drunker versions of Majel Barrett’s Lwaxana Troi: hedonistic, bombastic, flirty. Brilliantly voiced by Rachel Dratch, Janelle James, and Wendie Malick, their presence on board seems to turn everyone into emotionally crazy people—even more so than usual. The Cerritos quickly turns into a party ship, with crazed celebrating going on all over the ship.
We’ve seen this before with Betazoids, specifically with Lwaxana: in DS9’s “Fascination,” she was suffering Zanthi Fever and telepathically affecting the Deep Space 9 crew, making them act rather batshit. And that’s the assumption that Freeman and T’Lyn both make: that at least one of the Betazoid trio are suffering from Zanthi. However, T’Ana’s examination reveals no trace of the fever.
However, we’ve seen this type of telepathic influence once before: on TNG’s “Sarek,” where Mark Lenard’s titular character was suffering Bendii Syndrome and also telepathically mucking with the Enterprise-D crew.
One of the great frustrations with Trek is that oftentimes something will be introduced in one episode and then never referenced ever again, even though its existence might be useful in other situations. For example, being able to give someone the Platonians’ psychic powers temporarily, as seen in the original series’ “Plato’s Stepchildren,” or La Forge’s PTSD from being mentally manipulated in TNG’s “The Mind’s Eye,” which is never even referenced again, or the EMH’s ability to have a backup program after never being able to be backed up before in Voyager’s “Living Witness,” or the magic healing blood that should’ve revolutionized twenty-third-century medicine in Star Trek Into Darkness.
Another great frustration is the occasional repetition of plot, whether deliberate (TNG’s “The Naked Now” deliberately calling back to the original series’ “The Naked Time”) or not (Enterprise’s “Oasis” being very similar to DS9’s “Shadowplay,” to give but one example).
This episode of LD beautifully hammers on both those frustrations. The former in that neither Zanthi Fever nor Bendii Syndrome have ever even been mentioned outside of the episodes where they drove the plot. The latter in that the repetition is used to make the plot work, because the Betazoid trio is, in fact, innocent, and it’s T’Lyn who is influencing the crew.
T’Lyn starts the episode writing a letter to her former CO on the Sh’vhal, hoping that he will allow her to rejoin his crew and get away from these crazy-ass emotional types. However, by the end of the episode, she becomes comfortable with the fact that she’s, as Mariner says, “Vulcan as a motherfucker,” and that it’s her former crewmates on the Sh’vhal who are lousy Vulcans, so there, nyah nyah.
(The script, which is credited to Jamie Loftus, papers over the fact that Bendii Syndrome is (a) very very rare, (b) usually only affects elderly Vulcans, and (c) has no cure.)
As much fun as this is, particularly in its pairing of an overly-emotional-even-by-her-standards Mariner (which mostly means that she expresses her love for her friends and family to a Tendi-like degree, and also uses profanity to a T’Ana-like degree) and the ever-calm T’Lyn, my favorite part of this episode is the B-plot.
Boimler, in true Boimler fashion, refuses to spend any time having fun (like going to the bar to celebrate with the Betazoids) because he’s a lieutenant junior-grade now, and he has to know everything and be able to do anything.
Rutherford, concerned for his friend, contacts Shaxs, who brings Boimler to a meeting of security personnel. Getting his hopes up that this will be training that will increase his skill-set and therefore improve his chances of making captain some day, Boimler is rather shocked to find that they’re all relaxing and playing games and reciting slam poetry, and not doing things like tactical drills or shooting practice.
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However, once the Betazoid trio reveal their true colors—they’re actually badass secret agents—and take over the bridge, the security officers all drop everything, arm themselves, and take back the bridge with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of competence. It’s beautifully done, and especially nice to see in a franchise that tends to have the world’s most incompetent security forces.
Indeed, this entire B-plot is a repudiation of Trek’s chronic mishandling of security matters. The first part of it is Shaxs’ security detail succeeding in stopping a takeover of the ship, a level of success rarely seen in Trek. It began on the original series, where the security guards are far better remembered for their dying than they are for actually, y’know, securing the ship. It continued to TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise where Worf, Tuvok, and Reed and their assorted staffs (and, in the latter’s case, the Space Marines he got access to in the third and fourth seasons) mostly completely failed to keep the ship secure. (The other Paramount+ shows have been a bit better with it. Landry in Discovery’s first season was also incompetent, but her successors—Tyler and Nhan—have been shown to be good at their jobs, as has La’An on SNW, at least so far.)
The second part is what Shaxs explains to “Baby Bear” Boimler after it’s all over: security’s job isn’t just to beat people up and shoot things. Yes, that’s sometimes necessary, but their job is to keep the ship secure. In this case, it meant forcing an overeager junior-grade lieutenant to relax and take a breath before he worked himself into a tizzy.
The failure of most Trek screen iterations to understand this has been a particular frustration of mine for decades. (In the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series of eBook novellas I edited from 2000-2007, I made an effort to do better by the security detail on the U.S.S. da Vinci.) DS9 is the only show that’s gotten it completely right, with Odo being more of a sheriff than a soldier, with Voyager at least occasionally remembering that with Tuvok, too.
But securing the ship should be more complicated than that, and this episode gives us a lovely example of what Starfleet Security should be like.
