Some Blundering about Star Trek: Short Treks 2×04 “Ephraim and Dot”

First, a leftover observation from “Ask Not”:

The episode ends with Pike dropping Cadet Sidhu off in Engineering. As in, he walks her to the door and shows her the engine room, and just leaves. He doesn’t hand her off to anyone. He doesn’t even point and say, “That guy over there? He’s your new chief. Go ask him for your first assignment.” Is that a normal thing to do? In fact, it kinda looks like the place he drops her off is like some kind of balcony overlooking engineering without any obvious way to get down from there to the rest of the ridiculously huge engine room. Is this another test?

Anyway, “Ephraim and Dot”. I was a little unsure about doing these in this order because Wikipedia and Memory Alpha disagree on the order of the episodes. But putting it here makes a certain pattern emerge: “Q&A” was pretty much just a straight vignette giving a B-plot from a hypothetical Star Trek series set on Pike’s Enterprise. So was “Ask Not”. Between them was “The Trouble With Edward”, a short little dive into utter lunacy that is just fucking nuts and I love it to pieces, and I’m sure the fanboys will all get angry because they want Star Trek to be SRS BSNS and be more obsessive about continuity.

If they’re working to a pattern then, it might make sense that if episodes 1 and 3 are played-straight Traditional Star Trek b-plots, then episode 4 would, like episode 2, be something wacky.

“Ephraim and Dot” is Star Trek doing Tom and Jerry. You should leave now if you can’t handle that.

The short begins in the style of a Black and White, 16 millimeter, ’50s educational short film about the life cycle of the interstellar tardigrade. I have not explained much about interstellar tardigrades in Trek, but Discovery season 1 established that man-sized tardigrades have an innate ability to navigate magic mushroom space purely of their own volition. That’s why Hugh got himself tardigraded up. In the real world, tardigrades are cute little near-microscopic critters that became trendy in pop science for a while because they’re cute and they’re weird and they have shown impressive resistance to conditions such as heat, cold, radiation, high pressures, low pressures, and space.

One of the large interstellar variety, named Ephraim (Nothing in the show actually tells us which one is Ephraim and which one is Dot, and the traditional style of these cartoons would imply that the tardigrade’s name should come second, as it’s the prey, like Jerry or Tweety or the Roadrunner. But there’s an established “DOT-7” model of robot in Discovery and real-world tardigrades were discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze, so draw your own conclusions), is looking for a safe place to lay her eggs when the Enterprise bumps into her asteroid.

Ephraim pokes around it a bit, giving us a chance to see Kirk and McCoy meeting Khan through a window. Dot, a maintenance robot, identifies Ephraim as an intruder and pops outside to taze her. But Dot falls through the service hatch, causing a tumble and a chase to ensue.

Ephraim eventually finds herself in the warp core, where it lays its eggs. Dot catches up and drags the tardigrade away, almost jettisoning it, but Ephraim gives the robot the slip and buries it in a pile of tribbles. Dot finally manages to eject Ephraim while a shirtless Sulu threatens Kirk with an epee outside.

Using the mycelial network, Ephraim chases the Enterprise past the giant glowing green hand of Apollo, past the doomsday machine, through the Tholian web, and around Space Lincoln. It finally catches up to a refitted Enterprise as it battles the Reliant, and enters the ship through a hole blasted by Kruge’s Bird of Prey. Dot roughs the tardigrade up pretty good, but Ephraim goes full-on Mama Water Bear and is about to clobber Dot with a wrench but a pile of debris falls toward the clutch of eggs.

Dot tazes the distracted Ephraim again and forces it out an airlock. But when the robot returns to putting out fires from the battle, it notices one of the eggs. It locates the clutch just as the computer announces the self-destruct sequence.

Ephraim rushes back toward the Enterprise, but is cold-cocked by the explosion, waking up just in time to see the flaming wreck do its final death-dive into the atmosphere of the Genesis planet. A badly damaged Dot drifts by, and Ephraim prepares to vent her rage on it, but Dot opens its chest panel to reveal a pile of happy tardigrade hatchlings. The nature film narrator muses on what adventures might await them as Ephraim clutches Dot to her chest in a (water) bear hug and the happy family magic mushrooms away.

This is adorable. It feels very Chuck Jones, despite the fact that it doesn’t really fit the usual pattern – those cartoons always focused on the pursuer getting battered as fate favored the plucky prey animal. You never really worry about Jerry the way you worry about Ephraim, because you know that Tom’s the one who’s about to get an anvil on his head. One thing that they do particularly well here is that you feel entirely sympathetic to both of them. Dot is just doing its job; Ephraim is an intruder. And Dot isn’t even being mean about it or anything. It even says, “Live long and prosper,” when it kicks Ephraim out the airlock the first time. Ephraim isn’t taunting Dot or trying to cause trouble. It’s not clear how much Dot understands about what it’s encountering on the Enterprise, but, like, it starts out trying to dig a hole in the side of the ship, and that’s not really something they can just let slide.

