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Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Peanut Hamper episode was the show's satirical take on Dances with Wolves
Star Trek: Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan revealed that Peanut Hamper's episode, A Mathematically Perfect Redemption, was made to poke fun of rosy colonial stories
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One of the most delightful elements of Star Trek: Lower Decks is its connections to other elements of Star Trek lore, no matter how obscure. This encyclopedic approach has led to the resurgence of Peanut Hamper, one of the most selfish robots in Trek history. In case you've forgotten, Peanut Hamper got her name from it being "mathematically perfect."
In our most recent episode of Popversations, an interview series where our video producer Ashley Victoria Robinson talks to the best and brightest creators across film, TV, and comics, Star Trek: Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan revealed the origins of the episode, A Mathematically Perfect Redemption. As the seventh episode of the third season of Lower Decks, it depicts Peanut Hamper getting stranded on a pre-Warp planet inhabited by bird people. If the plotline of the episode felt familiar, it's because McMahan and the Lower Decks team pulled from a variety of films.
McMahan said, "There are so many Star Trek stories that are colonial fantasy that haven't aged well. And there's a lot of movies, Avatar, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, this story, this modern myth has been told over and over again. And I've never liked it. I understand the narrative structure of it, but it's a thing that Star Trek has done a ton, and doing one of those with a faceless, unlikable robotic protagonist and bird people and following all the beats strictly, from every other 'colonizer/savior living with the Indigenous population movie or show', just following those beats with a ridiculous set-up and then having her not learn a valuable lesson by the end of it..."
The episode remains a bit controversial for fans, as it seems that its critique went over some folks' heads. But the episode's brutal skewing of the tropes associated with the "colonizer-going-Native" narrative is hilarious. One of its strengths comes from the fact that the main beats in this story are utterly ridiculous. The "kindly old leader of the Indigenous folk" stock character who inevitably gets mortally wounded by a foe is brought to life to show just how nonsensical the story beat is in the first place.
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