The Ambergris Element
I mean, it’s better than “The Lorelei Signal”. You know. Mostly.
Diminishing Returns
Looks like we’re going to have to discuss pacing again.
We’ve talked before about the timing issues involved in taking a show designed to work in fifty-minute instalments, and trying to replicate it in just twenty-five. Broadly speaking, this animated iteration has tried three approaches to making the change work. There are episodes like “Yesterday” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles”, which start with a rock-solid and chewy concept (however well-hidden), and then burn through it at ludicrous speed. The aim here is throw out implications with wild abandon and trusting the audience first to catch them, and then to assemble them into a coherent theme. Not so much simplification as streamlining.
The second approach is exemplified by episodes like “The Survivor” and “Mudd’s Passion”; deploy a fairly simple idea and focus on it, allowing to move along at a decent clip. The aim is breezy fun and nothing else – a perfectly sensible ethos in theory, even if neither of those episodes actually ended up working. This approach clearly is simplification, but it the name of producing something quick and entertaining, rather than risk flaming out with something too complicated to work under the new constraints.
Then there’s the third type of episode, like “One Of Our Planets Is Missing”. These are the stories that very much oversimplify, where so much is jettisoned that the episode actually needs padding out to hit its required run-time. At first glance, it looks very much like “The Ambergris Element” belongs in this category. There are two separate scenes in which the newly be-gilled Kirk and Spock are trapped on land, gasping for air like stranded fish. Even odder, the crew end up harassed by Argo sur-snakes no fewer than three times – with the third involving them deliberately hunting such a beast for its venom, even though they just killed another one minutes earlier.
It feels like a desperate attempt to make an incredibly weak idea stretch past the time it takes to whip up a seafood paella. In fact, though, I think this is an attempt at something subtly different. A fourth way. This is an attempt to allow an episode’s signifiers and symbolism to do all the heavy lifting for it, so it can spend its time on something more interesting.
The only issue being how the more interesting elements almost totally fail to materialise.
Three Times A Snaky
You can hide quite a bit in the word “almost”, of course. We’re not totally without material to chew on. Some of the nods here to structures built elsewhere do genuinely work. It’s just not any of the obvious stuff.
And obviousness is the order of the day here. An underwater-alien chief lugging around a stylised trident? A sunken civilisation that’s clearly Greco-Roman in origin? On a planet named Argo, no less, with several characters sporting gold-coloured personal forcefields? This could not possibly be more clearly a rejigging of western mythology in general, and the story of Atlantis in particular. Given that fact, Margaret Armen surely deserves a few points for the perversity of avoiding calling the natives “Atlanteans”, then going for the even more obvious “Aquans” instead (maybe she’d been stung by the last time she named an alien species after a watery race from European mythology?). There are precious few points we can justify awarding her, after all.
But I’m going negative again. Let’s get back to my original argument – at least some of what is being played with here is genuinely interesting. Take our heroes’ sur-snake encounters. These are also a clear nod to mythology, both because it’s unmistakably a sea-serpent and because of the use of the rule of three, born of the same oral traditions as the sea-serpent itself. But Armen takes this a step further, by subtly linking this alien serpent to our own culture’s association of snakes and medical knowledge. The three encounters with the sur-snake represent the three stages of advancing modern medicine – discovering a problem (the sur-snake’s initial assault), searching for a means to counter it (the attack outside the ancient ruins), and then synthesising and applying the treatment (hunting the sur-snake for its venom).
We can go further than simply noting the use of a general snake symbolism, too. Let’s take a look at the Aquan medical symbol; a clear combination of the Rod of Asclepius and a caduceus.
The Aquan symbol doesn’t quite correspond with the shape on either side above – it has wings, unlike the Rod of Asclepius, but lacks the second twirling tail which would let it match up with the caduceus. There’s also the head and torso of a humanoid, of course, although that’s presumably only there to strengthen the visual clue to it being relevant to shape-shifting. At heart, though, the Aquan glyph is a combination of two of our own symbols for medicine and the medically trained.
But there’s an intriguing wrinkle here. The caduceus didn’t originally have any connection to medicine at all – it was the staff of Hermes, something you’d more expect to see on the side of a delivery van than an ambulance. So if we’re taking the episode’s use of mythological symbolism seriously – and I think we have to, because I can’t imagine what else we could find to talk about here – it’s worth noting that the symbol of Aquan medical knowledge evoke both our own antiquarian understandings of medicine, and a misinterpretation of same.
