10.1.2 The Red And The White

Starstruck

Our second binary system in the second round of the second iteration of IDFC. Feels like something we should be doing something with, right?

"Red Wunz Go Fasta!"

When we covered Battle At The Binary Stars, we talked about how Michael risked being torn apart by the difficulty of trying to orbit two stellar bodies at the same time. "Starstruck", as the oldies say, turns this up to eleven, with the two stars themselves ripping into each other's mass. The aim is not to find one's place within this system, but how to safely find a way through, while everything seems determined to tear itself apart.

This central image is reflected in numerous interesting ways as the episode goes on. The first point to make here is that this titanic battle between two stars is taking place entirely without any actual motivation. Nothing more is involved here than a pair of abyssal gravity wells drawing ever closer to each other. This is entirely obvious while we are considering the stars directly. Move into the realm of metaphor, though, and the observation carries more weight. The stellar wrestling match our heroes find themselves caught in isn't the only conflict happening in "Starstruck", and the question as to what extent those fights happen because of anyone actually wanting them is worth considering.

Take Rok-Tahk's battle with Gwyn in the vehicle replication bay. There's an obvious visual callback to the collapsing binary system as the diminutive, alabaster-skinned Gwyn fights the much larger, bright-red Rok-Tahk in a (brilliantly realised) set-piece inside a rapidly assembling shuttle. There's also a deeper resonance in the fact that, just as is happening outside the Protostar, it's the smaller combatant who wins. More interesting than either of these parallels, though, is that neither of them sought out this fight in the first place. It was simply something that happened as a result of external forces, which pushed and pulled them in precisely the right way to force them into a confrontation.

These external forces come from a variety of sources. There's the fact Gwyn's escape is liable to endanger the fugitives, given the nature of her father, and that (as Pog points out) Roh-Tahk is their best chance to force Gwyn back into her cell. Then there's Rok-Tahk's righteous anger over how miserably Gwyn answered her question about why she did nothing to help the Unwanted while they were forced to labour in the mines of Tars Lamora [1].

Meanwhile, from Gwyn's perspective, there's the extremely pressing question of how long the fugitives can go without accidentally getting her killed. Or engineering it deliberately, for that matter. Being at the mercy of four people who blame you for their years of slavery must have seemed like a likely death sentence even before Dal pairs their swapped roles with the idea that, were she still the one in power, the other side would quickly find themselves bundled into an airlock and hurled into space.

As that last sentence reminds us, though, there's a common factor to most, if not all, of the different reasons Rok-Tahk and Gwyn end up brawling. Who deactivated the brig fields? Who demanded Rok-Tahk act as enforcer? Who has persuaded Gwyn that trying to escape a dying star system in a stolen shuttlecraft is her best chance at survival?

The primary force dragging bodies into conflict is Dal.

Generation Gaffe

"Starstruck" goes all in on painting Dal as both selfish and arrogant. He doesn't actively wish harm on those he's ended up aboard the Protostar with, sure. It's still clearly something he could cause to happen, though, through his focus on his own needs, and own pride. Not a single problem the fugitives encounter would have been an issue had he heeded the hologram designed to keep crews out of trouble. Where "...Binary Stars" was about how hard it was for Michael to balance competing influences, "Starstruck" is about the impossibility of being able to wholly extract yourself from external pull, and the dangers inherent in believing otherwise.

The intended message here is that it would have been better had Dal immediately admitted he was out of his depth, and let Janeway steer him to safer waters. Indeed, the moral that one should always ask for assistance when in trouble is so foundational, the accompanying episode of Set Course With Kate Mulgrew - a series of very short videos in which Mulgrew highlights each story's subtext - is called "Accepting Help". And look. I'm not going to turn each essay on Prodigy into what I think of the moral message we're apparently going to get at the end of each episode. I grew up on He-Man, OK, I know this kind of "you know what's really cool, kids?" approach is just something that happens sometimes. At least Mulgrew Mulls Morals For Growth doesn't pop up at the end of each episode.

Still, we should take a moment to recognise that Dal, while clearly not being altruistic in his general attitude, has a pretty strong justification for not just following everything Janeway says. His argument that there's little point in hearing a sales pitch on a society from that society's winners -"They try to sell you the good life, but it's the good life for them, not us", as he puts it - works perfectly well as a general truism. Particularly, as Dal again points out, where the "us" in that formulation are a handful of fugitives in an apparently stolen spaceship. What possible reason is there to believe our crew would be afforded the same standard of living enjoyed by the highly feted, even beatified, Captain Janeway?

