Erik Owomoyela

Author Archive: Erik Owomoyela

The one that walked away from drama

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds earned itself a lot of goodwill by presenting a show that passably resembles Star Trek after what felt like the aggressive shock therapy of Star Trek: Discovery and Picard. I’m especially gratified that the show came most of the way back to the concept-driven episodic format that used to define the franchise, but has practically vanished in the serialized era of modern binge TV.

Really, it’s such a rarity that I can’t help feeling like the writers don’t quite know how to do it anymore.

“Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” adds another layer of throwback into the show, being a pretty straightforward adaptation of Ursula K. le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

On a technical level, it’s a clever adaptation. The Enterprise stumbles into the drama when they supposedly thwart the kidnapping of a young child, only to discover too late that the child is actually being sacrificed to a life of perpetual torment and the kidnappers were conspiring with the boy’s father in order to save him. The boy befriends the Enterprise crew, and to add even more personal drama, the leader of the idyllic civilization that intends to sacrifice the kid also happens to be an old paramour of Captain Pike. They even do a decent job of selling the idea that the happiness of an entire civilization could rest on the perpetual torture of an innocent child, an idea that le Guin never tried to explain in the original.

It’s a solid foundation for what could have been one of Star Trek’s most memorable episodes in decades. But then it blinks. The episode hides the truth of what’s happening from both the Enterprise crew and the viewer until it’s too late to do anything about it.

What’s particularly frustrating is just how far out of its way the episode goes to avoid revealing what’s truly at stake. This doesn’t just strain the plot logic—we’re told that everyone acknowledges the terrible price the child will have to pay, and it’s even a source of some civil unrest, and yet nobody tells the Enterprise crew about it—but it undermines the episode’s dramatic arc. It seems designed so that the crew can comfortably take both sides of the dilemma—first unwittingly enabling the torture of the child, and then condemning it once it’s conveniently too late for them to stop it.

It’s so easy to imagine the plot going another way. For instance, the boy’s father could easily have told Pike everything after being brought aboard the Enterprise and requested asylum on behalf of his son. Pike would then have had an actual decision to make—save the child and doom the planet, or the reverse.

It’s especially easy because, there’s another time when Star Trek did just that.

“Justice,” in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, featured a seemingly utopian society that is upheld by a draconian set of randomly enforced laws. After Wesley Crusher gets the death penalty for trampling some flowers, Captain Picard has to decide whether to break the planet’s customs or to sacrifice his best friend’s son.

It’s not a particularly good episode. Strange New Worlds does a much better job of realizing the impossible choice at the heart of le Guin’s original story. But TNG at least forced Picard to actually make the choice, while SNW goes out of its way to prevent its cast from really grappling with it.

Even stranger is how deeply the Enterprise crew are made unintentionally complicit in the child’s fate. Uhura, for instance, helps to track down the child after his last-minute kidnapping, is praised for her quick thinking, and then disappears from the episode before we learn that she actually helped deliver him to a fate worse than death.

Only Pike is even given the chance to react to the truth of what they’ve been a part of. He’s also the only character who’s given any kind of agency: Knowing that he’s going to be horribly injured ten years in the future, he is told that the planet’s advanced technology might be able to heal him. That almost feels like a perfect example of how the show’s writers are more focused on building continuity with a bigger story arc than finding drama in the moment.

Classic Star Trek has a reputation for being preachy, which it deserves. It’s also not above having its characters moralize to less powerful or technologically advanced peoples who’ll bear the burden of following through on their pronouncements. But it’s disappointing to see the show go so far out of its way to absolve the characters of responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

November 7, 2022 Works Read more >

Star Trek but everyone’s INT is 3

Picard takes a moment to remind us how good TNG was.

Toward the end of “Nepenthe,” Rios confides in Dr. Jurati that he thinks Raffi might have betrayed them to the Romulans. Given literally everything we’ve seen from Jurati in the episode so far, I assumed this was a elaborate ploy to guilt her into coming clean, because he’d noticed how obviously shifty she’d been acting throughout the episode.

Turns out, no. He was being totally serious and didn’t suspect Jurati at all. Which, while I found it literally unbelievable and frustrating to watch, is probably what I should have expected, since most of the major plot twists in Star Trek: Picard rely on everyone involved being kind of dumb.

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March 6, 2020 Storytelling Read more >

“Stardust City Rag” flies off the rails at like Warp 11

Towards the end of “Stardust City Rag,” Seven of Nine asks to borrow a couple phasers. She then picks out a pair of phaser rifles that look comically large when you hold them one-handed, which she then proceeds to do as she blasts her way through that scene they put in the trailers.

