Apologies to all and sundry for the lateness of this review of the latest Short Treks, but I was in Italy when the episode went live, and it turns out you can’t watch these episodes in Europe—or if you can, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. CBS All Access wouldn’t work for me over there, and while Netflix had Star Trek Discovery, they didn’t have Short Treks. As we say on Earth, c’est la vie. I got home this past weekend and finally got a chance to watch “Calypso.”
It was worth the wait. This is Michael Chabon’s first Trek work—he’s one of the people involved in the upcoming return of Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard—and if this is an indication of what the author of The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay will bring to the table, we’re in for a treat.
“Calypso” starts much the same way that “Runaway” did, with a stranger coming on board Discovery, but the circumstances are wildly different. Discovery has been abandoned, holding station for the past one thousand years, the ship’s computer following the captain’s final orders to hold position until the crew returns.
Discovery‘s tractor beam pulls in an escape pod containing a badly injured human. His wounds are healed, and the human—who gives his name first as Quarrel, then as Craft—awakens. It takes him a while to realize that the disembodied voice talking to him isn’t a person, but rather the ship’s computer.
Over the past millennium, the Discovery computer has evolved into a sentient artificial intelligence, named herself Zora, and does everything she can to make Craft comfortable on the ship. The one thing she can’t do is change her position. She’s still a computer, and her last orders from her captain were to wait at those coordinates for the crew’s return. Garbage in, garbage out: that the orders came from a captain who is probably long dead (I was going to say “must be,” but this is Star Trek after all, so the captain showing up after ten centuries isn’t out of the realm of possibility) is irrelevant. She can’t move until she has new orders. The ship only has one shuttlecraft, which had just been delivered when the crew abandoned ship. It doesn’t even have a name yet.
As for Craft, he’s a refugee from a war involving his homeworld of Alcor IV. In Discovery‘s time, no humans lived there, but now a whole bunch do. He was fighting a war, and got out in an escape pod that actually belonged to his enemies. The war has been going on for a decade, and Craft left a wife and child behind, whom he misses.
Zora does the best she can to make Craft comfortable, and director Olatunde Osunsanmi does a nice job showing the passage of time with multiple Crafts in the mess hall. She re-creates his favorite memory using ship’s audio and environmental controls (him out on a boat), and she also introduces him to human food. (“It’s a waffle. You pour syrup on it.”)
Aldis Hodge does superlative work here, as he has to interact with a disembodied voice, and does so magnificently. Hodge has always been expert at inhabiting his characters perfectly, giving them distinctive speaking patterns and body language. You absolutely believe he is who he’s playing, whether it’s Craft, Jake Talley on Supernatural, or Alec Hardison on Leverage. (For that matter, he did that with the various roles Hardison took on during cons in Leverage.)
Annabelle Wallis is equally magnificent as Zora, managing the impressive trick of keeping the even, modulated tone that you would expect from an AI, while giving just enough hint of emotion to make you think she has them. (Brent Spiner was a past master of this on The Next Generation as Data.) Despite having no screen time with Hodge, she achieves letter-perfect chemistry with him.
The heart of the episode is the movie Funny Face. Zora has come to love the climactic dance between Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. After Zora has done so much for him, Craft returns the favor by learning Astaire’s part in the dance and creating a holographic interface of Zora for him to dance with.
Eventually, though, Zora realizes she has to let Craft go. The shuttle might not make it to Alcor IV—it’s untested, and the planet is at the extreme end of the shuttle’s range—but he has to give it a shot. The last shot is the shuttle flying out of Discovery, finally named: Funny Face.
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All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries
This is a sweet, wonderful, tragic story. It has the Trek hallmark of bonding between people from wildly different backgrounds to make each other better, as well as the belief that just because intelligence is artificial, doesn’t make it not real. (A theme explored in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Requiem for Methuselah” on the original series, and through the characters of Data and the EMH on TNG and Voyager, respectively.) And while no details are forthcoming about life in the 33rd century (the farthest ahead in the timeline any onscreen Trek has gone, supplanting Voyager‘s “Living Witness”), we do know that humanity continues to thrive.
