Star Trek: Short Treks -- Season 2 Episode 4 (Ephraim and Dot)

Star Trek has gone the animation route before.  I watched a few of the episodes and didn’t care much for it, mostly because of the bad animation.  That’s why I was a little nervous with Short Trek’s two animated series.  I’m glad to see that each episode has some decent animation.

With Ephraim and Dot, we have two main characters.  Ephraim is a space tardigrade looking for a place to lay her eggs.  She finds and selects the USS Enterprise.  Dot is an automated cleaning bot on the Enterprise who doesn’t take kindly to Ephraim’s presence.  The two engage in a sort of cat-and-mouse game where Ephraim enters the ship and Dot chases her off.

Despite the nine-minute run time, it would appear to take place over several years.  It’s a little confusing, since it’s one continuous shot.  For context, we see scenes from Star Trek starting with Space Seen and going all the way to the destruction of the Enterprise in the movies.

There’s no dialogue except from some lifted from the various episodes.  Dot and Ephraim don’t communicate with each other.  Ephraim just protects her eggs and Dot does nothing except protect the ship.  There’s an antagonistic theme common to a lot of old-school cartoons.

Stylistically, it almost looks like something we might get before a Pixar film.  I almost wonder if, like The Trouble with Edward, this wasn’t meant to be a little silly.  It’s kind of difficult to take literally.

IMDb page

Star Trek: Short Treks -- Season 2 Episode 1 (Q&A)

This may be the easiest of the Short Treks to review.  Spock gets stuck in a turbolift with Number One.  The episode actually starts with Ensign Spock beaming on to the Enterprise to start his new assignment.  Number One informs him that the best way to make it is to ask a lot of questions, to the point of being annoying.

On their way to the bridge, the Turbolift stops.  The manual override doesn’t work and Engineering’s no help.  So, Spock uses the time to ask all manner of questions of his new first officer.  We find out a lot of things, like it not being a good idea to ask Captain Pike about horses.  Number One also prefers the next-to-current operating system rather than the latest update.  (I didn’t even know starships had numbered operating systems like that, but I guess it makes sense.)

It seems to be a running joke among the All Access series that Number One’s name is actually Number One.  It’s implied that her name is Una, but it’s not clear if that’s a first or last name.  Way back in The Cage, Pike referred to his first officer as such, which is apparently a tradition among some navies.

I honestly wonder if these were recycled from rejected plot ideas.  I could see this having been worked into an episode of Discovery.  I don’t think it would have worked, even as a b story.  This works to get the idea on screens and does seem to fit canon pretty well.  We see Spock smile and Number One advise him to play it straight.  Don’t let your freak flag fly if you want command.

I have always wondered why the Discovery and Enterprise turbolifts have been shown as a group of tracks inside the ship.  I always imagined them as tubes just wide enough to accommodate a single carriage.  Maybe I was wrong.  Maybe this just looks cooler.  I don’t know.  I’m sure an explanation will come along eventually.

IMDb page

 

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

The first two Terminator movies were a bit of a headache because of the bootstrap paradoxes.  If The Terminator hadn’t been sent back to kill Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese never would have been sent back to protect her only to become John Connor’s father.  Thus, the correct way to get rid of John Connor before he was born was to not try to kill him before he was born.

When this movie opens, Sarah is in a mental ward and John is in foster care.  He’s grown up thinking that she’s a nut job, which is a justifiable point of view.  She’s telling everyone that a machine from the future came back to kill her before her son was born.  This hasn’t stopped the apocalypse, which she needs to help John prepare for.  This would look like maybe the absolute worst Cassandra complex ever.  Except that it’s true.

Skynet has sent back an even better Terminator, the T-1000, to terminate John as a child.  Also returning from the future is a reprogrammed T-800.  This time, the original Terminator is going to protect John rather than kill him.  The same dynamic exists with a superior hunter and an inferior protector, but the same imperative exists: John Connor must live to defeat the machines.

The movie is done well enough that you can enjoy it without asking too many questions.  I originally wondered why the T-1000 didn’t, say, overload a power plant and destroy the whole city.  That would have been too easy.  Plus, the T-1000 has to be sure.  This means actually finding John Connor.  Still, you’d think that a computer system designed for defense could make a machine that could do better, or maybe even send back several terminators to work in concert.

In this case, I understand why some ideas weren’t used.  Sure, Skynet could have killed Sarah Connor while she was pregnant or killed John Connor as a baby, but this is something audiences wouldn’t react well to.  Sending something back in time is probably difficult, so sending an army back probably isn’t a viable option.  There isn’t a really great, obvious idea that I can think of.

We do get two more bootstrap paradoxes.  First, it seems likely that the arrival of the T-1000 either allowed Sarah Connor to get out of the hospital, or at least got her out early.  This allowed her to further train John Connor, who doesn’t appear to be battle ready just yet.  (Had she stayed in the hospital, John may not have done as well against the machines.)  We also find out that the arrival of the T-800 in the original movie gave Cyberdyne the idea for the terminators’ hardware, thus allowing for the creation of Skynet.  So, where did Skynet come from?

The movie could have been a simple action movie about two machines fighting over the future of the planet.  Instead, we get a commentary on the destructive nature of humanity.  Throughout all of the Terminator movies, the downfall of human civilization is inevitable.  We tend to fight one another.  This is what leads to the creation of Skynet in the first place.

IMDb page