Ah, OK. Yeah, that makes sense. The (totally earned!) confidence they’ve been showing this season has been a real sight to see.
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Hype Train To the Stars
- Thread starter WisteriaHysteria
- Start date
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- star trek
Ah, OK. Yeah, that makes sense. The (totally earned!) confidence they’ve been showing this season has been a real sight to see.
I'm also catching up. I watch on disc, so I'm well behind the streaming release schedule.
I liked Enterprise Bingo. I was less pluses by the body swap. Having two people who control their emotions body swap was an odd choice to me. I would have preferred swapping two characters with greater personality differences.
I like the show. Does anyone know if the second Gorn episode was intentionally an homage to Alien? Seemed like a lot of similarities: crashed ship with dead crew, fast growing creature and iirc acid spit or blood.
The finale was good, but possibly my least favourite episode of the season? That's more a testament how this season has been straight bangers, though. Loved how punchy the shot of the saucer crashing through that jammer was, and I'm also a real big fan of their Scotty.
Absolutely, yes, but, bizarrely, the first game specifically, not the remake.
Pretty good finale. Not as strong of a banger two-parter like some other season finales in the franchise but pretty good nonetheless.
Has this been officially renewed for a third season? Because if it's not hoooooo boy.
Also there goes my pet theory that every season would bring in a new Engineer and we keep expecting it to be Scotty and it never is and only in the season finale does he show up but just as another voice cameo. Honestly I'm happy to be wrong there.
Has this been officially renewed for a third season? Because if it's not hoooooo boy.
Also there goes my pet theory that every season would bring in a new Engineer and we keep expecting it to be Scotty and it never is and only in the season finale does he show up but just as another voice cameo. Honestly I'm happy to be wrong there.
Oh yeah, extremely! Pretty much every interaction in that setting really.
Also WHAT, I was blithely assuming that this was just a two-part finale, y’all are telling me we have to wait til next season for this? Gahhhhhh.
8-year-old me is laughing.
(Or maybe 9-year-old me? BoBW is the more obvious analogue, but for whatever reason, I remember the wait for Redemption part II being way less bearable for your JBear.)
They announced it was renewed for S3 long before S2 came out. But production was halted indefinitely because of the writer’s strike, so y’all have to wait at least a year after the writer’s/actor’s strike has concluded before you can see S3.
They were smart to make sure all the characters in peril were *not* the characters who were regulars on TOS
Pretty mid ep for the finale. The Gorn are not the most exciting enemies when you get them out of their ships, since they're just xenomorphs again.
The light-based communication stuff seemed at least a bit more interesting, wonder if that'll elevate the story somewhat when part two hits.
The light-based communication stuff seemed at least a bit more interesting, wonder if that'll elevate the story somewhat when part two hits.
I appreciate what they're doing. I understand the disappointment here? Like, they're playing with scary-movie tropes, but it's not actually that scary. Part of that is because of the prequel nature of the show, we know most of these characters will be safe and not actually die. A big part of a successful scary movie the peril and threat of death feeling real. That's not really something SNW can help by nature of its place in the timeline and how faithful it tries to be.
But - and maybe this is me giving the writers too much credit - I think a big part of these Gorn episodes is that they work on a deconstructive level? Like, the plot in the Alien movies only ever work because nearly everyone in the settings are incredibly stupid/incompetent. And really, that's just most horror in general. Like, how many zombie movies happen where the only reason the main characters get screwed because there's that one asshole who hides that they were bitten? That kind of plotting can't work in a Star Trek show, especially when Star Trek as an ethos has far more faith in the core nature of humanity than most horror things do. These characters are all the best of the best, with (mostly) impeccable moral compasses. Things are not going to feel all that scary and hopeless when we're genre savvy and know that they'll find a way to get out of this problem just like the hundreds of others they've gotten out of before.