Random thoughts
- It’s revealed that, some time in the past, Caitians used to eat Betazoids. That’s more than a little disturbing. Also, T’Lyn’s telepathic projection of emotions has a very, um, feline effect on T’Ana, who goes full crazed cat.
- The three Betazoids are investigating the ship that’s been blowing up random ships all season. That back plot had started moving to the front last week, with Starfleet’s desire for Tendi to attend her sister’s wedding partly motivated by the Orion ship that was destroyed by the ship. At the episode’s end, the Betazoid agents thank the crew for their hospitality by giving Freeman an image they’ve managed to obtain of the ship in question.
- All the various leisure activities the security team engage in relate to other people in security. We get a lovely bit of slam poetry about Worf. They play Security Charades, in which Boimler is the one who guesses that Kayshon is doing Odo. And there’s a puzzle where you can put the pieces together to form an image of Reed.
- The Betazoid women are incredibly flirty, which Ransom thinks means he’s in there, as it were, but it turns out they prefer someone more hard to get. Because of the heightened emotions of the crew, Ransom breaks down and cries.
- The title is a cute play on the phrase “pathological fallacies,” which is generally applied to the assumption that all members of a particular group share traits, which is an especially amusing phrase as it applies to Trek and its overuse of the “planet of hats” trope where all members of an alien species seem to behave the same. Like, say, all Vulcans being stoic and logical and all Betazoids being over-the-top party animals…
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at Capclave 2023 in Rockville, Maryland this weekend, doing panels, readings, and autographings. He’ll also be spending a lot of time in the dealer room at the eSpec Books table. Check out his full schedule here.
I thought this episode was a ton of fun, but surprisingly sweet, especially the B story. We’ve already seen that Shaxs is a complicated man with a soft (and spiritual side), so it makes total sense that he would adopt a holistic view of ship security. I also like that Freeman knew all she had to do was hit the red alert button and Shaxs would handle the rest. Capt. Freeman in general had a good episode, I thought.
Having recently watched “Fascination” with my kids, I definitely fell for the Zanthi Fever trap as easily as the Cerritos crew did. They didn’t totally ignore what was previously said about Bandii Syndrome, because they did acknowledge that she was very young for it. In the end, I didn’t think it was totally clear that she actually had it as opposed to simply losing control of both her telepathy and her emotions at the same time. Or it could be that there are different forms of Bandii, and younger Vulcans can recover more easily.
I’m trying to figure out how Caitians could have hunted Betazoids in the distant past, since I believe they’re from different planets. Was there a space-faring Caitian Empire long ago?
We know, basically, nothing about Caitian society beyond their existence via the characters of M’Ress and T’Ana, so who knows?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2 The Memory Alpha page on Caitians makes me laugh, because Lower Decks and T’Ana have added so much to the species that sounds so ridiculous when written in Memory Alpha’s straight-laced manner. My favorite is “When stressed, Caitians enjoyed playing inside boxes.”
Another solid episode. My favourite gag was when the Cerritos almost crossed the Neutral Zone but then turned aside at the last minute, only for us to cut to a scene on a Romulan warbird who’s crew is disappointed that they’ve been lurking around under cloak for nothing. It’s an excellent call back to all of those episodes where Romulans immediately decloak the instant our heroes even approach the Neutral Zone. Also, the idea of two species that have formerly had a predator-prey relationship now getting to just have a good laugh about eating each other seems very Star Trek.
My only real knocks against it are (1) that it doesn’t take T’Lyn’s syndrome seriously enough (it’s not even clear to me that she has Bendii, as she doesn’t seem to have any of its other symptoms, but it would have been be nice to clarify) and (2) the information that the Betazoids communicate to Freeman at the end about the mystery attacker is nothing that the audience hasn’t already seen. Also, I hope that Rutherford gets a proper focus episode soon; he’s been relegated to the B-plot all season.
“(The script, which is credited to Jamie Loftus, papers over the fact that Bendii Syndrome is (a) very very rare, (b) usually only affects elderly Vulcans, and (c) has no cure.)”
They didn’t actually say T’Lyn had Bendii, just that there are several Vulcan conditions similar to it. And it turned out that it was really just her emotional conflict causing her telepathy to go wild in a manner analogous to Bendii’s neurological disruption. Which is weird, since if repressed emotional conflict could do that, you’d think Spock would be driving his crewmates crazy all the time.
Although there were a few moments there when I wondered if it would turn out the crew was actually infected with the Psi 2000 virus…
An okay episode, a nice focus on T’Lyn, though the premise was a little implausible. I agree that it was wonderful to see a Trek character say that security is about helping people and protecting their well-being, not just running around shooting and hitting things. That’s how I tried to approach security in the novels through characters like Rennan Konya (created for Keith’s SCE) and Jasminder Choudhury (whom David Mack created for the Destiny trilogy but whom I got to write first when I was hired to write its lead-in book), security officers who see their job as being about preventing conflict rather than engaging in it. Really, security means safety and freedom from care. If violence happens, that’s a failure of security. So it was great to hear Shaxs’s speech here.
But the “Caitians ate Betazoids” bit was one I could’ve done without. It’s in poor taste and it raises a ton of questions about the two species’ respective histories. It didn’t really add anything to the episode. And it’s a lazy habit to generate T’Ana material just by falling back on “Look! She’s a cat doing stereotyped cat things!” over and over again.
