Jump to content

Star Trek Strange New Worlds


Zathras
 Share

Recommended Posts

Episode 7 - the crossover with Lower Decks! That was a lot of fun to watch! Top marks for me!

Rest of the series has been very strong - enjoying the Spock/Chapel storyline, Uhura had a standout storyline with actual Kirk rather than the 2 alternative versions we have seen so far.

Bloomin good stuff!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kirk shows extremely poor judgment for a recently promoted first officer in that episode though. He takes Uhura, who he the same symptoms as Ramon, in search for Ramon when he gets loose on the ship, then let’s her take off for sickbay on her own when she starts showing more symptoms, all because she says “I’ll be fine I promise.” That’s reckless even for Kirk!

EDIT: Pike does the same thing when she requests to be confined to her quarters, saying she’s worried about doing the same sabotage as Ramon. “Oh I assure you that won’t happen,” he says. Wtf. I know you gotta move the story along, but it’s a little dumb in this episode

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I totally lost interest in this, after seeing what they had done to the characters of Uhura and Spock. What are they trying to accomplish, with this total re-writing of these iconic characters. It's a disservice to the acting of Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols. Spock is one of the most iconic characters in television history, and it's just being swept aside by this show.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

season 2

 

ep 1

- I completely forgot about this Asian lady in Chekov’s seat. She’s in the captain’s ready room with the main cast during the teaser and gets dialogue and everything!? Apparently she was on the show last year!? The character’s name is ‘Jenna Mitchell’!!!!!1!

 

- I dislike the space inside the struts connecting the nacelles to the main ship. Don’t like how it looks! Is this new or old? For all I know it goes all the way back to the sixties. I don’t care. I noticed it in this episode and I want ‘em to change it.

 

- I really dislike how nü-Trek is so obsessed with their captains having catchphrases and it being explicitly lampshaded again and again, over and over, in poorly executed scene after poorly executed scene. They did it a lot on DSC, they did it on PIC, they’re doing it now on SNW. Shut up! Stop doing this!

 

It’s okay for the cartoons. I think I didn’t mind it with the cartoons. I don’t even remember if there’s even a specific scene where they make a big deal over Captain Freeman saying, “Warp me!”. I think she just says, “Warp me!” What I do remember is when they’re all talking about what they’ll say to let people into their quarters. That was funny.

 

This is not ... there isn’t ... Jean-Luc Picard is the only guy to do this and he had two (2)! You could argue ‘Make it so’ only half counts because he uses it for lots of other stuff too! Nobody else really has a consistent catch phrase for going places! Quick! Tell me Sisko’s! Tell me Janeway’s! Tell me Archer’s! Kirk doesn’t even ... you people are sick! You’ve made up something that doesn’t exist! I’m wracking my brain — if I’ve got one, if the Eymorg women of Sigma Draconis haven’t stolen it away! — to think of if this was something Star Trek ever did. The closest I can come to a memory of it is in the New Frontier Captain’s Table novel Once Burned where there was a helmsman, Mick Gold, who would always reply “On our way” anytime he was told to lay in a course without waiting for the direct order and then there was the one time he was given orders by a captain suffering from, like, PTSD and he and the rest of the crew didn’t really want to go through with it so he waited to be explicitly told. Nothing else is coming to mind!

 

This is kind of like if they decided today that all the doctors from now on had to have their own version of Bones’ shtick and would do all these dumb dumb metafictional eye-winking bits where each time there was a new doctor they always had to come up with their own thing.

 

I wouldn’t complain if any of the scenes where this happens were good. They’ve all been bad so far. Why do they keep doing this? Whose fault is it? Who do I have to blame for it? When Alex Kurtzman’s contract with Viacom expires in 2026 will it stop? Or is it now just part of the warp and woof of the franchise? Stop it! Unwarp it! Unworf it! Undo!

 

- I feel like the thing where a Klingon asks one of our characters about their possible Klingon blood has happened more often than just the one incident which is coming to mind — that governor with Picard in the episode where Geordi got mindwiped; French Federation Citizen Swears In Perfect tlhIngan Hol — but it’s always a good thing. I liked it!

