It’s been a while since the Miyazaki incident. Time has passed but even with a bit of a break through the last episode, no one has really moved on. The students are rejecting therapy to confront their trauma over the event and now, Tarima – the person who saved them by melting peoples brains – is back on campus, now in Starfleet to take her away from the War College path to focus on something a little more chilled out than potentially how to melt peoples brains more efficiently.
Writers: Gaia Violo & Jane Maggs
Director: Andi Armaganian
It’s been a while since the Miyazaki incident. Time has passed but even with a bit of a break through the last episode, no one has really moved on. The students are rejecting therapy to confront their trauma over the event and now, Tarima – the person who saved them by melting peoples brains – is back on campus, now in Starfleet to take her away from the War College path to focus on something a little more chilled out than potentially how to melt peoples brains more efficiently.
At the end of her tether, Ake brings in an old hand to force action in a typically unconventional way by inviting Sylvia Tilly, the original instructor of the new era, to the Academy to lead a class in something completely different. Theatre. Arriving with more confidence than she had on board Discovery, Tilly’s found her place and not taking any prisoners when it comes to play acting through one of her favourite productions to force them into confronting everything they’ve bottled up. The teacher healing cliché’ is in full force here. But it’s hardly the most unconventional tactic used in the school halls so far and seems oddly perfect for an oddball instructor hired by an oddball chancellor.
The chosen play is Our Town, Thorton Wilders minimalist, fourth wall breaking story written in the 1930’s that focuses on the mundane realities of life and how easy it is to miss, particularly when shrouded in grief. It’s a timeless story thats still being told, currently my Michael Sheen aty the Welsh National Theatre, and is a perfect framing for the cadets who are suffering in silence thanks to a typical mix of naivety and bluster. It’s also a perfect blend of their sombre melancholy coping mechanisms while Tilly has become even more aggressively positive now she’s ditched her captains ambitions and found her place in teaching the next generation.
Conceptually it’s a “yeah, we’ve seen this” style of narrative. But it plays out quite nicely around Tarima who’s just refusing to accept anything that happened and burying herself underneath shame and fear over what she’s done. Seeing her act out, from pushing people away to getting drunk and pushing them in a chaotic direction was a nice turnaround from her introduction as a perfect balance. It’s also nice to have everyone else rally around as the sane ones from Caleb being thje adult in the room, even when he’s being the moody shunned lover, to Genesis stepping up and becoming the best friend Tarima needs.
Thrown in with obvious parallels and direct acts from Our Town, it works surprisingly well to give a catharsis to the group who all have to confront their pain. And where they don’t, Tilly loses patience and forces their hands a bit. Well, a lot.
Since the Miyazaki, the only cadet that still has a spark of joy has been Sam. She was the one who chose Our Town, and she was the one who knew what the story meant and what it would achieve by supporting Tilly. She was also the one that was hiding the most. She was hurt on the Miyazaki, her matrix ‘glitching’ and destabilising. The Doctor tried to help. She went to a ‘spa’ as she called it to get holographic engineers to give her a once over. But now she’s at the point of no return, and ass Tilly pushes her theatre class, Sam’s whisked back to her home world to seek help from the people who made her.
And that’s where the B Plot gives us a larger story that picks up a thread easily forgotten from the Doctors past…
Since the first episode of the series, the Doctor has been a little standoffish around Sam. Not long after they first met, the Doctor pushed against the idea of being a mentor to the newly active hologram and never really felt comfortable for the admiration she had for him. Here we learn why. With no way to fix Sam, he and Ake escort her back to her homeworld hoping that, since she was designed on Kasq, maybe they can repair her damaged matrix.
Turns out they can’t. Which is actually a pretty cool idea; The Doctor started his life with an imprint of youth and fumbled through his limited program to evolve naturally. Sam didn’t get any of that. She was programmed to be a naive 17 year old and learn from there, but while she has the traits and spirit of her designed age – none of her emotions have context. Without that context within her programming, she’s in system shutdown mode. The solution is to factory reset her and let her experience life since birth so she can grown and learn from scratch and have a fully-functional system that understands and learns.
