In 1967, Star Trek aired “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Written by David Gerrold, the episode quickly attained legendary status, as pretty much any list of best episodes of the original series is likely to have the numbers one and two spots occupied by some combo of it and “The City on the Edge of Forever.” It’s one of the funniest episodes of Star Trek, and remains beloved to this day, with the image of Kirk being buried in tribbles falling out of the storage compartment one of the most iconic visuals in Trek history. When Deep Space Nine celebrated the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary in 1996, they celebrated it via that episode.
The latest Short Treks is the secret origin of the tribbles. It features H. Jon Benjamin—Sterling Archer his own self—so you know much wackiness will ensue.
Intellectually, I don’t see the point of this episode. The tribbles don’t really need a secret origin, and there are elements of this short that are just weird. And I have to wonder how, exactly, Edward managed to get into Starfleet…
But that requires thinking, and where’s the fun in that? Besides, not thinking is kind of the point of the short.
Newly promoted Captain Lynn Lucero is heading to her first command, the U.S.S. Cabot, after serving with distinction as an Enterprise science officer. Captain Christopher Pike sends her off to her new mission, which involves working near Klingon space.
Lucero’s first meeting with her department heads goes well right up until she gets to Edward Larkin. By far the oldest person in the room, and the only department head without an actual department (he works alone), he has trouble operating his equipment (insisting it’s broken, even though he’s just not working it right), and his big project is to breed tribbles as food.
Right away, the entire audience is squicked, because we’ve spent the last five decades thinking of tribbles as these sweet, adorable, purring fuzzballs, and you shouldn’t eat them! And Larkin never once comes off the idea of tribbles as the other white meat. (Well, red meat, apparently under the fur, they’re a deep red.)
We quickly realize just how clueless Larkin is. When Lucero expresses concern about their intelligence, Larkin immediately assures her that they’re not bright enough to evade capture for long, and he can always breed them to be brain damaged. Lucero patiently explains that there her concerns with their being intelligent are moral, not tactical, and then she quickly realizes that this guy’s not exactly Starfleet’s finest and transfers him to another department.
Larkin then sends anonymous letters to Starfleet Command calling her dumb and saying she shouldn’t be captain anymore. Lucero has no trouble figuring out that Larkin is responsible and has him transferred. Larkin then injects his tribble with his own DNA and alters their reproductive cycle so they’re born pregnant. They proceed to breed like, well, tribbles, and pretty much take over the ship. Eventually, they have to evacuate, but Larkin refuses to abandon ship, because dammit, he proved that he was right, he could do this and he’s not dumb, and then he gets overwhelmed by fast-breeding tribbles.
(One thing I like is that at no point does Lucero even consider the possibility of killing the tribbles. I’m sure many of them do die when the superstructure of the ship collapses, but it’s established that plenty survived, at least. The only fatality is Larkin himself, but tellingly, none of Starfleet’s attempts to restrain the tribbles are lethal: their phasers are on stun and they’re never consigned to space via an airlock.)
This is a completely goofy episode, with some horror overtones when the tribbles are taking over, but it’s mostly so over-the-top you’re getting a nosebleed watching it. And it’s funny as hell, which is what you want in a comedy short, and by being only fourteen minutes long, the goofiness doesn’t quite overstay its welcome. (The only bit that’s in danger of that is the “this conversation is over” sequence, which goes on about 12% too long.)
Benjamin is what makes it all work, of course. He’s very obviously been sent to the Cabot in a minor position without a real department in the hopes that he can do very little harm. (You have to figure he’s the son or cousin or husband of someone important.) And he so perfectly plays the just-clever-enough-to-get-himself-in-trouble imbecile that he’s made a career of, particularly as the voice of the title character on Archer. Anson Mount’s presence as Pike is always welcome, and Rosa Salazar does fine, mostly being Benjamin’s straight man, as it were, but she also gets the best part of the short.