 

- “What’s an antimatter detonation switch? It’s not a thing, is it?” “Yeah, no, definitely not a thing.” Okay, bad! I don’t like it when Star Trek characters talk like they’re in modern make’em’up blockbusters or like they’re goofy sitcom characters. Put the Star Trek characters into PLOTS from goofy sitcoms, sure, love it, can’t get enough of it. But it only works if they keep talking Star Trek while they do it. Would the episode where Kirk does the corbomite maneuver — can’t recall the title, sorry — have been improved if Kirk talked like this?

 

- The false flag Federation ship is called a Crossfield-class in dialogue but looks nothing like the U.S.S. Discovery!?!? Did they chicken out of doing it? Boo! The Mirror Universe two-parter basically had Kirk’s Enterprise blow up Archer’s Enterprise! (Different ships, yeah, of course, but that’s what it looks like on screen.) Go the distance! Have the Enterprise blow up the Discovery!

 

- I wonder if “Pedal to the metal” is an explicit reference to Galaxy Quest (1999). Maybe. Maybe not.

 

Verdict : great stuff! Solid! Enjoyable! I don’t much care for the direction — keep the camera right side up, please! stop spinning it around the characters! — but all in all I thought it was really good.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep2

- “Una broke the law.”

“And what if the law is wrong?” carrot-slam.

 

Just really psyched to be getting this episode.

 

- Really like the updated version of the TOS dress uniforms.

 

Verdict : a lot fun! The metaphor’s muddled, the plotting’s clumsy, the whole episode’s conceit seems profoundly misguided — I laughed out loud at everyone standing around in the transporter room applauding this week’s special guest star; I don’t understand why this episode wasn’t about Khan’s Einekle being Single Female Lawyer for the week ... is this criticism fair? maybe not! — but it’s a proper Star Trek courtroom episode! Really loved it!

 

But, I mean, why did Una turn herself in? really, why? the show doesn’t go with the obvious answer. The answer it gives is borderline unworkable ... she did it so she wouldn’t have to hide who she was from her subordinates!?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep3

Wow! DuckDuckGo getting a reference!

 

Temporal Wars too.

 

Verdict : surprised how much I liked this one by the time it got to the end! Feels like it’ll inevitably lead to a re-release of WoK where Shatner’s bellow of “KHAAAAAAN!” is replaced with a version of Russell Brand’s voicemail message to Manuel from Fawlty Towers but whatever, who cares.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep4

- “Oh. You did that thing you do.”

“What thing?”

“That thing when someone gets too close. It’s tough. So you panic. Find reasons to push them away.”

“I don’t do that. Do I?”

“You do that.”

 

This isn’t quite as bad as “that’s not a thing” but it’s close enough! Hate it! Hate to hear it! Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijn are pretty good but nobody’s good enough to pull this off. Especially not in the second season! Doesn’t matter that there’s been episodes of DSC, doesn’t matter that these characters have been around for a long long long long time (as the episode, if it’s the one I think it is, attests to), this is garbage. This is, as is my perennial complaint, the wrong kind of garbage! They could pretty it up a little and make it the right kind of garbage (“In all the years I’ve known you. Professor Such-and-Such, Doctor So-and-So, and now Captain Batel.”, you get the idea). But I guess this is the kind of garbage they think people want to hear!

 

- “I need to run a complete neurological analysis. I’ve never seen anything like this.” Hell yeah! There’s my garbage! There’s the garbage I love!

 

- is that Reed Birney? Yeah. That is Reed Birney!!1!

 

- Nurse Chapel completely ignoring Lt. Ortegas. Damn. A dozen fanfic writers tearing out their hair. There’s nothing between ‘em!

 

Verdict: great episode! Extratextually, an argument for this exact kind of storytelling! Superb!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep5

- Wow! Did they just confirm that the Vulcan solar system is Eridani B? Was that something ... that feels like something that was more in the books than on screen. I’m not going to doublecheck at the wiki.

 

- Maybe in the future they’ll redo Leonard Nimoy’s dialogue in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) to have him say : “As you know, I have made a vow never to give you information that could potentially alter your destiny. Your path is yours to walk and yours alone. That being said, Khan Noonien Singh is the most dangerous adversary the Enterprise ever faced. He is brilliant, ruthless, and he will not hesitate to kill every single one of you. Oh, I was once weirdly horny for his granddaughter.”

