9.1.4 "They Give You All The Faults They Had"
Moist Vessel
Families are complicated.
Work Won't Love You Back
It's time to take a look at the mother-daughter dynamic "Second Contact" let us know we'd be watching unfold. The first thing to note is that this is only the second time we see Freeman and Beckett talk to each other. "Stow it, Mariner!" is literally the only thing we've heard the captain say to her most troublesome ensign.
Which, of course, says something all in itself. But then, can we really blame Mariner for wanting to stay out of mom's way? Captain Carol Freeman really hasn't covered herself in glory during the first three episodes of this show. That absence of kudos is part of what's bugging Freeman, actually, but I mean the phrase first and foremost as code for “has been an awful human being”. So far she's tried to turn Boimler into a mole to find a pretext to shitcan her own daughter - only for that to fail because she can’t even be bothered to learn her spy's name - and put her crew under such tight time constraints they had to repel boarders while also keeping up with their admin. Our new captain gets precisely two lines in “Envoys”, and she uses them to ruminate on how to sound cool when ordering warp speed.
“Moist Vessel” doesn’t exactly walk any of this back, but it does offer context. Have you ever tried crossing your eyes while looking through binoculars, so that the illusion you're seeing one image collapses, and you superimpose one circle over another, making it impossible to process what you're seeing? That's what this episode makes me think of: a kind of headache-inducing, myopic Venn diagram that represents all that Freeman is able to see. One circle is labelled "Reasons why commanding the Cerritos sucks", the other "Reasons why I hate being on the same ship as my daughter". "Moist Vessel" takes place in the intersection, with Freeman stressing out by having to deal with an insubordinate officer who is also an ungrateful daughter. Presumably the title is a description of what separates us from ascended beings who freak out over mysterious marsupials - WE are the moist vessels! - but I think they could have gone just as easily with "The Worst Of Both Worlds".
Especially since Freeman is clearly struggling with where her Starfleet career has taken her, wholly independently of her daughter's choices. We saw last episode her conviction that the fleet holds the Cerritos in contempt. What we learn here is that this may be a broader feeling among commanders of California-class vessels. It’s surely no accident the vainglorious bore Durango is in charge of a sibling ship to Freeman's own, or that his obsession with being shown the respect he's convinced he's due almost causes disaster, just as Freeman's war against buffer time did in "Temporal Edict".
As we've talked about, this is almost certainly a consequence of Starfleet Academy churning out graduates with towering superiority complexes, which then become wholly toxic when mixed with the inferiority complex which sprouts in every officer not assigned to the Enterprise. It's not hard to see how this happens. Carol commands a technological marvel crewed by some of the most insanely talented and dedicated sentient beings in known space, but she's still stuck providing admin support for the real explorers.
The result is that Freeman simultaneously worships Starfleet, and despises it. This internal incoherence is then externalised as a poisonous obsession with having the respect of her crew. If the admiralty won't recognise her brilliance, she'll have to get that recognition elsewhere. The problem is, it doesn't work. It can't work, because she's demanding respect by dint of the rank she holds; a rank she only has in the first place thanks to the same people she's convinced don't recognise talent when they see it. Valuing her as captain means believing Starfleet Command knows what they're doing, which also means believing the Cerritos is where she belongs.
There's no way to make her happy. There's no way to win. Freeman needs her crew to simultaneously embrace and reject Starfleet. Or, to put it another way, she needs her crew to see her as simultaneously the embodiment of and antithetical to what it means to command in Starfleet. To fit and break the mould.
And as much as she requires that from everyone aboard the Cerritos, all of this goes double for her daughter.
Mommy's Issues
The reasons Captain Freeman is struggling with having her daughter on the ship's roster are multi-levelled; a trifle of discontent. At the base level, it can just be tough to live in close proximity with your adult child. I can't speak from experience for what it's like as a parent (though living with my folks for three months as a 41-year-old as I waited for our new house to be available was clearly stressful for them), but I'm reliably informed it's tough to separate your memories of the tiny life you were once wholly responsible for with the grown-ass human being who keeps eating your breakfast cereal. To go from expressing love through controlling the environment to expressing it through the full release of control. And you have to not just deal with own difficulties with all this, you have to navigate those of your child as well.
