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gladdecease) wrote2022-03-27 01:51 am
gladdecease) wrote2022-03-27 01:51 am
Entry tags:
trekfiles: unruhe / requiem for methuselah
I think all of my trekfiles documentation to date has been on microblogging platforms, so to sum up the concept: my sister makes me watch an episode of The X-Files, and then I make her watch an episode of Star Trek. We’re approaching the eighty episode mark now, five or six years after starting this venture. (It went a lot faster when we were still living in the same house.) We plan on going through all Trek in air order, and while I know she does have plans for shows to bring in after we run out of X-Files I do not know what those shows are.
I like to think over the episodes after the fact, see if there’s any common feeling or coincidental similarities. And also just to reflect on my memory of watching these Star Trek episodes back in 2009/10 versus rewatching them now, because Dang, My Memory Of The Bad Stuff Is Patchy.
”Unruhe” was about a mentally unstable man (sigh, x-files; if I made a drinking game for trekfiles, mental illness would definitely be a shot) who had a traumatic childhood and projects those circumstances onto women he sees in his daily life - to the extent that he decides to ear-stab nearby men and brain-stab the women (through the lacrimal duct) to destroy intrusive thought gremlins. The supernatural element - a psychic imprint this man subconsciously leaves on photographs - does not really make sense when you think about it for even a second (if it’s foresight, what do the screaming faces mean? if it’s his thoughts, then why does the last set show his unexpected death?) but it gives the episode the vibes it needs to be an X-File instead of a Criminal Mind, or the nineties’ equivalent.
I was warned in advance about eye horror stuff, but it didn’t really bother me. Not much to interest me here either; I thought I’d lost track of time at one point because it felt like everything was Done. I hadn’t figured on a Scully kidnapping in the third act, though that would definitely be in an X-Files drinking game - along with Mulder helplessly shouting SCULLAY as he searches for her. A below average X-File as far as I’m concerned.
Meanwhile, “Requiem for Methuselah” was an episode I half-remembered pretty well. A tired old immortal holes himself up on a planet far from Earth, revisits some of his old artistic pseudonyms in his retirement and builds himself The Perfect Woman. Kirk et al arrive on the scene in need of rare medicine and inspire the robot woman to ~feeling. The immortal is initially cool with using Kirk as an emotional fluffer, but soon becomes jealous. The Perfect Woman loves Kirk romantically and the immortal as a mentor, and her poor robot brain can’t handle the strain of watching people she loves fight, so she dies. McCoy assures Spock he is more pitiful than Kirk, crying himself to sleep over this dead robot girl, because Spock can’t love at all; Spock makes Kirk forget her with never before (or since?) seen Vulcan powers.
I had forgotten the medicine subplot and the emotional fluffer element to the Kirk-Rayna-Flint dynamic, but the broad beats were clear in my head. Flint feels so much grosser to me on rewatch, even knowing that he’s treating her like an object because she is an object to him. (It’s almost fascinating, the way he made himself a Born Sexy Yesterday intelligent sex doll, taught her anything she showed interested in and refused to make a move on her until she developed authentic feeling but did nothing to encourage the development of authentic feeling himself AND insisted that as a robot she was impossible to love! Like… were you at Step 4: ??? of your five step plan here?)
I wish Rayna had actually gotten the chance to have her intellectually stimulating conversation with Spock; for all that she’s presented as highly intelligent (and someone designed that way because Flint wanted a spouse on his level) we only really see her as pretty, and curious about the strangers here, and good enough at billiards that she leans over Kirk’s back to teach him how to do it. (I almost wish she hadn’t been a What Is This Thing You Call Love-style Kirk LI, because if that had been intentional flirting it would have been delightful.)
I don’t remember enough about The Tempest to know if the vibes I was getting off this episode are intentional. I feel like they probably were not - when Star Trek goes Shakespeare, it generally tells you it’s doing so.
My sister liked Rayna, on account of having a hairstyle and outfit that didn’t make her cringe in sympathy for the poor actress wearing it. She figured out the “twists” around Flint pretty early on as well, though not she says from the title invoking Methuselah but just because she watches TV. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That’s the problem with showing OG genre TV to someone who’s seen all the cartoons that fans of those OG shows produced decades later, you’ve been exposed to all the tropes and their subversions before ever seeing the originals. (She’s apparently having this same problem with BtVS.)