As much as I enjoyed the silly absurdity of the piece, it was the inquiry board at the end that sold it. After Admiral Quinn enumerates everything that went wrong—including everything that happened after Lucero abandoned ship—he asks her to explain how this could possibly be the work of just one crewmember. Lucero, having sat there patiently as her failures are spelled out in graphic detail by her superiors, finally speaks the great truth: “He was an idiot.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in meetings just like that review board and wanted to say exactly what Lucero said, and unable to do so for whatever stupid political reasons. I laughed a lot during the fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds of this trifle of a short, but I laughed hardest at that last line.
(Well, it’s not quite the last line, as there’s a commercial for tribbles as a breakfast cereal after the credits that was just magnificent absurdist craziness.)
Star Trek is supposed to be about humanity at its best, but every once in a while you gotta remember that, even in a universe where the average human is good and noble and smart, you’re still gonna have your fair share of imbeciles. (It’s one of the things I liked about Bashir’s father in “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” on DS9, in fact, as well as Reginald Barclay as we first saw him on The Next Generation’s “Hollow Pursuits.”) I wouldn’t want all my Trek to be like this, and, again, it’s not like the tribbles really needed a secret origin, but I was more than happy to bow to the ridiculous for a quarter of an hour.
Once again, we’re given no preview for the next Short Trek, which is entitled “Ask Not,” though it will be the third short in a row to feature Anson Mount as Pike, which is never a bad thing. It’ll go live on the 14th of November.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about pop culture for this site since 2011, including the current “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch” every Friday (his review of Thor: Ragnarok also went live today) and reviews of every episode of Star Trek Discovery and Short Treks to date. Look for his reviews of the remaining batch of Short Treks over the next couple of months, as well as of Star Trek: Picard starting in January.
I liked the episode for the fact that Larkin simply had no idea how bad his idea was – starting from the fact that Tribbles are simply un-appetizing. And – if the cereal commercial is accurate, apparently cannot be shaven or boiled clean of the fur before you eat them (gag)!
I also liked the big Tribble vacuum one of the crewmen had.
Also, given that the original tribble episode was an invasive species parable (according to David Gerrold), I liked that that theme was carried over in such a way that we could see the end result of an unchecked infestation
And somehow none of this gets into Starfleet databases to be discovered by Dr. McCoy. Oh well, as long as it’s funny.
Captain Archer’s Enterprise encountered the Mirror Universe, the Borg, the Ferengi, the Organians, and I forget who all else before other Star Trek crews had their official first encounters with them. Q didn’t even know that the scary Borg from across the galaxy, the big distant threat that the Federation wasn’t supposed to encounter for years, had already met the Hansen family.
It was a surprise to everyone on the Enterprise that Noonien Soong created Data, yet every other reference to Soong was written as if everyone knew Soong created Data from jump.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@twels: ” if the cereal commercial is accurate, apparently cannot be shaven or boiled clean of the fur before you eat them (gag)”
The fine print in the commercial says: “Fur may present choking hazard. It is suggested you shave cereal with Edward brand Tribble Razor included in Tribble Cereal Super Salon playset (sold separately). Edward Cereals LLC not responsible if tribbles survive and replicate in digestive tract. Chew thoroughly.”
Also, “It’s my DNA!” -Edward*
*Edward(tm) macronutrient currently not approved by Federation Food and Drug Administration.
And they come in Original, Hairy Berry, and Spicy Ranch.
To follow up on @4/krad’s point: In retrospect, large portions of ST:TNG season one (not just “Encounter at Farpoint”) feel like an extended pilot, in the sense of “we’re reinventing things, does this work?, oops upon audience testing it really doesn’t so let us never speak of it again”.
In a broader sense that’s always true with a long-running saga that purports to have “continuity” (“we’ll constrain ourselves to established facts as a courtesy, until it’s inconvenient”), but IMHO it’s particularly obvious with early TNG (1987) and its occasional resemblance to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).
@4/krad: It got worse when they couldn’t get Keye Luke to play Soong and decided to cast Spiner in age makeup. If Data was a positronic android who looked exactly like the roboticist famous for his positronic-brain theory, how could anyone not know who created him??