I was worried that doing two two-person stories in a row would be repetitive, but these two episodes prove the maxim that it’s the execution that matters, not the idea. Both “Runaway” and “Calypso” have similar ideas as their foundations, but the execution couldn’t be more different. Both are excellent, worthy additions to the Trek oeuvre. In fact, my only significant complaint is the absurd notion of “Taco Tuesday” surviving into the 23rd century. Or, in fact, deeply into the 21st. Bleah. (Though I do adore that, after Zora’s lengthy explanation of what a taco is, Craft then wishes to know what a “Tuesday” is.)
I promise a more timely review of “The Brightest Star” in December…
Keith R.A. DeCandido first started writing about Star Trek for this site in 2011 (including rewatches of three of the TV series and reviews of most of the movies and each episode of Discovery and Short Treks), first started writing Trek fiction in 1999 (he’s written sixteen novels, thirteen novellas, seven short stories, six comic books, and one reference book, and also edited three anthologies), and been watching Star Trek since birth. His rewatch of live-action superhero movies appears every Friday here on Tor.com, and 2019 will see the publication of three new novels of his: Alien: Isolation (based on the videogame), Mermaid Precinct (latest in his fantasy/mystery series), and A Furnace Sealed (debuting a new urban fantasy series).
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—Keith R.A. DeCandido
How was Italy? Just went there for the first time in October. Did you run into any of the flooded areas?
Actually, we have a visit to the 31st Century on ST:ENT. Jonathan Archer gets stranded there with Crewman Daniels in Shockwave (parts 1 and 2). As you note, Living Witness isn’t quite that far ahead.
Very nice episode, I agree with your review, krad. It’s funny that a starship has a romance with a man named “Craft”.
I loved this story. And it goes some way toward explaining why series set later in Trek chronology don’t mention the Discovery — it hid itself in the emptiness of space somewhere, keeping quiet, and was never seen again. Couple that with the possibility that many contemporary Starfleet types weren’t aware of the ship’s existence (which… I have no sense of whether this is the case or not, but work with me here), and you’ve got all you need to slip through the cracks of history.
Other random bits worth appreciating: the moment when you understand the significance of the title; the extremely flattering fit of Craft’s flight suit as he leaves.
Sigh… Yet another story where people centuries in the future have no interest in popular culture created later than the 20th or early 21st century. I’m sure it’s a great story and all, but I get so tired of that contrivance. Where’s all the contemporary pop culture, or the culture from the centuries between now and then? Sometimes in Trek it seems that humanity stopped creating any art or literature or music after the year 2000.
@6/AndrewWillett: “And it goes some way toward explaining why series set later in Trek chronology don’t mention the Discovery”
Why does that even need to be explained? How often do you go around talking about the Merrimac from the US Civil War, or Admiral Nelson’s HMS Victory? It’s a big universe, and people are usually more interested in their present than their past. And TOS’s characters rarely mentioned other starships than the Enterprise unless they were interacting with them or heading for a rendezvous with them.
I think that the references to 20th/21st century pop culture are there merely to ground the show a bit. It was the same with my favorite – Red Dwarf – when they were constantly referencing not just 20th century pop culture, but 20th century British pop culture.
Sure, characters could reference pop culture from the 31st or 32nd century, if your show is set in the 33rd, but it would be gibberish to the viewer. Each reference would need an explainer. When someone in sci-fi name drops Elvis Presley, we all know who that is and what he’s famous for. Name drop Floo Korgan Gorto, and no matter the context, it’s going to need explaining (he’s a very famous actor from Lomon VII, by the way).
@7/ChristopherLBennett To me, it was significant mostly because the absence from later history of any mention of the ship or its revolutionary technology was used as a cudgel in the “We hates DISCO, we hates it forever, precious” blowback from some quarters. For any fan made irate by this (or even just for people curious as to how it would be solved as a continuity puzzle), well, now there’s more canonical coverage.
