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I am only 3 episodes into Pluribus and it is possible that these questions bouncing around my skull have been addressed in some manner later in the series. If that’s the case, then I am looking forward to Vince Gilligan’s take on the matter but if not, I am deeply curious how it all shakes out.

Apple TV

In Pluribus a global event has melded nearly every human into a single consciousness sharing all of their thoughts, skills, experiences, and emotions as one. The protagonist of the show, Carol, along with roughly a dozen others, is for some reason immune and is decidedly not pleased with the new love and harmony of a world at peace with itself. Carol’s reasons are intense and understandable, but are not the subject of my ponderings.

Each individual of the new human collective presents as a serene, happy individual with a unified goal of making Carol happy in whatever way possible, all while espousing the utter contentment of their new states of existence, hoping that they can eventually bring Carol into this magnificent joining.

So, peace on Earth and perfect brotherhood for all of humanity, right?

I hate to break it to people, but humanity can be a right nasty bastard.

Pluribus’ thought experiment creates a unified human mind that would also include all the horrible experiences people around the globe have suffered; everyone is both the victim and victimizer. What exactly is that like? To be both a sexual assault victim and your assailant? To be both war criminal and war crime victim? What does it mean now that all of humanity has the direct emotional and psychological experiences of every serial killer on the planet?

I wonder if the series will get anywhere near these questions. It sort of reminds me of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and his quest to fully understand humans, but how can you fully understand if you aren’t engaging with the terrible darkness humans are so easily capable of?

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Antagonists and Villains are tricky characters to craft. Make them too simple in their motivations and action and they become cartoonish targets, forgettable and easily swept aside by the protagonists. Develop them too well and they become so sympathetic as to displace the actual protagonists as read and audience identification grows. A careful balance between evil goals and representing their full humanity is an ideal that is so rarely achieved.
But achieved it was with Andor’s Syril Karn and Dedra Meero, agents of Star Wars’ dread Galactic Empire, lethal opponents to the protagonists, but fully realized and capable human beings trapped by circumstance and their environments.

Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) begins the series as midgrade police officer working for corporate

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

security, desperate to prove himself and with a fierce passion for law and order. Syril gives no indication that he has ever given any thought to the politics of the empire. Syril has a much more grounded view of life: there are rules and they are the only thing that keeps the chaos at bay. Rules must be enforced and rule breakers must be dragged into the light and subjected to the legal system for correction. His rigid view of the law and justice sets him on a course for tragedy when he cannot accept his superior’s plan to sweep the murder of two fellow corporate cops under the rug. Refusing to participate in a cover-up that would allow a lawbreaker, a murderer, to escape justice, Syril ignites a series of events that lead to riots, the Empire displacing the corporate security, and his collision with Dedra Meero.

Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), a sector chief for the feared Imperial Security Bureau, ISB, has an

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

equally rigid but more political worldview than Syril. Taken from her criminal parent and raised in an Imperial ‘KinderBloc,’ Dedra is a true believer in the Empire. For her, it is not law that brings order to the galaxy but power and the Empire’s power must be unquestioned or there will be chaos. Laws and rules are, for Dedra, permeable, but only insofar as rule breaking advances and protects the Empire’s power to provide stability, peace, and security. Frustrated by a bureaucracy which keeps sector heads and Imperial departments quarreling and warring for resources, Dedra violates rules and protocols pursuing a growing rebellion that others either cannot or will not see. Cold, competent, ruthless, and intelligent, Dedra Meero represents the Empire’s best bet for killing the Rebel Alliance before it even forms beyond the odd terrorist attack or heist.

By the second season this pair have formed both a romantic and professional union. We aren’t shown the courtship, but with the series time jumps we are presented with the couple living together in the imperial capital. When Dedra puts Syril’s overbearing mother in her place, establishing the firm boundaries required to protect her partner, it is clear that Dedra truly cares for Syril. Later Dedra pulls Syril into an intelligence operation that when he learns its true scope and purpose rattles his steadfast resolve, providing their relationship’s tragic conclusion.
Syril isn’t an evil man, he’s a man with solid understandable belief in law and order, but who by temperament doesn’t look at the hand that wields the law for its own self-interested purposes. Dedra, unbothered by both genocide and torture, is evil. She engages in torture and terrorism, putting aside what qualms remain within her withered conscience to advance a system whose true nature is revealed with the annihilation of the Ghor. Her desire for order at any price finds that even genocide is not too high a price to pay. This devotion to power brings the eventual conflict which shatters Dedra’s relationship with Syril and his rigid moral code.
Andor presents the audience with Imperials that are true characters, that are people with complex inner lives and for whom the Empire is not a setting but an environment that shaped them and that they shape. This is writing at its best.