 

- I never put this together before but Kirk. and Chapel. Kirk. I forget which one of the Pocket Books has Kirk going on vacation in Scotland or whatever and someone pointing out that what his name means. I don’t know. Maybe something with Scotty mentioning it? I don’t recall. Still. Kirk & Chapel. Not subtle! (Although, it took me a lifetime to notice so ... subtle enough? I suppose. Is Spock’s relationship with Chapel just a sublimated version of his involvement with Kirk? Maybe!) (Oh. Hah hah. ‘Christine’.)

 

- This episode is all about an altered lesser version of Spock struggling to pretend to be the real Spock. This is so straightforwardly what the show’s whole project is about that, yeah, I gotta applaud it. Right on the nose. Right on the money.

 

Verdict: great episode! I teared up a little at the Spock & Chapel kiss. It wasn’t full on boo hoo hoo tears or anything like that — I may not have gone through the Kolinahr but I practice the ways of c’thia, sure, I accept all things with equanimity — but Star Trek made me feel the feelings. I didn’t know Star Trek could still do that to me. Those two crazy kids!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep 6

- What’s with the black badge as a background to the delta on Pike’s chest!? Has this been on the show before? If so, I never noticed it. I don’t like it. Looks bad! Looks dumb! Draws too much attention. Fleet Captain? Dumb! If this stays throughout the second half of the season I’m going to hate it every time I have to see it!

 

- “I know. He was one of my best students. I’m sorry. I just said that because he’s dead. Actually, he was just okay. But, look! Look what he made of himself.” Usually, I hate it when they do the faux funny undercutting but this was a good moment well delivered by Carol Kane.

 

- The Farragut!? But if Kirk is on the Farragut and is also a Lieutenant hasn’t it already ... eh, forget it, they’ll probably explain later in the episode.

 

- They haven’t so far! Not going to doublecheck at the wiki to see if the whole deal has gone down yet. Maybe they just restaffed the ship and kept Kirk along as the sole survivor? What!?

 

- Same as last season, I keep hearing a recurring theme on the soundtrack which reminds me heavily of the music from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Not the first episode! Just my first time noting it down.

 

- “It’s an honour to meet you”!? Wait, didn’t the canonical Kirk and Pike meet at the close of last season after he got done with the alternate timeline shenanigans!? I must be forgetting. I suppose that was still part of the other branch. Oh well. My mind’s going!

 

- All the money in the world to show this guy getting exploded into outer space but no sight of the Farragut!? Why?

 

- Uhura losing her brother — not just her parents but v. specifically her brother as well — in a shuttle crash is a ... interesting (!?) choice. If you remember what happened to Nichelle Nichols’s brother, I mean.

 

- Admiral Nogawa!?!?1?!?111?! Hell yeah!

 

Verdict : dumb! They whiffed it! Oh well. They can’t all be winners. What was this episode even about? Oh no, Uhura’s imposter syndrome and trauma! Again? An episode that’s batting clean up and trying (and failing!) to set up the next run at bat. It can’t even handle its dialogue — they stitched together the stuff about Ramon’s personal logs, they stitched together Kirk’s big speech about death, they stitched together the conversation in the shuttle between Carol Kane and Rebecca Romijn — and it’s got an uneven grasp of the characters’ established pasts. I don’t know what kind of choice it is to hold tight to the stuff from Star Trek (2008) even as everything else floats away from the other open palm while in a third hand (how!? i guess we’re all Lt. Arex for the purpose of this sentence) stuff that went down last season and stuff that went down in prior episodes this season is clutched tight tight tight to the chest. I guess if that’s the way they wanted to do it they had to find a better way of going about their business than making an hour of television about ... Ensign Uhura’s sleep schedule!?!? Oh no! Ensign Uhura is so so tired! Watch her watch an outtake from a prior episode on her iPad! Watch her watching things again and again! Watch her react to things that aren’t there! Hallucination episodes of Star Trek are always a bit tough, I gather, but this one was a real wreck.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep 7

- Wait, exposure to Bajoran and Cardassian languages prior to TOS in the main timeline!?!?1? Come on! No! Bad! Take that nonsense over to the JJ Abrams side of things where it belongs! Those guys are Lost Era at the absolute earliest! Definitely after Undiscovered Country at the bare minimum least!!!1! Bad! No! Undo! (I don’t think this is actually defensible on my behalf. It’s not even the first time they’ve done this. Some dumb dumb gave Pike some kind of medal or whatever from the Obsidian Order when they brought him in for Season 2 of DSC! Same part of his onscreen service record where we saw he got the Carrington prize! Dumb! So dumb! Whoever they’ve got doing the CGI stuff for the computer screens is always so so sooo dumb! Actual fact, no, probably a team of skilled professionals who tend to do superlative work. But I deeply dislike when I see a piece of minutiae that I have dumb dumb make believe disagreements about!)