The people mad about that are not going to care that there’s a canonical explanation. They just hate Disco.
@8. Though that just begs the question of how famous “Funny Face” is among the 21st-century audience.
For that matter, we’ve seen enough of the Primeverse timeline that the idea of Klingon Opera from the 2230s or a 22nd-century Zefram Cochrane biopic or a post-WW3 adaptation of “The King an I” isn’t too much of a stretch (complete with the interesting design challenge of presenting chronologically-appropriate “stock footage”).
#8
Daaah actually, Floo Korgan Gorto was from Lomon VI. It was his cousin, Sandy Gorto, who was from VII. You might remember him from the cover band of the Andorian hiphop artist Snidle Flake called Snidle Flakes and Berry. He later had a novelty hit single, “Faster Than Light, Slower Than Syrup,” in the 23rd century, which launched his solo career. He then got involved in New Age Vulcan mysticism, changed his name to David Bowie, and disappeared into what they used to call a black hole…
@8/danielmclark: “Sure, characters could reference pop culture from the 31st or 32nd century, if your show is set in the 33rd, but it would be gibberish to the viewer.”
No more so than any other aspect of worldbuilding. If you can convey the basics of an alien religious belief or a far-future piece of technology through the storytelling, it’s no harder to convey the basics of a future work of literature or pop culture. Star Trek did it with non-human cultures all the time — Klingon opera, Cardassian enigma tales, Quark’s Marauder Mo action figures, Tuvok’s kal-toh game, etc. So there’s no reason they couldn’t do the same with future human culture.
Heck, I’ve done it repeatedly in my Trek and original fiction. In a TNG novel, I had a couple of characters mention a favorite holodrama about the Space Boomers from the 22nd century. In my most recent Enterprise novel, one character invited another to see the new Bollywood historical epic about pre-Surak Vulcan. In my original novel Only Superhuman, I inserted throwaway references to a number of works of future pop culture alongside the real-world pop culture nods that the audience would recognize. It’s really quite easy, and fun too.
Juxtaposing past and future references is a useful trick too. TOS did a lot of this. One of its favorite tricks was to list several examples of a thing including a couple of real ones that the viewer would recognize — “Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Ferris, Maltuvis.” Or “the Nobel and Z-Magnees Prizes.” The audience instantly gets the future references by comparison to the past ones. And the story avoids the implausible contrivance of human history ceasing to exist between our present and the characters’ present.
Christopher: while your larger point is well taken, for a 15-minute piece, the visual shorthand makes for much easier storytelling, since you can just show the 21st-century audience old black-and-white Disney shorts and Funny Face without having to expand your very limited running time to explain them over-much.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@14/krad: Sure, I get that, but in a case like that, it doesn’t hurt to throw in the occasional futuristic reference alongside the recognizable ones. It’s the same thing TOS did. They included Genghis Khan and Caesar, but they didn’t stop at the audience’s present — they threw in future dictators too, like Maltuvis and Lee Kwan and Colonel Green. The problem isn’t that later Trek shows include pre-2000 references, it’s that they never bother to toss in the occasional post-2000 reference to balance them out. It’s frustrating because TOS did know how to do that, and did it well. It had its share of episodes based in the characters’ knowledge of Earth history that the audience would recognize — Trelane’s Napoleonic-Era fantasies, John Gill’s Nazi experiment, the illusory OK Corral, etc. — but there were enough future-history references alongside them that it didn’t feel like there was this huge empty gap in between our present and theirs.
Rebo and Zooty.
Are you objecting to tacos in general, or the concept of only eating them on Tuesdays?
@17/Gareth Wilson: The concept of “Taco Tuesdays” is an alien one to me; I’ve only become aware of it through increasingly frequent mentions on TV and movies, and I had to look it up today to figure out what the deal behind it is. Apparently it’s a regional practice, and it originated in the early 1980s with a certain taco restaurant’s discount deal. So it’s something that’s only come about fairly recently and is only practiced in certain parts of the country, mainly California. Thus, I agree with Keith that it’s pretty absurd to portray it as an enduring custom that will last centuries into the future.