By the way, any indication when this episode takes place? I saw a screencap showing a gray-haired Pike, so I assume it’s supposed to be fairly late in Pike’s tenure as Enterprise captain, maybe just a couple of years before “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
In ST:ID we get Zombie Tribbles, which would be an excellent name for a Star Trek Punk band.
There are tribbles in the Harry Potter books (a blink and you miss it reference in the animal store) which means that Star Trek and Harry Potter are in the same universe. I wonder what the Department of Temporal Investigations thinks of time turners?
@3. Steven Jacques Roby: While I agree with the sentiment of your comment (because I don’t see a continuity problem here), Archer’s Enterprise never encountered the Mirror Universe – the entire Mirror Universe story on ENT was set in the Mirror Universe itself and featured no Prime Universe characters from the ship. Also the Ferengi, the Borg and the Organians weren’t named in their appearances in an attempt to keep with continuity. As for Q not knowing about the Borg and the Hansens…I think it’s pretty clear that no matter what Q says, Q doesn’t know everything.
@7. ChristopherLBennett: Pike had gray hair throughout much of Discovery (which I only really noticed when I rewatched the season), but the stardate is 1421.9; does that help? (I’ve never really understood stardates).
@3 & 9: I checked the transcript of “Q Who,” and Q never professes a belief that no one in the Federation has ever heard of the Borg. The closest he comes is “They’re unlike any threat your Federation has ever faced.” Q’s speeches indicate that the Borg are a threat the Federation’s expansion will soon bring it into conflict with. That doesn’t contradict what was later established about the Hansens, since they were a single family exploring far beyond Federation space to investigate something they only knew from rumors.
And yes, Pike had grayish hair in the show, but not as gray as in the photo I saw, which is why I assume it’s further along. As for stardates, they’re basically meaningless, TOS stardates especially. TOS’s makers were deliberately vague about the time frame of the series (the century wasn’t established onscreen until the movies, the specific calendar year not until TNG), so stardates were invented for the express purpose of conveying no meaningful information to the audience. DSC is pretty much following suit; its season 2 stardates were mostly in the 1000 range, but occasionally jumped as high as the 1800s, and the season finale was in the 1200s.
@krad – My father is long retired from federal government service but he told me of a long practice that it was easier to transfer problem civil servants than to fire them. Managers would look for vacant management positions and transfer their problem subordinates to that office. The new manager would then come in and have to go through the process in turn. Captain Lucero sounds like a 23rd century victim of this process.
@11, @krad
When DHS was established after 9/11 they were manned up from other agencies, which took full advantage of the opportunity to get rid of the deadweight
I’ll be honest: this one didn’t sit well with me. It felt too awkward, and too mean-spirited. What Edward needed wasn’t a transfer, it was a ship’s counselor.
Transferring someone to get them out of your hair makes sense when you’re in a capitalist framework, where your job is to maximize profit and minimize risk, but I thought we were out here to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. If so, here’s some humanity that needs help, and we’re just going to insult him, dump him on somebody else’s plate, then insult him one last time?
Sigh.
I did love Rosa Salazar, so I hope we get to see Captain Lucero again!
#13. I agree, though to be fair this has happened before in Trek — in the more “evolved” 24th century — with Reginald Barclay. At one point Riker suspects the nervous lieutenant was dumped on them.
Honestly, I’m just waiting for a short with Borg Tribbles.
@Dholton: Borg tribbles?! That’s brilliant! Why didn’t they think of that?
@16/Sunspear: William Leisner already thought of it 17 years ago:
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Borg_Tribbles
@CLB: sounds like a fun story, although I’m having trouble picturing Borgified tribbles. Guess the Borg would shave their fur and they’d look as weird as hairless cats.
I don’t mind them giving us a tribble origin, but connecting it to Starfleet in this way is disappointing. Essentially the same thing Ridley Scott has been doing with his Alien prequels. Small universe stuff.
@19, Yeah, with Prometheus Ridley Scott totally ruins the Lovecraftian strangeness of the opening of the original Alien for me.
Did no one realize H. Jon Benjamin is the chef in the Arby’s commercials? We have the meats!
