Finally watching Disco season 2!

[conuly]

A few minutes into the first episode and I already have so many questions, questions like: Does Amanda know how to help Michael take care of Michael's hair? (I'm sure Sarek neither knows nor cares, sorry.) Did they tell Spock before plopping a new "friend" on his plate? Doesn't Michael have any other family that could take her in? Who's the social worker who approved this placement? Not only is Sarek the worst, but aren't cultural considerations a factor? Wouldn't it make more sense to place an 8 year old human child in a place with more humans? Like earth? (It's not like this family already knows her and is close to her. Like, if she and Spock were already BFFs it would make sense to place her with her friend's family so long as they were amenable to that. Or if they'd taken her in for a short term placement that somehow stretched out into the long term, it'd make sense for her to stay there.)

I mean, it's not that I think it is necessarily wrong, all else being equal, for a human kid to be raised by a mixed couple on Vulcan, but it's certainly not the obvious choice here. And it's not like she's an infant. She's a traumatized young girl who has been raised in a very different culture. (I'm not feeling too sanguine about Vulcan's ability and/or willingness to provide appropriate mental health care either, when it comes to that.) Who made this decision? Did they do any follow-up visits to check that everything was okay?

Also, their house is enormous. But, ambassadors, right?

1. "Sometimes it's best to keep your expectations low". That seems oddly... poignant. Are he and Spock doing it? Does Spock have a whole fetish for Starfleet captains? One which doesn't lend itself to emotional reciprocity, I see. (Is there fanfic?)

2. When the writers get off their grimdark kick, they're good at the little scenes that make us believe this is a real crew. "I hear it's going around." Now that the war is over, is there more of that?

2a. Sneeze into your elbow, dude!

3. Tilly is adorable, as always.

4. Stamets isn't doing so hot after all. Sigh.

5. Oh, geez, listen. I can see where the show is going to try to take this, but sometimes when your family member isn't talking to you, the thing to do is to let them keep doing it. Forever, if necessary, because either you've wronged them or because you're too wrapped up with bad memories. Spock's estranged from his entire family. He's got his reasons.

6. You're giving Sarek too much credit here. If he'd considered every possible effect of a Vulcan upbringing on a human child, he probably would've at least adopted one who didn't have her particular traumatic backstory.

7. Yup, there it is. Sarek, traumatized children are not an object lesson for other people! It was massively unfair and unkind to do that to all children in your family. If you wanted Spock to get along better with humans, you should have considered a move to earth or a mixed planet.

8. Nah, speak to Tilly instead. She is much better at this sort of thing than Sarek. Or better yet, how about the ship's counselor? You do have one of those, right?

9. Pike's aggressive informality is already starting to grate on me. Is he gonna be like this all season? Still, I'm glad we got the roll call.

10. I like the new/old uniforms, but what the heck is with those collars?

11. Oh, Tilly, you don't have to explain. Michael knows what's up, that's why she asked about Stamets in that way. You just have to make a face and give her the sample gatherer. (You can't fix everybody, sweetie.)

12. Those are very shiny jumpsuits.

13. Gold, red, blue - what's with Michael being silver? Is this some sort of "I got sorted into House Sparklypoo" thing?

14. PINBALLS!

15. Seriously, genre convention is dumb. A captain who doesn't know how to delegate is a bad captain.

16. It is so nice to see a mansplaining blowhard eat his words. RIP, jerkass.

17. This is a really bad plan all around and if they didn't have writers it never would have worked.

18. Well, now, this is suitably weird. Good thing they came to rescue this person. She's clearly an unknown genius.

19. "Are we breathable here?" I'm... not sure if this is a valid output in my idiolect? I'm gonna need to think about this one. Is it valid for anybody reading?

20. Brilliant, but not very nice/stable? Maybe you could warn your rescuers of the death traps BEFORE they nearly trip over them? Just a thought.

21. Interrupted escalating creepy suspense chords. I never know what to think of that decision.

22. *checks clock* You know what would be a really stunning swerve? If the woman they found with her hands in her coworker's brains was actually legit. We've got 20 minutes to establish if this is the case.

23. She's a legit genius, though.

24. Legit or not, she's earned some serious shore leave.

25. She definitely seems happy to have saved her patients! Yay I think she's honest!

26. It's not a mission until somebody has to reroute power.

27. Dramatic irony! She's all "Nobody gets left behind, or forgotten" and now she is the one being left behind. If it had been anybody else saying those lines, she'd be beamed up right now. She might as well have capped it all off with "What could possibly go wrong?"

