WHY WE LIKE IT: Peak Trek!
WHY WE DON'T: That's twice they've benched Pike, now.
REVIEW: "To the stars, through hardship." Una reinterprets Starfleet Academy's one-time motto in this episode, not to mean "it's gonna be hard to get to the stars", but that the stars are a crucible and we might come out on the other side of our hardships. And this is an episode that's ABOUT recontextualization. Una's court-martial, facing dismissal and 20 years in a penal colony for having joined Starfleet illegally (like Bashir would, decades from now) while being an genetically-engineered Illyrian, ends on a closing argument that cleverly recontextualizes testimony to take advantage of loophole grounded in Star Trek tradition - Una fits the same criteria as Saru, Neelix, Kes, Seven of Nine, Tasha Yar and others, unique individuals who shouldn't, by rights, be in Starfleet crews. That's recontextualization too.
Indeed, so are the underlying metaphors evident to today's audience. Una is essentially being tried for "being herself", and without necessarily pointing to any ONE element of identity politics, includes elements of them all, whether it's LGBTQ+ people in the military, segregation, prejudice based on cultural traditions (read: faith), "passing", hiding one's true self, body modification, hate crimes, I.C.E., it hits on issues affecting many "racialized" people. The episode must have been written and shot before Florida passed a law allowing doctors to deny care, and yet, there's 10-year-old Una in the flashbacks almost dying because her parents can't go to a doctor. The Law is a recontextualizer. It puts things in perspective. It's updated based on new understanding and new realities, and things that were once illegal, no longer are. The win here is on a technicality, and though like most legal dramas, the episode plays fast and loose with procedure (and I do wish there were more material about WHY these laws exist in the Trek universe - DS9 did a better job of that, like I feel anytime someone says Una is a great officer, they should be reminded that yeah, she has an unfair advantage - but that WOULD admittedly detract from the point they want to - need to! - make), Ad Astra Per Aspera nevertheless feels honest about civil rights law and how it's an incremental, uphill battle. Perhaps lines WILL be drawn between different kinds of genetically-engineered people and the Illyrians will get a better deal, but I don't think any of this contradicts the events of Dr. Bashir, I Presume. Well done.
Trek has a mixed track record with legal episodes, but when they're good (The Measure of a Man, The Drumhead), they're VERY good. I think the key ingredient is civil rights (which you don't find in Court-Martial or A Matter of Perspective which are, strictly speaking, DETECTIVE stories). And while this one is definitely very good indeed, it is more than a little weird that they fob off the big heroic lawyering moments to a guest artist. Good news, Yetide Badaki as Neera Ketoul is powerful, but in Trek, series regulars normally represent themselves or their crew mates (Captain Batel is somehow working at the JAG office suddenly, and she's rather terrible at it, so why not Pike?). They make a point of not even having him testify (for very good reasons as he KNEW so his career also hangs in the balance), so his big moment is recruiting Ketoul. And it's Ketoul who gets the big speeches, the realizations, Batel sitting entranced, the mean Vulcan prosecutor smiling at her flawless logic, and a round of applause at the end. While it's happening, you're under her spell too, but analyzing it as a piece of Trek, it IS weird, isn't it?
It's almost a two-hander though, because Una eventually gets to testify and make her own speeches about why she joined "the enemy", so to speak, the very entity enforcing the laws that her family and community suffered under. We learn a lot about Illyrians and what happens when a world joins the Federation and has to change its laws to conform to the whole. There's a dark side there. I wish we'd learned more about La'an in the process, as her genetic heritage is mentioned, but no one seems to think it disqualifies her for service. She still gets a good subplot, guilt-ridden over the idea that her logs might have leaked Una's secret. We also get Ortegas' humor, M'Benga's expertise with Vulcans, Spock being very irritated indeed, and Uhura's integrity. Small roles, but appreciated. And at the end, a silent moment with just us and Una, and complete earning of Alexander Courage's Star Trek fanfare.
SECONDARY WATCHING: In TOS' Court-Martial, you'll find all the iconography used here, including the gavel-bell, the truth sensor and most boldly, perhaps, the big honking dress uniform badges everyone wears. Ketoul's use of an actual book in her closing statement is no doubt an homage to Cogley's faith in books in that original series episode. Along with Ketoul, he stands as the non-recurring hero advocate with the biggest role, though again, the episode is a mystery, so he's not Kirk's savior in the end.
LESSON: Some Latin.
REWATCHABILITY - High: Though I have questions born of the format, this is basically what Trek was invented for. It could have gone awry, but a great guest star sells it.
Comments
One of my problems with it how heavy-handed it all was. It made "right side black/left side white" seem subtle. The advocate argued the moral issues to the tribunal, finished with a dramatic closing line . . . and then just kept going, reaching another dramatic closing line, only to repeat the process multiples times. The crew gathering to applaud her as she left seemed similarly over-the-top to me.
I think my biggest problem was that the writers were trapped in a continuity corner. We know from DS9 that this prohibition persisted into that show's time period. Unless the SNW writers were allowed to depart from that, all the advocate's speechifying about why the law was unjust couldn't end in the tribunal declaring it to be the Federation equivalent of unconstitutional. That made most of the argument pointless, and constrained the writers to come up with the strange asylum argument that -- at best -- might keep Una out of prison, but wouldn't (at least how it was explained) have kept her as a serving officer who remains in ongoing violation of a Starfleet rule that remains in force and who had lied to Starfleet for years about it.
Maybe I'm being too hard on the continuity issues, but I think that's the price the show-runners pay when they choose to do a prequel to an established property. ST:SNW in particular has based on lot of its characters and storylines on ST continuity. If they want to just ignore continuity and present what they consider a fun or interesting story, fine; go ahead and get today's version of Bob Haney to cut loose. That doesn't seem to be the intent of the show, though.
As I said, it's interesting to read another perspective, and I still think that SNW is the best Trek to come along in years. I look forward to next week's episode.
See also those podcasts I did with Mike Lacroix on Starfleet's military procedures and see how they don't really make sense either.