Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Space Odyssey (SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 - and some TNG)

 In Star Trek:Picard, many veterans of the TNG era returned, including Riker and Deanna Troi. The series is set decades later, and Riker and Troi are married and have a daughter Kendra, named after the daughter that Troi's mother had lost and never mentioned until the episode of TNG in which she did mention it. The Rikers lost a son instead of a daughter on the frontier planet Nepenthe.

The name of the planet, however, is the key to the Classical connection. Although the name Nepenthe appears to be merely conforming to the classic science fiction trope of naming planet with Classical Greco-Roman names, there are deeper connections. 

The name Nepenthe means 'no sorrow', a appropriate name for a planet where parents are trying to heal, but nepenthe is also the name of a drug in Homer's Odyssey when Telemachus, son of Odysseus, goes to Sparta to meet with Menelaus and Helen (who also have a daughter, Hermione) to seek information about his father. Menelaus and Helen welcome him. At the feast, however, Helen slips the drug nepenthe into Menelaus' cup to ease the burden of his memories. Menelaus, in modern terms, has PTSD from the Trojan war. The Greek word pharmaka refers to drugs both used for healing as well as more nefarious purposes. Both Helen and Deanna are skilled healers with a daughter (Hermione, Kendra) and a husband who was second in the command structure (Menelaus, Riker). Helen drugs her husband with nepenthe, while Deanna psychically removes her husband's emotional burden on the planet Nepenthe. In neither case is consent considered despite both women's history of enduring rape, in both the abduction and the violation sense; and it is hard to overlook that the science fictional woman is named Troi!

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