28. While you're running, don't forget the plainly visible laser tripwire of decapitation that is surely invisible to Klingons!

29. This place is its own death trap. War or no war, the Klingons would have to have been suicidal to try to board.

30. She ought to just be having near-death hallucinations, but I've seen the spoilers. Red angel plot tumors ahoy.

31. Wow, they saved the main character! I was in such suspense not knowing if she'd live or die!

32. SHE LOST THE SAMPLE!? This would never have happened if her jumpsuit had had pockets.

33. Oh, no, it's exciting technobabble stuff. I guess pockets would not have helped. THIS TIME.

34. Tilly gives excellent advice. Please follow it!

35. Guy in a wheelchair! Representation, yes, but my standards have raised: I want speaking parts.

36. Stamets is recovering yay.

37. What the hell did I just see? Yeah, I'm gonna clear, but what even WAS that?

38. What does the fortune cookie slip say? Does it make a good "in bed" joke?

39. "Not every cage is a prison, nor every loss eternal." Is Lorca sending creepy manipulative messages from beyond the mirror!grave? He is so skeevy. It's not meaningful, the dude dropped that slip on purpose when he left.

40. ...why would Spock have told Pike that he doesn't have a relationship with his sister? When would this have even come up? Kirk had to drag his estrangement from his parents out of him, it was like pulling teeth. That's not a normal workplace conversation, is it? "Hey, Spock, good to see you, before you give us your powerpoint on the role of logic in the workplace, let's have a heart-to-heart about your family, shall we?"

41. You'd like to go to Enterprise to see Spock, but you ought to go to therapy to see a therapist. If his estrangement from you really is your fault, Michael, then you really ought to stay away.

42. Pike definitely has a mutual thing for Spock, I'm not misreading this, right?

43. You're listening to your brother's personal log? WOW MICHAEL. GET SOME BOUNDARIES.

Comments

Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

I have not seen more than the first episode -- they had it up legitly on Youtube for a week or so, and I will buy the season from iTunes when it's available, like I did for Season 1 -- but...HEH!

LET ME HEADCANON THESE! Because I am terrible and like headcanoning. >_> I CAN MAKE THIS WORK!

TL:DR -- My headcanon is that Sarek saved Michael's life (and possibly sanity) with the emergency mindmeld right after he found her dying, and brought her home like a stray before anyone involved Earth CPS, and then handwaved "Ambassador. Further disruption bad for her" like he was Obi-Wan Kenobi at a Stormtrooper convention.

Longer babble! (Ignore if you don't care about babble. >_> )

1: Hopefully the Federation Internet will help with hair-care. ...Vulcan Internet should work, too. I mean, there's Tuvok. Vulcans have different hair as well!

2: Hmmmm. Sarek didn't think to, but he surely told Amanda, and Amanda told Spock, and Spock went and furiously drew holodragons.

3: Interesting question. Sounds like... no one close? Only child of only children (who might or might not be estranged from their parents) is maybe a thing?

4: Sarek brought her home like a lost puppy and no one asked questions. >_> He probably said he was, like, her Vulcan Godparent or something. (Vulcans only Never Lie when they might get caught at it.)

5: Earth Humans lost all culture after the Eugenics Wars, and have been intermittently trying to reclaim some semblance of it (hi, Scotty! hi, Checkov!) ever since. (This is actually based on an interesting... DW post? Tumblr post? Some time back, which discussed how Nothing From The Era Of The Viewers seemed to show up on TNG, and the blandness of Earth "culture." It was interesting.)

6-7: Earth only found out about it after Michael was settled and Sarek successfully argued that she would be even more traumatized if removed from one of the few people she'd had any kind of bonding with.

Hm. It's also entirely possible that Sarek went, "She was very injured and had given up on life, and a mindmeld was the only logical way to see if she could be encouraged to hang on until medical treatment could be acquired. And, ah, look, it was the only logical way to save her life, okay? She would probably be upset to go away from me right now. *cough* telepathic bond *cough*" And all the other Vulcans looked at him and went, "Sarek, you are a human-fancying weirdo, but okay, we will whisk you and your NEW pet human away before the humans know they should be trying to bring her home. Maybe you can get that little telepathic bond FIXED sometime?"

