11.1.2 Dancing About Holy Architecture

Children Of The Comet

Computer, music. Genre: of the spheres.

"Come Together" My father has a saying he likes to use when talking to someone about religion: "Listen to the music, not the words".

The link between music and religion hardly needs expanding upon. Nor is it it particularly hard to understand why so many church services are built around singing. Music brings us together.

"Children Of The Comet" understands this completely. It's why the key to unlocking the comet's forcefield requires Uhura's counterpoint to Spock's melody; individual expressions that form a greater whole. And note that it is a counterpoint, not a harmony. The latter implies a dominant voice others are accentuating. The former has multiple individuals providing equally important lines.

How people come together is a dominant theme here, starting from the very beginning with the captain's dinner. The meal is clearly intended as a bonding exercise in general (which makes it interesting that Ortegas sees it as an alternative method for passing information downward). More specifically, though, it's an opportunity for Pike to both learn about his newest crewmembers, and ensure his senior officers see that he values learning about his newest crewmembers. This is about facilitating the sharing of experiences, past and present.

Uhura proves the perfect lens through which to focus our attention on all this. She's the astonishing prodigy who's turned her intellect to learning as many different languages as she can, explicitly noting that she's doing this to find as much common ground with as many different people(s) as possible. To find new words with which to sing her song. Or better; to learn the words she needs to sing along to the songs of others. To understand their meanings. Not that lyrics have ever been all that a song is about. They've never been the only mechanism by which music binds us together. The tune Uhura carries with her as a memory of her mother is expressed through humming. It's not the words that are comforting, it's the music.

The flip-side to this is how the death of Uhura's family led her to, as Pike puts it, "[running] away to Starfleet". She needed to get as far as she could from the jagged edge of the hole they'd left in her world. As a result, she's now living inside a new cultural context, one she chose to interact with not through her philosophy of mutual understanding, but in a headlong dash to escape grief via distance. It's immediately put her on the back foot in terms of understanding where she is, and those who surround her. She falls completely for Ortegas' practical joke, she apparently offends Hemmer [1] (note that it's never actually confirmed he wasn't genuinely bothered by her comments), and she's bowled over by Spock politely making the obvious point that others are desperate for the role she's stumbled into, and isn't even sure she wants.

Matters escalate on her first away mission. This is a very standard template, and in particular it's worth noting just how many parallels there are between Uhura here and Hoshi Sato in "Fight Or Flight". A nervous linguist at the very start of their career is stuffed into a spacesuit and forced to confront the dangers of space travel, with their ability to translate a completely unfamiliar language the only hope of saving Enterprise from being destroyed by a technologically superior alien vessel.

My point here isn't to bang the well-worn drum about how we've seen iterations of all this before. At this point, every version of that argument is more rehashed and stale than any of the episode ideas they're directed against. I'd rather consider the implications of the differences. Sato's story is about how she managed to keep herself together while walking through a charnel house, and ends a one-sided space battle by persuading a second group of aliens to join the fight on their side. The universe is dangerous, but she has what it takes to fight back. "Children Of The Comet", in contrast, allows Uhura to experience the giddy joy of alien beauty, and to help set in motion a series of events which allows the Enterprise to make peace with its antagonists.

That last fact is crucial. For all that La'an presents the crisis within the comet as being a test of Uhura's individual genius, Uhura isn't the only person who saves the day here. Spock is needed for a counterpoint, as I mentioned, but he's also the one who flies the shuttle that calves enough ice to save Persephone III. Pike, Henner and Ortegas all directly contribute to the plan as well. Uhura doesn't prove herself worthy of Starfleet by saving the day alone. She proves it by being one link in the chain necessary to pull everyone to safety. Because that's how Starfleet works. As a team. As a choir. Individual voices that build into a single song.

"Fairytale Of New York"

My father has a saying he likes to use when talking to someone about religion: "Listen to the music, not the words".

Most commonly, he says this when someone is either trying to construct some logical negation of the concept of (the Christian) God, or when they're being a weary bigot. It's a useful way of signalling a conversation is over, a handy flourish if you find yourself talking to someone claiming, say, it's deplorably close-minded to have issues with a god committing genocide.

I find myself frustrated by the Shepherds here. Not that there isn't plenty to love. Thom Marriott does a great job making them sound simultaneously like self-important religious bores and a barely-restrained physical threat. The design of their captain is fun, and that of their spaceship even better; half battlecruiser, half space-borne cathedral. Ending the story with their religious faith being validated, at least in part, feels fundamentally Trek.

And yet the "in part" above is doing more heavy lifting than the tractor beam that saves the Enterprise. If the Shepherd's position had been that their God would never actually exterminate an entire race, that would be one thing. The Enterprise would still have felt morally obligated to ensure the Deleb [2] were safe, so the conflict wouldn't have gone away. We'd also still be left with the question as to what it all means that the Shepherds faith appears validated, but only because the Enterprise did interfere, and then for that interference to itself have been predicted by the comet in the first place.

