#ikea intergalactic

[lemissingmask]

[ID: Sketch of two IKEA Intergalactic cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other. End ID]

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To be continued...

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[curator-on-ao3]

Star Trek Captains at IKEA Intergalactic

(as coined by the incredibly talented @procrastinatorproject in her IKEA Intergalactic fic)

Janeway gets lost in IKEA for seven hours.

Sisko lies, he cheats, he bribes IKEA employees to cover the shifts of other IKEA employees. And he can live with it.

Kirk believes the IKEA needs to learn to govern itself.

Picard thinks his IKEA is the best of the best of IKEAs.

(Clancy tells Picard to get the fuck out of her IKEA.)

Archer protests IKEA’s “no pets allowed” policy.

Georgiou doesn’t get to spend enough time at IKEA, but she’s really great while she’s there.

Lorca shops at Amazon.

Pike buys extra IKEA Swedish meatballs to take home to his friends.

Burnham goes through a bunch of harrowing events, but the IKEA furniture is finally loaded into her car, at which point she says, “Let’s fly,” and drives out of the parking lot.

Freeman gets Mariner a kids’ meal, which Mariner pretends to dislike but actually loves even more than “the good mac and cheese” from the replicator because, hello, it’s IKEA Intergalactic and it’s awesome.

[mappinglasirena]

In episode 1.10, Rios, Raffi and Narek (later joined by Elnor, with sword) had a scene in a conference/ meeting / ready room. I understand the set is the captain’s quarters, redressed, but do we know if this room has an official name, and where it’s located? Thanks and love your work, as always! 🧐😀

Ah yes. This one 🙈

Unfortunately, that room remains a mystery.

In the Set Me Up behind the scenes tour, production designer Todd Cherniawsky refers to it as Rios’s “ready room”, but I don’t know how official that is. It certainly doesn’t look like much of a ready room, which is why I’ve mostly stuck with calling it the conference room for now.

Since, as you said, it’s clearly filmed in the captain's quarters, things like the view out of the door or the angles of the walls and ceilings don't really hold any clues as to this room’s in-universe location.

The most obvious point of reference might be the slatted light at one side of the room.

I have often seen people refer to this as a half-shuttered window, which would mean that this wall, at least, must be part of Sirena’s outer hull. Also, it would have to be in a part of the ship that’s facing the sun after the crash on Coppelius (i.e. facing forward or possibly aft, given the angle of the light, possible paths of the Ghulion sun and shadows cast by the surrounding mountains).

However! If you look closely at the two times throughout the season that we see the light/window in Rios's quarters, this conclusion becomes less clear.

First: In ep. 3, "The End is the Beginning", Rios has Sirena in orbit around Earth, making repairs and waiting for Picard to beam up.

We don't get an establishing shot for this scene, so we don't know at precisely what angle the ship is to the sun. It's possible the light we can see flooding the room here is Sol’s sunlight coming in through a window. No contradictions so far. But...

Second: In ep. 8, "Broken Pieces", Rios holes himself up in his cabin on the way to Deep Space 12. La Sirena is at warp at this point (as we can tell from the window behind Enoch shortly before we see Rios in his quarters).

Even if there is light outside the ship from the warp effect, it wouldn’t create this “steady sunbeams through shutters” effect we see here:

All this has led me to believe that this fixture in Rios’s quarters and the conference room is not, in fact, a window, but a large light. Someone (either the Starfleet engineers who designed the cabins Rios added to Sirena when he got her, or some denizen of the ship itself) designed it to look like sunlight through a slatted blind, possibly to give the ship a more homey feel.

Unfortunately, this means the “window” doesn’t tell us anything about the position of the meeting room in relation to Sirena’s hull after all. Essentially, we have no hints of any kind about the whereabouts of the elusive “ready room”.

Of course, that isn't going to stop me from speculating :D (Wild mix of educated guesses and complete headcanons after the cut.)

Basically, I can come up with two scenarios, neither of them completely satisfactory.

Option 1

The most straightforward explanation is that the meeting room is set up in an empty cabin.

By the end of season one, there are seven people living on La Sirena, so we can expect there to be at least seven cabins. One day, I will write a whole screed about the cabin placement on Sirena, and how this ship is bigger on the inside, but for now, let’s just assume there are seven cabins somewhere and two of them (Elnor’s and Seven’s) are empty at time of the crash on Coppelius.