I agree that this doesn't follow the Alien/Aliens model to the T, which is good. Though I think most of the cast in Alien/Aliens behaves rationally (excepting the bad guys), their plans and reactions are very survival driven. The space truckers want the thing out an airlock, the marines want to blow up the colony. Both of those are very not-Starfleet ways of dealing with the unknown.
A thing I like that they're doing in the finale, and in the other Gorn eps, is making them genuinely "monsterous" in how they cull and breed using sentients as cattle. This is just not something that can ever be tolerated by or within the Federation... the way they run their society requires prey, and even the klingons have found more civil ways to satisfy their militaristic thirst.
I am happy that the crew has settled into a "just kill all of them" consensus to these horrible-ass space monsters. The conflict here is in how curious Pike and the crew will continue to allow themselves to be: Why do they do this? What drove them here? Was it the solar flare, or are they expanding militarily? The Federation fears the military possibility enough that it now colors how they're looking at this. I like where that puts the characters. They are not at all inclined to take a sober look at this situation, one of their very own was killed by these things. It reminds me how the bugs in Starship Troopers were technically reacting to colonizing efforts by the fascistic humans, and how that fact was quickly buried in the propaganda.
I expect and hope that part 2 is going to add a lot more nuance to this situation, because it's potentially more interesting than a bug hunt.
A thing I like that they're doing in the finale, and in the other Gorn eps, is making them genuinely "monsterous" in how they cull and breed using sentients as cattle. This is just not something that can ever be tolerated by or within the Federation... the way they run their society requires prey, and even the klingons have found more civil ways to satisfy their militaristic thirst.
I am happy that the crew has settled into a "just kill all of them" consensus to these horrible-ass space monsters. The conflict here is in how curious Pike and the crew will continue to allow themselves to be: Why do they do this? What drove them here? Was it the solar flare, or are they expanding militarily? The Federation fears the military possibility enough that it now colors how they're looking at this. I like where that puts the characters. They are not at all inclined to take a sober look at this situation, one of their very own was killed by these things. It reminds me how the bugs in Starship Troopers were technically reacting to colonizing efforts by the fascistic humans, and how that fact was quickly buried in the propaganda.
I expect and hope that part 2 is going to add a lot more nuance to this situation, because it's potentially more interesting than a bug hunt.
Tfw it’s a T’Lyn episode
Edit: I don’t know how to feel about Kayshon doing a Naruto-run
Edit2: I like to imagine Worf running holistic wellness exercises with his security team and I’m pretty sure that’s the joke?
Edit: I don’t know how to feel about Kayshon doing a Naruto-run
Edit2: I like to imagine Worf running holistic wellness exercises with his security team and I’m pretty sure that’s the joke?
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@WisteriaHysteria I think you got your Trek threads mixed up
Thread mixed up confirmed. Points all still stand. Go catch up with LDS! It's great!
Is LDS the official abbreviation for Lower Decks, then?
I should go back and watch it now that i've watched Lower Decks
So hey this is back. Two episodes aired this week. First one was the second part of Hegemony, a cliffhanger we've been hanging on since (checks notes) 2023?! Yeesh, does anyone even remember what happened?
Something something lizard men? Scotty finally showing up? Relationship drama between Spock and Chapel? Something along those lines.
Anyway, things are resolved and everyone is fine. Hooray!
The second episode is a good ol Trek mainstay, the crew is visited by an all powerful trickster. But which one? Q? Or, given the timeline, Trelane? Welllllll...........
Anyway, I have a hunch next week's episode will be Ortega centered.
Something something lizard men? Scotty finally showing up? Relationship drama between Spock and Chapel? Something along those lines.
Anyway, things are resolved and everyone is fine. Hooray!
The second episode is a good ol Trek mainstay, the crew is visited by an all powerful trickster. But which one? Q? Or, given the timeline, Trelane? Welllllll...........
Yes.
Rhys Darby shows up to play the omnipotent imp this time around, and though he's never named more than enough hints in episode are given. At first he seems very Trelane-ish, down to his theatrics and even his foppish dress and speech. He even has a glowing energy orb parent show up at the end to chastise him.