Instead, the Shepherd captain makes their position plain: if M'hanit wants to commit suicide in a manner that takes an entire planetary population along with them, then that's absolutely fine. I'm quite sure I don't have to spend any time pointing out how vile a position this is. That doesn't mean I can't believe anyone would ever hold it - i the last two years we've all been witnesses to an ongoing genocide many explicitly defend as being the will of God. The problem is that the rest of the episode proceeds as though the Shepherds were basically correct. Their captain lectures Pike on his failure to have faith that M'Hanit would avoid the planet, without them ever actually suggesting that's what they expected to happen. It's tough not to grind your teeth when the aliens tell Pike they shall not part as enemies, as though he should be grateful to not have burned his bridges with someone who'd happily sit back to watch a god-sponsored genocide.

But how much of this is just my problem? Am I just over-analysing again? I certainly have form, as this place proves over and over. Prophets, even my music reviews are just close readings, peppered with endless riffs on riff-description. Isn't that exactly what my Dad keeps counselling against? When he shuts someone down with his standard line, it's often in response to some tediously over-literal interpretation of a religious text. That's not quite a rejection of close readings, because close readings are aware of the concepts of ambiguity and subtext, both things literalists prefer to ignore. It is though making the point that obsessing over every individual line isn't necessarily the best way to take in a message. Whatever close readings are getting us close to, it isn't likely to be God.

So one particular alien says one particularly awful thing, through a translation system which may or may not be carrying the full meaning or intent of their words, in response to questions they may never have imagined. It's certainly some distance from optimal. As bum notes go, it's about as loud, buzzing, and discordant as I can imagine. But does that one horrible sound mean every other bar becomes worthless?

Does it mean we can find no beauty in the song?

"Famous Blue Raincoat"

My father has a saying he likes to use when talking to someone about religion: "Listen to the music, not the words".

One of the reasons I've always loved this line is because it isn't just a comment on the nature of faith. It's a comment on the nature of music. Not just regarding how it can be used to send messages, but how those messages can exist independently of, or sometimes even in tension with, the words being used.

I'm not saying lyrics can't have inherent meaning, don't get me wrong. The most powerful percussion instrument is clearly the rhetorical triangle. But there's no intrinsic reason why they need to be the only or even the main vector by which meaning is imparted. As my good friend James Murphy once observed, The Beach Boys' music carries with it heavenly import, even though the average Brian Wilson lyric goes something like "Oh, baby, I quite like your hair". Or, as Spock puts it here, the mathematical structure of the musical scale gives it a beauty all its own, and that beauty can be made clear to us with or without the notes coming with footnotes.

This is the thinking behind the reveal that M'hanit's music carried an image within it. Based on my admittedly shaky understanding, this is absolutely ludicrous - even setting aside the question of file types, how can an audio signal be converted into enough binary information to create an entire high-definition image while also remaining recognisably a tune? As a metaphor for how music can paint a picture, though, it makes perfect thematic sense. It also takes us back to the intersection between song and religion, too. Don't worry. Someone bigger than you has got this. It was always going to be OK.

Other messages are available, though. Let's talk about Pike, and his continuing struggle with what he knows about his future. It feels like already we've moved on from where we were last episode. What's coming down the pipe for Pike is something he's still wrestling with, but it's become something that exists alongside his attitude to being captain of the Enterprise, rather than entirely shaping it. The Chris we see here is thrilled to be doing what he does; exploring the galaxy, saving lives, encouraging his crew to be their best selves. "I love this job", he whispers to Una at one point, and it's easy to believe him.

It doesn't mean he's come to terms with the truth. Or rather, coming to terms with the truth doesn't fix things. Not really. As his brief stumble when Pike asks Uhura where she sees herself in ten years (about how long Pike has left before the accident), he's still mourning the loss of his own future. Someone once told me grief is a button in a box, on one which has a ball bouncing endlessly around inside. Each time the ball hits the button, the pain overwhelms you for a little while. As time passes, the button remains, and the ball keeps bouncing, but the box gets bigger. There's still a press from time to time - and sometimes something or someone shakes the box so hard the button can't help but be hit - but gradually it happens less and less often.

We've talked already about how a second story sets the tone for a show, and the work done here is encouraging. We've known since the story of Orpheus (arguably obliquely referenced here by naming the endangered planet Persephone III) what happens when the only song you'll play is that of grief.