It’s possible one of these cabins has been used as some kind of meeting room in the past, and that’s why it has a table and way too many semi-matched chairs in it. Maybe it’s left over from the last time Rios was ferrying around a group of academics and/or businessmen and they needed somewhere to convene their Important Meetings. Or maybe it’s just a storage space for some excess furniture.

There is, of course, the possibility the furniture in this room isn’t real but projected, given the omnipresence of holo-emitters throughout the ship. I’ve mentioned many times why I don’t think the furniture in the normal living quarters is a holographic projection, but for something like a temporary meeting room in an otherwise empty cabin, it might make sense.

An argument to the contrary, however, can be found in the details of the room.

There are two additional chairs by the back window for a total of eight when the table only fits six,...

... the chairs at the ends of the table don’t match the ones on the side,...

... and if you look closely at the images above, you see that the table shows the same signs of age and wear as many other places on Sirena.

In my opinion, these kinds of incongruous details don’t necessarily fit with a purpose-built, holo-projected meeting room. You can, of course, find explanations for how it would still make sense (I have a few springing to mind right now), but the most straightforward assumption is probably that these chairs and the table were standing around the ship/the empty cabin anyway, and Rios just decided to use them for the occasion.

If this is the case, the likeliest location for this room is at the back of the upper deck, possibly in the area marked for additional cargo on the set plans:

(Starboard aft/Bottom left. There are some issues with possible cabins in that space, given that the back of the deck isn’t symmetrical and there isn’t quite enough space for cabins of the same size as the ones on the port side and a corridor. But that is a discussion for another time.)

Of course, if we go with this assumption, we have to just accept that the angle of the walls and ceiling in the conference room and the view through its door don’t line up with what they’d be in universe. These are just unavoidable artefacts of the production process, and we’ll have to ignore them or come up with very elaborate explanations.

Option 2

Now, the inconsistencies in the shape of the room might be explained by my second option for the location of the meeting: The conference room is a programme Rios is running on the holodeck.

In my opinion, this explanation is somewhat less likely. Rios is very practical. I doubt he’d create a purpose-built meeting room for the interview with Narek. Throughout season 1, most important discussions take place on the bridge or in the mess. And if Raffi and Rios were trying to have this talk in a controlled environment where Narek wouldn’t have access to anything he could, say, pocket and use as a weapon later, simply projecting furniture into the otherwise empty holodeck would have sufficed.

The room in its current configuration being already present in the holodeck database also seems unlikely. Why create a perfect recreation of the captain’s quarters only to fill it with a scratched-up table, too many mismatched chairs, and nothing else?

The only explanation I could see here (and now we are entering the Wild Lands of Boundless Speculation) is that the recreation of Rios’s cabin already existed in the database. After the ship’s systems were knocked out so thoroughly by the orchid and then rebooted through synth magic, it was the programme the computer defaulted to through some random act of chance. So, Rios might have taken Narek to the holodeck, expecting to have their talk in Picard’s Chateaux, but walked into his own cabin instead. And whether it was just quickest solution, or he didn’t want to admit the mistake in front of Soji’s murderous ex, rather than shutting the holodeck down and starting a different programme, Rios just told the computer to delete everything inside and project a table and some chairs. No, not those chairs, something more comfortable. No, don’t just add more chairs I meant - oh, fuck it. Nevermind.

Now, why would there be a recreation of the captain’s cabin and a bunch of associated, fittingly scuffed-up furniture stored on the holodeck in the first place?

Here, I want to offer the suggestion that somebody on the ship must have the task of periodically stopping by IKEA Intergalactic to replace worn-out or broken furniture in the cabins. With holo-emitters at their disposal, trying out how certain options would look in real life (and whether they would age in a way fitting the ship’s general aesthetic) is a superior option to merely looking at the IKEA catalogue. So, if this hypothetical holo person were very earnest about their job but also hesitant to use the built-in holo emitters in the actual captain’s quarters out of fear of getting yelled at, a full-scale recreation might be a sensible way to go........

It’s within the realm of possibility, is what I’m saying.

Still, in my opinion, the likeliest explanation is that the meeting room is an empty cabin at the back of the upper deck, on the starboard side of the engine room. We will probably never know for sure (barring some truly surprising developments in season two and three), but hey: more space for us writers to explore ;)

[procrastinatorproject]

For the Ask Meme, I'm gonna go with Passengers, and the Space Ikea fic...

