Seto Kaiba Posted August 25 Posted August 25 Rewatched "A Quality of Mercy" as part of introducing my Trekkie parents to Strange New Worlds. When it comes to the subject of Pike being a soft touch, no episode really encapsulates it better than "A Quality of Mercy" and its alternate take on the events of TOS's iconic "Balance of Terror". Not only does Pike's softer, more informal style lead to him failing to crack down on the racism on his bridge but even with a second ship for support he ends up fumbling the encounter with the Romulan Bird of Prey so badly that it causes more than a decade of warfare that goes so badly for the entire quadrant that the Klingon monks on Boreth make another once-in-a-generation exception for the same guy to take a time crystal and fix the timeline. Spoiler In hindsight, one thing that struck me as weird is that Lt. Ortegas is randomly just racist for this one episode. It comes out of nowhere and there's no reason or justification ever offered for it. "Balance of Terror" did have a racist officer on the bridge, who Kirk tells off for his bigotry, but that was a completely different character (Lt. Stiles) whose prejudice against the Romulans was also explicitly discussed and justified in-story with him being from a military family who fought in the Earth-Romulan War more than a century prior. And a random thought... since Strange New Worlds definitely wants to skew lighter and softer than other modern Star Trek shows (to its considerable benefit), y'know who'd be a good antagonist to bring back? The Kzinti. They're mentioned in Picard and we actually see a Kzinti Starfleet officer on the Cerritos in Lower Decks. They're a stubborn nuisance-level threat who are apparently still hassling the Federation on some level even in 2401. They were originally going to show the Kzinti starting sh*t with humanity back in Enterprise's fifth season (before the series was cancelled), and it'd be fun to bring them back as a lighter-and-softer nemesis for Pike now that the Gorn have been put back on the shelf until Kirk's era and the Federation's cold war with the Klingons is ongoing.
pengbuzz Posted August 26 Posted August 26 4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: and it'd be fun to bring them back as a lighter-and-softer nemesis for Pike now that the Gorn have been put back on the shelf until Kirk's era and the Federation's cold war with the Klingons is ongoing. Talk about Gorn with the Wind....
Seto Kaiba Posted August 26 Posted August 26 10 hours ago, pengbuzz said: Talk about Gorn with the Wind.... That's awful. 🤔
TehPW Posted August 27 Posted August 27 10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: That's awful. 🤔 Frankly My dear, the Gorn don't give a damn... 😅
Seto Kaiba Posted August 29 Posted August 29 "Four and a Half Vulcans" Spoiler The crew are due for three days of shore leave on some nearby planet, and Una is trying to come up with an excuse not to go after complaining earlier that she needed some vacation time. She tries to deflect by making it about Spock and La'an's relationship in an awkward and unfunny way. Captain Batel is bored of sitting around on Enterprise as M'Benga's patient and wants to convince Vice Admiral Pasalk, the Vulcan jerk who prosecuted Una, to let her work for the Starfleet JAG office again. She wants Pike to help her smooth things over with Pasalk with dinner. They predictably get interrupted. When the Vulcans are the ones asking Starfleet for help, you know things have gone pear-shaped. Some rules lawyering with the Prime Directive follows. There's some acknowledgement of how hypocritical it is for the First Contact rule-instigating Vulcans having broken their own precepts to make first contact with, and intervene in the development of, a pre-warp civilization. Starfleet is being asked to step in and save the natives of Tezaar from the Vulcans own technology because the power plant tech they provided is failing and will cause a planetwide nuclear meltdown. It's funny that we flashed back to the episode where Una was prosecuted for being genetically modified, when what the crew are about to do here is almost certainly illegal. There's a really weird and nonsensical leap in reasoning here. Why is it necessary to go in disguise at all? Spoiler So, because the Vulcans conveniently gave the natives of Tezaar extremely advanced technology it's Not Good Enough to simply disguise the crew going down as Vulcans or to use the disguise serum they used once back in season one and promptly never used again. They have to gene-edit the crew into actual Vulcans. Why is this necessary? They've already established that Tezaar made first contact with the Vulcans centuries ago and even received technological assistance from them to save their world. The whole plot revolves around needing to fix the tech the Vulcans left them. The natives of Tezaar already know aliens exist and have been in contact with them for longer than anyone on the Enterprise (save Pelia) has been alive. There is literally zero need for subterfuge. For some reason, they also do not sedate them the way they did for everyone in season one so instead we get treated to a minute or two of them crawling around on the floor being silly before popping up into frame again with different hairstyles... and Vulcan ears. Somehow, this also causes them to act like stereotypical Vulcans who've had an entire lifetime of Vulcan logical discipline and cultural immersion including the stereotypical Vulcan snobbery towards Humans. Pelia is disgruntled, apparently the serum didn't work on her because she's a Lanthanite... apparently she had the same problem with LSD (and has been synthesizing narcotics for her own enjoyment as recently as a few months prior). Why does the injection make the crew racist?! WHY IS THAT A QUESTION I HAVE TO ASK?! Spoiler Seriously. What the actual f***. The crew who've just been mutated into Vulcans for questionable-at-best reasons immediately start being racist towards Spock because he's "only half-Vulcan". These are people who live and work with Spock day-in and day-out and they are immediately sh*t-talking him for his mixed heritage and justifying their racism as "logical". Worse, Spock apparently decides to just roll with it instead of calling them out. I very nearly stopped watching at that point. I am 7 minutes and 38 seconds into this and I am very ready to walk away and skip the rest of this episode. Spoiler As a related question, why is it necessary for this five-man crew beaming down to Tezaar to be armed? Modern-day Vulcans are famous for their technical pacifism but Pike's swinging a lirpa around for some reason and La'an's brandishing a phaser rifle instead of anything useful for their actual job. Pike has to be racist to Spock again just announcing that they're beaming down. Is our premise here that Vulcan snobbery and racism is genetic? The crew fix the problem comically fast. Like, literally within seconds of beaming down. This magically makes the radiation being emitted by the failing nuclear power plants disappear. If it was possible to fix the problem that quickly, why was it necessary to send Vulcans? They could literally have been in and out before anyone noticed. Also the crew dumped all their bags on Spock somehow in the thirty seconds they were down there. This premise is awful. It's just awful. Genetically modifying someone to change their species doesn't magically implant that species's cultural norms and social values into that person. The whole crew just sort of rolls with the idea that talking like a Vulcan and being a racist arse are just genetic. The opening credits are more than ten minutes into the episode's runtime, and I'm ready to drop the entire episode before the damned title's done. Spoiler How is a gene-editing serum derived "from Spock's perceived experiences"? That doesn't make sense. Being Vulcan gives Nurse Chapel "unique abilities she did not have before"? What. Is this really just going to be forty minutes of Pike, La'an, Uhura, and Chapel being rude and racist to the entire rest of the crew? Spoiler Beto bumps into Vulcan!Uhura in the ship's lounge, and she immediately starts disparaging him. Kirk beams aboard looking for his brother and learns Sam's already done a runner, so he goes looking for other friends on the Enterprise. He invites Scotty to go for a drink. Vulcan!Pike is aggressively cleaning his kitchen because, as a Vulcan, he feels Batel did an inadequate job. Pike surmises that his new insight will help him help his girlfriend win over Admiral Pasalk to get her job in the JAG back, because being mutated into a Vulcan has magically granted him insight into the Vulcan cultural mindset. I think the writers may have forgotten the "Vulcans think Humans smell bad" thing was mainly a problem for Vulcan women, who had a heightened sense of smell. I also think the writers may have Vulcans confused with TNG-era Soong androids given that the episode seems to think being Vulcan gives people Super Multitasking Powers. Spoiler Chapel, for instance, bizarrely insists the Vulcan mind does not require rest. And of course is rude to M'Benga and Spock in the bargain. La'an is creeping Scotty and Kirk out in the ship's bar by being a paranoid nutjob. Scotty and Kirk muse on how unnerving the whole affair is. Pike et. al. have apparently decided to remain Vulcan because that's... allowed? They're clearly mentally compromised and getting more unhinged every scene, with Pike demanding shift changes every 42 minutes and La'an apparently getting feisty about conquering space and eliminating other species. After witnessing that, Una then goes on to insist there's nothing mentally wrong with Captain Pike or the others even while they're clearly and consistently acting out of character. ... this writing is terrible. I'm not quite 25 minutes into this trainwreck and I'm ready to put this one down there in the Hall of Shame with "Spock's Brain", "Turnabout Intruder", and "Code of Honor". I am unaccountably gratified to see that Star Trek fans on social media are already calling this episode out as inherently racist in its premise. Spoiler Uhura is, meanwhile, essentially forcing Beto to adopt Vulcan values and behaviors... creeping out his sister. Spock walks in on Nurse Chapel dumping her boyfriend Dr. Korby over subspace for being human and then breaks up with Spock again (why?) because she thinks La'an is a more logical match? She then announces she's terminating all of her friendships because friendship is a waste of time. La'an, meanwhile, is trying to force Kirk and Scotty to add more and deadlier weapons to the Enterprise. Ortegas learns Uhura's manipulating her brother with mind melds to make him act more Vulcan, de facto brainwashing him into living how she wants him to. (Don't get me wrong, Beto is an absolute garbage human being whose behavior in the previous episode should see him walking back to Earth but Erica is 100% in the right to call Uhura out on this horribly manipulative behavior.) Apparently Una's been withholding the solution this entire time because she's embarrassed the Vulcan who can solve the problem is her ex-boyfriend. That might be the stupidest plot twist since Dr. Brahms found Geordi's holodeck deepfake of her. Spoiler Patton Oswalt as a Vulcan spiritualist who is also Una's ex-boyfriend... named Doug. Who has a sister named Susan and a cousin Pete? Who is really creepily into Una and so their plan to fix the problem goes off the rails because she has to pretend she's married to Spock. This is some cringeworthy-ass Twilight-tier dialog too. I am actually developing a headache watching this. Apparently Vulcans are now the kind of generic space elf that is deeply offended by the existence of spices and seasoning. I know it's a popular Tolkien-inspired