Incidentally, I liked how obvious it was that T’Lyn was making an excuse to go to the party. If she’d really just wanted to find when communications would clear, she could’ve called the bridge. Or she could’ve set the padd to send the message automatically as soon as the connection was back up. That’s what my e-mail client does by default, so it’s weird she couldn’t do that here.
This episode gave me huge Steven Universe vibes, with all the attention given to mindful education and mental health. I am delighted. (Any chance the Cerritos could ferry Garnet, Amethyst and Pearl to the Gem Homeworld?)
Shaxs and the security team taking down the Betazoid agents was awesome. As someone hardened by years in the Bajoran resistance, Shaxs should know what the hell he’s doing–and, thank the Prophets, he does. Boims can learn a lot from this guy.
The retcon of Bendii syndrome bothered me a lot. In “Sarek”, Bendii was serious business–an incurable, neurological deterioration analogous to Alzheimer’s in humans. There’s no way ihat version of Bendii could be poofed away by an empathetic pep talk from Mariner. (And why does Mariner think that talking about Sarek would cheer up T’Lyn? Sarek’s cognitive decline and death has to be one of the saddest chapters of recent Vulcan history.)
Can Rachel Dratch, Wendy Malick and Janelle James voice all the guest characters?
As for the seasonal plotline…. is it me, or does the mystery ship kind of look like a Starfleet commbadge?
If the title is a pun on “pathological fallacies,” then shouldn’t it be “Empathological” instead of “Empathalogical?” Although the references seem to confirm it’s with an A. Maybe they did it on purpose, though. Maybe the idea was “Empath-a-Logical,” given that it’s Betazoids and Vulcans.
@6/jacoblasky: See my comments above: They didn’t say T’Lyn had Bendii, they said Vulcans have various conditions with similar symptoms, of which Bendii was an example.
And I’ve thought all along that the mystery ship looked like an agonizer from “Mirror, Mirror” (and I just saw someone on Twitter say the same, so it’s not just me).
Christopher: I thought it was Empathological, too, but here we are….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thinking about it some more, it’d actually be really interesting if Betazoid telepathy evolved as a defense mechanism against superior Caitian hearing or something like that.
@9/Chase: I very much doubt Caitians and Betazoids interacted long enough ago to have evolved in response to each other, unless they’re retconning Caitians as native to Betazed. T’Ana said it was only centuries ago, so presumably one species or both had interstellar travel earlier than humans did and had a presence on the others’ planet.
This show seems to be able to do no wrong for me, man do I love Lower Decks. T’Lyn is such a great addition to the crew. Also love it how they keep mixing up the characters and situations they are in.
-Kefka
I recall an episode or three of Enterprise where there was a drone ship which was part of some Romulan plot and with an image of the enterprise making an appearance hard not to see it as a breadcrumb.
I was thinking that when you pitch the mystery ship up 90 degrees, it looks kind of like a whale.
On the a-vs.-o thing:
Actually, the spelling here makes complete sense to me; there is a consistent convention for the use of a preceding “a” to indicate the opposite of an existing word – for example, “typical” vs. “atypical”. According to that convention, it would be completely reasonable to refer to a logical fallacy as being “alogical”…and, by extension, to denote an empathic condition involving logical fallacies as “empathalogical”.
Which mostly suggests that someone in the writers’ room for Lower Decks is a serious grammar nerd – or at least a humorous grammar nerd, who went to the trouble to invent a funny-looking but grammatically accurate word for their episode title.
@14/John: Uh, classical languages don’t work that way. If you were making a compound with “empath,” you couldn’t just stick “empath-” on front of another word component; the prefix would have to be “empatho-.” For instance, something that created empathy would be empathogenic.
Either it’s a typo that nobody caught, or a deliberate misspelling for humorous effect.
This episode was so much fun! I loved it!
When I first heard about the premise, I thought “Oh, it’ll be like Fascination but the emotions will be more chaotic like in Sarek” Way to subvert expectations by making the root cause Bendi Syndrome and *not* Zhanti Fever!
Speaking of Bendi Syndrome, we learned in “Sarek” that there was no cure but that episode was over ten years prior. So, hopefully they found some type of cure or treatment for it because T’Lyn is so young!
Mariner was so great today with T’Lyn.
Also, big props for Shaxs for his belief that Security’s job is to protect the crew by all threats, external and internal.
I definitely think the creation of the BIA was a direct result of the Dominion Occupation. They must’ve decided that they can’t count on Starfleet to protect them anymore.
My favorite bit was Migleemo at the end when he sees the destroyed replicator No shock, no remorse, just “Oh, well.” LOL.
Finally, the line “Ancient Caitians used to eat Betazoids.” makes no sense. (BTW, my first thought when I heard this was Ancient Caitians were Kzinti)
#15: Mmm. At the risk of descending into extreme pedantry…
Your own comment indicates that it’s spelled consistently with an a in official materials, which argues strongly against a typo. And the episode specifically describes the word as referring to a condition involving logical fallacies (that is, things which are alogical – though I grant that that’s an unusual application of the “a=opposite” convention). In the circumstances, I think we have to consider the spelling as both deliberate and as an accurate reflection of the word’s intended meaning.
The question then is “is it linguistically wrong”?
