Star Trek SNW Reviews H

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“Under The Cloak Of War” Episode Eight, Season Two. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is in at least one way perhaps the best anti-war episode of all ST. It is also a little difficult to follow closely to figure out if there is any significant REVELATION that addresses the question- is Federation Ambassador Dak’Rah something more sinister than the Federation knows? I’m going to focus on that part first. Partly because it is the more difficult part and I have a habit of often doing the difficult stuff first, and partly because it’s implied here and there that he is not the great man of diplomacy people think he is.

You should read the episode “summary” I link to above, but it is REALLY long and many readers might want something shorter, so here is a summary of the stuff about Dak’Rah.

One battle of the Klingon War became even uglier at one point when the Klingon commander (on the planet focused on) ordered that anyone without a Klingon uniform should be killed. That commander was Dak'Rah BEFORE his apparent transformation, but it’s not clear to the audience and unknown to a lot of people in StarFleet. The story is that the future diplomat fought in hand-to-hand combat with 2 or 3 of his subordinates to stop the slaughter of civilians. We learn that M’Benga was actually the one who fought the Klingon subordinates while Dak'Rah escaped. Although it’s still not totally clear to me, I believe this fact is the main revelation to StarFleet- not that the original order was given by Dak’Rah.

The former Klingon commander, apparently around the time that the war ends, goes through some kind of transformation politically/philosophically and defects to the Federation where he becomes a popular and inspirational ambassador. The timeline is not super clear because he was probably a Federation Ambassador no more than 2-4 years before the events in this episode, but I guess he got a lot done. There’s some suggestion that there’s something shady about how much distance he has (or ostensibly has) put between his past during the war and his new work with the Federation- that he has moved on and forgiven himself too much and unreasonably expects people like M’Benga to also forgive him and treat him as a friend. I initially was kind of inclined to think that M’Benga and Chappel and Ortegas were being too hard on Dak’Rah, that he had made a legitimate and total transformation, and maybe it wasn’t on an unrealistic timeline and he had apparently done a lot of really good work for the Federation. 

If someone believes that a relatively or very rapid total transformation like that is just totally unrealistic, think about the true story movie “The Best of Enemies” in which, over a small number of months, a very active, immersed Klan leader becomes anti-Klan and pro-integration, and then goes to work for the AFL-CIO (America’s labor movement and at the very least a sort of anti-racist force).

Anti-War Stuff

The other part of this is not obscured at all. It is a very anti-war episode up there with Deep Space Nine episodes “… Nor The Battle To The Strong” and “The Siege Of AR-558.” In general there’s a lot about war from the perspective of a StarFleet field hospital. You get the impression that among the hospital staff there’s a lot of casualties and/or a lot of turn-over in general (possibly from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder if not from actual weapons). Probably the main thing worth mentioning is that, although it’s not explained how this works (it’s long before StarFleet in the last three seasons of Discovery where they have individual transporters you carry with you like a communicator) apparently the wounded arrive at the hospital by transporter and that means that once in a while or often there’s a repetitive computer-voiced announcement of “incoming transport-incoming transport” which basically means, at least usually, that a lot of wounded are going to arrive. There’s something about the repetitive nature and the electronic voice of the announcement that caused me some kind of anxiety (although I’ve never been in a war I have some imagination of how upsetting it must be and since my mom’s death I have become a bit hyper-emotional). It kind of reminds me of how on the 1970s TV show MASH the sound of approaching helicopters would alert the staff that wounded would be there in seconds. But it’s even more powerful.