Strange New Worlds: Once La'An a Time

I'm going to pause France stories again, and go back once more to collect an episode from season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the perplexing "Once La'An a Time."

The strange fairy tale setting that Dr. M'Benga once encountered, populated with doppelgangers of the Enterprise crew, has returned. But this time, it seems that La'An is the one who must learn something: a way to reconcile the disassociated feelings about herself that have been building deep inside. As she goes on a storybook adventure of self-discovery, some of the fairy tale characters cause havoc aboard Enterprise and with the rest of the crew.

In a season built mostly of one-off genre episodes, it's a curveball of its own that one of those genres would be "sequel." But in a season built on wild swings in tone, it kind of makes sense to revisit the wildest tone shift from season one of the show, "The Elysian Kingdom." 

Except... does it make sense? Not in my eyes. When M'Benga found himself in this storybook three seasons ago, it was very specifically about him -- pulled from his personal history with his daughter, and specifically crafted (both by the writers and within the four walls of the story) to teach him a valuable lesson he needed to learn. Take M'Benga out of the center of it all, and it doesn't work. This episode barely even tries to make it work, giving us a half-hearted exchange between M'Benga and La'An in which he just hand waves the whole premise away: it looks like La'An has something to learn too.

Except La'An has no real stakes here. She's not after something as M'Benga was in "The Elysian Kingdom." She doesn't even want to be there -- which is an attitude you can give to a protagonist... but then you'd better make sure the audience doesn't empathize with them too much. (Otherwise, why are any of us here?) It feels both accidental and incidental that La'An is changed at all by these experiences.

Instead, the episode feels more about the storybook characters. Will Prince Dashing confess his secret? Is Queen Neve an actual threat to the Enterprise? Will Sir Amand and Pollux actually pull off their con? It's difficult to care about the answers to any of these questions, when none of these characters feel like they were ever meant to exist beyond one episode released four years ago. It just feels like an excuse to let the actors cut loose and have a little fun -- yet it's unclear if they're actually having fun after a season that's already given everyone ample opportunity to break from their usual characters.

Well... maybe Anson Mount and Ethan Peck are. As ridiculous as it is that no one notices Pike's strange behavior, the two actors are funny as the alter egos of their regular characters. The jokey references about Carol Kane and The Princess Bride are worth a smile. (Except.... did they just write Pelia off the show with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line of dialogue?) The visual effects of a dragon attacking the Enterprise are admittedly awesome.

But those are the few pleasures I could find in this tedious slog. Every Star Trek series has to have its worst episode, and we surely must have just gotten that for Strange New Worlds. I give "Once La'An a Time" a D. For people who have already been feeling about this season the way I felt about this episode, I shudder to think how this installment felt to you.

From Orchards to Omaha

Our morning in Honfleur was the first morning of the entire trip where we didn't have to set an alarm. We had plans of course, but nothing at a specific time. No tickets purchased in advanced, no rental car to pick up. Plus, we were now far enough into the trip to have conquered jet lag and be more or less on local time.

As an added bonus, this hotel room was nice. (If you ever find yourself in Honfleur, consider staying at Le Rituel.) The room was spacious, had decent curtains and a shade on a switch to keep the lights out, and the most comfortable bed we'd find on the entire trip. (Maybe even more comfortable than our bed back home!) This was the perfect occasion to sleep in, right?

Wrong! Around 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, the fire alarm went off, another "trip misfortune." After taking a moment to investigate, then another moment to realize the alarm wasn't going to stop, we decided the responsible thing to do was evacuate. We got dressed, made sure we had the backpacks with our passports, and were about to reach for the door... when the alarm stopped. As you'd expect, we were back in that bed as quickly as possible, though sleep was not quick to come again.

When we checked out a few hours later, the apologetic hotel employee informed me (in French, but I was able to understand) that someone had left their shower on too hot for too long, and the steam had triggered the fire alarm. (Our room had no shower; instead it had a nice big tub with a spray nozzle on a long hose. I'm not sure if she was being literal or figurative, but I know she said "shower." When they teach you that word in junior high French, you never forget it: "douche.")

Anyway... the focus for the day was on something Normandy is famous for, cider! At least, that had been the expectation. Things took a surprising but welcome turn when we arrived at the first of a couple planned stops. Christian Drouin, it turns out, isn't a cider maker! Instead, they make calvados. Essentially, what whiskey is to beer, calvados is to cider; after going through the steps to produce an alcoholic cider, you then distill it into calvados.