And how can we blame Dal for wanting nothing to do with a brand new authority figure, just after escaping the abuses clutches of the last one? Nor is the violent tyranny of the Diviner himself the only problem. The one friendly face Tars Lamora offered him was Gwyn, a full and willing participant in her father's crimes, who apparently wants a plate of replicated cookies for a reducing the regularity of the standard torture sessions. Naturally he sees an apparently friendly face slapped across an interstellar empire and refuses to take what's said at friendly face value. He's convinced there must be an angle here, because there's always an angle [2]. Like Rok-Tahk presented with a replicator, Dal can't imagine anything better than what he's always known.

This sets up an interesting binary (yes, another one): one between those in the audience who knew about the Federation and Starfleet before watching this show, and those who didn't. And remember, as I've argued, the intent here is fairly clearly to speak to the latter group - children who have seen little Trek, or even none. For us old hands, the correct call is immediately obvious - Dal and co should come clean as to what has happened, and ask the Federation for sanctuary as fugitives from wrongful imprisonment by a warp-capable culture that is not their own.

For the younger audience, though, it's Janeway and the Federation that needs to prove herself to our heroes, not the other way around. Prodigy wants to operate as a gateway to the wider franchise. Our newest hologram isn't just trying to sell her new companions on the Federation [3], she's trying to sell a new audience on Trek.

Battle Between The Stars

This brings us to possibly the most crucial question around this episode. Not whether it's wise for Dal to listen to Janeway, but whether it's wise for Janeway to be there for Dal to listen to in the first place.

There's a real danger that Janeway's gravity well is going to destabilise Prodigy just as surely as this episode's white dwarf unbalances its stellar system (is it unfair to note that white dwarfs are much older than red giants on average? Maybe, but I'm still going to do it). I don't think I'm being uncharitable in suggesting Kate Mulgrew is ultimately a fairly minor star, mostly known for Voyager itself and for Orange Is The New Black. Still, though, she's got significant edge on most of the other actors voicing the Protostar crew (save perhaps Jason Mantzoukas). More to the point, she's Trek royalty in a way only a handful of other actors can claim. There was a real risk taht her gravity well would drag along Trek's version of fans convinced a kid-focussed spin-off of a decades-old IP is somehow something anyone needs their opinion on [4].

The possibility of being loudly dismissed as Worst...Series...EVER! must surely have been on everyone's mind. And even were that pit circiled, there'd have been a concern that Prodigy would quickly become warped, twisted not a show about a handful of young outcasts trying to survive a hostile galaxy, but about how a fan-favourite character got their second wind, bouncing off new foils to whatever advantage suits them best (AKA the Picard model).

It seems clear the show itself is aware of the potential issues in choosing to add Janeway/Mulgrew to the crew roster. It knows the show needs to be about the prodigies themselves, rather than their mentor. "Starstruck" as a title is (impressively) pulling quadruple duty. Two meanings are immediate: the actual collapse of the binary system, and the way the Protostar is repeatedly hit by stellar matter once Dal accidentally deactivates its shields. But there's also the idea our heroes are starstruck by the appearance of an admittedly self-described [5] hero of a highly technologically-advanced civilisation, someone who presumably has long-since mastered the kind of interstellar they've barely even begun. Following on from that is the comparison between the (mostly) comparatively young and unknown voice cast of our young crew, and the experience - and star power at least within Star Trek - of Mulgrew herself.

Making sure Janeway's gravity doesn't pull the entire venture down into oblivion is a goal approached in several ways. Firstly, it's made clear our holographic captain is focussed on what her new charges need, and that this includes space. She's perfectly willing to sit back and let them make their own mistakes, right up until they're about to pass the point where those mistakes can't be recovered from. Mulgrew's performance is filled with good-natured (if privately amused) warmth. I love in particular her line read about the point-defence phaser system: "Technically it's auto-targetting, but you get to push the button". On paper, this could easily just be a neutral observartion, or even a dismissive comment on Pog's desire to splode something. Instead, Mulgrew's delivery is full of encouragement - you get to push the button, mate! Hugely cool things are about to happen because of a button you pushed! [6]

This is all helped by the Janeway hologram's rendering, which I mean in both an intra- and extra-narrative sense. Regarding the latter, take note of Janeway's facial expression when she turns her back to those who have just accidentally activated her. She's well aware these aren't Starfleet recruits, and is pretending otherwise [7] because, when faced with a gaggle of scared children, the first thing you do is try to make them feel safe. That's an amazingly subtle thing to be able to suggest via 3D animation.