But then you hear the parental orb is voiced by John de Lancie.
And finally, the producer confirms that the character is both Trelane and Q, or rather, Q's son. The one from Voyager.
I.... am not sure how I feel about that. I think it's fine that there are multiple types of omnipotent tricksters out there, Trelane didn't need to be a Q, much less one we've already met. But what's done is done I guess.
Rhys Darby shows up to play the omnipotent imp this time around, and though he's never named more than enough hints in episode are given. At first he seems very Trelane-ish, down to his theatrics and even his foppish dress and speech. He even has a glowing energy orb parent show up at the end to chastise him.
But then you hear the parental orb is voiced by John de Lancie.
And finally, the producer confirms that the character is both Trelane and Q, or rather, Q's son. The one from Voyager.
I.... am not sure how I feel about that. I think it's fine that there are multiple types of omnipotent tricksters out there, Trelane didn't need to be a Q, much less one we've already met. But what's done is done I guess.
Anyway, I have a hunch next week's episode will be Ortega centered.
I feel great about it! It’s been a long standing thing, among fans and in extended fiction, since TNG began. When Roddenberry created Q, his own writer’s room was just like, “wait, why are we just doing Trelane again?” It’s been my head canon for a long time, that Trelane is Q Jr, and the reason why he went to go mess with Kirk was because he wanted to see Icbeb’a hero and size him up.
So this was fun for me. I think my biggest criticism of that episode was simply that he didn’t get enough screen time and should have been allowed to do much more. Hopefully they bring him back again before the show’s finale.
If they brought on Rhys Darby's Q Jr for 30 seconds at the beginning of the episode to do a drive-by pronk the SNW crew in the same way, nobody would so much as bat an eyelid. Yeah, that's not how genetics work IRL. It's a flaw of the episode, but the rest of it is fun so I don't particularly care too much. I would classify this episode in the same realm as "Genesis" from TNG, or "Threshold" from VOY. Which is to say, dumb premise, but very fun episode that people who take things way too seriously obsess over for negative reasons and get stuck in their craw.
I actually think this episode does the opposite of genetic essentialism. Everyone was given the exact same gene therapy, and it manifested in each person in clearly different ways, based on deep seated parts of their core personalities. This episode was essentially like getting the crew plastered off of booze to observe as the dark parts of their personality as they came out due to the lack of inhibitions. I thought that was actually kinda interesting/clever in that respect. And even if you set that aside, it provided both Spock and Patton Oswald's character as a grounded counter-argument -- that this isn't remotely how all Vulcans are.
Going back to last week's episode, I didn't really enjoy it that much, mostly for its intentional aesthetic decisions. But it was an interesting episode nonetheless. It was a very open takedown of common internet fan criticisms of Star Trek/Starfleet. But done in a very logical, ethical, and to be frank, overly considerate and empathetic way. A well written thesis does not aim for a specific conclusion. It looks at all of the evidence and arguments presented in good faith, does an examination of what is true and useful, and then synthesizes the conclusion based on the evidence and repeated reexaminations. And that is what "What Is Starfleet" does. It presents a question, "Is Starfleet is a bad military?" in the form of Beto's biased reporting, and the examination of a tough moral quandry. But through the course of the episode, we see that his assumptions are either wrong, or overly reductive. And the conclusions he jumped to were wrong as well. I actually thought it was a very deeply considered episode, including Beto's agenda-driven "documentary". The only thing that kept me from truly enjoying it was the way it was filmed. Which actually served an important plot function and was a very carefully chosen decision. It just turned out that all those aggressive/confrontational camera angles was just really not fun to visually look at for an hour.
Welp. They finally gave Ortegas an episode, and it was pretty good
I'm a little conflicted on this one... overall, I loved it, Terrarium one of my favorites of the season. I have wanted a solo Ortegas ep for the whole run of the show, and I absolutely love every time Trek does Enemy Mine. But man, that ending, is so bad and cheesy, ugh.
