I am afraid to check this thread until I get a chance to watch this week's season finale.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
- Thread starter SHIELD Agent 47
- Start date
I don't know about anyone else, but I intend to be very careful with the spoiler tags. So far everyone discussing the episode has used them, so!
Yes. Please use spoiler tags for at least the next two weeks.
I just heard a complaint about the episode and realized it was a fantastic choice I hadn't given due credit for. The conflict in this episode is the fate of two characters we care about and a few dozen surviving colonists and Cayuga crew. There's the threat of a Gorn war if things go horribly awry, but very little of the episode is actually spent on that possibility. Paramount did it, they finally did a live action season finale that did not concern the fate of the universe, by focusing on people and things we care about!
And I hate the Gorn, they're just Xenomorphs with Turkana IV #### gangs, but I have to admit that saying directly "oh this is a zombie movie now" in dialogue and then living up to that in form really sugarcoated the pill.
And I hate the Gorn, they're just Xenomorphs with Turkana IV #### gangs, but I have to admit that saying directly "oh this is a zombie movie now" in dialogue and then living up to that in form really sugarcoated the pill.
We might not even get that, given how streaming services have been about cancelling shows and/or pulling them from their services entirely.
This was a ballsy move.
SNW is the most prominently featured image on Paramount Plus's poster ads at Walmart. It's gonna be fine. When SNW comes back in two or three years, if Paramount Plus has folded, it'll go to Netflix or something, it'll be fine.
So wow, that was the best season finale of Star Trek since at least the 90s(Not counting the Picard Series finale). Like this is this generation's Best of Both Worlds.
Saw the Captain twist a mile away, and why doesnt Pike just tell the folks that he can go out there and slaughter every gorn? His fate is sealed, and no Gorn is going to change it.
Scotty, oh my Q, that is freaking Scotty! No offense to Simon Pegg, but this guy nails it hard! I really hope that we get to see more of him next season.
Loved the Aliens references thrown into this episode, and love the fight with Spock vs the Gorn. Someone online pointed out that Gorn can survive in the vaccum of space, so they should have Spock just impale the gorn in face.
Scotty, oh my Q, that is freaking Scotty! No offense to Simon Pegg, but this guy nails it hard! I really hope that we get to see more of him next season.
Loved the Aliens references thrown into this episode, and love the fight with Spock vs the Gorn. Someone online pointed out that Gorn can survive in the vaccum of space, so they should have Spock just impale the gorn in face.
Incidentally, that wasn't CGI.
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Post by @forehead-alien · 8 images
💬 3 🔁 359 ❤️ 805 · I need everyone to know that the adult Gorn in the season 2 finale was not CGI, but a practical effect. A guy in a suit, just like the classic version. A huge thanks to suit p…
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Wild, I wouldn't have guessed that it was a full body suit thing (maybe a head prop, you know?)
Ok, I'm ready to watch season 2. I finished season 1 a few weeks before and it was pretty awesome.
I forget if I mentioned that ep2 with the sentient comet was weird cuz they went with something possibly mystical again (though I know science can probably explain it).
The light virus was scary but I wanted to see more of the dead folk. And I thought they'd actually show more skin, to expose themselves to more light, haha
Gorn ships was great cuz it was practically all spaceship fighting, without spaceship fighting, haha
The First Servant with the kid being fed to the machine was a bit gut churning with the reveal. It's the planet's culture. Why not? If this gets revisited, I'm not sure I want the kid saved anyhow. It's their culture. Dang.
The pirate thing was suppose to be funny ish but it was just ok with me.
I should like the fake fantasy ep but I got it in my head to be cynical about it.
I actually saw the Gorn babies ep before as a stand alone and didn't get all the fuss when I experienced it. Now with the context, I appreciate it better. I'm sad Hemmer had to go.
Loved the Romulon captain in the finale. Cool on Kirk's gambit. Great ep but I'm not too clear on the supposed right timeline.
The supposed best way was for Kirk to have shot down the assassin ship?
I forget if I mentioned that ep2 with the sentient comet was weird cuz they went with something possibly mystical again (though I know science can probably explain it).
The light virus was scary but I wanted to see more of the dead folk. And I thought they'd actually show more skin, to expose themselves to more light, haha
Gorn ships was great cuz it was practically all spaceship fighting, without spaceship fighting, haha
The First Servant with the kid being fed to the machine was a bit gut churning with the reveal. It's the planet's culture. Why not? If this gets revisited, I'm not sure I want the kid saved anyhow. It's their culture. Dang.
The pirate thing was suppose to be funny ish but it was just ok with me.
I should like the fake fantasy ep but I got it in my head to be cynical about it.