@21. C Opp: Arby’s is going to be looking at him suspiciously from now on…
In a nutshell, why I generally don’t like prequel series of established franchises. A pointless “origin” for something that requires no explanation, making said universe too connected and small. I just want Picard free to be its own thing…. no references to Discovery, or foreshadowing what’s supposed to happen one thousand years later.
@23. Brian: I would agree with you on principle, but it may be too late on that score. There are corporate needs that may have to be folded in. Then again, as I’ve said many times, Chabon’s involvement is encouraging, just an excellent writer.
@24/Sunspear: I don’t think there needs to be anything “corporate” behind linking different Trek shows together. It’s just fun to build connections and give a feel of a unified universe. I mean, it’s best if it’s done organically and not forced or contrived, but it’s a natural creative impulse when working in a shared universe.
@CLB: True. As you say, if done organically, it works better, as opposed to being told you must include XYZ elements. See the last review in the DS9 relaunch series for an example of all the different threads krad had to incorporate into his story. Kinda amazing that it holds together sometimes.
@15-18: But… I thought the Borg assimilated only intelligent life forms? Tribbles aren’t intelligent, are they? If we can have Borg tribbles, can we have Borg dogs too? There should be Borg dogs, it’s such a great tongue twister.
“The Borg dog broke the duck drone’s dorky orc cup.”
@27. Jana: one of Edward’s bonehead comments in the short: “I could genetically manipulate their DNA to make them brain-damaged.” Although it’s not established that they are actually intelligent, maybe the tide of tribbles that engulfs Edward is hunting behavior, or an expression of their rage.
The shot from outside the ship of the window ports jammed with tribbles was hilarious.
Firstly, I have never seen a funnier Star Trek episode. Secondly, I have never seen a more incompetent captain. You don’t move an excellent protein expert to climateology. it doesn’t work like that in science even if it is Star Trek. That is really really dumb. And you don’t immediately transfer somebody you don’t like within two days of you taking command. As a captain, the buck stops with her and she blames everything on him.
H. Benjamin plays the part to perfection. And the writing was excellent. I read an interview with him on other websites and agreed with him. Edward should be brought back.
@27/Jana: I believe there were Borg dogs or similar animals in The Return by William Shatner and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. The Borg assimilate life forms they find useful; maybe that isn’t always about intelligence. I don’t remember Bill’s story, but I suspect it portrayed assimilating tribbles as a failed experiment or something of the sort.
@30/Christopher: Nice! I haven’t read The Return because I didn’t like the idea of resurrecting Kirk. People should stay dead more often. But Borg animals are fun.
@31/Jana: I don’t want to spoil it, but you might like a certain scene in my e-novella Department of Temporal Investigations: The Collectors.
@29. David: “Edward should be brought back.”
Maybe he wasn’t lost as they stated. Maybe he injected himself with tribble DNA and became a giant one, the Grand Poobah Tribble. They could have a story where he tries to conquer the Klingon Empire.
Imagine Borg elephants, or rhinos, or grizzly bears. Or Borg orcas or sharks for water worlds.
For non-assault uses, imagine Borg mice or snakes.
@32/Christopher: I can’t be spoiled. I skip around in books, and I used to read novelisations and then watch the film. But you did make me curious…
@34/Lisa: Zoo cubes!
I liked the episode, it was fun, and that whats the point of it. It was also nice to look at, in all respects. I liked the USS Cabot, it’s a nice non-traditionally TOS design.
And I wouldn’t be so sure that Edward died… ;)
@13 – Aerik: I doubt Lucero will be a Captain next time we see her. :)
@18 – Sunspear: Borg tsticles.
@21 – C Oppenheimer: Tribble meats?
@29 – Davidb31: Yes, Lucero is at fault here.