I'm very glad someone remembers Passengers this fondly :D I still love it so much!

Okay, let's see, what are some secrets I can tell you about Passengers and IKEA Intergalactic....

The problem with Passengers is that most of the secrets are very intentional and will be revealed throughout the course of the series - if and when I manage to get back to that 🙈

Hmmm... Oh! I tried probably five times to work in the scene of the students (plus occasionally Jo and/or Cal) playing one of several games involving a rubber ball. It ended up getting a very brief mention in chapter 2, where they are engaged in a game involving "a deck of cards, a small rubber ball, and a lot of shouting."

Originally, there was a whole thing where we watch them play, and even a second game involving a silver hoop hovering in mid-air and some other paraphernalia, and it was going to establish Ren's proficiency at ball-throwing, which qualifies him to go outside and do the scanner-toss. But in the end, those scenes slowed the pacing too much, so they had to go 😅

Same for the scene where the generator powering the transphasic scanner overloads. There is a lot of worry about monitoring the output closely, and during the spacewalk, Aya goes to help the professor and Sophie keep it in check. Originally, we were going to witness the overload and ensuing fallout (instead of just hearing it happened in Emil's report at the very end), but it detracted from the main tension, so it was banished to offstage.

As for a Real Secret(tm).....

When Jo tries to blow up the pirate tech threatening the ship and hits a snag, she swears (the only time we've heard her swear so far), using the expression "Jesus sufferin' fuck" That expression (including the apostrophe) was chosen very deliberately. As was the reference she makes to the "hammer throw competition at one of the festivals her mother had taken her to as a child." Let's just say Ian is going to be incredibly happy with Jo at some point in the not-so-distant future 😁😁😁

Now, as for IKEA Intergalactic...

It doesn't really have a specific time when it takes place (apart from "pre-Picard"), but it does technically fit into the middle of Preparations. On the way to pick up Mtumbe et al from Trill, Sirena comes upon the storeship and because Steward was in a redecorating frenzy, they stop and go find new beds. And fish tanks. That's why, in Preparations, they suddenly have a ton of IKEA furniture they need to assemble XD

Also, it's only hinted at in Preparations and hasn't come up in Star Trek: La Sirena (yet), but Emmet is having a rough go of it throughout this whole time period. There wasn't a particular trigger, but he's just feeling particularly sleepy (i.e. depressed), which is why Emil didn't want to leave him alone on Sirena and stays with him when he falls asleep in the armchair in the welcome hall. If and when I ever pick that story up again, we're going to talk about that in more detail, but for now, this is the explanation for Emmet's extra-sleepiness.

Also also: I have some vague ideas of what the holos get up to on their little adventure, though nothing is set in stone yet. The one thing I do know for sure is that it will end with them earning the privilege of free IKEA furniture for life. (Well, for the rest of their digital existence, whether that be ten years or two hundred.) Rios is going to be very confused by the furniutre catalogues popping up in his subspace feed at regular intervals - always with profuse "thank you" notes attached and coupons for free furniture.

This really makes me want to re-read and work on continuing these fics 😍 Thank you so much for asking!

(Based on this post)

[procrastinatorproject]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Star Trek: Picard Rating: General Audiences Characters: La Sirena’s Emergency Holograms Additional Tags: Humor, probably not a lot of plot, but you never know, IKEA Summary: The year is 2394. A humble flat-pack furniture store of interstellar renown is making its way through deep space, when, late one night, some unlikely customers ask to be let on board.

A light was blinking on the main display, indicating a potential customer in comm range. Sasha quickly scanned the information. Small speed freighter, likely to have minimal crew, overtaking them at high warp… There was something funky with their registration. It seemed to throw the store’s computer for a loop, as if it was having trouble identifying the ship’s affiliation. Then again, the last time the OS had been upgraded was probably before Sasha was born, so this kind of error could mean anything, really.

She hesitated for a moment, uncertain how to react. Sure, she could think of many less-than-legitimate reasons why a ship might choose to travel under a sketchy registration, but the freighter was too small to pose any kind of threat to them. If its occupants were truly up to no good, they’d most likely just ignore the giant floating furniture store lumbering along in the slow lane and move on. In Sasha’s experience, not many smugglers interrupted a cargo run for a quick shopping spree.