A friendly employee took us through a guided tasting, teaching us just what calvados is and explaining the different gradings used for the spirit (most of them hilarious English abbreviations for the thoroughly French drink). Calvados is certainly not cider -- it's less sweet even than the driest cider you've ever tasted. But it's not quite whiskey either -- there are definitely subtle flavors and aromas of apples and other fruit that aren't common to the average whiskey.

Christian Drouin is large enough to distribute its calvados in parts of the United States, yet felt like a small family farm dedicated to one particular product. Our next stop, on the other hand, felt like "apple Disneyland." A very short trip down the road brought us to another distillery, Père Magloire. We were aware that a tour kicked off here once every hour, alternating between French and English. We bought tickets and waited the 10 or 15 minutes for the tour to begin.

When the time arrived, it was only my husband and I. Well, I thought -- I guess we better have some pretty insightful questions for the tour guide, since he'll be going to all this trouble just for the two of us. Nope! No tour guide. This experience was something akin to a family-friendly theme park ride. You leisurely made your way from room to room, each one a darkened theater with lighting effects, projections, and movie clips to explain the manufacture of their product. Here too: not cider, not even pommeau -- calvados. Without quite intending it, it felt like we'd found two very different experiences centered on a spirit we hadn't really known before. We even got to snap a picture with (a mannequin of) the man himself, Père Magloire. (A Colonel Sanders sort of figure to the French, it seems? Or at least, they wanted you to think so.)

A tasting followed at the end of the tour with a friendly young woman from Ukraine who spoke at least four languages -- Ukrainian, Russian, French, and English. She claimed not to be very good at English as she seamlessly explained different calvados "expressions" and pointed out half a dozen different tasting notes in each one. (Her facility with English, paired with her insistence on how bad she was at it, made me feel almost too embarrassed to want to attempt French for the rest of the trip. If this is "bad" at English, then neither English nor French has the words to describe how "bad" I am at French.)

The next leg of our drive brought us to the Omaha Beach, a site of the D-Day landings in Normandy during World War II. After lunch at a nearby cafe, we visited the museum near the shore. It featured displays of World War II artifacts, including weapons and vehicles, plus a half-hour film about the pivotal day in the war. It was the one time on the entire trip where answering "America" when asked "where are you visiting from?" didn't feel like an embarrassment. (Also, though not specifically planned, we were there on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.)

After the museum, we went down to the beach itself. Aside from a somewhat modest monument and art installation honoring D-Day, Omaha Beach is... well... a beach. A beautiful, but unassuming beach. That's perhaps part of the odd power of standing in the place -- it could be any place. Americans in particular don't have much concept of a war that happens in their own backyards; war is a thing that happens in "faraway places." Not so in France. World War II happened in every corner of the country -- including this random beach that happens to be a strategic landing point for a sea invasion.

We made a brief stop at a farm in the area, Ferme de la Sapinere, where we actually tasted a little cider rather than calvados, but soon had to move along to our stop for the evening. The town of Avranches was where our hotel was this night, for its closeness to our main event for the following day. The hotel manager recommended a local restaurant for dinner called L'Atmosphere, and while it wasn't bad, it wasn't great. Or maybe it was just that we decided to roll the dice on another famous bit of French cuisine for the appetizer. Foie gras? More like "full gross." Anyway, check off that experience.

And the next day, check off a much more pleasant one.... 

Stones Carved by Hands and Water

There's more to France than Paris, and we wanted to see it. So after four days in the capital city -- already a fun and satisfying vacation of its own -- we essentially began a second vacation by renting a car, a Ford Puma that would be our home away from home for several days, and leaving Paris behind.

The first adventure was just getting out of the city. It would have been a stressful obstacle course through traffic for me, but my husband actually enjoys driving in general (and in new places in particular), and so I didn't have to do any of the hard work. Soon enough, we'd left Paris behind and were working our way gradually northwest.

It would actually be days later in the trip that we'd realize our smartphone navigation was ignoring tolls (and thus, for France, any major highways between cities). For now, at least, that made for a quite novel trip through the French countryside, occasionally passing through a small town and not-so-occasionally passing through a roundabout. (A few roundabouts are nice. Hundreds get to be a bit draining.)

We stopped briefly near the commune of Les Andelys, where you can look down upon the area and see the medieval Château Gaillard, built in the late 1100s. We briefly considered a hike down to the castle itself, but opted to save our time for more things to come.

The first of those was a stop in the city of Rouen. We'd heard that the cathedral in Rouen was a real sight to see, and we were not disappointed. Outside, the building is so ornately detailed as to almost appear 3D-printed, and the three different towers are each built in a different architectural style.

Inside, the cavernous space is equally beautiful, with striking details both in glass and stone. I must say, I personally found this cathedral to be more impressive than the famous Notre-Dame de Paris.