I like to think over the episodes after the fact, see if there’s any common feeling or coincidental similarities. And also just to reflect on my memory of watching these Star Trek episodes back in 2009/10 versus rewatching them now, because Dang, My Memory Of The Bad Stuff Is Patchy.
”Unruhe” was about a mentally unstable man (sigh, x-files; if I made a drinking game for trekfiles, mental illness would definitely be a shot) who had a traumatic childhood and projects those circumstances onto women he sees in his daily life - to the extent that he decides to ear-stab nearby men and brain-stab the women (through the lacrimal duct) to destroy intrusive thought gremlins. The supernatural element - a psychic imprint this man subconsciously leaves on photographs - does not really make sense when you think about it for even a second (if it’s foresight, what do the screaming faces mean? if it’s his thoughts, then why does the last set show his unexpected death?) but it gives the episode the vibes it needs to be an X-File instead of a Criminal Mind, or the nineties’ equivalent.
I was warned in advance about eye horror stuff, but it didn’t really bother me. Not much to interest me here either; I thought I’d lost track of time at one point because it felt like everything was Done. I hadn’t figured on a Scully kidnapping in the third act, though that would definitely be in an X-Files drinking game - along with Mulder helplessly shouting SCULLAY as he searches for her. A below average X-File as far as I’m concerned.
Meanwhile, “Requiem for Methuselah” was an episode I half-remembered pretty well. A tired old immortal holes himself up on a planet far from Earth, revisits some of his old artistic pseudonyms in his retirement and builds himself The Perfect Woman. Kirk et al arrive on the scene in need of rare medicine and inspire the robot woman to ~feeling. The immortal is initially cool with using Kirk as an emotional fluffer, but soon becomes jealous. The Perfect Woman loves Kirk romantically and the immortal as a mentor, and her poor robot brain can’t handle the strain of watching people she loves fight, so she dies. McCoy assures Spock he is more pitiful than Kirk, crying himself to sleep over this dead robot girl, because Spock can’t love at all; Spock makes Kirk forget her with never before (or since?) seen Vulcan powers.
I had forgotten the medicine subplot and the emotional fluffer element to the Kirk-Rayna-Flint dynamic, but the broad beats were clear in my head. Flint feels so much grosser to me on rewatch, even knowing that he’s treating her like an object because she is an object to him. (It’s almost fascinating, the way he made himself a Born Sexy Yesterday intelligent sex doll, taught her anything she showed interested in and refused to make a move on her until she developed authentic feeling but did nothing to encourage the development of authentic feeling himself AND insisted that as a robot she was impossible to love! Like… were you at Step 4: ??? of your five step plan here?)
I wish Rayna had actually gotten the chance to have her intellectually stimulating conversation with Spock; for all that she’s presented as highly intelligent (and someone designed that way because Flint wanted a spouse on his level) we only really see her as pretty, and curious about the strangers here, and good enough at billiards that she leans over Kirk’s back to teach him how to do it. (I almost wish she hadn’t been a What Is This Thing You Call Love-style Kirk LI, because if that had been intentional flirting it would have been delightful.)
I don’t remember enough about The Tempest to know if the vibes I was getting off this episode are intentional. I feel like they probably were not - when Star Trek goes Shakespeare, it generally tells you it’s doing so.
My sister liked Rayna, on account of having a hairstyle and outfit that didn’t make her cringe in sympathy for the poor actress wearing it. She figured out the “twists” around Flint pretty early on as well, though not she says from the title invoking Methuselah but just because she watches TV. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That’s the problem with showing OG genre TV to someone who’s seen all the cartoons that fans of those OG shows produced decades later, you’ve been exposed to all the tropes and their subversions before ever seeing the originals. (She’s apparently having this same problem with BtVS.)
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I've run across that before with films which did ground breaking things at the time but now seem beyond ordinary.
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Perhaps the thing Spock does when he mindmelds with Kirk and says "Forget" is the literary bookend to when he mindmelds with McCoy and says, "Remember".
More prosaically, I think what he does to Kirk is the same thing Sybok did to make people his followers. He doesn't erase memories, he purges the emotions associated with them. Kirk did say just before, "I wish I could forget her."