 

Verdict: a lot of fun! Kind of miraculous that they pulled it off!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep 8

- is that ... yep, it’s Robert Wisdom. Bunny Colvin. Janice Moss’ father on Barry (‘18-’23).

 

- Eh, whatever, put the raktajino in a promenade-style cup who cares. They’re never gonna get the old wine into new bottles, hard as they try. Put the shapeshifters on PIC in Odo’s bucket. Who cares? Look! It’s the familiar thing! It’s so familiar! It’s familiar even though it doesn’t make any sense for it to be that familiar thing! Whooo cares?

 

- Nice design on that shuttlecraft in the flashback!

 

- They say it F.O.B. instead of ‘fob’ which is as far as I know — entirely thanks to a review of the (excellent! strongly recommended!) Battle: Los Angeles (2011) — incorrect. I could go on here about how TOS was largely made by World War II veterans and most Star Trek since then has obviously been crafted by individuals who have never been in uniform and the consequences of this to narrative verisimilitude in an ongoing franchise about the adventures of phony baloney people in outer space but whooo cares???

 

- Clint Howard!!!!1! Hurray! It never gets old to see him again! (I’m not being sarcastic or ironic or facetious or anything at all. Other than genuinely enthusiastic to see Clint Howard. Which I am. Now and forever!)

 

- “This General Dak’Rah, he’s ordering his men to kill on sight anyone that isn’t a Klingon soldier.” ADR’ing in “After they torture them.” as the very next sentence just doesn’t work! You can’t kill someone on sight if you torture them first! Do his men ... do they make sure to keep their eyes closed while they torture anyone that isn’t a Klingon soldier!? Sloppy!

 

- Thought about this during the season premiere but remembered to write it down now. Dr. M’Benga being good at hand-to-hand combat is actually kind of fitting. In one of his two (2) classic appearances the guy bitchslaps Spock. Arguably a more shocking moment for the time — think of Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night (1967) — than the interracial kisses on the show, yeah.

 

- And the whole secret assassin whatever is a second obvious avenue for explaining why Dr. M’Benga ends up no longer Chief of Medicine on board the ship once TOS proper begins. The first being that the stuff with the transporter buffer and running an unauthorized medical treatment of an intimate without permission — I feel like I’m not the first person to connect the dots on this — and I suppose the second will be some awful Section 31 style black ops kerfuffle that will come back to bite him. The third option is that it’s the future and that hierarchical kind of mindset doesn’t really apply and who knows maybe he’ll be happy to step down and let Bones run the show and the fourth option is that it’s never addressed. They might just never address it. Like, what’re they going to do, a scene where Captain Pike leaves the ship but before he does he says, “Dr. M’Benga. Nyota Uhura. You are both vital parts of this crew and as we all know thanks to time travellers from the future you, Uhura, are of galactic historical import. I am sure the new captain, who I have met an alternate version of, will be proud to utilize your skills in, respectively, two (2) and sixty-six (66) of his subsequent adventures. Tough luck, Jabilo, no, sorry, your name's Joseph. Nyota, you’ll make out better than Nurse Chapel who will be gone from fifty-three (53) of ‘em! Now let’s all take a moment to mourn Lieutenant Ortega, Lieutenant Hemmer, and presumably Carol Kane as well. I would acknowledge Lt. Noonien-Singh but in order for the events of ‘Space Seed’ to take place we kind of have to assume Kirk’s completely forgotten her — a little out of character for a beautiful woman to escape his memory entirely but whatchagonnado — and Spock has most likely undergone the fullara which we all recall is the Vulcan forgetfulness ritual as established in that there episode of ENT guest-starring Bruce Davison. What was I, Captain Pike, saying? Bruce Davison! Great actor! You probably remember him as Senator Kelly from the X-Men movies. You guys don’t know about the X-Men? You’ll meet them during a crossover comic and the TNG guys will also meet them in another crossover comic and again as well in the canonical sequel paperback novel to that same crossover comic. Okay. Good talk. Speech over.”