The Trouble with Edward is a is a shining example of modern dumbed down entertainment. I do love the hilarious return of the Tribbles as well as the Human element in the origins story. I’m a life long Trekkie who enjoys the entire franchise including CBS’ latest additions. I even get less than prime examples of humanity like unprepared for command Capt Lucero & the bumbling idiot Dr. Larkin still being in Starfleet given how short handed they must be after the massive casualties of the Klingon war. I just hope this short gets chocked up as a holo recreation based off Lucero’s report rather than literal canon. They just broke my suspension of disbelief by ignored too much established details or even biological plausible science for the laugh. It’s things like adding human DNA caused the over the top popping Gremlins like reproduction with no corresponding food source to justify the ship wide flood. Kirk was buried because they got into the grain storage compartment.
@37/Jesse T: Good point, but some earlier Star Trek stories had the same problem. TNG’s “Home Soil”, for example.
With luck, they won’t expect us to believe this is in continuity with the rest of the show.
@37/Jesse T: “It’s things like adding human DNA caused the over the top popping Gremlins like reproduction with no corresponding food source to justify the ship wide flood. Kirk was buried because they got into the grain storage compartment.”
But we saw in “The Trouble with Tribbles” that the tribbles proliferated everywhere on the Enterprise, even on the bridge where there was no food beyond the coffee occasionally brought by yeomen. It was established there that the tribbles had gotten into the food preparation machinery, which gave them both a source of nourishment and a means to travel all around the ship through the dumbwaiter system and maintenance ducts. They would’ve continued to reproduce out of control if Scotty hadn’t beamed them all to the Klingon ship (a far less humane solution than Lucero was willing to attempt, it sounds like).
I’m a big fan of comedy sci-fi, and H. Jon Benjamin can do no wrong in my opinion, so I absolutely adored this episode. My only gripe was that they didn’t give David Gerrold any credit anywhere.
@41/cvalin: Gerrold might have been entitled to residuals for the use of tribbles (though I think that applies only to characters rather than species), but not screen credit unless it was a direct remake or used clips from his episode like “Trials and Tribble-ations” (which did give him a “Based on” credit in the end titles.)
This was not only the worst episode of the current incarnation of Trek (even compared to the time Culber got fridged on STD), it also actively insulted my intelligence as a viewer, and the Captain was completely incompetent to boot.
Captain whatshername should’ve locked up Eddie Moron in her brig and read him the riot act the MOMENT she realized he was bad-mouthing her behind her back to Starfleet Command. He’s blatantly insubordinate and criminally reckless, it’s criminally negligent of her to not take immediate action to neutralize this idiot and his harebrained scheme.
Leaving aside the unnecessary creepy element of adding human DNA, and the dumb-even-by-Trek-standards fake science, this episode was just a chore to watch.
Keith, I know you’ve got a conflict of interest here because you’ve written Trek novels in the past and might be under orders from corporate to talk up this stuff, but come on, man, the entire premise of the episode relies on every character being suicidally stupid, and it’s loaded with quietly misogynistic subtext what with the female Captain inadvertently justifying every complaint the jerkoff scientist has about her with her incompetent leadership.
@37: “The Trouble with Edward is a is a shining example of modern dumbed down entertainment.”
^^^This sums up my feelings in a nutshell. It’s a story completely devoid of thought or creativity, made by a crew so inept, so mean-spirited, that I’m half convinced Alex Kurtzman is trying to burn the franchise down for the insurance money.
That, or turning Trek into a neocon hellhole (where peace is for stupid dummies unless you get it at the barrel of a gun, and Islamophobia Klingonphobia is 100% justified because they really ARE all barbarian savages who hate America the Federation and must be either destroyed or put under a nominally friendly puppet dictator for the safety and security of our oil companies our fatherland) didn’t work, so Kurtzman is just throwing crap at the walls out of spite.
@worffan: “This was not only the worst episode of the current incarnation of Trek (even compared to the time Culber got fridged on STD” and ” It’s a story completely devoid of thought or creativity”
These are completely subjective statements. Which you are entitled to believe, of course, but not to overstate so strongly. Applying a overly-serious standard like yours would kill any sitcom in existence. Tone matters. If you miss it…
I’ve had my issues with Discovery, but a little levity and showing Starfleet isn’t perfect isn’t one of them.
