10.1.1 Found Highway

Lost And Found

The scenery's unfamiliar, but we're definitely back on the right track.

No Love Found Between Them

My working theory for Prodigy - as covered at the end of my previous essay - is as follows. Lower Decks proved that light-hearted, sass-seasoned animated Trek was simultaneously an extremely smart move, and one completely unacceptable to a host of extremely loud older fans who wouldn't know a good idea if it phasered away their chest cavity.

The solution was simple: a cartoon for kids.

"Working theory" is something of a misnomer, of course, in the sense that you might find out at any moment that it wasn't ever working at all. Prodigy is the only Trek show that I'd seen absolutely nothing of before starting to write about it. Sure, I'd only seen a handful of TAS episodes, too, but I had at least a little experience with it when IDFC started. There was also over forty years of conventional wisdom about the show, at least some of which I'd acquired through osmosis.

Prodigy, though, was a near-total mystery. It still is, beyond what I've picked up from watching "Lost And Found". As such, anything I suggest here might prove completely unviable five months from now, when we get to the show's second episode (I'm treating this opening story as a single instalment, as it was upon original broadcast). At present, though, what strikes me most about this show I'm assuming is based on getting kids into Trek is just how little Trek is here to get into.

My fiancé summed this up just a few minutes in, by asking: "Why is this so Star Wars?". It's an interesting criticism, partially because she's only seen five Star Wars films (none more than once), and none of the TV shows. Even so casual an acquaintance with the other US sci-fi franchise proved enough to recognise the visual and narrative language being employed.

And she's clearly right, right? A colourful riot of extremely alien aliens, most of them speaking incomprehensible languages; droids everywhere, including a sinister overseer who, if he and General Grievous aren't direct relations, certainly look like they exchange Life Day cards; a ludicrous action set-piece involving desperate chases through insanely dangerous environments, etc. The story even ends with them flying through inexplicably starship-sized tunnels. Change the Kazon slaver into a Quarren, and replace the object of the Diviner's quest from being the Federation into, say, a Jedi temple or something, and I don't think you'd have any problem selling at least the first half of this episode as a new Star Wars show. Even the OT-or-nothing die-hards might accept it as canon, at least until they found out the actor who voices Dal is black.

None of this is necessarily an issue. Well, it might be an issue for territorial Star Wars fans, but that's their problem; I've got my own breed of fanatical dickhead to keep an eye on, thank you very much. Besides, while it'd take far less effort to turn this into a standard Star Wars story than a standard Star Trek one, it's not like anyone has cause to sue anyone else for copyright infringement. This is just a matter of what stories became sufficiently embedded into culture that they became our genre signifiers. It might be interesting to imagine what had happened were Trek to have come out on top, but the creatives of the 2020s need to play the sabacc hand they've been dealt.

For the rest of us, I'd argue this is actually a good thing.

Found Cause

What matters here isn't how much of a case you could make for this opening story being reminiscent of Star Wars. It's how little the case can be made that we're watching something reminiscent of Trek. The endless self-reflections and self-cannibalism the franchise needs to leave behind is, indeed, absent here. I spent much of the last essay arguing the only way Trek could survive was by expanding what that word is allowed to encompass, That's exactly what we get here. I can't be entirely sure, with so much of Voyager and Enterprise still to watch, but I can think of only one other Trek episode to not feature a single member of Starfleet, and that episode uses that fact as its big twist. Certainly, I'm willing to put money on this being the first story to not be be defined in any way by its characters' relationships with the fleet, whether as members, former members, or unlikely allies. Beyond a single line about the Diviner's obsession, the only link to the all-pervading UFP, until the final seconds, is an abandoned and buried starship.

Consider what this implies. A Starfleet which is buried and all-but forgotten. It's artefacts can be excavated, still powerful and wonderous, but the people that find them are left to do with them as they will. And it's those people that matter, not what they've happened to find. Yes, Dal and Rok-Tahk need the universal translator in order to talk to each other. The speed with which they become at least companiable is entirely down to them.

Contrast this with the Diviner, clearly framed as a hissable villain (it's always nice to see/hear John Noble get his evil on). We're given very little of him here, but that makes it all the more notable that almost the only thing we learn about him as a character is that he's obsessed with the Federation. Doubtless this is just a hint at a broader backstory, but what you choose to introduce your audience to first matters.

In this case, it is this: getting along with those different to you makes you Trek. Treating your obsession with the Federation as all that matters makes you the enemy. Even the one major nod to canon (the appearance of Kazon, Medusans and Tellarites being essentially window dressing, albeit ones that make it very difficult to understand where the building in question is supposed to be), a holographic Kathryn Janeway, is introduced as a way to help these new characters and their new context survive. Trek lies beneath this show not as a foundation, but as a launchpad.

This is a very different message to what Lower Decks is offering us - that show doesn't require an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Trek Encyclopedia [1], but it certainly rewards it. It simply isn't interested in veneration, which is the common theme between the two shows. They're starting in almost precisely opposite directions, but they're driving at the same point. What makes good new Trek has nothing to do with the size of its intersection with the structures and scriptures of good old Trek.