Though that link might be just about all that helped Michael work through the trauma, so of course it would not be logical to remove that emotional bandage of "vulcan mindlink," and then next thing you know, she's all grown up, being nearly More Vulcan Than Thou, and getting rejected for the Vulcan Science Academy because Vulcans are still hidebound and freaking out.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

You say "hidebound", I say "mildly xenophobic and a bit racist". I'm not done, btw, still watching/editing.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

Ah! No fair! O:D (After episode 1, I will avoid spoilers. Alas.)

(Vulcans are a lot racist, really, though they would insist that no, no, they're just logically superior. They're species-snobby as anything, even when they're not being ST:Enterprise-era of anti-telepath and control-freaks and stuff.)

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

They're definitely all about "Oh, it's not your species, it's your culture" posturing.

That's how Sarek got and retained custody, because obvs it'd be better for traumatized human children to be raised with Vulcan emotional control, and probably all human children!

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

Yuuuuup. Which, I mean, it might be true. It's just that they think your culture is barely above yogurt and "culturist" is basically synonymous to "speciesist" for 'em.

(I still kind of love how humans keep messing with their snobby heads.)

*nod* Sarek totally got all the other Vulcans on board with him keeping this new pet, er, foundling by "what a good example it will be for child-rearing techniques!" arguments. >_>

(That said, the whole mindlink thing does tend to have canon effects on humans, so staying near Sarek after that might have indeed been less traumatic than trying to get her a human home. Vulcans are so weird about talking about stuff like that, though, that I really can't imagine that anyone actually told Earth CPS the whole story, and just dragged their heels till it was clear that this needed to be a long-term thing for Michael's stability.)

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

Dragging your heels until you can claim "She's bonded with us!" is the MO of every unethical adoption story ever. (The tragic thing is that it works, because most people are ethical and when people pull this line they're reluctant to further harm the kids in their care.) Gross and inappropriate, and I maintain that a compromise position of "Vulcans are long-lived, Sarek's an ambassador, he can go be an ambassador on earth for the next decade until Michael's an adult" would've been best all around.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

It would have been. It really would have been. (Sarek would probably have been perfectly happy to go do that, too, since he is a human-fancying weirdo.) Hmmmmm... Sarek felt he had to be living on Vulcan to make sure that Spock was raised Properly and would therefore be able to do all the Vulcan Things? Sarek may be a human-fancying weirdo, but he certainly had a chunk of Being Traditional in his personality -- and might have assumed that Spock, what with the ears and the green blood, would need Traditional Vulcan Values in his upbringing?

...Hmmmmm. Wait, Spock has an older half-brother, right? Who ran off to have emotions all over everything? Sarek might have some issues he's still working out, regarding childrearing.

Okay, Disco, now I want to know what you're going to do with https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sybok in the mix. *kicks back and sets feet on the coffee table*

(Significantly older, flunking out of Vulcan High School, not around much? Sarek feeling Sybok needed to be on Vulcan and he couldn't get a transfer until Sybok was old enough to be considered a full adult?)

Edit: I totally agree that heel-dragging to use the "Michael is bonded" excuse wasn't ethical, especially if they weren't talking about the probably pretty dubious emergency mindmeld thing, too! Of course, Vulcans feel human concerns are a little dismissable, so... >_>

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

Yes, a family with one disaffected young person is exactly the right place for a traumatized child.

Maybe Sybok would've done better on earth. Vulcan obviously wasn't good for him OR Spock, earth could hardly have been *worse*. (Then again, we've seen that both Worf and B'elanna had issues with their respective upbringings. I don't know that half-Vulcans would've had an easier time than Klingons/half-Klingons with human parents.)

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

*nod* All kinds of NEW and DIFFERENT ways to mess things up.

Image of Sybok running off and joining a human retro-rock band, coming back with his ears pierced a zillion times all up to the tips, tattoos, and a mohawk. A rainbow mohawk.

He might've been happier. Or maybe had different issues; he probably would have had to deal with a lot of humans who were more interested in his ears than him, for instance.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

YES.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

I totally agree that heel-dragging to use the "Michael is bonded" excuse wasn't ethical, especially if they weren't talking about the probably pretty dubious emergency mindmeld thing, too! Of course, Vulcans feel human concerns are a little dismissable, so... >_>

You know, I'm shitting on Sarek a lot here (such the worst), but his kids have two living parents. Amanda was complicit in all this, and although I can imagine that all of Vulcan society is likely to ignore her, did she even try to explain how wrong all this was on all fronts?