There are several problems with this. Picard neither owns nor commands the ship they’re on, and doesn’t have any business giving away its phasers. Seven’s plan is to use the phasers to go murder somebody, so she’s making Picard complicit in her plan while actively deceiving him about it. And Picard seems completely oblivious to this, despite it being blindingly obvious.

But the silliest problem is that Seven definitely doesn’t need two phasers. Not only that, but each phaser she takes is about the size of her arm, when Star Trek has repeatedly shown—including in this episode—that weapons a fraction of that size already have more firepower than she would need. But in a sense, this fits perfectly—because if “Stardust City Rag” has any defining characteristic, “too much” probably sums it up.

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February 22, 2020 Works Read more >

Three Nacelles (technically): The Condorcet Criterion

Diagramming out spaceships has been an on-and-off hobby of mine for at least 20 years now, though I don’t have a lot to show for it.

This design was inspired by a sketch that Alex Jaeger made for a ship that was supposed to appear for about five seconds during the space battle in Star Trek: First Contact. Called “USS Criterion,” the design came to my attention thanks to this video from Trekyards.

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June 23, 2019 Design Read more >

Plot Twist

It takes a special kind of writing to make a development that’s been literally years in the making feel like it came out of nowhere.

At its best, Game of Thrones’ most shocking plot developments are surprising because of how completely they betray the characters’ expectations, even though they feel tragically inevitable in retrospect. By making the audience empathize with the characters, the show makes the audience share their preoccupations and assumptions about what’s happening next, and thus share their shock when it all goes horribly wrong.

It’s this approach that made the show such an effective adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s books—and why the show’s last and biggest twist feels like such a misfire.

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May 14, 2019 Storytelling Read more >

Star Trek: Discovery needs to slow down and breathe

I’ve come to the conclusion that Star Trek: Discovery’s main problem is that it’s in too much of a hurry to actually deal with any of the ideas it brings up.

This article makes a pretty compelling argument that Discovery’s most interesting element is the way it challenges Star Trek’s idealism. But It also seems to work from the premise that suggesting maybe the Federation isn’t that great amounts to a valuable piece of commentary in itself, without sparing any attention to how effectively the concept is presented.

That’s maybe because Discovery doesn’t present the concept very effectively at all. Because it’s in too much of a hurry.

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February 3, 2018 Storytelling, Thoughts Read more >

This year’s debates are going to be terrible

Because we can’t even agree on what makes a good debate anymore.

The NBC News Commander-In-Chief Forum was a good idea on paper. Two of the biggest problems with modern political debates are the way that they cram too many issues into too little time, so that there isn’t enough room to examine any of them in detail, and the way moderators like to tailor their questions for each of the individual candidates instead of just setting the topic of discussion and letting the debaters challenge each other. Having an extended, one-on-one interview with each candidate should have been an ideal solution.

In practice, the forum somehow made both problems worse. And the reaction to it is a pretty good example of why we can’t have nice things.

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September 8, 2016 Journalism, Politics, Thoughts Read more >

Dynasty envy

Monarchy is a completely nonsensical form of government. Making someone the leader of your country because one of their immediate relatives was leader of your country is blatant nepotism, and history is full of examples where it produced rulers who had no business being in charge of anything.

I mention this because apparently Queen Elizabeth has been Queen Elizabeth for a really long time, which serves as a news peg for Vox’s Dylan Matthews to make the argument that monarchy is actually great.

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September 9, 2015 Government, Thoughts Read more >

Nation-State Socialism

I tend to be skeptical of American socialists. Partly because I think that socialism doesn’t actually have a useful definition within American political discourse, because supporters and critics both treat it as a nebulous concept that stands for whatever they want it to stand for.

The other problem is that socialism hasn’t been a major distinct force in American politics since the 1930s, when FDR absorbed a lot of its ideas to make the New Deal. Which means the socialists who do understand what they’re talking about are working from an old playbook that doesn’t always hold together.

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July 31, 2015 Government, Works Read more >

If Kirk was a Republican

There’s a certain element of Star Trek that really appeals to conservatives. Usually it manifests in a weird fetishization of the show’s military aspects, like the non-canon but ubiquitous Starfleet Marines, but fans who are too respectable to associate with the fandoms can try arguing that the whole show had a conservative message.

I assumed that was the direction Ted Cruz would go when the New York Times asked him if he preferred Captain Kirk or Captain Picard. Instead,  he actually had some fairly thoughtful reasoning:

Let me do a little psychoanalysis. If you look at ‘‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’’ it basically split James T. Kirk into two people. Picard was Kirk’s rational side, and William Riker was his passionate side. I prefer a complete captain. To be effective, you need both heart and mind.

He’s still wrong, but not as wrong as I’d expected.

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July 24, 2015 Thoughts, Read more >