@15/ChristopherLBennett: I wonder how much of the TOS future-history building comes from the number of actual SF writers–people in the habit/business of building future histories–who did TOS scripts, whereas the later Trek series lacked such writers.
I don’t know, Taco Tuesday is no less absurd as Turkey Thursday in my mind. Lots of reasons a particular food can be tied to a day of the week. If there’s some future tradition or meaning tied to it, perhaps a showing of soliarity between the future United States and Mexico, I could see Taco Tuesday surviving for centuries. And, after all, tacos are good eatin’!
@20/Edgar: Is Turkey Thursday a thing? Or is that meant as a jocular reference to Thanksgiving? (While we’re at it, it was very America-centric of TOS: “Charlie X” to have Kirk say “It’s Thanksgiving on Earth.”)
Anyway, bringing up Tex-Mex cuisine highlights another worldbuilding weakness in Trek. Where’s all the syncretic culture? All sorts of new foods and traditions and languages and religions and so forth have arisen as hybrids between different cultures that interact regularly, yet there’s no trace of such blending in any Trek culture even after centuries of coexistence — with the sole exception of raktajino (Klingon coffee), which according to a Trek cookbook is actually a variant of actual Earth coffee that the Klingons assimilated into their culture and bred for extra strongness. By the TNG era, Federation culture should be a promiscuous blend of human, Vulcan, Andorian, Bolian, and other cultural influences, in custom and cuisine and technology and fashion. (And language too, though I have to give that a pass since the show needs to be comprehensible to present-day Earthicans.)
Yes, Thanksgiving is Turkey Thursday in my family. And I agree, there should be a lot more blending of cultures in Star Trek.
@9, @10There is nothing wrong with hating STD, and there is nothing wrong with saying that the show won’t change that. If I have to keep my beef with the show out of the comments then can you at least keep your beef with people who do not like it out of them too.
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We don’t always reference all culture timelines. There are hundreds of years, if not thousands that get skipped. (Dark ages) Like it or not, ours is not one of them. Like the Victorian age. Which we note, study, etc. So much more happened before and and after that time that no one cares about. They discovered new art form, new music, etc. In real life, not Sci-fi life, we live in a 50 year period that saw the birth of man space travel. You are gonna say that 1000 years from now they are not going to look at us as one of the turning point of human history? The biggest one ever I think
Everything about this period of time will be scrutinized by history. And documented. And sometimes idolized. It will be iconic. We saw the wheel become space travel. Coal go to nuclear. There is no more dynamic, or scary, time than our lifetime in human history. And I don’t mean in a long while. I mean since our grandfather was alive. That’s crazy.
“And while no details are forthcoming about life in the 33rd century […], we do know that humanity continues to thrive”
… and wage war.
Contrast this with Kirk’s speech in “A Taste of Armageddon”: “We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it.”
@21/Christopher: “While we’re at it, it was very America-centric of TOS: “Charlie X” to have Kirk say “It’s Thanksgiving on Earth.”” – The German dubbed version turned that into Easter. Back in the day nobody in Germany would have known what “Thanksgiving” is.
Didn’t Star Trek have lots of alien foods? Saurian brandy, Romulan ale, Kaferian apples, Ktarian eggs, Ktarian chocolate puff, Thalian chocolate mousse,…
And nobody picked up on the reference the episode title made to the Odyssey!
Calypso was a nymph who detained Odysseus on her island and would not let him leave. Odysseus bitterly missed his wife and child and begged the gods to make her let him go. Finally, after 7 years, the gods were able to prevail upon Calypso to let Odysseus go and she provided him with the materials to build a raft.
I could do a little riff of my own about the significance of cultural references. . . .