elf trope, and I hate it. Vulcans are desert-dwellers. They should have a pretty refined appreciation for spices and seasonings instead of being offended by the existence of salt. Spoiler Vulcan!Pike is rather dickishly undermining his own girlfriend's attempts to rejoin the workforce. Pike and Pasalk's little tete a tete about her career inspires her to rip into both of them and be the first person in this entire episode to not give racism a free pass. She calls Pasalk out on his bigotry and hypocrisy regarding his favoritism towards Vulcans and how he's suddenly gone from disparaging Pike openly to being besties because Pike became Vulcan. From his reaction, she actually did some damage there. I'll admit, "Doug of Vulcan" is growing on me. Kind of surprising he's not in Starfleet, considering he seems to be quite the xenophile by Vulcan standards. He's a very T'lyn sort of free spirit. Either that or it's because he's the only Vulcan in this episode who's not being a racist prick. Spoiler La'an has gone full Romulan and is planning to engineer a war between the Klingons, Tholians, Orions, and Gorn for... reasons? Scotty takes La'an out with a booby-trapped console that shocks her unconscious. The episode's problem is then solved offscreen, for maximum frustration and minimum catharsis. I cannot begin to express how frustrating that is. Spoiler So, somehow Doug helped the crew get in touch with their true selves and that enabled them to turn Human again? Chapel and Uhura lament that they were absolutely awful to everyone, and Pike unfortunately makes another racist remark asking if all Vulcans are monsters instead of, y'know, apologizing for being a racist dickwhistle. Pike runs off to ensure Batel's not about to change the locks on his quarters, Uhura runs off to apologize to Beto, and Chapel rather depressedly muses on having to call everyone to apologize for what she did in her altered state. La'an needs help becoming Human again, and we get to see another flavor of racism that is also presented as inherently genetic. Apparently La'an's augment heritage ALSO make her lowkey automatically racist? So she alone decides to go crazy rampage nuts and fight Spock in her mind that turns into ballroom dancing because it turns out she's really just anxious about her relationship with her coworker. Uhura at least tries for a sincere apology. Pike is walking on eggshells and flinching at every sound in his kitchen with Captain Batel, and rightly so. He gets saved by Pasalk, who was apparently so impressed by being called out on his own bullsh*t that he wants Batel to take over his job as head of the JAG when he retires in a year. Chapel tries to patch things up with Spock and Korby. Chapel seems to be the only one who really understands what an awful person she was being, admitting that she does not deserve the forgiveness she is being shown because of her actions. La'an's episode-long freakout is apparently because she's upset that her relationship with Spock is getting too comfortable. The episode ends with Kirk and Scotty having a moment. This episode has a post-credits scene. Spoiler Which takes the form of a montage of Spock and Doug discussing various Human eccentricities like birthday parties, the "pull my finger" joke, high fives, reading speeds, the need for eight hours of sleep, fondness for cheese, horror movies, and contractions. That. Was. F***ING TERRIBLE. I have an actual headache from watching that. It really was about thirty minutes of the crew being racist for no reason.
pengbuzz Posted August 29 Posted August 29 3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: "Four and a Half Vulcans" Hide contents The crew are due for three days of shore leave on some nearby planet, and Una is trying to come up with an excuse not to go after complaining earlier that she needed some vacation time. She tries to deflect by making it about Spock and La'an's relationship in an awkward and unfunny way. Captain Batel is bored of sitting around on Enterprise as M'Benga's patient and wants to convince Vice Admiral Pasalk, the Vulcan jerk who prosecuted Una, to let her work for the Starfleet JAG office again. She wants Pike to help her smooth things over with Pasalk with dinner. They predictably get interrupted. When the Vulcans are the ones asking Starfleet for help, you know things have gone pear-shaped. Some rules lawyering with the Prime Directive follows. There's some acknowledgement of how hypocritical it is for the First Contact rule-instigating Vulcans having broken their own precepts to make first contact with, and intervene in the development of, a pre-warp civilization. Starfleet is being asked to step in and save the natives of Tezaar from the Vulcans own technology because the power plant tech they provided is failing and will cause a planetwide nuclear meltdown. It's funny that we flashed back to the episode where Una was prosecuted for being genetically modified, when what the crew are about to do here is almost certainly illegal. There's a really weird and nonsensical leap in reasoning here. Why is it necessary to go in disguise at all? Hide contents So, because the Vulcans conveniently gave the natives of Tezaar extremely advanced technology it's Not Good Enough to simply disguise the crew going down as Vulcans or to use the disguise serum they used once back in season one and promptly never used again. They have to gene-edit the crew into actual Vulcans. Why is this necessary? They've already established that Tezaar made first contact with the Vulcans centuries ago and even received technological assistance from them to save their world. The whole plot revolves around needing to fix the tech the Vulcans left them. The natives of Tezaar already know aliens exist and have been in contact with them for longer than anyone on the Enterprise (save Pelia) has been alive. There is literally zero need for subterfuge. For some reason, they also do not sedate them the way they did for everyone in season one so instead we get treated to a minute or two of them crawling around on the floor being silly before popping up into frame again with different hairstyles... and Vulcan ears. Somehow, this also causes them to act like stereotypical Vulcans who've had an entire lifetime of Vulcan logical discipline and cultural immersion including the stereotypical Vulcan snobbery towards Humans. Pelia is disgruntled, apparently the serum didn't work on her because she's a Lanthanite... apparently she had the same problem with LSD (and has been synthesizing narcotics for her own enjoyment as recently as a few months prior). Why does the injection make the crew racist?! WHY IS THAT A QUESTION I HAVE TO ASK?! Hide contents Seriously. What the actual f***. The crew who've just been mutated into Vulcans for questionable-at-best reasons immediately start being racist towards Spock because he's "only half-Vulcan". These are people who live and work with Spock day-in and day-out and they are immediately sh*t-talking him for his mixed heritage and justifying their racism as "logical". Worse, Spock apparently decides to just roll with it instead of calling them out. I very nearly stopped watching at that point. I am 7 minutes and 38 seconds into this and I am very ready to walk away and skip the rest of this episode. Hide contents As a related question, why is it necessary for this five-man crew beaming down to Tezaar to be armed? Modern-day Vulcans are famous for their technical pacifism but Pike's swinging a lirpa around for some reason and La'an's brandishing a phaser rifle instead of anything useful for their actual job. Pike has to be racist to Spock again just announcing that they're beaming down. Is our premise here that Vulcan snobbery and racism is genetic? The crew fix the problem comically fast. Like, literally within seconds of beaming down. This magically makes the radiation being emitted by the failing nuclear power plants disappear. If it was possible to fix the problem that quickly, why was it necessary to send Vulcans? They could literally have been in and out before anyone noticed. Also the crew dumped all their bags on Spock somehow in the thirty seconds they were down there. This premise is awful. It's just awful. Genetically modifying someone to change their species doesn't magically implant that species's cultural norms and social values into that person. The whole crew just sort of rolls with the idea that talking like a Vulcan and being a racist arse are just genetic. The opening credits are more than ten minutes into the episode's runtime, and I'm ready to drop the entire episode before the damned title's done. Hide contents How is a gene-editing serum derived "from Spock's perceived experiences"? That doesn't make sense. Being Vulcan gives Nurse Chapel "unique abilities she did not have before"? What. Is this really just going to be forty minutes of Pike, La'an, Uhura, and Chapel being rude and racist to the entire rest of the crew? Hide contents Beto bumps into Vulcan!Uhura in the ship's lounge, and she immediately starts disparaging him. Kirk beams aboard looking for his brother and learns Sam's already done a runner, so he goes looking for other friends on the Enterprise. He invites Scotty to go for a drink. Vulcan!Pike is aggressively cleaning his kitchen because, as a Vulcan, he feels Batel did an inadequate job. Pike surmises that his new insight will help him help his girlfriend win over Admiral Pasalk to get her job in the JAG back, because being mutated into a Vulcan has magically granted him insight into the Vulcan cultural mindset. I think the writers may have forgotten the "Vulcans think Humans smell bad" thing was mainly a problem for Vulcan women, who had a heightened sense of smell. I also think the writers may have Vulcans confused with TNG-era Soong androids given that the episode seems to think being Vulcan gives people Super Multitasking Powers. Hide contents Chapel, for instance, bizarrely insists the Vulcan mind does not require rest. And of course is rude to M'Benga and Spock in the bargain. La'an is creeping Scotty and Kirk out in the ship's bar by being a paranoid nutjob. Scotty and Kirk muse on how unnerving the whole affair is. Pike et. al. have apparently decided to remain Vulcan because that's... allowed? They're clearly mentally compromised and getting more unhinged every scene, with Pike demanding shift changes every 42 minutes and La'an apparently getting feisty about conquering space and eliminating other species. After witnessing that, Una then goes on to insist there's nothing mentally wrong with Captain Pike or the others even while they're clearly and consistently acting out of character. ... this writing is terrible. I'm not quite 25 minutes into this trainwreck and I'm ready to put this one down there in the Hall of Shame with "Spock's Brain", "Turnabout Intruder", and "Code of Honor". I am unaccountably gratified to see that Star Trek fans on social media are already calling this episode out as inherently racist in its premise. Hide contents Uhura is, meanwhile, essentially forcing Beto to adopt Vulcan values and behaviors... creeping out his sister. Spock walks in on Nurse Chapel dumping her boyfriend Dr. Korby over subspace for being human and then breaks up with Spock again (why?) because she thinks La'an is a more logical match? She then announces she's terminating all of her friendships because friendship is a waste of time. La'an, meanwhile, is trying to force Kirk and Scotty to add more and deadlier weapons to the Enterprise. Ortegas learns Uhura's manipulating her brother with mind melds to make him act more Vulcan, de facto brainwashing him into living how she wants him to. (Don't get me wrong, Beto is an absolute garbage human being whose behavior in the previous episode should see him walking back to