8.2/10
92%
64%
77%
79%
Yes, we’re back with another gimmick-laden episode but unlike previous entries in the season, this one actually makes sense and has some much needed character development.
Trelane is back — well, I’ll call him Trelane as when he tries to introduce himself he’s cut off by Pike who quite frankly doesn’t care about him or his shenanigans.
Pike wakes up with a bandage around his head, he was in a terrible shuttle accident which has hurt Spock and he’s in need of a living heart transplant.
Duh. Duh. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuh.
Actually, they didn’t use that sound effect but they should have, they missed a trick there.
Pike is confused, he can’t remember anything from the past two weeks which Dr. M’Benga explains is due to …… Cosmic Amnesia.
Duh. Duh. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuh.
Okay, I’ll stop with that. Sorry.
Pike is confused by his surroundings, he feels that everything is brighter and somehow hazier. The crew are talking with dramatic pauses and staring off in random directions but to them it’s completely normal.
It turns out, in order to complete a school project, Trelane has trapped the crew of the Enterprise in a Soap Opera so he can study their interactions and prove that they are worth further study.
The only way out of Trelane’s experiment is for Pike to go along with the storyline which, as it’s based on old Earth Space Operas include a long lost family member, evil twin and potential medical malpractice.
Body Cleaning The Season
This is the 7th out of 10 episodes of Season 4, before we get to a massively truncated fifth and final season next year.
Of the seven aired episodes, every one has been a pastiche of some other genre and it’s almost like the writers had run out of ideas for Strange New Worlds, or would rather be writing anything but science fiction.
And then we come to Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass which takes the day time soap opera format and turns it up to an 11 in a way that really works in the Star Trek environment and this really scrubbed the stink off of the season from it’s previous genre-hopping episodes.
🚨Red Alert! Spoilers for Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass ahead!🚨
One thing that is a problem for this episode is that you need to have seen some truly terrible Soap Operas in order to understand the underlying parody.
Here in the UK we have Coronation Street and Eastenders which are flagship soaps but they are taken more on the serious end of the scale. Sure, people come back from the dead unexpectedly or a random unknown child might appear but I can’t remember an evil twin (missing a trick Eastenders – evil twin Alfie would be a brilliant addition!). They’re also filmed in a very natural way, there’s no tight zoom-ins, dramatic pauses or Vaseline lens blurs, it’s all portrayed as gritty and real life.
We have had terrible soaps though, BBC’s Eldorado springs to mind, but it was still nowhere near the level of US Soaps. When I was in Canada I was able to watch Days of Our Lives and I was truly shocked with how the series was put together and aired. Truly ridiculous storylines, terrible staging and random editing. It was glorious.
And that’s the big problem here: If you haven’t seen what is being parodied, can you fully understand the parody?
I think most countries will have been able to see clips of soaps like Days of Our Lives or The Young and the Restless or will have comedic parodies of them but certain things will go over an international audience’s head.
Take Pike’s shuttle craft accident as an example. At the start of the episode, M’Benga states:
The dreaded Abbott-Chancellor Collision.
It’s a good thing you were once an ace test pilot.
Otherwise you’d be dead.
I shouldn’t have to google a joke to understand the punchline but here I did. The Abbotts and Chancellors are two families from The Young and the Restless so why is this funny? No idea. And a lot of people outside the United States won’t know either.
And that had me worried that there would be other similar references that I would miss or not get but luckily that seems to be the only one.
The main focus of the episode is Captain Pike who managed to avoid being taken in by Trelane’s meddling and is the only member of the crew aware of what’s happening to them.
It turns out that Pike is still harbouring a deep-seated grief over losing Marie Batel when she was turned into some sort of timey-wimey protection statue (you had to be there). During his final few moments with Batel, she was able to open up the fabric of space and time to create a world for the two of them to live a full life in, complete with a daughter. And it’s the loss of a daughter that Pike had but didn’t that still sits heavily with him.
I really like how they framed this episode. It’s hard to see how Pike would have finally seen a counsellor to discuss his grief if it initially hadn’t been scripted for him that he must. And that small interaction with Dr. Eleanor Chivers (Deidre Hall who, at the time of writing, has starred in a whopping 5395 episodes of Days of our Lives as Dr Marlena Evans) allows Pike to finally open up and grieve for a daughter only he knew.
As well as the many nods to soaps through music being played out of nowhere, dramatic close-ups and people starring off at random angles, they’ve also changed up the way that the episode is filmed. The episode is bookended by the usual anamorphic format of 2.39 : 1 but when we’re in soap opera mode, we lose the letterboxing and move into full 16:9 television aspect ratio, it’s a subtle change but it shows that something strange is afoot.
I know this episode certainly won’t be for everyone but in terms of a vehicle for Pike’s acceptance of loss, and the survivor’s guilt he’s feeling I think it was a rather fitting genre for his story to take place in.
The one thing I’d change?
I just wish we had an actual
Duh. Duh. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuh.
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