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In the interim between the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969 and its resurrection as a television series with Star Trek: The Next Generation, creator and idolized leader Gene Roddenberry got high on his own supply of mythmaking and adoration.

After Trek vanished from the active airwaves, becoming the fare of syndication with daily reruns of episodes on local stations, the idealized version of the series and its message took hold in the growing and devoted fan base. The idea that Trek showed a future free of the human failings that so troubled our society then and continue to today, particularly bigotry, instead accepting everyone and celebrating their differences. People had been made better over the centuries, despite Kirk having to admonish officers to leave their bigotry in their quarters because there’s no room for it on the bridge, and McCoy’s continual treatment of Spock and his unending comments about the first officer’s heritage would earn him a perpetual hall pass to H.R. in any current corporation. When Roddenberry, after being booted from the film franchise, got the chance to make a TV series again, it was one that reflected what people praised about Trek while ignoring how the original series had actually been written. Every character would love and accept every other character, making drama among the crew something very difficult to write. This newfound “we love everyone” ethos was particularly strong in the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troi.

Paramont/CBS Home Video

Troi (Marina Sirtis) acted as the ship’s counselor and adviser, using her racial abilities to know the hidden emotional states of her patients and the people that the ship encountered on its adventures. She was presented as a warm character, accepting and understanding of everyone with a kind heart and word for the people around her and deeply troubled by their pains.

I find the construction quite improbable.

The truth about people is that we all wear masks nearly all the time. People rarely reveal just how much their inner thoughts, emotions, and drives are not reflected in their surface expressions and actions. Now, this would make someone like Troi a very useful agent in ferreting out the truth of a matter, a useful writing and plot device, but think about it from her point of view. She knows just how often everyone around her tells their little “white” lies, just how often men fake interest in a woman’s conversation when their minds are driven by more base desires, just how often people hold each other in contempt while presenting smiles and politeness. I can think of no better recipe for creating a hardened cynic, someone who knows that people are far nastier and crueler than they reveal. How much we are all just animals restrained by social conventions.

And that is a much more interesting character than a Pollyannaish woman wailing about joy and pain.

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Fans watching this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where pilot Erica Ortegas is

Credit: Paramount Pictures

marooned on a planetoid with an enemy of the Federation, can be forgiven if they think that the plot was lifted from the 1985 film Enemy Mine. Of course, fans with a more extensive knowledge of televised SF programming might think that film lifted its plot from the final episode of Galactica 80: The Return of Starbuck. This ignores that the 85 film was an adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 Hugo winning novella of the same name.

If we go beyond the science-fiction genre, we get to what might be the Ur-text of the modern incarnation of this plot, the 1968 feature film, Hell in the Pacific.

Warriors from opposing sides stranded and forced to work together to survive, eventually overcoming their prejudices towards each other, is a powerful metaphor for life in general and it is not surprising that it feels like it has been adapted and readapted as many times as the plot of The Seven Samurai.

Episode 9 of this season, Terrarium, sees Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), after taking a shuttle craft into a gravitational anomaly, stranded on the moon of a gas giant only to discover that a Gorn pilot has also crashed here. Ortegas, a survivor of a brutal Gorn assault, has to grow beyond her personal terrors and emotional trauma to join forces with the alien pilot if they are both to survive until Enterprise can locate and rescue them.

Terrarium echoes the original series episode The Galileo Seven as the ship, tasked with delivering vaccines to a plague-stricken colony, faces a ticking clock that will force Pike to abandon the search for their missing officer. It is a nice bit of lore in the episode that the Enterprise is scheduled to rendezvous with the starship Constellation and its captain, Decker. Ortegas’ solution to alerting her crewmates as to the location of her crash also feels borrowed from that original series episode.

While the elements copied over from the original series are detracting from this episode, I still very much enjoyed it. Unlike Hell in the Pacific, The Return of Starbuck, or Enemy Mine, Ortegas’ history and emotional trauma makes this a more personal story and therefore one of greater growth than the other explorations of this concept. That does not diminish the other interpretations; each has their own charm and message about seeing past the surface of another and are worthy of enjoyment, even the Galactica 80 episode.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.