 

- is ... is Robert Wisdom’s whole speech about what he wants Dr. M’Benga to do just ADR’d in!?!? Most of it seems to be, yeah. Everything but his line about how the combat veterans on the ship look up to him and he believes many others do too. You can see him saying those words in the wide shot.

 

- The Klingon blood just doesn’t look right. It’s supposed to be purple-pink. It looks like human blood. (I mean, then why do they call it ‘Klingon bloodwine’ if it doesn’t look like THEIR blood? Hmm. A conundrum for the ages!) This bothers me way more than the overall look of the Klingons themselves this season. It’s pretty good this year!

 

- I’m taking the “What if I told you he murdered children?” line as being there to recall to mind Dr. M’Benga’s purging of the transporter databank, his allowing that ensign to go off to the front with the Andorian guy, even what he did to his own daughter when he let her turn into a Nebula God. I mean, yeah, that’s right there. The episode’s got good bones. I mean, it ends badly. Could’ve been slightly fixed if they gave the Robert Wisdom guy a martyr complex and had him actively goading Dr. M’Benga into it but as is, no, not a good ending. I mean, even still, there would still be the problem of the unsactioned vibe of him going off to kill those guys with a knife after he already rejected the mission and everyone else bit the dust, I don’t know, not sure how that works according to the rules of war.

Verdict: not too bad! Ending’s bad and kind of ruins Nurse Chapel — hey, I wonder if it ever comes up when she goes to medical school that she saw a doctor lose his cool and murder an old man — and Dr. M’Benga — I suppose the mystery has stopped being about what gets him demoted and is now why he’s even still allowed to practice medicine, to wear the uniform; the guy belongs on Elba II, he belongs in the Tantalus Penal Colony, send this guy to New Zealand! — and Captain Pike too — how many horrifying secrets of his crew is this guy going to keep close to his chest? at some point you start to wonder if the guy’s fantasy of being a slave trader and raping women who actually enjoy it is less a fantasy and more of a ... is Captain Pike evil?!? — but characters can’t really be ruined on Star Trek in that way. The ending’s SUPPOSED to be like this. They did this on purpose! They’re always doing this on purpose. They did it on purpose on DSC when they left that prisoner to die too. They’re aiming for moral ambiguity and complexity but instead they just wound up with this! Oh well. It’s a solid C-. Maybe even better than that if you’re grading on a curve. If I were to rank every new episode of Star Trek since the series premiere of DSC I’d bet that it’d be closer to the top than to the bottom.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep9

- oh wow! Dr. Korby! Yeah!!!!1!

 

- “So, that happened.” AUGGGGGGGGGGGH! What’s wrong with a good old fashioned “Captain’s log, supplemental. I’ve assembled the senior staff in the ready room. *Ahem*. All systems stable.” I don’t know why these guys all speak like they’re in a Judd Apatow movie or like the people writing the scripts want to be the next Judd Apatow. Talk like Star Trek! That’s not Star Trek talk! Make the characters talk Star Trek talk! It’s obscene! It’s more obscene to have this dialogue than it would be for Captain Batel to say to Captain Pike over their Skype call that she’s psyched to have him nut thick ropes of hair gel cum deep into her juicy pussy. That at least would ... frank sexuality has its place in Star Trek! This kind of flippant warmed over cliché is just annoying! It’s bad! It draws more attention to itself than it moves things along smoothly and judiciously! It’s particularly bad here in this specific instance! A musical episode is almost by definition an earnest endeavour. How am I supposed to let this episode into my heart if it’s doing dumb dumb plagiarized winks’n’nods at the top of the first act?

 

- “I shouldn’t have interrupted you because you had that thought first.” Putting this kind of therapy speak facilitated communication HR handbook stuff into the mouth of James T. Kirk is dumb but if Lt. Singh had cut him off during the final syllables with a curt, “And I outrank you.” that’d probably have made it go down smoother. I mean, is there some substantial audience of put upon professional women who are always getting talked over during work meetings that is watching SNW? Do those women watch this show? I assume it’s mostly cis male nerd freaks (present!), baby boomers, and children. I assume those women watch non-competitive reality television and K-dramas. Maybe the writers and producers of SNW are all high fiving each other over the idea of having James T. Kirk model a new kind of non-toxic masculinity; maybe they think from now on no one will ever interrupt a woman again.