I don’t think so. The correct spelling can’t be “empathological”, because that would imply a condition involving empathic ability and logical thought, which is not what we’re seeing in this episode – a key nuance is missing. The alternative of “empathoalogical”, despite preserving the full root and the nuance, is problematic; the adjacent “oa” creates difficulties for pronunciation and invites confusion with the previous formulation.
Moreover, there’s ample precedent for dropping a vowel between the subject term and the suffix in this kind of scientific nomenclature. And most often that letter is an extra o – see particularly gastronomy, zoology, et cetera.
I admit here that I am not fluent in Latin, and therefore that if (a) we were talking about strict Latin usage, and (b) the strict Latin formulations for the suffixes are -logy and -nomy instead of -ology and -onomy, then “empathalogical” would be bad Latin. But as a practical matter, we’re not talking about Latin, we’re talking about modern English usage (or possibly 23rd century Federation Standard usage, which is necessarily descended from modern English usage). And English has long since adopted the convention of referring to scientific disciplines and conditions as “-onomies and -ologies” – notably but far from least in the naming of old-school Jeopardy! categories.
Either way, the word as spelled with an a appears to me to be an accurate if inventive formulation that clearly describes the condition illustrated in the episode as aired. In that context, it’s almost certainly a newly coined word – but I don’t think you can accuse it of being misspelled.
I just realized that Lower Decks is keeping up the intermittent Trek tradition of adding a new main cast member in season 4, with T’Lyn following in the footsteps of Worf for DS9 and Seven of Nine for VGR. Okay, technically Gabrielle Ruiz is a recurring guest star rather than a main-title regular, but T’Lyn’s been in every episode so far this season except the second, and she’s gotten more focus so far than Rutherford or any of the command crew.
@17/John C. Bunnell: “Your own comment indicates that it’s spelled consistently with an a in official materials, which argues strongly against a typo.”
Not at all. It simply means the error would be on the part of the episode’s makers rather than the reference sources. If that’s the official version of the spelling, then of course that’s what references will use.
It’s hardly unheard of for official credits to have typos or other errors — for instance, the end credits to TOS: “Tomorrow is Yesterday” crediting Captain Christopher as Major Christopher, or ST VI’s end titles crediting Nichelle Nichols as Uhuru, or Picard‘s “Vox” putting a tilde over the “o” when it should’ve been a macron. The original Total Recall infamously added an extra L to Philip K. Dick’s name in its opening titles.
“The correct spelling can’t be “empathological,” because that would imply a condition involving empathic ability and logical thought”
What are you talking about? It’s a pun on “pathological,” using the “-logical” suffix meaning “pertaining to the study of,” as in technological, psychological, ideological, theological, archaeological, etc. It’s from the Greek logia, meaning study. “Logical” is from the Greek logos, meaning word or reason. They’re merely homonyms.
“I admit here that I am not fluent in Latin”
Nor Greek, manifestly.
Oh, there was one other line that was weird–
Freeman tells the BIA agents “Betazed is a member of the Federation! We’re allies!”
If they’re part of the Federation, then they’re more than allies!
I have to say that except for the too much jumping and shouting, Lower Decks is slowly becoming my new favourite Star Trek. :)
Quoth Mary: “My favorite bit was Migleemo at the end when he sees the destroyed replicator No shock, no remorse, just ‘Oh, well.’ LOL.”
That’s not how I read Migleemo’s reaction at all. He had quite a bit of remorse, and walked away whistling innocently trying to pretend like he had nothing to do with it, hoping no one would notice.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@19 While it may just be awkward writing, I could imagine different worlds relating to their Federation memberships differently, especially depending on how long they’ve been members and how much they do autonomously.
Vulcan has its own fleet of ships and practically its own foreign policy with respect to Romulus at times. In the 23rd century, at least some intra-Federation issues were hashed out at Babel by diplomats rather than in the Federation Council by politicians.
In this episode, Betazed has its own intelligence service. Which suggests something more like EU or NATO members than US states or Canadian provinces.
Or maybe I’m just handwaving. :-)
Heh, overuse.
Another excellent episode, they are killing it this season! T’Lyn was exactly what they needed to make everyone gel.
I really want a scene where someone asks the whales about the ST4 probe. The two whale crewmembers are belugas, right? So were belugas not extinct like humpbacks? Seems like our intrepid whale crew would have Thoughts (handed down from their parent’s time) about The Alien Probe That Was Totally Cool With Killing All The Other Whales By Vaporizing The Oceans, But Chill When Humpbacks Show Up.
I think that Star Trek has been fairly consistent about depicting the Federation as being closer to a European Union-style arrangement than a US or Canadian-style federal state. In any case, it occurs to me that a race of telepaths would make absolutely terrifying spies.
#18: Oy.
(No, I am not fluent in Greek – or Yiddish – but we’ve reached and passed the point where further discussion is warranted. Clearly there *is* a play on words involved; we’re simply coming at it from different directions and reading different levels of knowledge and intent into the construction of the pun. And in some ways even the actual intent doesn’t matter – even if the writers didn’t realize it, both our readings can be plausibly extracted from the source material. Which, from some angles, arguably makes the pun even better….)
@21
I just rewatched and okay, I can see that now that I’ve noticed his shocked look. Originally, I just figured he was walking off whistling as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
@22 & @24
Yeah, the UFP is probably more like the EU but the word “allies” is just odd to me. The UFP and the Klingons are allies.