Earth but Erica is 100% in the right to call Uhura out on this horribly manipulative behavior.) Apparently Una's been withholding the solution this entire time because she's embarrassed the Vulcan who can solve the problem is her ex-boyfriend. That might be the stupidest plot twist since Dr. Brahms found Geordi's holodeck deepfake of her. Hide contents Patton Oswalt as a Vulcan spiritualist who is also Una's ex-boyfriend... named Doug. Who has a sister named Susan and a cousin Pete? Who is really creepily into Una and so their plan to fix the problem goes off the rails because she has to pretend she's married to Spock. This is some cringeworthy-ass Twilight-tier dialog too. I am actually developing a headache watching this. Apparently Vulcans are now the kind of generic space elf that is deeply offended by the existence of spices and seasoning. I know it's a popular Tolkien-inspired elf trope, and I hate it. Vulcans are desert-dwellers. They should have a pretty refined appreciation for spices and seasonings instead of being offended by the existence of salt. Hide contents Vulcan!Pike is rather dickishly undermining his own girlfriend's attempts to rejoin the workforce. Pike and Pasalk's little tete a tete about her career inspires her to rip into both of them and be the first person in this entire episode to not give racism a free pass. She calls Pasalk out on his bigotry and hypocrisy regarding his favoritism towards Vulcans and how he's suddenly gone from disparaging Pike openly to being besties because Pike became Vulcan. From his reaction, she actually did some damage there. I'll admit, "Doug of Vulcan" is growing on me. Kind of surprising he's not in Starfleet, considering he seems to be quite the xenophile by Vulcan standards. He's a very T'lyn sort of free spirit. Either that or it's because he's the only Vulcan in this episode who's not being a racist prick. Hide contents La'an has gone full Romulan and is planning to engineer a war between the Klingons, Tholians, Orions, and Gorn for... reasons? Scotty takes La'an out with a booby-trapped console that shocks her unconscious. The episode's problem is then solved offscreen, for maximum frustration and minimum catharsis. I cannot begin to express how frustrating that is. Hide contents So, somehow Doug helped the crew get in touch with their true selves and that enabled them to turn Human again? Chapel and Uhura lament that they were absolutely awful to everyone, and Pike unfortunately makes another racist remark asking if all Vulcans are monsters instead of, y'know, apologizing for being a racist dickwhistle. Pike runs off to ensure Batel's not about to change the locks on his quarters, Uhura runs off to apologize to Beto, and Chapel rather depressedly muses on having to call everyone to apologize for what she did in her altered state. La'an needs help becoming Human again, and we get to see another flavor of racism that is also presented as inherently genetic. Apparently La'an's augment heritage ALSO make her lowkey automatically racist? So she alone decides to go crazy rampage nuts and fight Spock in her mind that turns into ballroom dancing because it turns out she's really just anxious about her relationship with her coworker. Uhura at least tries for a sincere apology. Pike is walking on eggshells and flinching at every sound in his kitchen with Captain Batel, and rightly so. He gets saved by Pasalk, who was apparently so impressed by being called out on his own bullsh*t that he wants Batel to take over his job as head of the JAG when he retires in a year. Chapel tries to patch things up with Spock and Korby. Chapel seems to be the only one who really understands what an awful person she was being, admitting that she does not deserve the forgiveness she is being shown because of her actions. La'an's episode-long freakout is apparently because she's upset that her relationship with Spock is getting too comfortable. The episode ends with Kirk and Scotty having a moment. This episode has a post-credits scene. Hide contents Which takes the form of a montage of Spock and Doug discussing various Human eccentricities like birthday parties, the "pull my finger" joke, high fives, reading speeds, the need for eight hours of sleep, fondness for cheese, horror movies, and contractions. That. Was. F***ING TERRIBLE. I have an actual headache from watching that. It really was about thirty minutes of the crew being racist for no reason. Wait... didn't Starfleet disallow Una's race from joining Starfleet or the Federation for genetic tampering... Spoiler You know... the same thing they're now doing in this episode? Or am I mistaken here/ on the wrong track/ boldly going where I really shouldn't go?
pengbuzz Posted August 29 Posted August 29 On 8/26/2025 at 10:48 AM, Seto Kaiba said: That's awful. 🤔 You should see the poster:
Seto Kaiba Posted August 29 Posted August 29 13 hours ago, pengbuzz said: Wait... didn't Starfleet disallow Una's race from joining Starfleet or the Federation for genetic tampering... Hide contents You know... the same thing they're now doing in this episode? Or am I mistaken here/ on the wrong track/ boldly going where I really shouldn't go? Yeah. While it has not always been consistently presented - e.g. TNG "Unnatural Selection", VOY "Lineage" - the United Federation of Planets does have a ban on genetic modification of sentient beings. Dr. M'Benga's violation of that ban in this episode is kind of the least of this episode's writing problems, though. Consider, if you will... Spoiler Why was it necessary for the Enterprise crew to "disguise" themselves as Vulcans in the first place? We're told point-blank at the outset that Tezaar has been in contact with the Vulcans for longer than the Federation has existed. They may not be warp-capable yet but they know warp drive exists and they know alien life exists, and the whole mission is undertaken at the behest of the Vulcans. Why the need for subterfuge? Moreover, we literally have an entire series (Star Trek: Enterprise) built around the premise that the Vulcans DO NOT share technology with "less developed" species even after they make contact. Why was Tezaar an exception? Given that this entire operation was at the behest of the Vulcan government, what prevented the Vulans from simply calling the Tezaarites up and telling them that they can't get there in time but a ship belonging to their closest allies is en route to help? Even if the goal was for the Tezaarites to never notice the non-Vulcans, why not just have Spock (a Vulcan) ask them to temporarily clear out to the Enterprise's non-Vulcan engineers can fix the issue and beam out without being seen? The entire objective of this away mission was to fix a faulty power plant. They didn't bother to send any engineers down after the serum didn't work on Pelia. The away team was the science officer and four people who are probably not qualified to be reactor technicians: the captain, the tactical officer, the communications officer, and a nurse. Why did any of those people need to go for what was strictly an IT housecall? The issue with the power plant apparently took only a few minutes to fix at most, meaning the whole subterfuge was probably unnecessary. Why does a gene therapy the Kerkhovians designed to turn Spock back into a half-Vulcan turn the rest of the crew into full Vulcans? He was as Human as they are before that serum was used to correct the damage the Kerkhovians did to him. Unlike the "disguise" serum that Chapel used in the first season to disguise the crew as Kileyans with superficial and temporary external changes, this serum turns the subject fully into another species. Vulcans are significantly different, anatomically and biochemically, from Humans. They have several organs humans don't, their hemoglobin-equivalent is copper-based, etc. This serum magically changes the crew into another species with radically different anatomy in seconds as if the only difference between Humans and Vulcans is pointed ears, eyebrows, and a bad attitude. We know from Star Trek: Discovery that even Starfleet's finest medical scanners have trouble detecting surgically altered aliens if the work is finely done, either the pre-war Tezaarites have sensor tech way beyond Starfleet's (how?!) or why was the crew planning around the possibility of having to stick around long enough for hours-long invasive medical scans? Why does the Kerkhovian gene therapy cause the Enterprise crew to behave like Vulcans raised in Vulcan culture? Vulcan logic and emotional suppression are not innate genetic properties of the Vulcan species. They are learned behaviors. Philosophies and social conventions that Vulcans are taught from a young age and must rigorously practice their whole lives in order to maintain. It's not innate, or even necessarily easy for them to do. Spock's girlfriend's entire job is literally running a prison/rehabilitation center for Vulcans who've rejected or lost their grip on their logic and their emotional suppression. Being genetically a Vulcan doesn't equate to having spent one's life immersed in Vulcan culture... but for some reason, the crew behave like Vulcans are just all "that way" on a genetic level. Likewise, mind melds are an intimate and potentially dangerous telepathic practice that requires considerable training to perform safely. So much so that melds initiated by an untrained or insufficiently trained melder can give someone a life-altering and potentially lethal degenerative neurological disorder as explained back in ENT "Stigma" and "Kir'shara". Uhura behaves like simply being Vulcan makes her a master mind melder and is able to use it to brainwash Beto. This inexplicable innate knowledge of Vulcan preferences and culture seemingly extends as far as their culinary preferences and work habits, things which are by no means instinctive in any species. Why does literally nobody attempt to keep the mutated crew for medical observation or restrict their duties while they are clearly mentally compromised? They've literally been mutated into a completely different species by improvised genetic engineering. There's no way that doesn't come with consequences due to changes in brain chemistry. But M'Benga just turns them loose. Worse, M'Benga and the others are from a civilization that banned genetic engineering precisely because it tends to create Smug Supers. Yet they ignore it when Pike and the others immediately start talking down to literally everyone as inferior including Spock. M'Benga literally trusts one of the mentally compromised crewmembers to work on the treatment for what mentally compromised them. Is he insane? None of the crew, save for Una, raise any kind of protest when Pike starts making decisions that are actively hostile to the crew's health and wellbeing including an impossible shift schedule. Una's protest goes no farther than telling Pike it's "maybe a bad idea". Nobody thinks to warn anyone that Uhura is literally brainwashing someone. Nobody calls it in when La'an starts showing an unnatural interest in the ship's weapons and starts demanding to make unsupervised changes to the Enterprise's systems. She's only stopped by a potentially-fatal boobytrap Scotty builds. Nobody seems to find Chapel's behavior alarming until she literally cuts off her social ties to literally everyone she knows, and even then they still let her do as she pleases. Somehow, the continuous stream of racist remarks from the mutated crew are simply ignored. Made worse by the fact that the very first thing out of Pike's mouth after he's changed back is another racist remark this time disparaging Vulcans. The fact that M'Benga almost certainly broke the law for this weirdly trivial away mission is a tiny, tiny problem next to the vast number of other writing problems in this episode.