@45: It’s entirely possible to have levity and humor without insulting the viewer’s intelligence. DS9 did this all the time with episodes like “The House of Quark” (which is btw one of the best Trek episodes ever and does massive amounts of work in a short time to humanize and de-stereotype both the Ferengi AND the Klingons).
This episode does not. Like the rest of STD, all it has is shallow trend-chasing and vapid attempts at superficially pursuing what a focus group thinks the audience wants.
Also, Star Trek isn’t a sitcom. In a sitcom, the characters are supposed to be stupid and unbelievable because you’re only watching for half an hour after work to turn your brain off while sipping a beer. Star Trek is supposed to at least think through its plots a little bit.
@worffan: Shows featuring murder do not endorse murder (unless a viewer already has trouble separating fantasy from reality). Stories about dumb and inept people do not necessarily insult intelligence, unless a viewer is determined to see it as such.
” all it has is shallow trend-chasing and vapid attempts at superficially pursuing what a focus group thinks the audience wants.”
Source? Other than pure speculation, that is. And what trend exactly is being followed here?
Hate of an IP is a matter of personal taste, which is fine, but continually stating opinion as if it’s fact, not so much.
@47: I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, then, because we seem to be watching completely different shows. The one I watched had an insubordinate cliche who acts more like a sitcom stereotype than any real scientist not get fired for blatant insubordination to his superior officer, featured human DNA somehow turning tribbles into super-fast-breeding gremlins, and seemed to think that turning Star Trek into Futurama without the wit would make it funny.
As for the trend-chasing–well, people objected to the neocon warhawk pessimism of season 1, so they added bad comedy and gave us a stock Dickish White Dude to be killed off because the writers apparently think that social progressivism means “white dudes bad” (which is…kinda the dumbest take I’ve ever seen on any media ever?) and then cribbed the Gary Stu artificial intelligence from David Mack’s lousy Control novel and turned it into the Big Bad halfway through largely because season 2 had no narrative coherence. Now they’re trying to respond to the people who complained that the jokes weren’t funny by turning the whole show into a joke.
I’m sorry, I just can’t stand a second of this show anymore. My only hope is that Picard is watchable (and Chabon, unlike Kurtzman, is actually a really good writer with a track record of solid works like the John Carter movie and the alternate-history novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union under his belt, so IMO there’s a good chance his show is actually good).
@48. worffan: “people objected to the neocon warhawk pessimism of season 1, so they added bad comedy and gave us a stock Dickish White Dude to be killed off because the writers apparently think that social progressivism means “white dudes bad””
Assumption, still.
As I said, I’ve been plenty critical of Disc‘s season 2, but not because it represents any particular ideology. I think that’s a false track. The writing is sometimes bad and the grasp of actual science is even worse. Misapplying small-scale biology to macro-level astrophysics only makes sense if you’re stoned. And a visible light signal triggered in the future does not travel backward in time. There are other issues as well, such as an over-powered Space Iron Woman suit that was built by a couple human scientists decades earlier and which still has more power than the most advanced ship in Starfleet.
On top of that the structure of the season is broken. They changed tack because of behind the scenes turbulence, leaving large story artifacts unresolved, which in the school of Abrams/Kurtzman mystery-box storytelling is OK. It’s not.
But I don’t think they are kowtowing to focus groups and political winds.
I wholeheartedly agree with you about the potential of Picard and Chabon’s involvement. I’ve said only positive things since it was announced.
@49: They’re not kowtowing to political winds, if they had the political awareness to do so they’d have something more like a budget version of DS9 with shinier visuals. They’re attempting to appease what they think are the political winds.
What they’re doing is trying to appeal to “those liberal millennial SJWs” without actually knowing what we left-wing youth want and what kind of storytelling will show a genuine belief in socially progressive ideals and opposition to reactionary ones. Thus, instead of doing what DS9 did and showing the real human nuance behind the Bajorans and Cardassians and Klingons and Ferengi and Jem’Hadar and even to an extent the freaking Founders, they would rather provide us with a white dude whose sole purpose is to be a dick, be humiliated for no reason, and then die because anybody who doesn’t like the protagonist is clearly just an evil stupid racist misogynist who needs to just go and die right now.