As for Betazoid Intelligence, I tend to think that’s a new development that occurred after the Domininion Occupation. After the Dominion War, they decided they couldn’t count on Starfleet to protect them.
I don’t see the issue here. The existence of the FBI doesn’t mean that cities and counties and states don’t have their own law-enforcement. And we’re talking about entire planets here. Of course each member world is going to have their own local agencies and such.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@27/krad
I just think intelligence gathering would be at the Federal level–not planet by planet. And even if each planet is allowed to have their own law enforcement services, Betazed was always depicted as a very open, peaceful society. I wouldn’t think, historically, they’d have a need for intelligence gathering.
I was initially underwhelmed by this episode. Everything seemed a little too obvious, forced, and cheap. I was particularly disappointed that they watered down Lwaxana’s character by making it seem like all Betazoid women of a certain age were just like her (only more so).
But krad reading your review has changed my mind. Seriously, thanks. You made some great insights about the generalizations typical to Star Trek. Armed with that (and the benefit of the doubt) I’ll give this ep a second chance.
My favorite line was definitely T’Lyn’s “Vulcan as a m-f’er”. Dare I say it, though, her deadpan voice is better in small amounts.
Betazed was conquered and occupied by the Dominion. After that, they might have decided that an intelligence agency was a good idea.
@29/truther: “I was particularly disappointed that they watered down Lwaxana’s character by making it seem like all Betazoid women of a certain age were just like her (only more so).”
Except wasn’t that the cover they put on for their mission? Maybe they were pretending to be like Lwaxana because she’s such a prominent Betazoid diplomat that people from other worlds expect other Betazoids to act like her.
As for the intelligence agency thing, it seems to me that a race of powerful telepaths would have no need for such an institution on their own world, but would be very popular recruits for such institutions on other worlds. So maybe the Betazed Intelligence Agency is more like a talent agency, subcontracting their services to other governments.
Another little detail I liked: The custom Bajoran tarot cards that Shaxs was using, including such figures as “The Celestial Temple”, “The Emissary” and “Derna”. I think that I would have liked it a little better if they’d had their own divination system like the Romulans in Picard, but, eh, Bajor has been in close contact with Earth for a while; it makes sense that they might repurpose some elements of human culture to suit their own mythic context.
@32/jaimebabb: Of course, the idea of tarot as “divination” is an artificial invention anyway. They were invented as a card game in 15th-century Italy, and were purely a card game for 300 years until mid-18th-century occultists started using them for cartomancy and claiming they were rooted in ancient Egyptian magic or whatnot. So since they were already co-opted from their original purpose in that way, it seems natural enough for an alien culture to co-opt them and syncretize them with their own belief system.
@33/ChristopherLBennett- In looking at occult practices, I’ve come away with the impression that if something has any measure whatsoever of randomness or unpredictability to it, some human somewhere has probably tried to use it to either predict the future or talk to the Dead. And also gambled with it, obviously.
@34/jaime: “I’ve come away with the impression that if something has any measure whatsoever of randomness or unpredictability to it, some human somewhere has probably tried to use it to… predict the future…”
Proving just how much trouble human beings have understanding the concept of “random.” It’s part of how our brains work to extrapolate patterns from disconnected inputs, which often helps us extract meaning from incomplete data, but also leads us to imagine or expect patterns where none exist.
“Vulcan as a Motherfucker”
I appreciate that T’Lyn required the objective perspective of an emotional being to reflect on how she’s actually quite Vulcan. It is a fascinating appraisal of Vulcan society that they tend to make their own people feel defective when they don’t meet their standards of cthia. It is not logical. Though I think that Captain Sokel genuinely sent T’Lyn somewhere where she thought that she would shine, rather than it being punitive. He was simultaneously relieving himself of a headache and giving T’Lyn the opportunity to grow in an environment more conducive to her natural proclivities.
Mariner was aggravating as shit the first couple of episodes of this series. So seeing her turn into such a good friend to T’Lyn and seeing her just be a happier more well adjusted person as the seasons have gone on (including forcing Uhura to lighten up a little) has been a rather joyous journey. This season started with her needing to reinforce Boimler’s confidnce and this week, she had to reaffirm a Vulcan’s security in her own Vulcan-ness. And by being true to her own rebellious nature that maybe the people complaining about T’Lyn were the ones in the wrong and T’Lyn is actually fine. And her and her Mom actually being friendly and loving towards one another even when being telepathically influenced is just a big ole smile on my face.
The Bendii Syndrome was simply highlighted as an example of Vulcan conditions similar to Xanthe Fever. It was immediately ruled out as T’Lyn is too young. But it was mentioned as a proof that Vulcans can telepathically disrupt other people’s emotions. The way T’Lyn phrased it indicated it was one of many ailments in Vulcans that can produce the effect.
Rachel Dratch, Janelle James, and Wendy Malick. As Betazoid diplomats/spies. I love being served something I didn’t know I wanted.
I love that Rutherford immediately called in Shax and the team when Boimler started overstressing himself. The Starfleet version of a Code Red is mandatory relaxation. Shax does have a very holistic application of security. Physical security and mental health are actually quite strongly connected. It also connects to how Shax calls his juniors baby bear. But the Security team jumping into action with the red alert shifting them all into dramatic lighting,with Kayshon appearing to bird run like a ninja, then proceeding to no diff, the secret agents. Special mention to Haubold, showing weave nation certification dodging the stun baton with zero difficulty was fantastic.