Hikaru Ichijo SL Posted September 1 Posted September 1 I watched episode 6 of this season. I finally enjoyed it. Maybe because the pompous Captain Pike was not in it mas much. Also it was nice seeing Kirk and his future crew together.
Thom Posted September 3 Posted September 3 Definitely not the best of the season. SNW has done some good humorous episodes but this was clearly an example of trying way too hard. Which is a shame as, other than Mount acting way over his pompadour to be Captain Conehead and the Una/Doug-thing, there was (I think) a good story hidden inside the whole mess. I really liked Chapel's iteration, as she was not flamboyantly over the top, and I would have really liked to have dived deeper into her cutting off Kolby and her friends. Uhura brainwashing What's His Name could have floated a third of the episode with the rest anchored by La'an's decent into villain-hood. If they had done this with the intent of telling a drama rather then bending over backward to twist it into a comedy it could have been a really strong episode. Instead, it was dragged down by the weird hair transitions, the slow-mo walk and having the actual mission solved in under 10 seconds. I did like seeing Kirk again and interaction with Scotty, though his reason for being there was pretty flimsy. It seems the Federation isn't all that big anymore if the Farragut is still right around the corner. On racism, I have to say I didn't see any. To me, what they were showing was nothing more than the usual Vulcan logic-bred arrogance that we've seen all through Star Trek. They were literally stating facts that Spock was only half Vulcan, so yeah, 4.5 Vulcans.
pengbuzz Posted September 3 Posted September 3 2 hours ago, Thom said: I did like seeing Kirk again and interaction with Scotty, though his reason for being there was pretty flimsy. It seems the Federation isn't all that big anymore if the Farragut is still right around the corner. Spoiler Makes me wonder if Kirk is somehow convincing his captain to tail the Enterprise... O.o
Thom Posted September 3 Posted September 3 9 hours ago, pengbuzz said: Hide contents Makes me wonder if Kirk is somehow convincing his captain to tail the Enterprise... O.o Spoiler He might already be 'in love!'
Seto Kaiba Posted September 3 Posted September 3 (edited) 21 hours ago, Thom said: [...] It seems the Federation isn't all that big anymore if the Farragut is still right around the corner. Two thoughts on this: If you think about it, the Enterprise must be pretty darn close to the heart of the Federation in this episode. Spoiler We're told the Vulcans made first contact with Tezaar "hundreds of years ago" c.2261. We know from Star Trek: Enterprise that the Vulcans only started space exploration in the 19th century and didn't go very far out because they didn't like the neighbors and didn't see a point in exploration for its own sake under the High Command. Tezaar's star system must be pretty close to Vulcan space. Vulcan is said to be about 16 light years from Earth, so Tezaar is in all likelihood fairly close to Earth too. Purmantee III's almost certainly even closer to Tezaar than Vulcan for the Enterprise to be able to beat the Vulcans there, putting it fairly near to Earth too. If Spock can take a personal holiday on Vulcan while his ship was drydocked for repair and refit in Earth's orbit at the start of the series, it's not unreasonable for Kirk to do something similar and go to a nearby resort planet like Purmantee III. Why someone named a planet after a chain of deli restaurants is another matter entirely. Spoiler I wouldn't - and won't - credit the writers with thinking this far ahead but the planet's proximity to Vulcan and Earth could explain why they're so insistent the landing party be made up strictly of Vulcans. The Vulcans probably made first contact with Tezaar somewhere during their 200 year border dispute with the Andorians and probably "warned" the Tezaarites about other aliens being hostile with the same hypocritical half-truths that Earth Starfleet quickly saw through in the 2150s. The Federation has never really been that huge, truth be told. Spoiler Most of the planets with known distances are fairly close together. Andoria and Tellar Prime are ~11 light years from Earth and Vulcan is only ~16 light years from Earth. The official starmaps we've seen in the Discovery/Strange New Worlds/Section 31 era materials make the Federation out to be a long and thin vaguely rectangular territory sandwiched between and leaking through the gaps between the more spherical territories of other interstellar powers like the Romulan Empire, Klingon Empire, Cardassian Union, Ferengi Alliance, Gorn Hegemony, and Tholian Assembly. It's only a few dozen light years across, but it's several hundred light years long. Pretty much all the familiar star systems from 90's Trek are within 100 or so light years of Earth like Trill, Bajor, Cardassia, Risa, Talos, Romulus, Qo'nos, Ceti Alpha, etc. Given the above assumptions about the location of Tezaar and Purmantee III, they're practically in the densest part of Federation space. In DS9, Cassidy Yates's SS Xhosa is said to be traveling to "the other side of the Federation" on her run from Bajor to Cestus III, which takes eight weeks at the Xhosa's maximum warp. (The maps actually bear this out, putting Cestus III on the opposite side of the Federation's short axis, but also more than halfway down the long axis, a distance of approximately 226 light years, which can be covered in approximately eight weeks by a ship traveling at a completely reasonable Warp 8.7.) That suggests a suitably bored person could fly from one end of the Federation to the other in about 1/3 of a year. 21 hours ago, Thom said: On racism, I have to say I didn't see any. To me, what they were showing was nothing more than the usual Vulcan logic-bred arrogance that we've seen all through Star Trek. They were literally stating facts that Spock was only half Vulcan, so yeah, 4.5 Vulcans. They repeatedly disparage Spock for being half-Human and thus "not a real Vulcan", disparage the Human crew of the Enterprise for being Human, and present themselves as being inherently superior because they are Vulcan. All textbook racist behaviors. Just substitute any two real world ethnic groups in there in place of "Vulcan" and "Human" and you'll see what I mean. Batel literally calls Pasalk out at length for showing clear racial bias towards Vulcans and publicly disparaging non-Vulcans and treating Pike completely differently once he passes for Vulcan. Spock himself points out at the end of the episode that the crew's treatment of him reminded him pointedly of the bigotry he faced at home for being "only" half-Vulcan. And yeah, they try to justify their bigotry with "logic" the same way that people on Earth tried and still try to justify racism with misleading or misrepresented statistics and various flavors of pseudoscience like phrenology, but that doesn't make it not racist. Where the episode veers into bullsh*t territory is that the Enterprise crew, who were Humans mere seconds earlier and clearly remember being Human, immediately behave like they have been Vulcans their entire lives and grew up immersed in Vulcan culture and cultural biases as though these things were all programmed into Vulcans at the genetic level. That is, put simply, insane and nonsensical. Especially considering Pike and Chapel and La'an have all at one time or another come to Spock's defense when he faced bigotry for being a half-Vulcan in the past. The whole plot of this episode is pants-on-head stupid. Edited September 3 by Seto Kaiba
Hikaru Ichijo SL Posted September 3 Posted September 3 Here we go again. Episode 7 put me to sleep. I hate documentary type episodes. Not Just Trek but any show period. This show seems to be getting worse. I
Seto Kaiba Posted September 3 Posted September 3 13 minutes ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said: Here we go again. Episode 7 put me to sleep. I hate documentary type episodes. Not Just Trek but any show period. This show seems to be getting worse. I NGL, kinda with you on that one. "In-story documentary" type episodes are a hard sell even when they're well done. That one was definitely not.