That’s where the Doctor comes in. He doesn’t want to do it. Not at first, and certainly not out of spite. His keeping people at arms length was something he’d learned, a shield he put up after a horrible tragedy in his formative years. That tragedy was an idealistic attempt to create a family on Voyagers holodeck, a simple fantasy life to help himself gain context to humanity. After witnessing that it was a picture perfect and flawless world, B’elanna Torres put some reality into the mix, replacing the Stepford wife and perfect children with more realistic traits and emotional swings. The whole experiment ended when one of those children died.
To B’Elanna and to us, it was an episode of the week holodeck moment. To the Doctor it was an early formative memory of how painful life can be and now, centuries on, he’s seen everyone he knew and loved live and die countless times. Mirroring Tarima, who’s burying everything about herself to stay balanced, the Doctors buried his own need for personal connections and love and just as she had to face her own fear of opening back up to the world, so does the Doctor who saves Sam by giving her a father.
Thanks to a convenient time dilation effect that means they experience 17 years on Kasq in just two weeks of normal time, Sam’s reset to a baby with the Doctor raising her from birth.; giving her a life of experience and understanding so she can process complex emotions she was never prepared for. And it’s all done rather nicely. Robert Picardo shows that he can still make you shed a tear years after his finest hours on Voyager, and the end sequence of watching snippets of Sam’s new life mixed in with Tarima and the rest of the cadets – in a more metaphorical way – begin a new era in themselves as their play begins to resonate with them.
Life of the Stars is one of those episodes that really does feel like it comes from the teen drama playbook in terms of it’s narrative, especially revolving around Tarima’s problems. But it also adds a lot to the context of the show while playing on how easy and common it is to bottle things up until it reaches breaking point. It also served to expand Tarima’s scope in the series massively as, until now, she’s been a romance for Caleb where as here it feels like she’s part of the team. A reluctant part, at first, but for all the intrigue and options over the character and her abilities, she feels a lot more rounded with scenes to build relationships with the other cadets; and it set up a great dynamic with Genesis that could be fun to explore.
It’s also nice to see some cohesion and harmony within everyone. When Tarima joined the cast towards the end of the episode, there was a nice warmth there. And still everything Sam seems to bring it’s own joy and it was very fitting for her that, even knowing she was dying, her focus was trying to help everyone else. As much as it was fascinating to see the others grow past their traume, and lay seeds of who they’ll eventually become, Sam returning as a whole new person opens up some fascinating doors. Is Sam still Sam now she’s lived a full life with a loving father?
It’s one of those hours of television that feels a little cliche’d in places, weird in others, but was a necessary step for the theme of the show and letting these people learn to live and love through the worst of times as, if they intend to keep wearing that uniform, life is only going to get harder from here…
Tilly being in the episode was a nice bonus, especially seeing her with more confidence and little interactions with fellow displaced time traveller Reno, but the best part of her entry was how her chaotic self didn’t overwhelm or steal the spotlight. She became a perfect catalyst to push and nudge the cadets out of their misery and start to find some peace in moving forward.
EPISODE DISCUSSION & SPOILERS
Highlights
- It was nice to hear Chiwetel Ejiofor's voice again as he returned as the voice of Kasq to greet Ake and the Doctor.
- Despite not leaning into warrior culture, it's kind of funny that Jay-Den is still besotted with Klingon Opera.
- It's been a curiousity how Sam exists as a photonic being independently. For the first time we see her emitter which looks like a funky Light Bee from Red Dwarf.
All Connected...
Using Voyager’s Real Life as a basis for the Doctors own trauma was an interesting choice. The show also mentioned Gotanna, a planet that much like Kasq had it’s own accelerated time. In that episode, Blink of an Eye, the Doctor volunteers to be the away team. His first trip lasts a few minutes in real time, but three years pass on the planet. Due to the difference in how time passes, Gotanna live for centuries with Voyager in their orbit and eventually – in the course of a day on Voyager’s time – advance enough to send their own away mission…
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