The BIA doesn’t surprise me, nor does it seem like an automatic reaction to the Occupation of Betazed. Recall the V’Shar (I know they don’t exist) which is the intelligence agency of Vulcan. I doubt the Andorian Imperial Guard was disbanded. The Betazoids are uniquely suited to intelligence gathering and transfer, I would think in most situations a robust intelligence service would be the first and most well developed line of defense.
On the subject of the Caitians hunting Betazoids, I look at the Star Trek Online lore (I apologize if people are sick of hearing about it), STO’s devs didn’t have any rights or licensing to use the Kzinti, so they created a situation with the Caitians and a new version of the species called the Ferasans. They started on the planet Ferasa, the Ferasans are the result of an augment program. In this case the augments won, and the non-augmented Caitians left to found a new homeworld, Cait, while the Ferasans became a hostile aggressive power, until they joined the Klingon Empire. So an older iteration of Caitian civilization being a literally predatory interstellar power doesn’t seem unreasonable. No more unreasonable than only a few centuries having passed since humans were as greedy as Ferengi.
The Romulans decloaking and being disappointed was so on brand. The Commander pepping his crew up with a new spot to lurk was hilarious.
As far as Migeleemo, it’s fairly obvious he was terribly embarrassed.
Migleemo’s whistle sounding human instead of like bird song was disappointing.
@36/mr_d: The name “Ferasan” is a reference to the 1989 book The Worlds of the Federation by Lora Johnson, which posited Ferasa as the name of Cait’s primary star.
I’ve never understood why people want to associate Caitians with Kzinti. I mean, they’re distinctly different. Kzinti aren’t just cats, but have alien features such as their hairless tails and ears resembling bat wings or Japanese paper fans. But then again, M’Ress was obviously meant to be a lion-woman, yet later versions of Caitians are all based on different cat species, particularly T’Ana being treated as a big housecat. So I guess it’s not unprecedented for people to lump everything felinoid together without differentiation.
I didn’t like the Romulan gag, because it just reminded me of my pet peeve of productions as far back as “The Deadly Years” having Romulan ships waiting just inside the Neutral Zone, as if it were part of Romulan territory. The whole point of a Neutral Zone is that it’s neutral! Nobody from either side is allowed in it! I would’ve liked a joke that made fun of that particular bit of recurring idiocy, or at least lampshaded it, but instead they just repeated the idiocy without criticism.
While there’s probably more to the Dominion War than the snippets we know, the occupation of Betazed seems less an intelligence failure (at least of the sort that humanoid spies would help with) than a strategic and military defeat. It’s Earth that came within a hair’s breadth of falling due to Changeling subversion; Betazed lost to an invasion fleet.
That said, responses to traumatic defeat don’t have to be rational. Betazoids have a natural advantage as spies, and presumably no special resources for creating an early warning network or defense fleet separate from the Federation. “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.”
I’d think the point of hiding cloaked in the Neutral Zone is deniability. If the Romulans are outgunned, they were never there. If they have the Feds outgunned, they uncloak, destroy them, and tell a pretextual story about rushing to confront the invaders as soon as they were detected. (From their side of the Zone, of course!) The hope is that the Feds decide they don’t have proof worth a war, but the Zone becomes a de facto Romulan-aligned buffer (or at least a place they can operate more freely than the Federation) as long as they’re reasonably careful. If not, well, as someone once said, “risk is our business”.
Places like the Korean DMZ aren’t without similar stories of provocations and resulting flare-ups of violence. Ditto various ostensibly neutral places during the Cold War.
@38 / mschiffe
The dialogue in “In the Pale Moonlight” suggests that it was an intelligence failure; the fleet assigned to guard Betazed was out of position on a training manoeuvre because Starfleet Intelligence had wrongly determined that the Dominion forces weren’t in a position to invade. It wasn’t so much a matter of overpowering the Federation fleet as it was catching them with their pants down.
I saw that when refreshing my memory of the events, but I’m still not entirely sure what agents could have accomplished to avoid that It’s not as if they could embed as Jem’Hadar, Vorta, or Founders.
Granted, telepaths, which helps. But still, can they get close enough to the invasion fleet to get info on its planned movements? I guess if it was after the Cardassian alliance they could try the old Enterprise Incident disguise gambit. It still kind of seems as if they needed patrol ships or observation posts or sensor nets more than the kind of spycraft we’re seeing here.
Calling it now: the Sh’vhal is toast.
There’s a spectrum between “Small Universe Syndrome” and “Nothing is connected whatsoever.” While making the Kzinti and Caitians into separate members of the same race may making the universe smaller, it gives a lot more history for those two races that doesn’t have anything to do with Earth. A little too much history in Star Trek is involving Earth and giving past interactions between alien races without humanity makes the world feel more alive and lived in as I’m sure you’ll agree.
Yes, the Kzinti and Caitans could be like Romulans and Vulcans but the Caitans are the reverse being the “good” guys who left the bad guys.
And while I’m uncomfortable with this because the Kzinti are Larry Niven’s creation, I don’t disagree with the idea in theory.
I think that Shax taking Boimler under his wing is going to help develop him into a fine captain some day.