Hikaru Ichijo SL Posted September 3 Posted September 3 1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said: NGL, kinda with you on that one. "In-story documentary" type episodes are a hard sell even when they're well done. That one was definitely not. I have never seen in-story documentary that i liked. Have you.
tekering Posted September 4 Posted September 4 47 minutes ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said: I have never seen in-story documentary that i liked. Have you. The Practice S02E10, "Spirit of America" is a definitive example of the form. It can (and has) been done well.
Seto Kaiba Posted September 4 Posted September 4 1 hour ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said: I have never seen in-story documentary that i liked. Have you. The original CSI had a good one, though mainly because it was self-aware enough to take cheap shots at its own medium.
pengbuzz Posted September 4 Posted September 4 2 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said: I have never seen in-story documentary that i liked. Have you. M.A.S.H.; "The Interview" (Season 4, Episode # 25). Watch it sometime.
Hikaru Ichijo SL Posted September 4 Posted September 4 (edited) On 9/3/2025 at 5:38 PM, tekering said: The Practice S02E10, "Spirit of America" is a definitive example of the form. It can (and has) been done well. On 9/3/2025 at 6:35 PM, Seto Kaiba said: The original CSI had a good one, though mainly because it was self-aware enough to take cheap shots at its own medium. On 9/3/2025 at 7:36 PM, pengbuzz said: M.A.S.H.; "The Interview" (Season 4, Episode # 25). Watch it sometime. I have never seen any of these shows. Episode 8 was another stellar example of a horrible story. I am so tired of Pike's hair. Again I like the Kirk side story far more than Pike's. I am starting to think i just hate Pike. Edited September 5 by Hikaru Ichijo SL
pengbuzz Posted September 4 Posted September 4 (edited) 1 hour ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said: I have never seen any of these shows. Episode 8 was another stellar example of a horrible story. I am so tired of Pike's hair. Again I like the Kirk side story far more than Pike's. I am starting to think i just has Pike. I agree about Pike's hair; it was better in Discovery. As for MASH; I highly recommend the show. Really good episodes, and some not so great ones as well, but overall a classic! Edited September 4 by pengbuzz
Seto Kaiba Posted September 5 Posted September 5 OK, it's here... the moment some of us have been waiting for. An Ortegas episode. We've been waiting for her to get some proper character development for almost three entire seasons now. It's about time they got around to her. Spoiler "Terrarium" We get another look at Ortegas's quarters at the start. Her Home Depot Husky brand toolchest, her model Avro Lancaster bomber and Supermarine Spitfire fighter from WW2, and some other odds and ends. They found a region of space with weird gravity waves and no clear source. One has to wonder why Ortegas felt compelled to show up to the meeting about it in body armor. Or why she was putting on said body armor in her quarters and not in one of the prep rooms like usual. Dr. M'Benga has cleared her for solo missions... but why is this a solo mission? Also, M'Benga's judgement is highly suspect after he turned four mentally compromised mutants loose last episode. If he said the sky was blue I'd expect any sane soul to ask for a second opinion. They never really establish why "every ounce counts" for the shuttle this time either. It's clearly an excuse meant to get Ortegas alone, but it doesn't seem to make sense in context. Especially since the shuttle has to be stripped down to bare essentials and they can't even send the science officer on this scientific survey mission. It just seems like another ill-considered excuse plot-type setup. Not even four minutes in, and it's incredibly obvious Ortegas is gonna get marooned. The Enterprise doesn't seem to have any problem using visuals, why is Ortegas flying instruments-only? It's nice that the writers remembered the Enterprise has more shuttles than just the Galileo for once. It's a new one this time, the Archimedes. A wormhole pops out of nowhere, and sucks Ortegas up. Oh well, bye Ortegas. You flew the ship, I guess. It dumps her in orbit of a gas giant and she crashes on some kind of moon, conveniently knocking out most of the shuttle's systems, destroying the survival supplies, and injuring her. With a reasonably level head, she sets about seeing to survival needs and macguyvers a water condenser out of cabin components before looking to the world outside in search of possible food sources. So we're doing the usual formula... Spoiler The writers remembered that Starfleet isn't supposed to know much of anything about wormholes at this point in history, so the crew recap the fact that a wormhole that's been even partially stable is virtually unknown (true until DS9) and that Ortegas could be ANYWHERE. As per the usual convention for stories like this, the Enterprise started this dangerous research while another, more important and time-sensitive mission was hanging over their heads. In this case, the urgent delivery of vaccines to Epsilon Indi III. So they can't hang about for long to look for her for very long. Ortegas also has time pressure in her side from the moon passing too close to the gas giant it orbits. Oh hey, an overt TOS reference. The ship the Enterprise is due to rendezvous with is Captain Decker's USS Constellation, the same ship and captain from TOS "The Doomsday Machine". Spoiler OK, we're kind of riffing on TNG "The Enemy" here. Ortegas's shuttle has conveniently crashed within eyeshot and easy walking distance of the only other inhabitant of that inhospitable moon, a soldier from the show's most prominent hostile power. In this case, a Gorn. They've just reversed the roles. Ortegas is the one spoiling for a fight and the Gorn is the one determined to help them both survive. Strange New Worlds's writing team have FINALLY decided to present the Gorn as a sentient species with the same intelligence and complexity as any other spacefaring race in the franchise, rather than the near-mindless murder monsters and Xenomorph expies of earlier seasons. This is much closer to the territorial but generally reasonable Gorn of TOS, and oh boy do I like it. Well, in fine Star Trek tradition that shuttlecraft is a writeoff... Spoiler Uhura's about to get a dressing down, I think. She fudged the numbers on her plan to get Pike's approval for a rescue attempt, jeopardizing the 4000 colonists waiting for a critical vaccine for the sake of Erica. Erica cobbles together a basic translator out of a tricorder, only to find the Gorn can literally understand what she's saying anyway. Erica gets over her phobia of the Gorn so completely they end up joking about their situation and Erica tries teaching her fellow castaway to play chess. The Gorn pilot introduces her to a Gorn board game too. This is actually really well done. This is what I come to SNW for. Spoiler Maybe it's just my fondness for reptiles talking, but the Gorn pilot in this manages to be almost cute in a frightening sort of way. It's like a very big monitor lizard. Reminds me a bit of my savannah monitor. Turns out the Gorn pilot's lack of enthusiasm for escape is that her injury makes her believe that she can't go home again, and Erica reassures her. Pike gets to fly the Enterprise as they attempt Uhura's rescue plan. Uhura clearly regrets fudging the numbers. The gas giant has almost 400 moons. Ortegas fumbles her rescue plan badly enough to take down the Gorn's shield and comms. She plans to set fire to part of the gas giant's atmosphere as a SOS. Uhura confesses, and Pike admits he knows and would've gone anyway. Ortegas's big plan literally set the entire atmosphere on fire as a signal, which worked pretty well. Unfortunately, La'an and the security team shoot the Gorn pilot on sight, freshly traumatizing Ortegas. The mysterious presence watching them finally reveals itself. It's the freaking Metrons. So, hey, another TOS reference. The same one from "Arena", actually. Kinda widens the existing plot hole though. Spoiler Apparently this was All A Test by them to see if the Humans and Gorn could get along. The Metrons aren't happy with the results, though. More shots of Ortegas's quarters... this time models of the Enterprise and Shenzhou, as well as replicas of the Quimbaya artifacts (sometimes erroneously claimed to be ancient airplanes). Spoiler They close on a shot of Erica's newest knickknack, the bone game piece from the Gorn pilot's game. Really well done. Honestly, worth waiting for both as a character-focus episode and an excellent reversal of course on the show's main antagonist.
pengbuzz Posted September 5 Posted September 5 1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said: Also, M'Benga's judgement is highly suspect after he turned four mentally compromised mutants loose last episode. If he said the sky was blue I'd expect any sane soul to ask for a second opinion. They never really establish why "every ounce counts" for the shuttle this time either. It's clearly an excuse meant to get Ortegas alone, but it doesn't seem to make sense in context. Especially since the shuttle has to be stripped down to bare essentials and they can't even send the science officer on this scientific survey mission. I wonder how many more of these questionable moments of "judgment" (or lack thereof) are going to be tolerated before M'Benga is either reassigned or otherwise canned? I know if McCoy started acting like this, Kirk would at the least have had severe questions about his fitness as CMO.