I actually saw the Gorn babies ep before as a stand alone and didn't get all the fuss when I experienced it. Now with the context, I appreciate it better. I'm sad Hemmer had to go.
Loved the Romulon captain in the finale. Cool on Kirk's gambit. Great ep but I'm not too clear on the supposed right timeline.
The supposed best way was for Kirk to have shot down the assassin ship?
Yeah, it really didn't hit for me either, like, if I'd seen Balance of Terror, I hadn't seen it recently or remembered it as particularly notable.
I can't tell if I'm really appreciating Captain Angel's master-level camp for its own right, or because it's within chiding phaser waggle range of the personas used by YouTube video essayist (and recently actor as well) Abigail Thorne. I still don't know if finding out Jesse James Keitel was herself also trans after I saw the episode made it seem less of a coincidence or more of one. Either way, I love a villain who's having a good time.
100% guarantee you that if it had been a TNG episode, they wouldn't have saved the kid, but that's also part of what I like about SNW. X ]
This is why you should never talk about things you enjoy on the internet, it can only ever ruin the fun.
It was an actual reference to TOS? that's amazing!
The fake fantasy ep looked really well made but it was time filler for the ending with the daughter. I think I would have loved it if it had a pet dragon included or something, haha.
I forgot about the Spock mind switch ep! The negotiation part was good but the punching of the prisoner person wasn't as cool, haha. Enterprise bingo was amazing! Is there an official list?
Edit - official list that can be adapted to fans, somehow? Shouting at an elevator? Water guns?
A dragon would have helped, definitely.
I disagree that it was filling any time, if anything it had too much to do to do it justice. We don't know anything in particular about this little girl who's going to die as of the beginning of the episode and by the end we have to be told not shown that she's going to go become a super space entity instead. The storybook setting is a reflection of her, and how it differs from the source material is how Mbenga recognizes his daughter in it, which tells but doesn't show us something about her as a character real quick right before we find out that she's not really going to die but is going to stop being part of Dr. Mbenga's life and story, after the first half or so when we're just getting used to the fun of seeing the cast playing these characters from a storybook without knowing anything about her influence on it at all. I find it extremely based that shipping saves the day, but even that doesn't by itself really endear me to her character.
I think there's another version of this episode where she could have been present playing one of her characters the whole time and we could have got to know her even a little to appreciate the stakes of the story, but they would have had to sacrifice five of the eleven things they were doing at the time to pull it off.
Saw the first two season 2 eps.
Couldn't we have had a unheard of futuristic musical instrument for Spock? A sonic screwdriver or something? Haha. Anyway, that was a fun bit. Th fighting drug was coooool but ooooh, glorify the violence, haha. I feel sorry for the crew of the fake ship tho.
Had a lump in my throat at the trial of una. Good trial drama. Bit too much focus on the sassy lawyer but I guess that's ok. Also facepalm on one who outed Una. Like, what in heaven's was what person thinking? Geeeeez, haha. Could have gone a better way about it. But I guess the situation needed a big splash. And we wouldn't have gotten that scene with Pike almost passing out, haha
I'm still fuzzy on the discrimination of Augmentation. What is wrong with bettering yourself? It's still hidden behind the Eugenics War, which killed 10 millions or so. I'm sad that since SNW is in the past, it still isn't resolved by DS9 with Bashir and the mutants. I hope there's an episode that deals with this.
Like, I don't even know how Una was augmented. Was it just better lungs so they can breathe the toxic atmosphere?
Couldn't we have had a unheard of futuristic musical instrument for Spock? A sonic screwdriver or something? Haha. Anyway, that was a fun bit. Th fighting drug was coooool but ooooh, glorify the violence, haha. I feel sorry for the crew of the fake ship tho.
Had a lump in my throat at the trial of una. Good trial drama. Bit too much focus on the sassy lawyer but I guess that's ok. Also facepalm on one who outed Una. Like, what in heaven's was what person thinking? Geeeeez, haha. Could have gone a better way about it. But I guess the situation needed a big splash. And we wouldn't have gotten that scene with Pike almost passing out, haha
I'm still fuzzy on the discrimination of Augmentation. What is wrong with bettering yourself? It's still hidden behind the Eugenics War, which killed 10 millions or so. I'm sad that since SNW is in the past, it still isn't resolved by DS9 with Bashir and the mutants. I hope there's an episode that deals with this.
Like, I don't even know how Una was augmented. Was it just better lungs so they can breathe the toxic atmosphere?
She has a super special immune system at least, which seems to be among other unspecified things. It's not the same for every Illyrian. Different groups give themselves different modifications depending on their environment.