Ugh. Really soured me on the end of the ep. Otherwise, loved it a lot.
\\\All the practical stuff about Ortegas macgyvering together gizmos to drink her own piss, her talking to herself to not go crazy, wandering a dead, horrible moon, set upon by monster centipedes, I loved it. This show looks great and everything, particularly the millipede she bites into, looks fantastic and groady and evocative. I also am a big fan of the decision to have her encounter a wounded, non-xenomorph Gorn. The device she rigged up to give Yes/No answers was a lot of fun, I wished they'd gotten there sooner, because the scenes of them just talking were quite good. Trek putting in the talk! Always good!
Then we have perhaps the biggest 11th-hour fumble since Zebulon showed up in the last minute of *Future Imperfect*: A fucking energy being did this? He looks dead in the camera with his intentionally doofy costume and explains that this was all an experiment in this over-the-top "you're supposed to hate me because Kirk hates us later on" voice? Because "it's from Arena"? And they kill the female gorn because it would be too hard to figure out what happens next? Are you shitting me with this?
I guess I'm happy Ortegas reacts realistically and appropriately, telling him she does not give a fuck what he thinks and that he's a ghoul, but like, why have it in the episode at all? Especially if the character is not going to be IN THE EP until the last minute? Ugh. Could not believe it.
Also believe killing the gorn was a lazy idea but I guess I'm at least happy it was La'an who did it, since it is in-character she would shoot on sight, and it presents some possibly good drama between Ortegas and La'an, two of the strongest characters on the show.
Just take the entire Metron element out! You don't need to include them! All the inexplicable things that happen can just be explicable or improbable!
Then we have perhaps the biggest 11th-hour fumble since Zebulon showed up in the last minute of *Future Imperfect*: A fucking energy being did this? He looks dead in the camera with his intentionally doofy costume and explains that this was all an experiment in this over-the-top "you're supposed to hate me because Kirk hates us later on" voice? Because "it's from Arena"? And they kill the female gorn because it would be too hard to figure out what happens next? Are you shitting me with this?
I guess I'm happy Ortegas reacts realistically and appropriately, telling him she does not give a fuck what he thinks and that he's a ghoul, but like, why have it in the episode at all? Especially if the character is not going to be IN THE EP until the last minute? Ugh. Could not believe it.
Also believe killing the gorn was a lazy idea but I guess I'm at least happy it was La'an who did it, since it is in-character she would shoot on sight, and it presents some possibly good drama between Ortegas and La'an, two of the strongest characters on the show.
Just take the entire Metron element out! You don't need to include them! All the inexplicable things that happen can just be explicable or improbable!
Ugh. Really soured me on the end of the ep. Otherwise, loved it a lot.
I didn't have a problem with any of this really. They spent the entire episode hinting a non-magnanimous, higher force was at play here from the very beginning. From describing the impossible scenario that was unfolding, to Ortegas repeatedly spotting an energy-being in the sky watching her. To me, it was more than sufficiently telegraphed ahead of time so that when it went down, I was like, "Oh, that makes sense," vs any other emotion. And that's before you get to the fact that the entire season's ongoing theme has been about godlike entities messing with the crew. I don't blame ya for feeling like it's a cop-out, because it kinda is. But it's a copout designed to make the show fit firmly into canon, as well as bridge the TOS and SNW versions of the Gorn which I appreciate a lot.
All of it felt very well considered and thought out. Which is ironically more than I can say for the setting. A planet orbiting so close to a gas giant that it brushes the atmosphere of said gas giant is as impossible as it is ridiculous. The gravity of the gas giant would rip the moon apart if it orbited that closely. And even if it didn't, the radiation of the gas giant would have fried them both alive. But this is Star Trek and the realism of the setting has never been a high bar. Plus there's space-magic involved so w/e.