Seto Kaiba Posted September 5 Posted September 5 (edited) 26 minutes ago, pengbuzz said: I wonder how many more of these questionable moments of "judgment" (or lack thereof) are going to be tolerated before M'Benga is either reassigned or otherwise canned? I know if McCoy started acting like this, Kirk would at the least have had severe questions about his fitness as CMO. He's still serving on the Enterprise during Kirk's tenure as captain, in fact. He's originally a minor TOS character, appearing in one episode of the show's second season ("A Private Little War") and one episode of the show's third season ("That Which Survives"). So he was still on the Enterprise in 2266 and 2267, albeit not as the ship's chief medical officer the way he was under Pike. Edit: in some of the non-canonical expanded universe material from before the current regime, he remained a part of the Enterprise crew clear into the late 2280s, making the transition to the Enterprise-A as well. Edited September 5 by Seto Kaiba
pengbuzz Posted September 5 Posted September 5 4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: He's still serving on the Enterprise during Kirk's tenure as captain, in fact. He's originally a minor TOS character, appearing in one episode of the show's second season ("A Private Little War") and one episode of the show's third season ("That Which Survives"). So he was still on the Enterprise in 2266 and 2267, albeit not as the ship's chief medical officer the way he was under Pike. Edit: in some of the non-canonical expanded universe material from before the current regime, he remained a part of the Enterprise crew clear into the late 2280s, making the transition to the Enterprise-A as well. True, but as you stated, not as CMO.That makes me wonder if the stage is being set for his stepping down from that position.
Seto Kaiba Posted September 6 Posted September 6 15 hours ago, pengbuzz said: True, but as you stated, not as CMO.That makes me wonder if the stage is being set for his stepping down from that position. Seems unlikely at present. Maybe they'll play with that in season 5 or something. Kirk may have just preferred the doctor he brought with him, or perhaps M'Benga took a year in a shore posting like Dr. Crusher did and Kirk didn't want to reorganize the department when he came back.
pengbuzz Posted September 6 Posted September 6 1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said: Seems unlikely at present. Maybe they'll play with that in season 5 or something. Kirk may have just preferred the doctor he brought with him, or perhaps M'Benga took a year in a shore posting like Dr. Crusher did and Kirk didn't want to reorganize the department when he came back. Makes me wonder; but again, you raise some good points.
Seto Kaiba Posted September 12 Posted September 12 Strange New Worlds season 3 finale is out... "New Life and New Civilizations". Spoiler OK, the episode recap goes hard and heavy on the extradimensional Vezda aliens from "Through the Lens of Time". Then it transitions immediately and seamlessly to talk of how Captain Batel will be leaving and how everyone will miss her. We're telegraphing this outcome so hard that Samuel Morse is demanding a writing credit. Spoiler Seriously. I have not seen a set of Death Flags this blatant since I watched Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. We are at three minutes in and Pike has already done a log about how Captain Batel is going to leave to take her amazing new posting, how he's going to miss her, he's met up with her for a final 72 hours together, and is throwing a party to have every other cast member talk about Pike was inconsolable while she was away and how they're going to miss her when she's gone. On the plus side, Scotty is the latest victim of the dress uniform prank and came fully kitted out in his kilt. It's even, quite appropriately, Scott clan tartan. The same pattern that the TOS producers deliberately sought out for Scotty's dress uniform in "The Savage Curtain". Spoiler Pelia has to stop short and remind herself that she's not supposed to talk about Time Travel. She stops just short of launching into an anecdote about the time she met a time-traveling La'an in her antique shop in Vermont in 2022. ("Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow".) Roger Korby apparently can't leave well enough alone, so he apparently f'ed off to find more information about the Vezda and found a planet that worships them as gods. Yikes. Guess who's back? Back again. Gamble's back. Tell a friend. Somehow, some way, the Vezda not only magically rebuilt Gamble's body in the transporter buffer... it also beamed itself out of the buffer and f'ed off to the planet where its kind are worshipped as gods so it can jumpscare Dr. Korby in the goofiest edgelordiest outfit imaginable. In all honesty, this is supposed to be the season's Big Bad and I am absolutely failing to take it the slightest bit seriously. This is some of the worst wardrobe work since Praetor Shinzon's oil-sheen pleather onesie in Star Trek: Nemesis. This was supposed to be a serious dramatic moment. Like, it even comes with its own musical sting to emphasize the drama... but I am on the f***ing floor busting a gut laughing because this MFer's out here dressing like its first free act was to hit up a tailor shop and say "What can you do to make me look more like a Power Rangers villain?" This costume doesn't say "I am an existential threat to the galaxy". It says "I'm going to get my *ss beat by five teenagers with attitude". Spoiler So, Korby's on a planet that is conveniently both not a Federation member, pre-warp, AND friendly with a bunch of hostile powers like the Orions. Covert ops time. Ladies and gentlemen, I present a vintage film reel (colorized) of the writers for this episode doling out death flags for Captain Batel during development: I want to say they're laying it on with a trowel, but honestly at this point it's more like a bucket excavator. Pike notes that Batel didn't have to come on this mission because she has a new job to go do, and she of course reassures him they'll be back and that she thinks she needs to be here. Like she has to stop it. Because, of course, this is Star Trek the Enterprise doesn't send an elite security team on this infiltration mission. They send the ship's executive officer, chief medical officer, chief of security, communications officer, and Nurse frigging Chapel. La'an knows the Vulcan nerve pinch and somehow nobody in this busy plaza cares that she just knocked out two temple guards in full view of a busy plaza of people? Uhura very sensibly points out that the last time they walked through a suspicious alien gate they almost got trapped forever in a tesseract labyrinth. Oh for pity's sake, now we have space ley lines... Spoiler Conveniently, the Vezda escaped from the Enterprise's transporter buffer while it was directly on top of a ley line that runs directly to this new planet Skygowan. (Interesting to note this is apparently on or very near the border of the Talarian Republic from TNG "Suddenly Human". Can someone please remind the writers this is neither Hellraiser nor Event Horizon, and that regardless of the euphemisms the crew might use there is no reason for this alien to be speaking (bad) Church Latin on an alien world. Spoiler Seriously. Not only does Gamble's reanimated corpse show up to a crowd of the "faithful" looking like he's just come back from tea with Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd, he has the crowd composed entirely of aliens on this alien world chanting in Church Latin. The crew might call the Vezda demons euphemistically, but they are not literal Christian demons... and this crowd seem way too keen on mutilating themselves Event Horizon style for a guy whose only real ability seems to be not noticing how cringe he looks in that awful robe. They literally gouge their own eyes out. The classics scholar in me is offended by the Church Latin, and as someone who actually took Latin in school I can't help but notice it's not grammatically correct Latin either. Demittis tenebris is "You let down in the darkness". They probably meant "You bring down the darkness" which would be Demitte tenebram. Intertius vide clara is "Doom, See the clear (objects)." or possibly "Clara! See the dooms!". I'm guessing they meant something more like Clare intertium tuum vide, or "See your doom clearly". Does Clara see the dooms? I don't know, let's ask her. Spoiler Conveniently, the only (other) ship in the quadrant is the frigging Farragut. With James T. Kirk taking Pike's call n place of his captain for some reason? The giant stone door... or portal... or whatever conveniently has an inscription in Swahili. Conveniently with text that refers specifically to the two Kenyan crewmembers who grew up speaking Swahili: Uhura and M'Benga. "Do you believe in destiny?" Let's get Cher in here and find out if you believe in life after love, doc. Or better yet, do you believe in confirmation bias? Our gimmick is a space door that generates random fortune cookie dialog specific to the person standing next to it. Spoiler And leads back to Vadia IX. Gamble apparently watched The Acolyte while he was stuck in the transporter buffer, because the Vezda decided it's bored pretending to be a generic Christian demon from one of the The Conjuring movies and now wants to do that one force push that kicks up a ton of dust that everyone does at least once in The Acolyte. He wants to release all his Vezda buddies with M'Benga's help and take them back to Skygowan to possess the locals. So he attacks the thing keeping them sealed, and that... superimposes a sh*tty looking digital effect on Batel's eyes? Turns out she's magically connected to the Beholder statue on Vadia IX somehow. Pike reasonably points out this is kind of a bullsh*t plot twist that doesn't make sense, and Batel decides that no it makes All The Sense because being fused with Gorn DNA, the Chimera flower, and getting an Illyrian blood transfusion has made her Captain Marvel or something and now she's just straight-up positing that the Vezda are pure evil and the ORIGIN of Evil. What is it with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds's writing team and the desire to make an alien race that is capital emphasis Pure Evil? Seriously. That's not a thing in Star Trek. "Good" and "Evil" are relative. They depend on subjective morality. One culture's Good is another culture's Evil. There's no such thing as a universal definition of "Evil", never mind a universal origin of "Evil". This is turning into the plot of the 2005 Doom movie with The Rock and Karl Urban. Spoiler Batel's insane theory is that the illegal genetic modifications done to save her life magically unlocked a Genetic Memory of how to defeat Evil (the Vezda). Somehow, all the parts of every race that know how to fight the Vezda are... Humans, the Gorn, the Illyrians, and a flower? Also, how did a blood transfusion make her part-Illyrian? That's not how