That first episode set the tone for season 2, and while I recognize that at least this time Michael Burnham isn’t a violently racist neocon who uses cultural imperialism to justify her preemptive strike and mutiny while the show’s subtext attempts to prove her right, it was still a pretty crappy tone and was a slog to get through.
This tribble mini-episode continues the trend of tone-deaf course-correction attempts. It reminds me of when Berman and Braga thought that the best way to address the flagging ratings caused in part by Captain Archer being an unprofessional ass who got his job through nepotism, was to have Archer threaten to start a holy war by peeing on sacred trees because his dog got sick.
I’ve literally never seen anything Kurtzman created that I’ve ever enjoyed, and STD season 2 is no exception.
@worffan: “to have Archer threaten to start a holy war by peeing on sacred trees because his dog got sick.”
I gave up on that series before anything like that happened. Sounds far-fetched even if you’re characterizing it accurately.
Can agree that Disc S2 was sometimes ” a slog to get through.”
@51/Sunspear: “A Night in Sickbay”, early second season. The episode that made me give up on the series.
@52/Jana: I like “A Night in Sickbay” better than most people seem to. I respect that they had the courage to do a pure character story with no tacked-on action and nobody’s life in danger except Porthos from a health problem. It has its weaknesses, but at its core it’s a story about a guy who really, really loves his dog, and I can’t hate it for that.
@52: Yeah, A Night In Sickbay is like pulling teeth. From the bad sex comedy, to Phlox’s horribly unsafe “sickbay”, to the sexist and demeaning treatment of T’Pol, to the laughable incompetence displayed by Archer at every single moment of the episode, to the sheer childish petulance the man exhibits even in his very first line, it’s a how-to guide on how not to do television.
Man, the first two seasons of Enterprise were even worse than STD. I have no idea how they even survived for season 3.
Quoth worffan101: “Keith, I know you’ve got a conflict of interest here because you’ve written Trek novels in the past and might be under orders from corporate to talk up this stuff,”
Um, have you actually read, like, any of my reviews? I’ve been more than happy to trash plenty of things. Yes, I’ve written Trek novels in the past, but I’m not operating under any orders from anyone — if I was, I wouldn’t be writing reviews. I’ve written plenty of negative stuff about TOS, TNG, DS9, DSC, and Short Treks on this site, which a casual perusal of my byline will reveal.
Don’t assume that, just because someone disagrees with you, it means they must be a corporate shill.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@Jana: oof, didn’t remember dropping out so early. Thought I stuck with it longer. I watched a smattering of later episodes, but not whole seasons.
Tor.com’s moderation policy is extremely clear about the fact that personal attacks on writers and other commenters will not be tolerated: for those who want to participate in these discussions, *do not* engage in such attacks, or in any other rude or obnoxious behavior.
I’m a bit tired of haters calling DIS “STD”.
@59/MaGnUs: The official abbreviation for Discovery is DSC.
Why shave tribbles? Skin them and roast them (nice slippers!). Tribbles onna stick! (pass the ketchup)
So, the only thing I couldn’t figure out was why the crew of the Cabot had the Enterprise-style uniforms and not the Discovery-style (or would that be the Shenzhou-style, since we technically saw them on that ship first?). In Pike’s log (yay! Pike!), he says Lynne Lucero had served as science officer and had been promoted to captain. I assumed Ensign Spock replaced this woman as Chief Science Officer, but was she a science officer or the science officer? It doesn’t really matter; I’m just trying to fit this episode in to the Discovery timeline.
@62/DanteHopkins:
I’m afraid the real answer to all your questions might be that the production team is loosey-goosey with details.
Some of the uniforms in this short didn’t have collars on them. Why not? The same reason the Enterprise-C uniforms in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” didn’t have collars on them. Namely: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@63/Aerik: The “Yesterday’s Enterprise” uniforms ditched the undershirts of the movie uniforms as a cheap-and-easy way to suggest evolution in the uniform design over the decades between the E-A and E-C. Although personally I think they did it the wrong way around. They should’ve ditched the fancy double-breasted jackets and kept the turtleneck undershirts, which would make far more sense for everyday fatigues and would be evocative of the TOS pilot uniforms.