That’s a nice flourish in an episode so concerned with the extent to which people should cleave to modern interpretations of ancient laws. For every sensible slice of time-tested wisdom, there’s something else that’s no longer relevant, or which has been twisted through mistranslation into something useless or even damaging.
“…Devoting Full Time To Floating”
It’s a smart approach – you give the audience just enough symbolism for them to fill in the basics, and then concentrate on putting the familiar building blocks together in an interesting way.
The catch with this approach, though, is that if you’re going to use it you have to make sure the structures built actually are interesting. And that’s simply not attempted anywhere else here. Everything is played completely and lamentably straight. Nothing clever is done with the idea of an alien Atlantis. There’s no twist to the idea of people being transformed into water-breathers so they can discover an undersea society, a trope at least as old as A Thousand And One Nights. At every point the ingredients being pulled from the shelf are used to cook the blandest dish possible.
There’s a similar absence of spice in how the Aquans are written. Could there be any more obvious an approach than making the elders conservative isolationists, and the youngsters curiosity-driven rebels? At this point, Armen has managed to somehow do even less with the idea of an underwater culture than “Abdullah The Fisherman And Abdullah The Merman” achieved centuries earlier. There’s one brief moment where it almost looks like the rote recitation of tropes might be leading somewhere interesting, when we learn this rule-bound, rigid society only exists because its founders broke with their own traditionalists as the planet’s landmasses began sinking. Today’s reactionaries were yesterday’s revolutionaries. That’s smart. It’s also immediately and totally ignored.
As weird a sentence as it is to write, everything here not involving snakes seems massively lazy. The episode seems utterly convinced that the weirdness on display is a) enough on its own, and b) actually counts weird at all, as oppose to a series of literally age-old ideas and images providing a backdrop for Trek to swim past. Literally the most surprising element of this whole story is that Kirk doesn’t try to sleep with a mermaid (just kidding, Dr Horáková!). DC Fontana once defended this episode by pointing out it was an example of a story that clearly could never have been done in the live-action show. I’ve talked before about how weak that particular tea tastes – a single bag dunked into an alien ocean – but it’s especially unconvincing here, where the assumption seems to be that the mere fact this episode is possible should justify that possibility being realised.
There are other issues here as well. It strikes me as somewhat ableist to insist a water-breathing sentient could never command a starship (cetacean ops are people too!). Not only does this not make sense in an episode where crew members are shown wearing personal forcefields to survive in inimical conditions, the Aquans might partition for Federation membership one day, making Kirk’s careless implication that they couldn’t have his job becomes something of an issue.
The episode is also sloppy on the subject of the “ancient knowledge” that will allow the Aquans to escape the coming earthquakes. There’s no suggestion Kirk and Spock actually find it – they’re too busy trying to save themselves from a lifetime of wrinkled fingers and algal deposits between the molars. And even if they did dig it out, their straight-up blackmail of the locals – if you don’t help us get the sur-snake venom you’ll never be able to use the anti-earthquake info – is both nonsensical and more than a little ugly. Then, after all that, the top-secret anti-quake technique just turns out to involve phasering the absolute crap out of part of the planet (how the ancient Aquans came up with this without starships is left unanswered). The answer, it turns out, is to go around shooting everything.
In truth, I could probably forgive these issues in a better episode. It’s the willingness to take the easiest, most obvious narrative decision at almost every point that sinks things. I talked last month about the sense the show has realised it is failing to turn around the steady shrinking of the franchise in essentially every direction, but that it can’t figure out how to reverse the decline. The best I can think of to say about “The Ambergris Element” is that it at least gestures at something the show might be able to try out.
But that’s the thing about gestures. You can’t use them to get any heavy lifting done. Ultimately, “The Ambergris Element” does nothing more than suggest how the show might find a way to strengthen its legs. It leaves it to others to actually do the workout.
With just three more episodes left of the show’s first season, there really isn’t the time left to vaguely point toward possible improvements. The show desperately needs an unambiguous win. It’s time to bring out the big guns. Well, one big gun, commissioned to write an episode about a big gun.
Next up, it’s “The Slaver Weapon”, by Larry Niven. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
Ordering
2. The Ambergris Element