@39/mschiffe: “I’d think the point of hiding cloaked in the Neutral Zone is deniability. If the Romulans are outgunned, they were never there. If they have the Feds outgunned, they uncloak, destroy them, and tell a pretextual story about rushing to confront the invaders as soon as they were detected.”
Except that in every case where we’ve seen it, the Starfleet ship survives the encounter. We’re told that a ship being in the Zone is an automatic act of war, but the Romulans’ presence in the Zone is never reacted to in that way; the story just presumes they’re entitled to be there. And in cases like Prodigy, the Romulan ships show themselves quite openly across the border of the Zone, as if they have nothing to hide by being there. (Although in the PRO example, I suspect it was scripted as the Romulan ships being in Romulan space beyond the other edge of the Zone, but the animators mistakenly interpreted the Zone as a flat border with no width.)
On the Betazoid intelligence question, why assume they had no spy agency before the Dominion War? If Caitians used to hunt and eat Betazoids centuries ago, then it stands to reason that Cait and Betazed had a long-running conflict centuries ago, so the Betazoids would’ve had plenty of reason to have an intelligence agency back then.
@43/C.T. Phipps: “While making the Kzinti and Caitians into separate members of the same race may making the universe smaller, it gives a lot more history for those two races that doesn’t have anything to do with Earth.”
But they don’t even look like each other! Kzinti are not simply anthropomorphic cats. They’re aliens that superficially resemble felinoids but have distinctly alien features, notably their fan-like ears and furless “rat” tails. In Known Space, they’re up to 8 feet tall and quite stocky, though the TAS and LD version is slimmer and more human-sized. Also, Kzinti females are non-sapient. Kzinti don’t resemble Caitians any more than, say, Vorta resemble Vulcans. There’s no sensible reason to assume they’re related just because they both fall into the general category of felinoid aliens.
(I was going to point out that Kzinti have 4 fingers, but so did M’Ress and the Prodigy Caitians, whereas T’Ana and other Caitians seen in LD have 5 fingers, as presumably did the Caitians in TVH. It’s the Tellarites all over again.)
There’s also a good statement that humanity’s lack of dimorphism is actually rather unique to us. We come from a very small amount of stock that got wiped nearly out. The fact that so many variants of birds, dogs, and other creatures exist means that the two races superficial similarities might not be such a odd thing.
Same with Tellarites.
I’m not saying you’re not right. I’m just saying it’s not quite the jump it could be.
@37/ChristopherLBennett,
I don’t think the intention was to associate the Caitians with the Kzinti at all. When STO was building out their story and the Klingon faction, basically making enemy forces for the game, they had the Klingons under their new Chancellor J’mpok conquered the Gorn, absorbed the Nausicaans, contracted with the Orion Syndicate and the Letheans, and annexed the Ferasans. They couldn’t use the Kzinti, but they still wanted a feline faction, hence the Ferasans. I had heard that the star was Ferasa maybe once, so thanks for that. I’ll have to see if I can find Worlds of the Federation somewhere.
@45 The Feds are also well known marshmallows who regularly don’t declare war in the face of open provocation due to their high ideals/clear cowardice. Against that, they reliably win the wars others finally goad them into, which is why they’re a major power despite actually taking peaceful coexistence seriously. But the Romulans aren’t wrong to think they can get away with “acts of war” that either leave no witnesses or few/no casualties. The Romulans have by contrast convinced everyone they’re on more of a hair trigger.
Which may be a bluff, since I don’t think there ever is a war over a Neutral Zone incident before Romulus is destroyed. But evidently a successful one.
(I’m not assuming the Betazoid intelligence agency was created after the Dominion War, just responding to the speculation that it was.)
@45 – “We’re told that a ship being in the Zone is an automatic act of war, but the Romulans’ presence in the Zone is never reacted to in that way”
In TOS alone the Enterprise entered the zone in The Way to Eden, The Deadly Years and The Enterprise Incident. There were probably others. And that’s just one ship. Who knows how many other Starfleet ships did something similar.
And T’Lyn is brought to the spotlight yet again. A very clever twist on an old Trek story. Like most, my mind wandered to Lwaxana’s headaches and ensuing hilarity on DS9’s “Fascination” and completely forgot about the unintended consequences of Sarek’s Bendii syndrome on his episode (and you’d think it would be easy to remember Wesley coming to blows with LaForge and getting slapped by Beverly – somehow, I’d forgotten). It’s the type of story that fits this show like a glove. And I certainly like Mariner in this nurturing role getting T’Lyn’s spirits up – not unlike her better scenes with Boimler.
Finding out that the three Betazoids were secret agents made me wonder about one thing though: are there any interstellar laws in the Trek universe regarding telepaths and how they use their gifts? Babylon 5 got a lot of mileage out of that issue. Who do the Betazoids answer to if they invade on someone else’s privacy without their consent or illegally eavesdrop on otherwise sensitive state secrets? Trek’s track record with Betazoids have mostly boiled down to Lwaxana making others embarrassed or uneasy (aside from that one scene where she exposes the terrorist ambassador on “Manhunt”). And any scenes of Spock getting telepathic info are scenes where he performs the action under Kirk’s command without ever addressing the issue of whether it’s right or not (to say nothing of the near mindrape on Undiscovered Country).