It would have been well worth the stop all by itself. But we also had a fantastic lunch at a local cafe, Le Central. (Which had another great French whisky; and unlike the Bellevoye from the night before, my online searching has suggested that Rozelieures may be more available in the United States.) We even fit in some shopping, where I found a nice fall jacket so perfectly suited to the day that I wore it out door.

I could imagine staying in Rouen for the rest of the day, but we had somewhere to be: specifically, Étretat. This small coastal town is known for its breathtaking cliffs, France's own version of England's famous White Cliffs of Dover. And they did not disappoint. From the beach, you can see two of three arch features where the sea comes crashing in.

And it only takes a short hike of maybe 15 minutes to reach the top of one of those cliffs. From there, you get not only a beautiful panorama of the sea, a golf course (if that's your thing), and a stunning look back down on the village itself... 

... you also see a third arch feature a bit further beyond.

As afternoon rolled into evening, we made our way to our stop for the night, the small village of Honfleur. It has a picturesque harbor, the Vieux Bassin, lined with bars and restaurants. It was the first time I really was pushed to used my French on the trip. In Paris, it seemed like everyone spoke English. If a person said something to you in French, and you paused for even a fraction of a second before replying, they'd just switch over and start talking to you in English. But it was "French only" at the hotel, and mostly French at dinner (where our server's only English was to tell us that her English was "catastrophic"; with a word like that, I had my doubts).

Anyway, said dinner was a tasty seafood dinner (what else?), followed by a relaxing drink overlooking the water as the sun set on another great day.

 

The City of Louvre

If you ask the average person to name something famous in Paris? Well, they're going to say the Eiffel Tower, of course. But if this were a Family Feud question, you could expect to see the Louvre up on the big answer board. We weren't going to miss it.

Of course, the Louvre itself -- the palace that once served as the primary residence for French kings -- is an impressive building expanded over centuries. Its far more recent renovation, the glass pyramids designed in the 1980s by I. M. Pei, are even more iconic. It all makes for some nice photos as you make your way to the line to enter (at the sign for your assigned time).

What you can find in the Louvre could be its own "Family Feud style" question -- except that you'd probably only get one or two answers from those "100 people surveyed": the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. Assuming you knew both of those famous pieces were at the Louvre, you'd probably expect that it's primarily an art museum. That's not quite the case.

The Louvre certainly does have its share of paintings, sculptures, and sketches -- and given its sheer size, it may well have more of those than any museum near you. But the vast majority of the museum's collection is archaeological finds and object d'art. On the whole, the place feels much more akin to the British Museum than I was expecting. Yes, the furnished palace chamber rooms were ostentatious (like Versailles the day before)...

And yes, the extensive Egyptian collection was impressive...

But overall, we thought we'd be seeing more "art" at the Louvre. Of course, we caught the two "headliners":

...but even our efforts to dig a bit deeper than that were thwarted. We were aware that the painting behind a popular internet meme, Self-Portrait in the Guise of a Mocker by Joseph Ducreux (seen here), was in the Louvre collection. We even looked up its specific room number online... only to learn that that area (and half the floor around it) was closed for remodeling. So no pictures of us next to the painting, copying the strange pose.

While we'd deliberately gone to the Louvre on a day it's open late, we didn't wind up taking advantage of those extra hours. Instead, we opted for a leisurely dinner. We'd been having a lot of French food, and decided to mix it up with an Italian restaurant. (It felt like we'd chosen a good one when a vacationing family from Italy sat down at the table next to us.) And for an after dinner drink? We skipped the more expected French beverages in favor of French whiskey, Bellevoye, that turned out to be quite delicious. (Here's hoping we can find a bottle in the States some day.)

We ended our night a bit early, but that worked well for our plans the next day: we were renting a car to leave Paris and explore other parts of the country.

A Crappy Start to a Nice Day

"Last time on... My France Trip...", we'd visited Versailles -- and had actually gotten through a day without a misfortune. So naturally, misfortune visited us right away the next day. While seated at the tables in front of this morning's breakfast boulangerie, a pigeon on the edge of the building high above pooped directly on my husband's head. I have no picture. (I know, you're broken up about that.) He kept his cool as I dug out the wet wipes he'd smartly packed in our backpack, then cleaned him up. Crisis managed. Still, ew.

It was smooth sailing from there, though, and began with one of the best experiences of the entire trip: a visit to the Catacombs of Paris. All that stone for Notre-Dame and all those other fancy buildings in and around Paris? It came from somewhere, specifically from beneath the city itself. The extensive quarrying left a maze of tunnels beneath the city. And in the late 1700s, those tunnels were put to a new use. With cemeteries overflowing all over Paris, the decision was made to relocate the remains to a vast ossuary beneath the city. By the time the relocation was completed, the remains of over six million people had been placed there.