 

- Julia Child getting a mention on Star Trek means her career for the OSS is also canonical. Them’s the rules! Them’s the breaks!

 

Verdict : fun! Liked to see everybody so happy! Singing! Dancing! I’m not a big musical guy so no clue if it was, like, ‘good’. I enjoyed myself! Kind of bizarre to see something that was once an April Fools joke done for real. On a long enough time scale I suppose all jokes come to pass, all forms of ongoing fiction devolve into self-parody, anything that rings true enough to make someone else laugh is a worthwhile area of creative investigation for a beast that struggles to find enough offal to sustain itself for ten feedings at a time. Star Trek musical episode! Sure. Why not!? (I feel like the prior five sentences make it seem like I didn’t like the episode. I did like the episode! It’s just ... not a good sign.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ep10

- Lt. Singh mentioning her brother a little less than twenty minutes in is a clue to the attentive viewer that we’re going where we’re going here.

 

- Ucccchhh. This guy seems way too young to be Scotty. Gotta shoot off his middle finger too!

 

- The episode up until this point has been our characters worried that Nurse Chapel is dead and now has our characters suspicious of ... Scotty!?!?!? They keep asking him questions! There’s just such a mismatch of what the audience knows and what the characters know.

 

Verdict: not up to snuff! The entire episode builds towards an inadequate cliffhanger. Like, what is it? will Captain Pike follow orders and let Dr. M’Benga and George Kirk and a bunch of dumb dumb colonists die? no stakes! even if it were Erica Ortegas and Carol Kane beamed away by the Gorn it’d still be no stakes because there’s no countervailing force. No reason why he wouldn’t do what’s right. Oh no!? War? War if he crosses a line? He is Captain Pike! It’s pretty clear that he believes a diplomatic solution is possible to any problem! He’ll just give a speech, “I see even your youngest and most naïve value the possibility of new life above their base appetites. We in Starfleet share the same sentiments. Love is stronger than hunger. Our need to connect unites us more than our need to destroy. Would you folks like to come over for dinner?” or whatever.

 

Everything up until then was pretty rough too. I liked the zero-G combat and handholding, sure. That’s about it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I waited until the season was almost over to watch. Pretty good! Most of the episodes were really quite well done. Eight out of ten, really. I didn’t like the finale and I didn’t like the sixth episode.

 

I feel like there’s only two or three complaints about the season as a whole that I didn’t otherwise address.

 

COMPLAINT #1: James T. Kirk. James T. Kirk is always just showing up! Why!?!?1? I guess maybe it’s the thing with how, like, Worf would be in Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and in Staᴙ Trek: Nemǝsis (2002). And apparently, although it’s left a little unclear onscreen, Worf goes on to be captain of the Enterprise-E until it meets some kind of disastrous end. What’s my point? My point is I guess it’s Star Trek tradition for captains of the Enterprise to just inexplicably be around for no reason because they were on the old show.

 

James T. Kirk is not Spider-Man. Spider-Man can just show up as a guest star or do a cameo and it’s, like, whatever. He’s teaming up in someone else’s book. It’s fine. The whole narrative doesn’t necessarily revolve around him. Kirk is not like that. A story with Kirk in it becomes a story about Kirk. It doesn’t matter if he’s alternate universe Kirk. It’s still James T. Kirk. The people making this show seriously expect me to care about Lt. Noonien-Singh in stories about him and her interacting!? What!? Oh no! How will her broken heart heal when he dies in her arms, how will she deal with interacting with his canonical reality self, how can she keep the secret of their time travel shenanigans from him, how can she manage once it turns out he’s still seeing his steady off and on!!!? There’s like four episodes with Kirk in it this year! They won’t stop shoving this guy in front of my face!

 

James T. Kirk doesn’t make sense as a character outside of his role as an intersecting apex of other points of view. He doesn’t work as a foil to his brother or opposite the granddaughter of a guy who will one day temporarily kill his best friend! He works when he’s talking to Spock or when he’s talking to Bones. When there’s a moral problem or a sci-fi make’em’up at play for him to be the one to solve! He can’t really be the second banana. There’s no life in the guy if he’s on his own. He says so, explicitly!