blood transfusions work. Honestly, Batel's reaction to this makes me understand why Starfleet of the 24th century felt the need to put a psychologist on every Federation starship. This isn't just crazy talk, this is bad superhero movie crazy talk. She is now rationalizing her inability to settle down in one place as a Great Destiny to Seal Up Evil Once And For All. 25 minutes exactly in this mess, and I am ready to be done. I should not have to pause an episode this many times to vent my dismay at the quality of the writing. Spoiler No Captain Batel, you are not The Sentry. He's copyrighted property of Marvel Comics Inc. The Vezda apparently produces 3.22 * 10^26 watts of power... marginally less energy than the Sun produces each second. A focused phaser blast from the Enterprise can do HALF OF THAT?! HALF. OF. THAT. WHAT. To put that in perspective, the Enterprise-D's state-of-the-art warp core was rated to generate 12.75 exawatts according to dialog in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Far more than the humble Constitution-class could ever hope to generate. But here's Pelia casually saying the Enterprise's phasers output 161 million exawatts. Twelve million, six hundred and twenty seven thousand, four hundred and fifty one times the output of the Enterprise-D's entire warp core. For the record, that amount of energy is equivalent to 2.6 billion Hiroshima bombs detonating every second. Scotty, you won't vaporize the temple, you'd vaporize the whole planet! And of course the Vulcan mind meld is the key to making this hot nonsense work because Mind Melds are Magic! The beam is anti-protons now too... which is a weapon Starfleet explicitly DOES NOT HAVE because they were amazed such a thing was even possible six years from now when they find the Planet Killer! Kirk and Spock are on first name basis now, and share a mind meld in the ship's bar... Kirk even jokes that this is a shitty first date. Now now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything. Spoiler Somehow, Pike and Batel are not vaporized by having what is allegedly the energy output of AN ENTIRE STAR focused like six feet away from them in the form of a beam of antimatter! Somehow, the planet does not simply explode from the insane force of this. Somehow, this makes the portal go. They get there just in time for Gamble to break out of the closet that M'Benga chucked him in. Gamble of course decides that he absolutely has to talk like a standard horror movie demon. So we've got gamble in his goofy burgundy robe and too much eyeliner vs. a generic white girl with glowing hands and eyes... oh, this is every Marvel movie! It wouldn't be an end-of-season episode if we didn't dick around with Pike's predestination paradox a bit more, would it? Spoiler So we get a vision of an alternate future where Pike and Batel get married, settle down, have a kid and a dog, and somehow Pike's training accident just never happens. He lives a rich, full life with Captain Batel only to then discover the whole thing was an illusion and Gamble has freed all the Vezda. Batel just magics them all back into the pit, gets some reverb on her voice, and delivers some dialog so cringeworthy that Gamble literally disintegrates from hearing it and Batel is apparently so embarrassed that she turns into a statue for eternity. Then Kirk and Spock play chess as new mind meld besties who know everything about each other. La'an abducts Spock, so the Kirk brothers get to share a drink and Pike drowns his sorrows with Una in his quarters to "Wait" by M83 because his girlfriend is a piece of impressionist art in a negative space wedgie for eternity. Was this episode a product of the writers strike? Seriously. That was awful. No one aspect of it is truly horrible on its own, but somehow a series of bad decisions came together to make an audiovisual mess worse than the sum of its parts.
pengbuzz Posted September 13 Posted September 13 On 9/12/2025 at 12:37 AM, Seto Kaiba said: Strange New Worlds season 3 finale is out... "New Life and New Civilizations". Reveal hidden contents OK, the episode recap goes hard and heavy on the extradimensional Vezda aliens from "Through the Lens of Time". Then it transitions immediately and seamlessly to talk of how Captain Batel will be leaving and how everyone will miss her. We're telegraphing this outcome so hard that Samuel Morse is demanding a writing credit. Reveal hidden contents Seriously. I have not seen a set of Death Flags this blatant since I watched Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. We are at three minutes in and Pike has already done a log about how Captain Batel is going to leave to take her amazing new posting, how he's going to miss her, he's met up with her for a final 72 hours together, and is throwing a party to have every other cast member talk about Pike was inconsolable while she was away and how they're going to miss her when she's gone. On the plus side, Scotty is the latest victim of the dress uniform prank and came fully kitted out in his kilt. It's even, quite appropriately, Scott clan tartan. The same pattern that the TOS producers deliberately sought out for Scotty's dress uniform in "The Savage Curtain". Hide contents Pelia has to stop short and remind herself that she's not supposed to talk about Time Travel. She stops just short of launching into an anecdote about the time she met a time-traveling La'an in her antique shop in Vermont in 2022. ("Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow".) Roger Korby apparently can't leave well enough alone, so he apparently f'ed off to find more information about the Vezda and found a planet that worships them as gods. Yikes. Guess who's back? Back again. Gamble's back. Tell a friend. Somehow, some way, the Vezda not only magically rebuilt Gamble's body in the transporter buffer... it also beamed itself out of the buffer and f'ed off to the planet where its kind are worshipped as gods so it can jumpscare Dr. Korby in the goofiest edgelordiest outfit imaginable. In all honesty, this is supposed to be the season's Big Bad and I am absolutely failing to take it the slightest bit seriously. This is some of the worst wardrobe work since Praetor Shinzon's oil-sheen pleather onesie in Star Trek: Nemesis. This was supposed to be a serious dramatic moment. Like, it even comes with its own musical sting to emphasize the drama... but I am on the f***ing floor busting a gut laughing because this MFer's out here dressing like its first free act was to hit up a tailor shop and say "What can you do to make me look more like a Power Rangers villain?" This costume doesn't say "I am an existential threat to the galaxy". It says "I'm going to get my *ss beat by five teenagers with attitude". Reveal hidden contents So, Korby's on a planet that is conveniently both not a Federation member, pre-warp, AND friendly with a bunch of hostile powers like the Orions. Covert ops time. Ladies and gentlemen, I present a vintage film reel (colorized) of the writers for this episode doling out death flags for Captain Batel during development: I want to say they're laying it on with a trowel, but honestly at this point it's more like a bucket excavator. Pike notes that Batel didn't have to come on this mission because she has a new job to go do, and she of course reassures him they'll be back and that she thinks she needs to be here. Like she has to stop it. Because, of course, this is Star Trek the Enterprise doesn't send an elite security team on this infiltration mission. They send the ship's executive officer, chief medical officer, chief of security, communications officer, and Nurse frigging Chapel. La'an knows the Vulcan nerve pinch and somehow nobody in this busy plaza cares that she just knocked out two temple guards in full view of a busy plaza of people? Uhura very sensibly points out that the last time they walked through a suspicious alien gate they almost got trapped forever in a tesseract labyrinth. Oh for pity's sake, now we have space ley lines... Reveal hidden contents Conveniently, the Vezda escaped from the Enterprise's transporter buffer while it was directly on top of a ley line that runs directly to this new planet Skygowan. (Interesting to note this is apparently on or very near the border of the Talarian Republic from TNG "Suddenly Human". Can someone please remind the writers this is neither Hellraiser nor Event Horizon, and that regardless of the euphemisms the crew might use there is no reason for this alien to be speaking (bad) Church Latin on an alien world. Reveal hidden contents Seriously. Not only does Gamble's reanimated corpse show up to a crowd of the "faithful" looking like he's just come back from tea with Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd, he has the crowd composed entirely of aliens on this alien world chanting in Church Latin. The crew might call the Vezda demons euphemistically, but they are not literal Christian demons... and this crowd seem way too keen on mutilating themselves Event Horizon style for a guy whose only real ability seems to be not noticing how cringe he looks in that awful robe. They literally gouge their own eyes out. The classics scholar in me is offended by the Church Latin, and as someone who actually took Latin in school I can't help but notice it's not grammatically correct Latin either. Demittis tenebris is "You let down in the darkness". They probably meant "You bring down the darkness" which would be Demitte tenebram. Intertius vide clara is "Doom, See the clear (objects)." or possibly "Clara! See the dooms!". I'm guessing they meant something more like Clare intertium tuum vide, or "See your doom clearly". Does Clara see the dooms? I don't know, let's ask her. Reveal hidden contents Conveniently, the only (other) ship in the quadrant is the frigging Farragut. With James T. Kirk taking Pike's call n place of his captain for some reason? The giant stone door... or portal... or whatever conveniently has an inscription in Swahili. Conveniently with text that refers specifically to the two Kenyan crewmembers who grew up speaking Swahili: Uhura and M'Benga. "Do you believe in destiny?" Let's get Cher in here and find out if you believe in life after love, doc. Or better yet, do you believe in confirmation bias? Our gimmick is a space door that generates random fortune cookie dialog specific to the person standing next to it. Reveal hidden contents And leads back to Vadia IX. Gamble apparently watched The Acolyte while he was stuck in the transporter buffer, because the Vezda decided it's bored pretending to be a generic Christian demon from one of the The Conjuring movies and now wants to do that one force push that kicks up a ton of dust that everyone does at least once in The Acolyte. He wants to release all his Vezda buddies with M'Benga's help and take them back to Skygowan to possess the locals. So he attacks the thing keeping them sealed, and that... superimposes a sh*tty looking digital effect on Batel's eyes? Turns out she's magically connected