Then there's the decision to not make the Janeway hologram corporeal. It's fun to riff on the Watsonian justifications on this - perhaps it implies a simpler form of holo-matrix which could never even potentially acquire sentience, to bypass the issues nodded at in an earlier footnote. From a Doylist perspective, though, it further moves holo-Janeway into the role of kindly advisor, a Kenobi-esque ghost hanging around to help where needed. Or, perhaps a better description, she's a hologram from the past, here to offer guidance in the future - a sort of inverted Al Calavicci, to use a reference the old guard are more likely to get.

"...Bends Toward Justice"

In short, plenty of thought has gone in to making sure the physical and thematic weight of Captain Kathryn Janeway doesn't overbalance the show, and the same is being done with Mulgrew's professional gravity. There's space being given to the cast members newer both to Trek, and to TV in general.

Not that the voice cast of the ship's crew are totally inexperienced. All but Mantzoukas are pretty early on in their careers, but they'd all had starring or at least recurring roles on a TV show or two before (even Rylee Alazraqui, who was announced as a cast member on Prodigy just a month after her tenth birthday). If Mulgrew is at least a minor star, then, the other cast members were plausibly on the way to becoming stars. They were beginning to form gravity wells of their own. And what do we call a star before it is a star? A protostar. The plan for this show to become as bright and weighty as any other in the franchise was being referenced right from the very start. In these early stages, the task for Janeway and Mulgrew both is to use the gravity they generate to help draw these prodigies/protostars in the right direction, rather than pulling at them in ways which might cause damage. In that context, the resolution to this week's crisis - Janeway inspires one of her charges to realise that, rather than fight the white dwarf's gravity, they can use it to slingshot their way to safety - is a perfect encapsulation of what the episode as a whole is wanting to say.

We return, at last, to orbital trajectories. Or at least to elliptical ones; force applied in just the right way to bend an object's path, so as to stop it either disappearing into infinity or come crashing to the ground. Michael Burnham had no help in trying to figure out a safe arc of travel, and Kathryn Janeway will be damned if she's going to let the same happen here. If she's being is being a little manipulative in getting the job done, well, a certain amount of circumspection is baked in when you're pretending not to notice the ship you're on has been hijacked. Janeway is being as honest as she can in her dealings with her new crew, within the lattice of deception that allows those dealings to happen at all. That's always the thing about trying to be helpful to the new generation - you have to let a certain amount of stuff slide if you want to end up in a position where you can help them with everything else.

And the thing about trajectories on a constant curve is this: eventually, you find you've made a one-eighty. It seems Janeway's plan is to reach the Federation the long way round. It's worked for her before, after all. With the right ship, and the right crew, there's no reason it can't happen again.

She just needs the protostars to align.

[1] Seriously, Gwyn completely blows it here. She opens with a "just obeying orders" argument, then insists she'd been told the slaves - some of them clearly children, and at least one which was literally a kitten - were criminals, making a lifetime of unpaid manual labour under appalling safety conditions apparently just fine.

[2] As the title of this essay alludes to, one might see this as a conflict between those unable to see past traditional authoritarian exploitation, and those proposing a genuine alternative under socialism. I'm gonna "just a cigar" that idea here, though; this isn't the post for another dip into the spiraling horrors on both sides of the Russian Civil War. Besides, the Whites lost that one.

[3] I can't decide how I feel about the final lines of the TOS opening narration being repurposed as a sales pitch. I guess that, if we're meant to think Kirk himself said those words at some point, turning them into advertising copy does feel like something the weird tendency towards cultish hero worship Starfleet periodically displays would result in. I can't imagine that's the intention of the text, but since when has that bothered me?

[4] SHUT UP I KNOW.

[5] Or kind-of self-described, maybe, depending on how one differentiates between the flesh-and-blood Janeway and her holographic equivalent. This does raise all sorts of questions as to what prompted Janeway to allow herself to be holo-mapped, given her almost unique perspective on the nature of holographic life after seven years working with Voyager's EMH.

[6] Apparently Mulgrew needed some convincing to return as Janeway, and it was specifically the idea she could help to introduce a whole new generation to the franchise that sold her on coming back. [7] I look forward to learning how wrong I am about all this as I go further through the season.

Ordering

1. Past Prologue 

2. Maps And Legends

3. Yesteryear

4. Envoys

5. Battle At The Binary Stars

6. Parallax

7. Starstruck

8. Fight Or Flight

9. Charlie X 

10. The Naked Now