” the new Bollywood historical epic about pre-Surak Vulcan.”
I hope you’re In Talks to sell that idea to Bollywood.
Huh. And here I thought Taco Tuesday was a thing my friend Mike in Aspen Hill came up with to describe the potluck he hosts before the Tuesday AA meeting in Kensington. Learn something new every day, I guess.
There’s gonna be a new Picard show and an animated sitcom about lower deck characters by one of Rick & Morty’s writers, plus Nicholas Meyer is trying to make a miniseries about Khan’s years in Ceti Alpha V.
I wouldn’t blink much at CBS co-producing a Bollywood Vulcan epic.
@27/Jana: “Didn’t Star Trek have lots of alien foods?? Saurian brandy, Romulan ale, Kaferian apples, Ktarian eggs, Ktarian chocolate puff, Thalian chocolate mousse,…”
Yeah, but that’s my point — everything in Trek is monolithically alien. Everything is identified exclusively with only one culture, rigidly segregated by planet of origin. Where are the fusions and hybrids that happen in real life when different cultures intermingle?
Although I suppose it’s possible that the chocolate recipes you mention could be alien variations of Earth dishes, assuming they mean actual chocolate and not some alien equivalent.
“Where are the fusions and hybrids that happen in real life when different cultures intermingle?”
Spock, Alexander, Naomi Wildman, Simon Tarses… :)
@32/MaGnUs: I meant cultural fusions. Your examples just underline the problem. Hybrid characters like Spock and Alexander are usually expected to identify with only one of their heritages. When they attempt to strike a middle path, it’s portrayed as an exception and they’re under pressure to “choose” one path or the other.
The smiley means it’s a joke.
As I recall Neelix tried to add a little non-Vulcan twist to Plomeek soup. It did not go over well with Tuvok.
It seems they’re teasing a possible ending to DISCO. Not sure how to feel.
The way you feel about “Taco Tuesday” is the way I felt about Bashir and O’Brien embracing the phrase “in the zone” on Deep Space Nine.
@36 – postmanblues: We don’t know when Discovery was abandoned, who was the Captain, what organization actually still controlled it, etc.
Nice episode, although it remains me to several movies: Passengers, Wall-e and 2001 all over the place…
Finally saw this. From the hype, I was expecting something brilliant, but instead it’s just a pretty nice story. It’s well-made and very well-acted by Aldis Hodge, but it doesn’t delve as deeply into its potential as it could, since it’s more interested in being sweet and sentimental. (A story about a lonely AI not wanting to let go of the human it rescued could’ve gotten much more dramatic or dark or scary.)
It was interesting to get a glimpse into the Federation’s future, and to see that there are humans that see it (i.e. the “V’draysh”) as the enemy. I wonder if that will be developed any further. It was also interesting to see an onscreen depiction of a concept I’ve seen mentioned in a number of SF prose works (including Diane Duane’s Star Trek: My Enemy, My Ally and David Brin’s Earth, the latter of which I just read last week): old 2D movies/TV shows converted to holographic form. Which, personally, I consider blasphemy, but it’s interesting to see it visualized.
And once again, it seems that, through some bizarre fluke, the only Earth motion pictures that have survived into the warp era are those owned by Paramount Pictures. I guess all the other studios’ libraries were bombed or wiped by cyber-viruses in World War Three? ;)
One virus in the Disney servers and a lot gets lost.
Hey, the “more:” link stopped working. Help!
My complete Trek rewatch has caught up to this episode, and from the perspective of someone who has seen all of the first four seasons of Discovery, “Calypso” is fascinating and intriguing.
Was Discovery‘s AI named Zora, years later, because of “Calypso,” or was that always the plan?
Has the crew really been missing for a thousand years? Because this story is set in the 33rd century, which we know Zora and her crew reached together. Is this an alternate timeline?
Was the series ever going to come back and explain this? It came tantalizingly close in “Face The Strange.”
Will it still come back and explain it? Will Burnham and company meet Craft?
So many questions!