 

COMPLAINT #2: Wait. I think I actually talked about this. I really don’t like the empty space in the struts, the pylons, the thingmabobs connecting the nacelles to the main body of the ship. Doesn’t look good to me. They need to put the ship through another refit next year and fix it so it looks normal.

 

COMPLAINT #3: I was sure there was something else but I forgot what it was. Must not have been too important. I’ll file the grievance if I can ever recall it oh wait as I am typing these words I just remembered what it was. Twenty plus years of Star Trek prequels and still no Dax symbiont how come give us Dax during this time she is supposed to be a gymnast who boned Bones give us Dax give us Emony Dax or whomever it was during TOS times come on stop playing around with ENT references and give us Dax. ENT wouldn’t give us the Dax! I want Dax! Dax dax dax! The stuff with Trill people in the future on DSC wasn’t good enough! Daxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx!!!!!1!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Gamevet said:

I totally lost interest in this, after seeing what they had done to the characters of Uhura and Spock. What are they trying to accomplish, with this total re-writing of these iconic characters. It's a disservice to the acting of Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols. Spock is one of the most iconic characters in television history, and it's just being swept aside by this show.

I think you’re being a little over the top, but I get it. The continuity bothers me as a fan even if as a TV writer I get.

The Spock issue they inherited from Discovery. Pike and Spock were extended guest stars but everybody screamed for it to be a show. I don’t think it’s a disservice to Nimoy, but he doesn’t feel very Spock me.

Uhura isn’t offensive at all as a performance, she’s very true to the character, I just think her age isn’t quite right.

Chapel I don’t care how out of continuity it is because the actress is as hot as the sun and can do whatever she wants.

I feel like I already got over the recasting 15 years ago with the Abrams movie, and this show is a thousand times better than it was. This is most true to Trek show since the 90s.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/11/2023 at 12:40 PM, R.CAllen said:

- Admiral Nogawa!?!?1?!?111?! Hell yeah!

Whoops. It is not hell yeah. It is hell no. I realize now I got this guy — spelled it wrong, too, it’s Admiral Nagawa — confused with Admiral Nogura from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and he’s also in some of the books. Neither of these two appear to be the guy with Robert April in the final scene of the season premiere. That guy is Commodore Tafune.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Darth Krawlie said:

For people who know the timeline better than I do, about how many years before TOS is this show taking place? I figure with Kirk only just becoming a first officer it’s still at least a few years away, but I don’t know for sure

Depending on which seasons and specific stories, SNW is about 7-8 years before TOS. Overall it fits timeline continuity--

Discovery was said to be 100 years after ENT and 100 years before TNG, and a decade before TOS, that means 2255, as TOS s1 was 2265.

Pike was introduced in season 2 of Discovery, taking emergency command to help them look for Spock, both of whom were technically already on the Enterprise. This is 2256. SNW S1 was concurrent with DIS S3, so that would be 2257.

So SNW S2, is likely 2257-2258ish. TOS S1 was 2265, so again, about 7-8 years.

More nerd math--

In the DIS S2 episode "If Memory Serves" things sort of cross over with the OG Trek pilot The Cage, which is a little apocryphal  in its complete form, but footage was used for the TOS episode The Menagerie, which is where the scarred no-talking Pike in a box thing was established. The episode uses footage of Leonard Nimoy and Jeffrey Hunter (the original Pike) from The Cage as a fun homage, but they don't say exactly when it was that the Enterprise had that mission. (And obviously they used the Cage to cast half the characters of SNW).

But, The Menagerie takes place in 2267 and Spock says the mission was in 2254. That's a difference of 13 years, that would put that mission a year before S1 of Disco, which tracks storywise.

They are fudging the ages of some of the characters, which, they can kinda do because difference sources have listed different birth dates for the TOS characters. Example, most sources say Uhura was born in 2240, making her 25 in TOS S1, which means in SNW she would be 18 at best, and while young, she's older than that.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fascinating! I knew about the Cage/Menagerie redo and the DIS episode of it, but not how wonky the timeline of it all is. I knew there was SOME chicanery, and frankly the show runners should do whatever they want to make this the best show and fit in as well as they can in the established continuity, but not be completely hindered to it either. Totally fine with it not being perfect, but 7-8 years sounds good enough for me. Thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.