I get the impression that “Trouble” is meant to be set some years later than Discovery season 2, so maybe the uniform change there had a similar intention.
Anyway, one thing to keep in mind about Short Treks is that it’s clearly made on a budget. The stories have few cast members, mostly reuse existing sets, and emphasize dialogue over action/FX. Heck, “Q&A” was set mostly in a turbolift, which is taking the idea of a bottle episode to an almost literal extreme.
See, I looked at this episode from a completely different perspective.
Edward was right. Captain Lucero was demonstrably not ready for command, as evidenced by the fact that she didn’t bring him up on charges for gross insubordination when she had the chance.
As the episode starts, a crew member of USS Enterprise Captain Pike’s, Lynne Lucero, gets promoted to captain and takes command of USS Cabot on a relief mission for the Planet of the Week. Almost immediately she butts heads with Lieutenant Edward Larkin. He’s a biologist running this pet project to genetically engineer tribbles as a food source for the Aliens of the Week, since they’re apparently made out of meat. Since he’s one of the Barclay types that somehow keep slipping through Starfleet’s pre-enlistment psychiatric screenings, he fails to adequately defend the usefulness or relevance of his project and she shuts it down and reassigns him.
He responds by complaining about her to other crew members. Okay, I can’t blame him. But when nobody pays his complaints any mind because he’s an ass, he escalates to sending anonymous complaints about her fitness to command, or as he sees it her lack thereof, to Starfleet Command, among other things calling her “dumb”.
This well past grumping about the new boss. It’s serious business now, “careers on the line” serious.
Captain Lucero quickly figures out Larkin’s behind the complaints and calls him up to the ready room to inform him that she’s having him transferred. He disrespects her to her face, brazenly lies that he didn’t send the complaints, and then tries to continue talking about it when she tells him flat-out that she’s having him transferred and the discussion is over.
Okay, Star Trek? I love you dearly, but Captain Lucero is not the principal of an elementary school dealing with a kindergartner tattling and eating paste in art class. She is the commanding officer of a ship carrying sufficient firepower to glass an inhabited planet, dealing with a commissioned officer who is being blatantly insubordinate and disrespectful to his superior officer. That’s not “finger waggle and get sent back to duty”. That’s a captain’s mast or a court-martial.
But instead of relieving Larkin and confining him to quarters pending disciplinary action, she sends him back to duty until his transfer comes through. This leaves him free to disobey orders and continue pursuing his tribble obsession, which directly causes the peacetime loss of a Starfleet vessel, the failure of the mission when they have to evacuate the planet because tribbles are now apparently capable of surviving hard vacuum and planetary reentry (Wut?) and a major diplomatic row with the Klingons close on the heels of a major interstellar war in which the Federation barely secured a status quo ante peace deal.
The last scene is telling. Captain Lucero is front of a board of inquiry. Her career is over, and she knows it. And it’s all because she didn’t have the guts to smack down an insubordinate subordinate when she really needed to.
Finally saw this. It seems to be in a style of modern comedy writing and acting that just doesn’t work for me. I merely found Edward irritating and unpleasant rather than funny, and it’s implausible that anyone so incompetent could ever have made it into Starfleet. People have made comparisons to Barclay in above comments, but Barclay just had social anxiety and depressive tendencies; he was perfectly capable as an engineer, even gifted. This guy’s such an obvious idiot, and so blatantly hostile to his commanding officer, that it’s hard to believe he ever earned that uniform in the first place. (Unless maybe this is the first time he’s had a female commanding officer. Within the context of TOS’s gender attitudes, that’s not entirely implausible.)
Also, I don’t see any way to reconcile it with TOS continuity. This was during Pike’s command, so it must’ve been years before “The Trouble With Tribbles,” so if the tribbles had already infested Klingon space and become a major scandal way back then, how were they unknown to both Starfleet and the Klingons in TTWT? I can only see this as what DC Comics used to redundantly call an “imaginary story,” one that wasn’t meant to take place in continuity.