Thirty Days of Star Trek: Favorite Time Travel Episode

Day 14- Favorite Time Travel Episode

Welllllll, while Trials and Tribble-ations is one of my all time favorite DS9 episodes, and I’m as fond of City at the Edge of Forever as the next Trekker, I’m still going with a two parter here, slightly bending the rules. Because Past Tense (DS9), when it was broadcast, does one thing the other time travel episodes didn’t/don’t. (Except the ST IV about the whales, but that was done in a lighthearted manner; also, it’s a movie, not an episode.) Usually when our crew travels back in time and encounters various misdeeds of the past, it does so in a way the watching audience can pat themselves on the back, because it’s also their past, and they themselves are already more enlightened.

Past Tense, otoh, was set in the viewing audience’s future. Not a distant future, a very close future. And not a future with an extreme event like WWIII or the Eugenic Wars to deal with which the audience could dismiss as „well, it’s part of Trek canon, but it won’t happen to us, those crazy kids in the 60s and their imagination, amirite?“ No, the near future of Past Tense has so called „sanctuaries“ in the big US cities in which the homeless, the physically and mentally disabled, the poor and the illegals are just dumped into, kept out of sight, and utterly neglected by the state. And so the story’s J’Accuse does mean the viewing audience. There is no comfortable patting on the back. Trek often gets accused of preaching? Damm right it’s preaching! On every level. (Not so coincidentally, Sisko and Bashir get up locked in a „sanctuary“ while Dax, who, spots not with standing, is classified as a white woman, gets befriended by a millionaire. ) At the same time, the characterisations are three dimensional. (And, in retrospect, amazingly optimistic.) The overworked administration worker isn’t evil or spiteful, just overworked (and herself hung out to dry by her superiors). The hostage-taking criminal developes a grudging respect for our hero. The millionaire actually wants to help. (Incidentally, all the guest stars and our regulars deliver excellent performances.)

(The bitter irony: those 1990s writers could imagine a lot, but not the intentional cruelty – rather than cruelty out of lethargy/overwork/looking away – that would put children in cages and argue that clean underwear and toothpaste are not human rights.)
The sci fi gimmick used – Sisko unintentially causes the early demise of one of his historical heroes, whom he then has to embody so history can proceed as it should – also ensures there is no feel good happy ending. When Bashir asks Sisko how people could let things ever get this far, he means us, the viewers. The question is now more urgent than ever. Not just in the US.


( The Other Days )

Tudors and Medici

C.J. Sansom: Tombland: The latest adventure in the Matthew Shardlake mysteries. While the previous outing, Lamentation, would have made for a good conclusion, I had an inkling we might not have seen the last of Matthew and friends due to the job he takes at the very end of it. (Property lawyer for *Spoiler*.) And indeed it was not, though one of my major guesses, that if Sansom continues his series, the next book will feature the death of Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour subsequently losing his head in more than onse sense in a major way, turned out to be incorrect: the consequences of Seymour’s actions to *Spoiler* and Matthew Shardlake are dealt with in the opening chapter of Tombland. The rest of the novel takes place a few months later in the same year, and the big political event of the novel is the rebellion in Norfolk.

One of Sansom’s most estimable traits – which differentiates him from the zillion of other writers setting their novels in the era of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I or even during the years in between – is that he really brings home what ordinary citizens lived like and what the consequences of all those back-and-thro religious changes (one year’s heresy being next year’s orthodoxy, and vice versa) were, as well as the consequences of Henry’s costly (and ineffectual) wars. The last novel, Lamentation was a bit atypical in that because Shardlake’s main client there was Catherine Parr, the cast was more noble-heavy than usual. This novel, otoh, goes in the other direction: the nobility (including the royal part of same) only makes cameo appearances, while the brewing rebellion – due to years and years of Henrician mismanagment followed up by two years of, in this telling, more mismanagment by Edward Seymour – and the poverty and countless injustices it hails from is told via the our hero, who visits Norwich due to *Spoiler* sending him there to assist a distant relation accused of murder, ending up with the rebels.

(He still solves the case, though, which gets much more prominence than last novel’s murder got, and is skillfully interwoven with the political plot – Matthew Shardlake meets many of the later players via said case first.)

The various new characters in Norfolk are vividly drawn, and despite the end being obvious (even if you’ve never heard of this particular rebellion before, you’re probably aware the reign of Edward VI didn’t include reforms that wouldn’t happen in England until Cromwell, O, not T), I came to care a lot about them and dreaded what was bound to happen. But of course I remained majorly invested in our recurring cast. Lamentation ended with a big rift due to the events in that novel, which continues into to this one, but eventually ( a pleasing spoilery event takes place. )

Moreover, the new kid on the block, Nicholas, continues to be a good addition to the cast – he’s different from Barak as Shardlake’s assistant both due to his (gentry) background and his character, he gets character development and growth in this novel, and because of his background, his pov on the rebellion early on is really different from Matthew’s and Barak’s without Nicholas being vilified for this.

Another strength of these novels is that the humanity of our hero remains strong: he’s the only one who doesn’t lose sight of the murder victim and what she’s been through when most other characters are far more invested in the results her death had.

Nitpicks: at one point, Matthew is told an information which some pages later is told to him again and treated as news by our narrator, which made me wonder whether Sansom’s editor didn’t catch it or whether Matthew was uncharacteristically obtuse regarding what „he interfered with her“ means in the context it’s told.

Also, it’s a rule in this series that Matthew will always dislike the girls his assistants fall in love with first, even if he later changes his mind about them. Look, author, at some point, you’re starting to look coy about what we’re supposed to take from this tendency.

Best in-joke for the Tudor lore wise: very late in the novel, it’s mentioned in conversation that the Earl of Warwick’s younger son Robert has met a girl in Norfolk, „old Robsart’s daughter“, whom he wants to marry. This has nothing to do with anything in the novel and is just idle gossip of no interest to our hero, but his source adds the obligatory „marry young, regret later“ comment in case you’ve missed which future famous historical mystery has just been set up.

In conclusion: the series remains top quality, and I look forward to the next one.

On to events a century earlier:

Day 20 ~ What do you like best about The Medici?

Like The Borgias in their heyday (i.e. the first two seasons), it provides me with interesting characters and complex relationships which now and then even fit really well with their historical context, even if just as often fantasy rules, and does this in exceedingly beautiful Renaissance surroundings.

( The other days )