It is, instead, a matter of soul. A question of heart.

Found In Translation

Let's talk about minds, then. This is your brain; this is your brain on universal translation.

"Lost And Found" isn't the first Trek story to suggest an alien's gender can be revealed by their translated tones. In fact, fact fans, something similar happened in the very first story to feature the UT: "Metamorphosis". In that episode, Kirk and co. learn the Companion, a sentient glittering cloud which had been holding Zefram Cochrane on an asteroid near Epsilon Canaris III, is female, purely by the sound of the voice generated for them.

Why the selected voice should be proof of gender isn't explicitly laid out, but we can piece it together from two comments Kirk makes. The first refers to the translator:

The second relates to the concept of sex itself:

As it happens, there's no reason whatsoever to believe male and female would have any sensible interpretation outside our own biome, though Kirk doesn't go so far as to suggest them as the only two possibilities among the vast panoply of potential alien lifeforms (and how obnoxiously, gleefully stupid would you have to be to believe that?).

Leaving that aside, though, the idea seems to be that the universal translator has interpreted the Companion's brain-waves as female, and pitches its own electronically-generated voice accordingly.

Whether we consider this progressive depends a great deal on our interpretations of "recognise" and "brainwave patterns" (and I guess "female", but I'd hope IDFC was already entirely clear on that point before taking the above swipe at the risible Forstater). Are we dealing with biological essentialist drivel about how women's brains are just built differently? Or an understanding that our gender identity begins within and flows outward from our consciousness?

It's a little tricky to give "Metamorphosis" much credit here, given the gender reveal sharply swerves our heroes onto a new line of thinking. Suddenly the Companion stops being a zookeeper for Zefram Cochrane, and metamorphises instead into his would-be lover. Heteronormativity and gender essentialism aren't the same thing, no. Neither are thunder and lightning, though, and it still feels odd when we encounter one without the other.

"Lost And Found" is rather more careful in what it wants the universal translator to be saying.

Let's start by noting that Dal misgenders Fugitive Zero in his conversation with Gwyn, a careless mistake which almost earns him a place on Drednok's "To Torture" list. And it is a mistake. Not just for the obvious but ultimately useless truth that any unidentified alien is a "them" absent further information, nor even the much more important fact that any actual human is a "them" absent further information. Angus Imrie is deliberately and carefully delivering an androgynous performance (listen to him in interviews to hear how different his voice is to Zero's). He does this so well that I'd assumed Zero was female until Dal's discussion with Gwyn, meaning I was making an equivalent mistake to Dal's.

Not only is Dal primed as an unreliable observer, then, much of the audience are too (I don't want to suggest everyone made my mistake of automatically pigeonholing Zero gender-wise). And there's no justifiable reason for that, no viable defence for mistaking a broadly accurate heuristic as infallible, It is simply something most of us have learned, and must work to unlearn. Dal, at least, shows early signs that he's prepared to try. When Rok-Tahk's translated tones prove utterly at odds with the low growls of her actual voice, Dahl stops himself from labelling what's he now hearing, noting instead only that he wasn't expecting so great a difference.

This seems important. I am not trans, and as always I want to be careful not to speak for or over identities and experiences which are not my own. That said, the idea of a device which can reveal to others our "true" gender identity, by expressing our interiority in a manner more consistent with how outside observers believe that interiority "should" be expressed, strikes me as a problem. This is not, at all, to criticise the idea of acting in any manner which feels right to you, including decisions to act in ways which are ultimately culturally determined as being "correct". But the point is how you want to be observed, not how the observer feels in observing you.

The problem isn't really the communicator itself, though. How could it be? It's just a tool. Specifically, it's a tool designed to allow communication between wildly different cultures. The need to express the nature of the observed in terms familiar to the observer is foundational to its very existence. The problem is in not recognising what is acquired in translation. Conceiving of Rok-Tahk as a girl is not necessarily any more reasonable than conceiving of them as a man, until Rok-Tahk themselves chooses to clarify.

The hope is that Dal has realised that. The hope is we all can.

This is all good, and important. The reputation the franchise has for grappling with the social issues of the day has never been fully earned, but at its best, Trek has found ways to say what needed saying. "Lost And Found" is doing just that, or at least, is doing the groundwork needed to do just that later.

It might not be the best opening episode of 21st Trek. Perhaps I just prefer competent comedy to competent action-adventure, but I'd rather spin up "Second Contact" for an initial dose of animated fun. I'd put "The Vulcan Hello" above this, too, since for all its faults, I can't help but respect how pretty and accomplished it is, and how much it make me think. For all that, though, this is definitely the episode which feels most like the future. A story with all the right instincts about what needs to be left behind, and what has to remain.

At long last, we may have found what we had lost.

[1] Yes, I had a copy when I was a teenager. What do you mean, obviously?

Ordering:

1. Emissary 

2. Encounter At Farpoint 

3. Second Contact

4. The Vulcan Hello

5. Lost And Found

6. Broken Bow

7. Beyond The Farthest Star

8. Remembrance

9. Caretaker 

10. The Man Trap