The second layer is Carol's difficulty in having to act as her kid's commanding officer. Again, I have no personal experience to offer, though I'd note that back when I was a schoolteacher my colleagues would actively try to avoid teaching classes which had their kids in, even as a cover lesson. This again is an issue of separation of identities, made perhaps even more difficult because you've got two to separate simultaneously - you are both parent and teacher, they are both child and student. This is particularly thorny because both are ultimately relationships of authority, which are parallel in some dimensions but orthogonal in others. Your child simultaneously has to be just another student, and clearly cannot be. And that's a fact they are also going to be struggling with, probably without the psychological equipment necessary, making things even more difficult.
These layers are porous, of course. Excuse me, they are permeable. By that I mean if you end up in a professional context where you are an authority figure to your adult child, these two problems end up feeding off each other. And all of that is just general context. I used a teaching metaphor above because it links more closely to my own experiences, but it's also a good way of highlighting the fact Freeman is expected to be teaching the ensigns of today how to become the senior officers, even captains, of tomorrow. Mariner herself is in command division, meaning at least on paper (on PADD?), Freeman is being asked to mould her daughter into a shape resembling her own.
And now, drenched in custard, cream and brandy, we breach the surface of the trifle. We'll talk about Mariner's own perspectives on all of this later, but Freeman's final problem is that she has a daughter who won't respect her, and an ensign who won't respect her, and they're the same person. She sees herself as failing twice over. Maybe three times, actually, given Beckett also doesn't seem to respect dedication, or a work ethic, or just pitching in without having to sass everyone in earshot first. Mariner seems to take the greatest delight in disrespecting every aspect of who Freeman is, or wants to be. Having ended up with so sharp a serpent's tooth, the captain can think of nothing to do but shake her daughter's jaws from her ankle. Once Mariner is reassigned, Freeman at least won't have to be reminded of that failure on a daily basis.
All of which I'm sure our good captain would be the first to tell you about herself, if you got her drunk and promised to keep your mouth shut. It isn't all that's going on, though. Carol's disappointment with her daughter is wholly intermingled with her disappointment with Starfleet. It's not just that she needs Mariner to love her as a mother, and respect her as a mother and a captain, and not let that love and that respect interact with each other but also to totally do that (because if she really loved her mom, she wouldn't deliberately make her mom's job harder). It's that she also needs Beckett to simultaneously revere the organisation which she has dedicated her life to, and which has trusted her with command of a starship, while also seeing them as a bunch of idiots whose failure to recognise Freeman's worth is making her miserable.
I'm not sure how much of this Carol recognises on a conscious level. In this episode, at least, she seems to be mainly dealing with this through shunting the problems elsewhere. It's telling that when Mariner is given a promotion here, she receives a gold uniform. There's been no sign at any point Mariner is interested in Engineering, Ops, or Security. What matters here isn't so much that the uniform is gold, though. It's that it isn't red. Freeman is subconsciously telling her daughter that she isn't fit for command. Or maybe that she shouldn't want command. Or both. Yeah, it's almost certainly both. Does Freeman even know herself, though? I can't imagine she does.
Note also how Freeman sees Mariner’s mockery of Durango as a slight against herself - it's particularly telling how she furiously responds to her daughter’s loud yawns during Durango’s briefing: “If you ever disrespect me like that again..!”. At the same time, though, she admits the man is and always has been boring, and cracks wise at the end of the episode about how Durango will be right at home in a dust-filled pseudo-tomb. Carol's paradoxical need over how to receive her daughter's love and respect becomes an expression of "cool mom" foolishness. Nothing seems to scare Captain Freeman more than the fear that she might be the dusty mummy.
If there's a way to bring together all of what's roiling around Carol's head like a bad day in the Badlands, it's this: she wants her daughter to want to be like her, but to not actually end up being like her. She wants some slack cut for her about where she's ended up, and for Mariner to end up in a better place, while also wanting Mariner to see things precisely the opposite way round.
I think this internalised, unrecognised paradox is what lies at the heart of the plan to force Mariner into leaving the ship by promoting her to senior staff. On the one hand, this allows Carol to subject Beckett to all the most boring and frustrating aspects of commanding a Starfleet vessel – arguments over chairs, poker games where no-one wants to risk pissing their colleagues off, the universe’s worst opening mic night. Every moment of this is Freeman screaming “see the shit I have to deal with!?!” to her daughter.