A self-guided tour of the Catacombs (with audio narration provided) takes you first through empty tunnels -- themselves an impressive sight. Then you enter the ossuary, where the seemingly endless piles of bones are a stark reminder that all are equal in death. Indeed, while many famous people are known to be resting in the Catacombs somewhere (because they were in the cemeteries that were emptied out), it's now impossible to know whether any given skull you look at might be Robespierre... or someone whose story is lost to history.

 

We had some time before the next activity we'd bought tickets for, so we decided on a leisurely walk toward Jardin du Luxembourg. We didn't run across anything worth stopping for until we came to a smaller park to the south of the garden, with a fountain I'd later learn is called the "four parts of the world fountain." The sculptures themselves suggest that the four parts might be fish, naked people, turtles, and horses -- specifically, turtles spitting water in horses' faces. Fun.

The Luxembourg Garden is a large public park right next to the senate building in Paris. The government building is closed to the public, but the garden is open to all. And we were so struck by the beautiful scenery that we decided it would make a perfect spot for another "picnic lunch" -- we grabbed fresh bread, meats, cheese, and wine from a nearby store, then brought them back to the park to enjoy the view.

Before we got back on the metro, we took a few minutes to catch a glimpse of the nearby Panthéon, a monument and mausoleum dating back over 200 years. We didn't have time to venture inside, though; we had 2:00 tickets to visit the Louvre Museum.

And as you could imagine, talking about the Louvre is worth a post of its own... which I'll pick up tomorrow.

Strange New Worlds: Orders of Magnitude

I'm going to pause the France blogs today, in part because the season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has arrived, and I'm three episodes behind. Let's make that two, at least, with a look at "Orders of Magnitude."

Pike, Una, Uhura, Chapel, and A'Sha form a landing party to seek out a distress signal in a deep cave of a planet, falling out of contact with Enterprise. In their absence, Admiral Simon Reeger arrives and commandeers the ship for an urgent mission to pursue a mysteriously cloaked enemy that has just carried out a vicious attack on a Federation colony. With key command personnel not aboard, Reeger makes the highest-ranking officer present his first officer: the visiting James T. Kirk. Soon, the two are at odds with each other about the lengths worth going to to catch their prey. Meanwhile, on the planet, an ambush by Andorian smugglers puts the landing party in danger -- and it may be up to Uhura to save them all.

So much for season four of Strange New Worlds being "oops, all genre episodes." Even "Off-Hour," the former trophy holder for this season's "most normal" episode, was a visual homage to 24. "Orders of Magnitude" is straight-down-the-middle Star Trek... so much so, in fact, that some fans have a nickname for this kind of episode: "Badmiral." The Star Trek franchise has seen plenty of episodes about some misguided admiral (or commissioner, or otherwise ranking officer) coming aboard and messing everything up with their malicious/incompetent/just-plain-different mission.

This particular incarnation of the Badmiral conceit is lifting a lot of plot points from the movie Crimson Tide -- but by no means to the degree that it becomes anything like an homage or send-up of that film. (I'd hardly call Crimson Tide a movie that everyone knows super well anyway. It's not even in the same league as "Star Trek does Muppets" or "Star Trek does Jurassic Park.") And the thing is... even I, who have basically loved and defended this wild Strange New Worlds season of tonal potpourri, have to admit that was pretty clearly the best episode so far. I can certainly point out that classic Trek did widely-loved episodes with gangsters and Tribbles, Next Generation turned the crew into children, Deep Space Nine played baseball for a whole episode, and more. But at the end of the day, if Strange New Worlds is going to be at its best when it's not taking crazy genre swings? Maybe it shouldn't take so many crazy genre swings.

There are a lot of reasons this episode works so well, but the performance of guest star Joe Morton as the Badmiral is a a big one. He exudes authority and mixes it up with the cast very well. Every confrontation with Paul Wesley as Kirk crackles; it feels like Reeger could do something wild at any moment. (And so it really feels earned at the end, when he really does lose it.)

This episode is a big step toward positioning characters where they're "supposed to be" at the end of this prequel. I didn't necessary need an explanation for why Dr. M'Benga would wind up essentially demoted to serve under McCoy by the time of the original series, but this episode gives a good one that's strongly rooted in character. This series has established M'Benga as a person who acknowledges the horrible things he's done, and who isn't above grand gestures to atone for them. Taking the fall for Kirk is exactly the sort of thing the character we've come to know would do.