I feel like there’s probably a better match for the archetype they’re homaging here than Tom and Jerry, but I can’t recall a specific one (I feel like I have literally seen an old Warner cartoon where the pursuer finally succeeds in evicting the prey, then discovers that aw shucks it was only guarding its babies, and has to go out and rescue its vanquished foe).

It’s real cute. It’s also a bit of an egg hunt in the non-literal sense as well, as a big chunk of the episode is excuses to play archive footage. This sort of thing often bothers me, but here, I’m cool with it, since it’s all down to little background details rather than intruding on the story. One oddity of the structure, though, is that it clearly is meant to take place over the course of years (this is set up early, as the nature film narrator mentions that tardigrade eggs take a long time to hatch), but it is not edited to make it feel like a montage – rather, the action feels continuous. Maybe that points to something else, since it’s established that tardigrades have an unusual relationship with time.

The animation is… Well, it’s not great, to be honest, but it’s passable. It’s a cel-shaded computer animation style that reminds me a lot of the past few generations of Transformers. Elements don’t quite meld correctly. Dot, for instance, looks very CGI, in a way that makes you imagine it’s supposed to look like it was added in post – just as a DOT-7 would look in live-action Discovery. The human characters look sort of flat and slightly uncanny. They remind me of the flash-animated reconstructions that the BBC has done for some of the missing Doctor Who episodes, where it’s an uncomfortable mix of the minimalism of old Filmation stuff and the hyper-realism of Ralph Bakshi’s rotoscoped stuff. The Enterprise itself has a kind of comic book look, and if you told me that the short was actually meant to look like a comic book overall, I’d buy it. Ephraim, on the other hand, has elements of Disney-cute mixed with a Warner toon’s immateriality. It moves very fluidly and stretches and snaps and springs like a Looney Tune. And, of course, there’s the fact that it is incredibly obviously modeled on Stitch.

Other visual elements are all over the place. The M-113 salt monster which appears as part of the nature film’s opening sequence looks great and a bit Scooby-Doo. The planet-eater looks awful. Lincoln doesn’t look like Lincoln at all, but possibly he does look like Lee Bergere.

Most interesting for fans, of course, is the TOS-era Enterprise. It’s done in the Discovery style, with the double pylons, long shuttle bay, and lots of red detailing in hallways that have windows everywhere. This was to be expected, of course, though according to some of the people that worked on the Constitution-class redesign for Discovery, one of their design principles was make changes that could conceivably have been “removed” in later refits – leaving open the possibility that by Kirk’s time, the Enterprise would’ve been “upgraded” to its classic look.

The Enterprise as it appears in the Star Trek II and Star Trek III scenes is pretty much unmodified from the movie-era design, meaning that we might well assume that Discovery’s “visual reboot” only covers the TOS era – that’s pretty consistent with my general feeling that while the visual style of Discovery does not fit in with TOS, it does actually look very plausible as “A few years before the movie era”. One particular oddity of the short, though: in those last scenes, the Enterprise’s hull is clearly marked NCC-1701-A. Which is not just wrong, but it undermines the plot of the episode: the whole point is that it’s the same ship. It’s weird if this is a mistake, and weirder if it’s on purpose. The Enterprise also shows far less damage from the battle with Reliant and far more from the battle with Kruge (Actually, the damage in that sequence looks more than anything like the Enterprise-A’s battle with Chang from Star Trek VI), and there’s one shot where the ventral hull markings are rotated about 45 degrees, which is weird. Again, getting the Enterprise’s hull markings right seems so straightforward it’s hard to imagine no one noticing they’d gotten it wrong, but what could it possibly mean if it were on purpose?

In the course of this article, I’ve deliberately avoided gendered pronouns for Ephraim and Dot, because this is real weird. Neither one of them actively asserts a gender (Though the narrator does use “her” for Ephraim once). Whether tardigrades have multiple sexes actually varies by species among real-world ones, but you’d think that egg-laying should code Ephraim as female, while being the pursuer in a Chuck Jones-style cartoon should code Dot as male. But to be honest, insofar as either character seems to be deliberately gender-coded, I feel like the writers imagined Ephraim as male and Dot as female. Especially given that they gave them names that aren’t especially gender-neutral. Or that the baby tardigrades literally gestate in a compartment in Dot’s abdomen. But I certainly wouldn’t call anyone wrong who interpreted them as any other combination of genders you like.

As with the other minisodes, I can’t really see how this one might be prefacing events from the next season of Discovery, but it’d be hella cool if it did. I’m giving this one three and a half needlessly sci-fi gimp hoods out of four.

 

I shall return after Christmas to address “The Girl Who Made the Stars”.