Orpheus is also a salutary lesson on the importance of looking forward, even when you'd rather not. When Number One questions Pike on his lapse in his quarters, the show gets its chance to reveal one of its smartest choices - we're not going to spending our time watching Pike try to cheat the future. What we might call "locked fate mysteries" tend to be fairly uninspiring, not least because we've seen them so many times before, and there's so many ways genre fiction possesses to provide a "solution" that's broadly internally consistent without being remotely satisfying. The approach taken here, which is that Pike knows he could easily avoid the accident, and has resolved not to, to ensure more than a half a dozen other people survive, is a much more interesting one.

We return to this at the end of the episode. It is, to state the obvious, no coincidence that this episode features a message predicting the near future, a prediction which then comes to pass. This time around, as we've discussed, the message is positive - M'hanit always knew the actions of the Enterprise crew would result in new life being brought to Persephone III (note that Persephone is also a spring goddess). Ultimately, though it's still a reminder that the future is not always unwritten.

"Losing My Religion"

My father has a saying he likes to use when talking to someone about religion: "Listen to the music, not the words".

The advantage of framing religious instruction - or any approach of information delivery - in the context of music isn't just that it allows for multiple non-parallel messages to be delivered at the same time. It allows for an understanding that the same communication can be interpreted in radically different ways. Number One gestures at this by noting receiving a message doesn't necessarily imply understanding a message, but it's more helpful for the purposes of this essay to think in terms of rhetoric. I mentioned the rhetorical triangle as part of a groan-inducing joke already, but to dig into the idea a little more: there are three parts to every act of communication. The ethos is what the communicator intended to convey. The logos is the actual form the message takes. The pathos is how the message is interpreted by the receiver.

Ultimately there can be only one ethos, and one logos, though each might be complex and multi-layered. Pathos, though? There are as many variants of that as there are people who heard the message. In some cases, some of those variations likely will be misunderstanding. But there’s much more to it than that. There’s all the ways the message ties into who and what we are, and reflects that nature, imperfectly and messily and sometimes beautifully, back at us. We all take something different away. The audience ultimately determines what a song means, simply by sheer weight of numbers. This is just as true for the songs of God as it is for anyone else's.

For Number One, M'hanit's brings a message of hope. A reminder that interpretation is a fallible process, and humanity's track record of figuring out what's coming next would shame a random number generator busy getting blackout drunk. How can her captain witness what just transpired and not realise knowing what is to come is the province of beings utterly beyond their capacity to comprehend?

For Pike, though, M'hanit has simply offered further proof that the future is set in stone tablets. There are beings out there in the galaxy that not only can see the shape of what is to come, but can take snapshots of those shapes too. Pike is fixated on his own polaroid from the future, and isn't particularly swayed by what he sees as Una arguing that technically photos can be doctored.

And both of these takeaways seem broadly consistent with the song of M'Hanit. Ultimately, it comes down to the choices we make. Number One thinks the comet is telling Pike we can make choices that bring unimaginable triumph out of seeming tragedy, and that he's been given the chance to think about how to do just that. Pike heard a song telling him the choice he's already made is the right one - any attempt to save his mobility risks more than a half-dozen deaths, and in a situation like that, there's only one thing a Starfleet captain is ever going to do.

Where the two of them agree, though, is that choice remains fundamental. The decisions our crew make here - Pike committing to save the Deneb, Uhura running with the ball Sam Kirk passes her, Ortegas relying on her self-made evasive maneouvres, Spock flying into a debris field to perform light surgery on a goddamn god of a comet - lose not one ounce of weight because M'hanit saw them coming. The picture sent to Uhura is reassurance; that they did the right thing, and that M'hanit knew they always would.

So maybe both Chris and Una are right. Certainly, the words are different, but both of them seem like they're broadly, to very deliberately reach for a specific metaphor, singing from the same hymn sheet. These are counterpoints within the same song, Not that of M'hanit, but of Trek itself.

Which is surely enough. We can justifiably complain that we've heard these words before, in a slightly different order or even delivered verbatim. There remains value in the fact that the song remains the same. To bring us together. To hold the line against those who would run defense for the despicable. To send the universe a message, and to listen to its reply.

In space, everyone can hear you sing.

[1] Hemmer! What a guy! The answer to the question I'm amazed anyone thought to ask: how can we create the least Geordi-like character imaginable while still making them a blind chief engineer?

[2] It's nice to see the TNG iteration of the Prime Directive just tossed aside here. No-one even mentions General Order One when Pike tells the Shepherds that Starfleet will avert a natural disaster which is liable to bring on a genocide. Also, I absolutely love the breezy confidence of the Deleb themselves. It's such an amazing make-up job for an alien race only featured in two short, dialogue-free scenes.

Ordering

1. Past Prologue 

2. Maps And Legends

3. Yesteryear

4. Children Of The Comet

5. Envoys

6. Battle At The Binary Stars

7. Parallax

8. Starstruck

9. Fight Or Flight

10. Charlie X 

11. The Naked Now