But it's also about trying to prove to Beckett that she's cool. The scant seconds of scat she offers up ahead of “The United Federation Of Characters” makes her position clear – everyone else (particularly Ransom) makes art that is cringe as hell, but Carol Freedman? She's genuinely where it's at. Her scat is flecked with gold. She even feels the need to end her performance with a quick lesson in how to be a good captain! She wants her captive audience of one to be bored, miserable, appreciative and inspired all at the same time.
The Ensign's Off Command
Even aside from Mariner's own approach and opinions in all of this, none of it was ever likely to work. Once we factor in Beckett herself, the whole plan becomes, well, comical. There is nothing, at all, Mariner wants less than to turn into anything approaching her mother, who she sees as pompous and hyper-critical. Neither of which are particularly difficult to understand – who starts banging on about how their daughter should be banging on spontaneously-generated alien space rocks? Even more fundamentally than that, though, Carol repeatedly commits what Mariner thinks of as being a cardinal sin: being lame.
I’m not going to talk much about that specific aspect of Mariner’s character; I just don’t find it all that interesting. Not until the end of Season Four, at least, when we find out why she’s like this, anyway (short version, and I guess vague spoilers: she's lost too many people, and responded by constructing a persona based on not caring about anything). These days, I’m of the opinion endlessly sorting and resorting everything into two boxes marked “cool” and “cringe” isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively harmful. One needn’t take things quite that far, though, to recognise the broader point that this approach is, by and large, a game for the young.
I say "young": we don’t really learn much about the ages of our four ensigns on the show. We probably know the most about Mariner, actually; by Season Four we learn she can’t be younger than 27 when Lower Decks kicks off. The rest of them are almost certainly in their early twenties, though, and while Mariner is older, part of her whole deal is that she doesn’t act like it.
“Moist Vessel” makes use of our Mariner's cultivated immaturity by centring on one of youth's most common burning fixation: what other people think of you. For Boimler, this means being desperate for others to see him as competent bridge officer material. With Tendi, it’s the insistence that literally everybody like her. O’Connor is projecting an image of himself as a dude who has his life together so totally, he's about to ascend onto another plane of existence entirely.
Almost all of us, I think, have to go through this stage of obsessing over the opinion of others. Some people who end up comfortable in their own skin quicker than others, sure. Rutherford, as we’ve seen already, will tank a hot date and upend his entire career progression in order to simply be who he needs to be (perhaps this is linked to his implant periodically trying to rewrite his personality; he knows the value of knowing completely who you are). For most of us, though, there’s an awkward decade-plus long period where we're terrified that who we are stems from how we’re seen by others, rather than it being the other way round.
This is another of those situations only made worse by choosing a career in Starfleet. As O’Connor says, when everyone around you is unbelievably smart and resourceful and driven, you'll need something else, some other additional "thing", if you want other people to notice you. Which is quite correct, actually, though it does rather assume that being noticed is a particularly important goal [1]. But then that’s a huge part of what Starfleet is, as we’ve discussed – an endless series of trials in which you are constantly being asked to demonstrate how you're better than everybody else around you. It’s like how Oxbridge recommend that applicants make sure they have some kind of high-effort hobby which has its own grading system (playing a musical instrument, for instance), so that they can beat out all the feeble losers who merely excel in all their academic disciplines, but never quite got round to making the piano their forte.
Mariner understands this, actually, but only up to a point. She sees where Boimler’s drive for the big chair ends up – you're still miserable unless it's decided you're the best captain. Carol doesn’t think her daughter listens to her, but the truth is Beckett has learned from her only too well. The problem for Mariner, though, is that she’s stuck in the same trap as those around her. She keeps insisting she doesn’t care what other people think about her, but that's becase that's what she's desperate for other people to think about her.
Or certain people, anyway. This is why Beckett is comparatively agreeable during her time as a senior officer – the people she wants to play to simply aren’t there. She doesn’t want to rebel, so much as she wants others to see her rebel. She’s not averse to that audience including the senior staff – hence her theatrical yawns during Durango’s briefing – but when it’s just them and her, there’s no audience at all. The captain’s plan appears to be working admirably; by cutting off Mariner’s access to the people whose opinions matter to her (however much she pretends otherwise), her instinct for insubordination is least temporarily tempered. The irony here is that, by promoting her daughter as a perverse way to get her to quit Starfleet, Freeman arguably makes Mariner a better Starfleet officer. Certainly, as the episode nears its end. Carol realises her daughter is not just competent in a crisis, but inspired, and realises accordingly that they could make a formidable team.