to the Beholder statue on Vadia IX somehow. Pike reasonably points out this is kind of a bullsh*t plot twist that doesn't make sense, and Batel decides that no it makes All The Sense because being fused with Gorn DNA, the Chimera flower, and getting an Illyrian blood transfusion has made her Captain Marvel or something and now she's just straight-up positing that the Vezda are pure evil and the ORIGIN of Evil. What is it with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds's writing team and the desire to make an alien race that is capital emphasis Pure Evil? Seriously. That's not a thing in Star Trek. "Good" and "Evil" are relative. They depend on subjective morality. One culture's Good is another culture's Evil. There's no such thing as a universal definition of "Evil", never mind a universal origin of "Evil". This is turning into the plot of the 2005 Doom movie with The Rock and Karl Urban. Reveal hidden contents Batel's insane theory is that the illegal genetic modifications done to save her life magically unlocked a Genetic Memory of how to defeat Evil (the Vezda). Somehow, all the parts of every race that know how to fight the Vezda are... Humans, the Gorn, the Illyrians, and a flower? Also, how did a blood transfusion make her part-Illyrian? That's not how blood transfusions work. Honestly, Batel's reaction to this makes me understand why Starfleet of the 24th century felt the need to put a psychologist on every Federation starship. This isn't just crazy talk, this is bad superhero movie crazy talk. She is now rationalizing her inability to settle down in one place as a Great Destiny to Seal Up Evil Once And For All. 25 minutes exactly in this mess, and I am ready to be done. I should not have to pause an episode this many times to vent my dismay at the quality of the writing. Reveal hidden contents No Captain Batel, you are not The Sentry. He's copyrighted property of Marvel Comics Inc. The Vezda apparently produces 3.22 * 10^26 watts of power... marginally less energy than the Sun produces each second. A focused phaser blast from the Enterprise can do HALF OF THAT?! HALF. OF. THAT. WHAT. To put that in perspective, the Enterprise-D's state-of-the-art warp core was rated to generate 12.75 exawatts according to dialog in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Far more than the humble Constitution-class could ever hope to generate. But here's Pelia casually saying the Enterprise's phasers output 161 million exawatts. Twelve million, six hundred and twenty seven thousand, four hundred and fifty one times the output of the Enterprise-D's entire warp core. For the record, that amount of energy is equivalent to 2.6 billion Hiroshima bombs detonating every second. Scotty, you won't vaporize the temple, you'd vaporize the whole planet! And of course the Vulcan mind meld is the key to making this hot nonsense work because Mind Melds are Magic! The beam is anti-protons now too... which is a weapon Starfleet explicitly DOES NOT HAVE because they were amazed such a thing was even possible six years from now when they find the Planet Killer! Kirk and Spock are on first name basis now, and share a mind meld in the ship's bar... Kirk even jokes that this is a shitty first date. Now now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything. Reveal hidden contents Somehow, Pike and Batel are not vaporized by having what is allegedly the energy output of AN ENTIRE STAR focused like six feet away from them in the form of a beam of antimatter! Somehow, the planet does not simply explode from the insane force of this. Somehow, this makes the portal go. They get there just in time for Gamble to break out of the closet that M'Benga chucked him in. Gamble of course decides that he absolutely has to talk like a standard horror movie demon. So we've got gamble in his goofy burgundy robe and too much eyeliner vs. a generic white girl with glowing hands and eyes... oh, this is every Marvel movie! It wouldn't be an end-of-season episode if we didn't dick around with Pike's predestination paradox a bit more, would it? Reveal hidden contents So we get a vision of an alternate future where Pike and Batel get married, settle down, have a kid and a dog, and somehow Pike's training accident just never happens. He lives a rich, full life with Captain Batel only to then discover the whole thing was an illusion and Gamble has freed all the Vezda. Batel just magics them all back into the pit, gets some reverb on her voice, and delivers some dialog so cringeworthy that Gamble literally disintegrates from hearing it and Batel is apparently so embarrassed that she turns into a statue for eternity. Then Kirk and Spock play chess as new mind meld besties who know everything about each other. La'an abducts Spock, so the Kirk brothers get to share a drink and Pike drowns his sorrows with Una in his quarters to "Wait" by M83 because his girlfriend is a piece of impressionist art in a negative space wedgie for eternity. Was this episode a product of the writers strike? Seriously. That was awful. No one aspect of it is truly horrible on its own, but somehow a series of bad decisions came together to make an audiovisual mess worse than the sum of its parts. Alternate title: The Worst of Both Worlds....
Seto Kaiba Posted September 13 Posted September 13 (edited) 9 hours ago, pengbuzz said: Alternate title: The Worst of Both Worlds.... Hmm... nah, I wouldn't go quite that far. It's a real stinker, for sure. I've seen a lot of fans on Reddit and Facebook saying it's the worst episode of Strange New Worlds to date and I'd be hard pressed to disagree. I think a lot of them are going too far saying that it's one of the worst episodes in the franchise, though. It has a nonsense plot that clearly sounded a lot cooler in the writer's head and it's badly acted, but it's not rife with Unfortunate Implications the way most of the franchise's very worst episodes are. Like the insane sexism of "Turnabout Intruder", the very blatant racism in "Code of Honor", the comedic handling of a sex change in "Profit and Lace", the implicit rape in the nonsense plot of "Threshold", the de facto sexual coercion of "Elogium", the normalization of racism in "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans", etc. I hope they do better with season four. I'm still intensely thankful we're getting both a season four and five because this is still hands-down the best of new Trek. Edited September 13 by Seto Kaiba
pengbuzz Posted September 14 Posted September 14 11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: Hmm... nah, I wouldn't go quite that far. It's a real stinker, for sure. I've seen a lot of fans on Reddit and Facebook saying it's the worst episode of Strange New Worlds to date and I'd be hard pressed to disagree. I think a lot of them are going too far saying that it's one of the worst episodes in the franchise, though. It has a nonsense plot that clearly sounded a lot cooler in the writer's head and it's badly acted, but it's not rife with Unfortunate Implications the way most of the franchise's very worst episodes are. Like the insane sexism of "Turnabout Intruder", the very blatant racism in "Code of Honor", the comedic handling of a sex change in "Profit and Lace", the implicit rape in the nonsense plot of "Threshold", the de facto sexual coercion of "Elogium", the normalization of racism in "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans", etc. I hope they do better with season four. I'm still intensely thankful we're getting both a season four and five because this is still hands-down the best of new Trek. Yeah... I was trying to do a play on The Best of Both Words (TNG)
JB0 Posted September 14 Posted September 14 On 9/11/2025 at 11:37 PM, Seto Kaiba said: Seriously. That's not a thing in Star Trek. "Good" and "Evil" are relative. They depend on subjective morality. One culture's Good is another culture's Evil. There's no such thing as a universal definition of "Evil", never mind a universal origin of "Evil". More importantly, if you ARE pure distilled evil, you turn into a puddle of metamucil and ink. You don't retain a humanoid form.
TehPW Posted September 15 Posted September 15 On 9/4/2025 at 5:41 PM, Hikaru Ichijo SL said: I have never seen any of these shows. Episode 8 was another stellar example of a horrible story. I am so tired of Pike's hair. Again I like the Kirk side story far more than Pike's. I am starting to think i just hate Pike. You need to at least watch MASH. It's a show that everyone on the planet can relate to, morally or humoral speaking.
TehPW Posted September 15 Posted September 15 On 9/13/2025 at 3:41 PM, Seto Kaiba said: Hmm... nah, I wouldn't go quite that far. It's a real stinker, for sure. I've seen a lot of fans on Reddit and Facebook saying it's the worst episode of Strange New Worlds to date and I'd be hard pressed to disagree. I think a lot of them are going too far saying that it's one of the worst episodes in the franchise, though. It has a nonsense plot that clearly sounded a lot cooler in the writer's head and it's badly acted, but it's not rife with Unfortunate Implications the way most of the franchise's very worst episodes are. Like the insane sexism of "Turnabout Intruder", the very blatant racism in "Code of Honor", the comedic handling of a sex change in "Profit and Lace", the implicit rape in the nonsense plot of "Threshold", the de facto sexual coercion of "Elogium", the normalization of racism in "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans", etc. I hope they do better with season four. I'm still intensely thankful we're getting both a season four and five because this is still hands-down the best of new Trek. maybe. What I hope is how they show Pike still grieving into next season...
Seto Kaiba Posted September 15 Posted September 15 16 hours ago, JB0 said: More importantly, if you ARE pure distilled evil, you turn into a puddle of metamucil and ink. You don't retain a humanoid form. Even then, if you think about it, Armus's evil is still subjective. The species that created him had to decide what traits of theirs were negative and inclining them to destructive behavior and physically removed those aspects of themselves somehow. It's narratively convenient that their definition of "evil" matched Humanity's. 55 minutes ago, TehPW said: maybe. What I hope is how they show Pike still grieving into next season... It'd be nice if they didn't have him get over it too quickly. Then again, I guess that kind of depends how much of a time skip there is between season 3 and season 4. If it follows on right away then he should definitely still be broken up about it. If there's a couple months in the middle, it'd be weird if he were still totally devastated. Spoiler 'course, it was always a foregone conclusion the Batel thing wouldn't work out. It'd be weird for him to run off to Talos IV to be with Vina after his accident if he had a girlfriend or wife waiting for him back on Earth.
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