In the original series, so many episodes turn on Kirk disagreeing with the orders of some leader above him that it feels only natural for a prequel series to give us the chronologically first time that happened. And the heavy implication here (though technically it's never confirmed) is that this is a Romulan ship out on a "Balance of Terror" style bombing run. (Maybe it's even the same ship, under the same captain?!) I feel like that particular detail might play better if Strange New Worlds hadn't already done an episode tying into that classic, but it still plays. Indeed, the tie-in actually shores up the arguments of both Kirk and Admiral Reeger. Twice now, we've seen that a "Balance of Terror" situation with anyone other than Kirk in the captain's chair doesn't end well. But also, Reeger is absolutely right that by not dealing with this problem today, it will happen again in the future.

Uhura also gets a promotion -- but more importantly, a key story for her character. Star Trek has offered up the lesson that "you can make no mistakes and still lose" a few times before, but I feel like Uhura's emotional investment in the cadet she's been mentoring was a new take on that. Having the baddies she's up against be Andorian, calling to mind her mentor, was an inspired detail. And getting to see her save the day was simply delightful.

Throw in some great visual effects (as always) and a soundtrack that seemed deliberately evocative of James Horner's work on Star Trek II, and... well, like I said, it was clearly the best episode of the season so far. I give "Orders of Magnitude" an A-.

Versailles

The next day of our France trip was mostly spent not in Paris, but in nearby Versailles, to see the famous palace there. It's an hour subway ride each way, and the château and its grounds are huge -- so a visit is easily going to take up most of your day.

It's well worth it, though. In the context of the modern super-rich, this shrine to opulence is a reminder that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" -- a place simultaneously impressive, ridiculous, beautiful, and gaudy. The chapel alone is larger than Sainte-Chapelle (which we'd seen back in Paris the day before), with elaborately detailed paintings covering every inch of its high ceilings.

There's an official Versailles app with audio guide, and we downloaded it to hear the descriptions of the dozens of rooms we wandered through. Though each room had a different theme, and was used historically for something specific -- guard's quarters, guest spaces, dining, separate bedrooms for each member of the royal family -- there was an unintended bit of comedy in the narrations. It seems that almost every room in the palace was also occasionally used for gaming. It became a running joke for us for the rest of the trip, that any space we entered was "also sometimes used for games." It conjured a new kind of board gaming "challenge" in my mind -- not to play each game in your collection at least once, or to play 10 games 10 times each in a year, but simply to play some board game in every room of your house. I'm sure us commoners could pull that off if we really set our minds to it (though the bathrooms might be awkward). But if your house is the Palace of Versailles? Good luck.

We paused for lunch at a restaurant in the palace before continuing the tour outside in the palace gardens. There's a whole separate admission fee to see them, and when we first stepped onto the plaza behind the palace, we wondered if we'd been conned. But soon, we discovered that if your time at Versailles is limited, you'd be much better off spending it in the gardens rather than the building.

At first, you see only a wide graveled area...

But there is a staircase up ahead. There must be something down there...

And yes, that's quite beautiful. This area, called the Orangerie (for the many boxed trees planted there) is certainly striking. And yet, after the so-far-over-the-top-we-can't-even-see-the-top of the palace interior, this can't really be worth charging separate admission, can it?

But wait... there's another staircase on the far side of the plaza. What's over there? We almost didn't go over to see. And when we did, and initially saw only a path down along a stone wall leading to a break in the trees on the right, we almost didn't go down. It just didn't look like much!

Boy, would we have missed out. That's where the real gardens -- implausibly huge -- begin. There are a series of hedge mazes, each one leading to a unique "bosquet" in the center. A wide open space with a waterfall feature...

A huge colonnade...

 A fountain show...

 

And more. Plus, a grand park -- literally named "Grand Trianon" with its own wild basin and artwork. There were hundreds of people milling about, canoeing, you name it. A few were driving golf carts, and only after we'd seen a few did we clock that they weren't gardeners, they were tourists who'd found a spot to rent the carts in order to easily reach as much of the area as possible. (We wished we'd done that.)

We'd come that close to missing out on the best part of a visit to the Palace of Versailles. (So finally! A day where something didn't go a little wrong!) And now I can report back to make sure you don't miss out if you ever have the chance to go.

Once we made it back into the city, we wandered for a bit in Le Marais, the Paris district that includes the city's "gay neighborhood." It was definitely an active, open place full of restaurants and bars. We enjoyed one of the former. We skipped the latter after seeing dozens of people crowding the streets outside for a smoke (and a break from the pounding music?). We're too old for that scene.

In all, a real highlight of a day for the trip.