It’s at this point that multiple threads tie together, and everything falls apart. Freeman achieves a breakthrough with her daughter, as she realises working together is not just possible, it's actually really effective. For the first time in who knows how long, Carol is no longer disappointed by her daughter. Quite the contrary, in fact, she can suddenly see how the two of them could, working together, achieve more than either of them could alone.
There's just a few problems. Or maybe it's the same problem, causing trouble across multiple dimensions. Freeman might think she's thinking about how they can both become more than they were before, but all she's actually doing is considering how Beckett can help her achieve her own ambitions. To the extent Beckett is being considered at all, it's under the assumption that now Carol can see a way to improve her daughter's standing, she can now be safely, uncomplicatedly be expected to want to become her mother. Because why wouldn't she, now the possibility of career advancement now seems to be back on the table?
So Mariner rebels. Of course she rebels. It's her go-to move in general, doubly so with her mother, and on top of all that, Carol can't be bothered to ask whether she's interested with either a closer relationship with her mother, or a boost to a carreer she has repeatedly, deliberately sabotaged.. This then dovetails (happily, from Mariner's perspective) with the arrival of Admiral Vassery, another bigwig external to the Cerritos that Mariner can insult. Motive, means, opportunity.
The truly delightful almonds atop the trifle here is that we end up with the audience Mariner is playing to being simply and entirely her own mother. And Freeman finds herself included in the joke whether she wants to be or not (an inversion of Freeman and Lt Winger Bilston Jr addressing their audiences earlier). “Yo, dummy! She’s making fun of you!”. It's impossible to miss that this is Beckett wholly rejecting a new relationship on her mother's terms - she's not just replicating the disrespect to Durango that her mother ordered never be repeated, she's taking it into the realm of the flagrant. But she's doing something else as well. She's offering an alternative vision for a partnership, in which the two of them find common ground not in trying to get Starfleet to see them as better than they are, but in seeing how Starfleet itself isn't nearly as good as it thinks it is.
It doesn't work. I don't think Mariner ever thought it would. She knows her mother too well. She knows that whatever else may be true, the problem here ultimately stems from her mother's own immaturity. The inability to move past what other people think of her. It's not the only quality they share, but while they continue to share it, no other quality is likely to be particular important in their relationship. The fact Beckett knows all this, while also failing to recognise that her inversion of that problem is simply that same problem reflected, is just one more way in which the two of them can't see eye to eye. "They give you all the faults they had", indeed. I guess it's hard to look someone in the face when you both fear it will be a mirror, and fear that it won't be.
And so, Mariner wins in the saddest way possible. Freeman takes the Admiral’s side and, with him presumably keeping a close eye on the situation, feels forced to demote her daughter. She's back where she wanted to be - the lowest rung of the ladder she watched her mother sacrifice so much to climb, only to hate her view as she neared the top. Carol for her part loses, in the sense that she's still on the same ship with her daughter, and thus still capable of trying to find genuinely common ground any time she chooses, something she obviously has no interest in doing.
Neither of them learn anything. They're both in stasis. They are each, in entirely equivalent and totally inverted ways, no different from the crew of the generation ship. Only one is a mummy. but both are immobile and incapable of learning; both are buried beneath years of accumulated matter. Durango represents the failure state for both of them - taken off their own ship because their ego finally wrote a cheque their competence couldn't cash.
We'll see over the next 46 episodes how this sad, cold stalemate is ultimately resolved, though. We'll watch as each of them learns to consider who they want to be within themselves, and to see relations with others as opportunities for exchange, rather than for validation. We'll learn how far Freeman and Beckett can move in each other's direction, once they shake the dust off, along with so much else.
And ultimately, what else can be expected from our time in these moist vessels than that?
[1] I am also here reminded of advice Dr Anne Galloway passed on from her earliest days in academia: "We're all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind".
3. Moist Vessel 4. The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry
5. Babel
6. Absolute Candor 7. Phage
8. Unexpected
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