Funny enough, I didn’t even take notice of the fact that Shaxs and his team acted so quickly and professionally to retake the bridge. Inept security is such a played out trope on Trek that I sort of normalized it within my expectations of the franchise. So I pretty much watched the sequence without even paying attention to that difference. In a sense, I was still in Boimler’s shoes, still making peace with the fact that security means more than just shooting or arresting people.
Also, a side note. Is it just on my end, or has Lower Decks stopped doing the pre-credits teaser scene? This isn’t the first episode where this happens.
@47/mr_d: “I don’t think the intention was to associate the Caitians with the Kzinti at all.”
Maybe not in STO, but it’s been done quite a bit in the past.
I love, love, love the “holistic view” of security.
FWIW, I saw the notion that Caitian and Kzinti were related in, I believe, one of the old “Worlds of the Federations” books. I thought it was an interesting idea but didn’t put a lot of thought into it. Lately, watching TAS it makes less sense because how do we explain the difference between Caitian and Kzinti females?
I just mentioned it here because it’s what I thought of when I heard “In ancient times, Caitians ate Betazoids.” I guess they were going for a joke since “Genesis” had Deanna Troi turning into a fish.
But writing a line that makes zero sense just to a joke is silly to me.
@53/Mary: Oh yeah, WotF does say Caitians were believed to be “descended from an ancient Kzinti colonization group.” Which surprises me, since I didn’t think they would’ve been allowed to mention the Kzinti at that time. Maybe that’s why the book had one of those infamous Richard Arnold-mandated disclaimers at the front saying it was “solely the author’s interpretation of that universe.”
Title update: The actual onscreen title card says “Empathological Fallacies.” So the “Empathalogical” title listed in the promotional materials and references is, indeed, a typo.
Alan Dean Foster connected the Caitians and the Kzinti Star Trek Log 5. It was a flashback to M’Ress’ time before the Enterprise when the ship she was on was attacked by Kzinti.
“We Caitians and the Kzinti sharre common genetic rroots in the farr past, as do the Vulcans and the RRomulans. With a little carreful makeup, I could pass as a Kzin.”
The Ambergris Elelement – Star Trek Log Five
.
Everyone’s so intent on looking for common ancestry between Kzinti and Caitians, no one even mentions the Vedala…
A minor personal annoyance: T’Lyn and her former CO both refer to her unique decision making process as being instinct-based. Uh, no. Instincts are evolution-programmed robot responses to familiar situations. What T’Lyn is using is intuition, which is the ability of the subconscious mind to correlate and act on information the conscious mind may be unaware of. As the late, great Randal Garrett put it, it is “The ability to go from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion without passing through the space between.” Kind of a psychic equivalent to warp drive. Ponn Farr is instinct; acting on an uneasy feeling that one might need more advanced sensor and/or shield systems in the near future is intuition. Mariner was right; while intuition is not a strictly logical process, to deny its practical uses is, in a word, illogical.
@57 – The Vadela seem more canine than feline.
@57 & 59: Apparently the Vedala were scripted to be “something like a large, spectral lemur.” Alan Dean Foster’s novelization likens it to an aye-aye lemur.
Here’s the best look at the Vedala from “The Jihad,” without the coloring error in the wider shot that blended its left ear in with its garment:
I guess it is sort of lemur-ish, if a lemur had Vulcan-meets-Ferengi ears. It’s not really all that feline or canine or anything specific. I think it’s a cool design for an alien, in that it’s mammalian without being based directly on any single species like M’Ress was.
I mean, female (and many male) Known Space fans have been arguing the Kzinti claim about their women as being bull pucky for decades rather than an objective alien trait.
@61/C.T. Phipps: “I mean, female (and many male) Known Space fans have been arguing the Kzinti claim about their women as being bull pucky for decades rather than an objective alien trait.”
Are they unaware that Known Space established explicitly that the Kzinti genetically engineered their females to be subsapient, and kill those that show signs of intelligence (since some are still born that way despite the engineering)? The Ringworld Engineers established that the transplanted Kzinti enclave on the Ringworld, placed there before the engineering, had fully sapient females. It’s not just a belief or a claim, it’s something Kzinti males actively brought about through eugenics (or perhaps dysgenics is the word for it).
Yes, they are.
I suppose they want basically a “happy ending” for them or some to escape or reverse the condition. It’s a common theme in fanfic.
Weirdly, the closest equivalent would be basically a retcon similar to the Moclans regarding women in The Orville.
@63/C.T. Phipps: There are professional stories about Kzinti females retaining intelligence — I mentioned Engineers and the Ringworld enclave, and I think there are some in the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies.
It’s actually pretty similar to the Moclan situation, now that I think about it. Moclans forcibly reassign their rare female babies to male, while Kzinti engineer intelligence out of their females and kill any female children who display high intelligence. In both cases, there’s a small number of females who manage to escape culling and lead their lives away from the homeworld.
And I daresay it was Niven himself who established the retcon — first saying in “The Warriors” and Ringworld that Kzinti females were subsapient, then revealing in Engineers that they’d been engineered that way and had originally been intelligent. I would speculate that he realized, or readers complained, that the original idea was misogynistic, so he tried to ameliorate it by establishing it as an artificial alteration to their natural state.
There are authorized Known Space novels in which modern female Kzinti can overcome their genetic problems with medication (Treasure Planet) and in which the home planet of the Kzin has untraveled areas where intelligent female Kzin still reside (I won’t mention that title, to avoid spoilers)