This show cannot be afraid of tip-toeing around TOS conflicts if they actually want to tell some good dramatic stories. The end of this ep really torpedoed an otherwise great concept out of fear of some fans complaining about an inconsistency with Arena, and it's just like, come on guys. Tell the story as best as it can be, all the canon stuff are nice-to-haves, secondary to that.
If we're meant to take the Metrons as an important part of the story, then the story of this ep is, what, that Ortegas and the gorn were screwed with by a god-like entity, but survived it? As opposed to the Enemy Mine story of Ortegas and an enemy combatant putting everything aside to survive together. It's such a cop-out to pull us away from the interesting story to tell us, no, actually, this is about the Metrons, they're at it again. Bleh.
We have put up with god-entity stories in the past because sometimes they result in some decent character work - to take the Q as an example, most Q episodes aren't great, but there are ones like Tapestry or Deja Q or All Good Things that use him as a shortcut to put Picard into an interesting situation. Arena itself is a good episode, and they are placed there by god-aliens. This episode did not need that, it certainly didn't need the distraction.
Sometimes I hear fans offering "well this might have appened in TOS" as a blank check to get away with lazy and bizarre writing like this. That works for little things, it doesn't work when a good story is made less so for it.
If we're meant to take the Metrons as an important part of the story, then the story of this ep is, what, that Ortegas and the gorn were screwed with by a god-like entity, but survived it? As opposed to the Enemy Mine story of Ortegas and an enemy combatant putting everything aside to survive together. It's such a cop-out to pull us away from the interesting story to tell us, no, actually, this is about the Metrons, they're at it again. Bleh.
We have put up with god-entity stories in the past because sometimes they result in some decent character work - to take the Q as an example, most Q episodes aren't great, but there are ones like Tapestry or Deja Q or All Good Things that use him as a shortcut to put Picard into an interesting situation. Arena itself is a good episode, and they are placed there by god-aliens. This episode did not need that, it certainly didn't need the distraction.
Sometimes I hear fans offering "well this might have appened in TOS" as a blank check to get away with lazy and bizarre writing like this. That works for little things, it doesn't work when a good story is made less so for it.
Nah, I respectfully disagree with all of that. And honestly question why you keep watching this show haha. You seem to only ever have bad things to say about it so I dunno why you keep going.
S3 finale was pretty decent. I thought the internal logic of the episode was a little slipshod, but nothing too egregious and distracting from the really good emotional beats/character moments. Pike getting his own mini-Inner Light was a good sequence, and Erika observing Kirk & Spock's instant chemistry with a wry look as an audience surrogate killed me. The finale itself felt like it could have been a series finale if it needed to be, and I feel like that was an intentional act.
Overall the season was a bit uneven and not as successful as the first two, but still good and enjoyable TV. I'd chalk most of that up to the one-two-three combo of the Writer's/Screenwriter's strikes and the Paramount sale all weighing heavily on the production, but who knows. It'll be very interesting to see where the show goes from here. It's got 1.5 seasons left. And who knows how Skydance will handle this show, and the rest of nuTrek. Esp since Alex Kurtzman's contract expires next year.
S3 finale was pretty decent. I thought the internal logic of the episode was a little slipshod, but nothing too egregious and distracting from the really good emotional beats/character moments. Pike getting his own mini-Inner Light was a good sequence, and Erika observing Kirk & Spock's instant chemistry with a wry look as an audience surrogate killed me. The finale itself felt like it could have been a series finale if it needed to be, and I feel like that was an intentional act.
Overall the season was a bit uneven and not as successful as the first two, but still good and enjoyable TV. I'd chalk most of that up to the one-two-three combo of the Writer's/Screenwriter's strikes and the Paramount sale all weighing heavily on the production, but who knows. It'll be very interesting to see where the show goes from here. It's got 1.5 seasons left. And who knows how Skydance will handle this show, and the rest of nuTrek. Esp since Alex Kurtzman's contract expires next year.
Currently, the show is ending after Season 4 with a "5th Season". The fifth season is only going to have 6 episodes instead of the full 10.