104: Absolute Horror
Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast
English - April 15, 2021 00:04 - 1 hour - 50.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 20 ratingsSociety & Culture History ds9 enterprise society startrek tng voy culture deepspacenine ent history Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Suspiria and “Cold Fire”
Despite being teased in the series premiere, it took Star Trek: Voyager well over a year to actually introduce its female caretaker, a being with the power to send the ship home on a whim. And when the entity did appear, in the second-season episode “Cold Fire,” she turned out to have a surprising and distinctly sinister name: Suspiria. An apparent reference to Dario Aregnto’s 1977 film of the same name, in which a young ballet student stumbles into a coven of witches, it was a clear sign that the female caretaker would prove less benign than her male counterpart.
In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Lee Hutchison for a look at some of the links between Argento’s remarkable movie and this unusually creepy Voyager installment. We discuss episode writer Brannon Braga’s well-documented love of horror, the repurposing of Kes as the archetypal Scream Queen, and whether the horror genre’s conflicted feminism is a good or bad fit for the gender politics of Trek’s first female-led show.
Host
Duncan Barrett
Guest
Lee Hutchison
Production
Tony Black (Editor) Duncan Barrett (Producer) C Bryan Jones (Executive Producer) Matthew Rushing (Executive Producer)