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

HMMMMMM.

I honestly don't know. I mean, she loves Sarek (and he loves her, any time you can pry it out of his closemouthed "emotions are kind of like what you do in the bathroom" Vulcan mouth...), but I don't know if she would have been able to muster up a lot of "Um, maybe not?" in the face of "a human kid to help" when A: her husband's previous son and B: her own kid are... probably not bonding in ways that humans recognize emotionally.


...
I think about the only way to make it "right" is if one just goes with the concept that the mindlink Sarek established really *was* the only thing keeping Michael from having a complete mental breakdown from what she witnessed, survivor guilt, etc. In which case Amanda would've probably been 100% complicit in keeping Michael close enough for the mindlink to continue supporting her while she found some way to process the trauma.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

Also... we know Spock is estranged from all of them, and Michael has been in only sporadic contact with both Sarek and Amanda since becoming an adult. Is Sybok also estranged from his parents? Do either Sarek and Amanda understand that a three for three estrangement rate on offspring is a devastating indictment of their parenting? Has it occurred to either of them to question the steps that led them down this path?

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

Hmmmmm.

Sybok ran off because he wanted to do Emotions, and his dad was all "...um, no? you're not supposed to go wallow in them? And definitely not talk about them? In public? UM???" (I don't recall what Sybok thought about Amanda. That could've been a case of "you're not my real mom!")

Spock... went "a plague on Vulcan; I'm gonna run away and join Starfleet." (Sarek, you really can't expect a half-human kid is going to be MORE Vulcan than your Vulcan kid...) And when Sarek went "...you're going to WHAT NOW?", well... (This kind of makes it more poignant, with Disco, knowing that Sarek made a devil's bargain and then Spock didn't even want it. I bet Sarek was really trying to pressure Spock about that and going "LA LA LA" whenever Spock ever brought up that he wasn't sure he wanted to continue his education on Vulcan, where everybody kept being racist testing him for Vulcanity.

Was Michael estranged-estranged? Or just... not seeing them that often and having complicated emotions about a father-figure (mindlinked father figure!) who is psychologically unable to express parental bonding in ways that the human mind can work with. (The more intimate mindlink with Amanda presumably helps in that regard. Man attracts human wives twice at least, after all.)

She had the Alice in Wonderland book that Amanda read to her a lot, and keeping it wouldn't seeeeeeem to fit with Truly Estranged?

I may be blanking on the details, but Michael's relationship is probably the best of the three. *wry*

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[conuly]

I think you can have fond memories of one parent and still be more or less low or no contact with them simply because you can't separate them, emotionally or logistically, from the other one.

Re: Ignore me, I'm geek-babbling

[archangelbeth]

*nod* Definitely logistically, at a minimum.

Definitely a complicated relationship.

[thornsilver]

Ok, I gotta ask what is this about?

[conuly]

Star Trek: Discovery, season 2. Our choices for fan nicknames were either "ST:D" or "Disco" and I think nobody can blame us for eschewing the usual convention of doing initialisms.

[thornsilver]

I am not sure if I am relieved or disappointed by this not being fanfic.

[conuly]

If it makes you feel better, whatever they say it definitely takes place in a third continuity.

[saturnofthemoon]

I always assumed Sarek knew Michael's parents in some capacity, but they have yet to refer to it in the show...

[conuly]

Even with rescue mind meld bonding it's weird, right?

[archangelbeth]

From how desperate Sarek was to rescue her, I'd assumed that they were the moral equivalent of neighbors, yeah. I don't recall that the exact relationship is mentioned, though, yeah.

[bitterlawngnome]

I think they must have finally started writing a series at the last episode and worked backwards from there.

[conuly]

That's some timey-wimey shit.

[bitterlawngnome]

Captain, the plot has more twists than an episode of Drag Race! We're rerouting emergency power to the teleologic array!

[conuly]

I've also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I'm thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven't fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.

Roger Ebert, on ST: Nemesis

[bitterlawngnome]

I'm still waiting for food replicators that say "... brought to you by the fine folks at Mondelez3K"