By the twenty-fourth century, they've caught up with late-twentieth-century concerns, you'll remember, so Bashir makes a much more coherent case in "Chrysalis" that the Federation is worried about parents competing in an arms race to improve their children at all costs and win the meritocracy. That would create a world where Ethan Hawke can't go to space because his parents didn't have him modified as a baby to have good enough test scores to join Starfleet. That's the kind of nuanced rationalization you expect for a centuries-old institutional bigotry. But for some reason, the 23rd century doesn't seem to need the extra steps.
(Bashir isn't actually referencing the movie Gattaca, which came out a year before "Chrysalis" did in the real world, because Bashir is in a timeline where the release of Gattaca would itself have been five years after the Eugenics War, and so never happened. But I won't spoil that any further.)
Personally I felt the opposite, this episode tries to jump all the way from the Lavender Scare to Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the writing is making the awkward compromises instead of making the characters do. I would have been much happier with an ending where Una is forced to take the easy way out when the tribunal decides it finds no concrete evidence that she's been genetically manipulated - Una gets to go back to work, but at the cost of being honest about herself or exposing the hypocrisy of the rule. (Much like the Symbiosis Commission covering its ass around Joran Dax, because the appearance that the rules are maintained is more important.) Even if it was possible for real change to happen, I.e. we didn't already know the future, that change would have to take more than one boring court episode.
Sure would have been nice for this episode to answer that question! I don't think it goes any deeper than "because Khan".
By the twenty-fourth century, they've caught up with late-twentieth-century concerns, you'll remember, so Bashir makes a much more coherent case in "Chrysalis" that the Federation is worried about parents competing in an arms race to improve their children at all costs and win the meritocracy. That would create a world where Ethan Hawke can't go to space because his parents didn't have him modified as a baby to have good enough test scores to join Starfleet. That's the kind of nuanced rationalization you expect for a centuries-old institutional bigotry. But for some reason, the 23rd century doesn't seem to need the extra steps.
(Bashir isn't actually referencing the movie Gattaca, which came out a year before "Chrysalis" did in the real world, because Bashir is in a timeline where the release of Gattaca would itself have been five years after the Eugenics War, and so never happened. But I won't spoil that any further.)
I haven't seen all of Prodigy, but I understand the situation has improved somewhat since DS9. There is also another episode in SNW this season that calls forward and back around again to the idea in a somewhat optimistic way.
Personally I felt the opposite, this episode tries to jump all the way from the Lavender Scare to Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the writing is making the awkward compromises instead of making the characters do. I would have been much happier with an ending where Una is forced to take the easy way out when the tribunal decides it finds no concrete evidence that she's been genetically manipulated - Una gets to go back to work, but at the cost of being honest about herself or exposing the hypocrisy of the rule. (Much like the Symbiosis Commission covering its ass around Joran Dax, because the appearance that the rules are maintained is more important.) Even if it was possible for real change to happen, I.e. we didn't already know the future, that change would have to take more than one boring court episode.
I didn't see anyone saying this last year. I just watched the episode this morning and I didn't care for it at all.
I'd like to talk to the producers about it. Why are we doing any of this? All told, I liked Season 1. On its good days it was pretty good. On its worst days it wasn't worse than the worst of Golden Age Trek (and that is saying something. Discover IS and so is Picard). The Gorn episode was a shameless (shameful?) Alien redo event and like the storybook episode they land an impact in the final scene that once again is not satisfying.
But the Romulan episode is just totally wrong. Totally. I've been tacitly willing to overlook a lot of changed premises to do this show and make it work as a modern show and they've had a lot of successes. Captain Pike is just a totally different person with the same name. M'Benga, Chapel, and Uhura we honestly didn't know enough about to be sure. They redressed the ship and costumes and props to look better on a modern TV show and I was okay with all of that. The point, I think, was to flesh out all of these characters and show that in their own time they all did great.
The point of this episode is that Pike is not the man we need in a pinch and that luckily for the universe he got sidelined before he really screwed everything up. Almost like a time traveller went back and caused his accident to prevent everything from going wrong. Is the point of this show to glorify James Kirk? That's what I'm getting today. I loved seeing the maroon uniform! But it is confusing to my brain (admittedly autistic) to jump forward. I precariously placed this cast as what Uhura, Chapel, and Spock looked like when they were younger, but then you jump to when I knew them and they STILL look like this? And the hopeful, diplomatic style that they've been building on Pike for a season turns out to be a super dangerous thing outside its natural bounds. All through the episode I feel like the solution to this problem is not to blow Pike and a couple cadets up to save the future, but learn how to properly handle this incident, but since they also noticed that they peg on at the end that they looked at every scenario and even having Pike retire won't help, apparently, or calling in sick that week and letting the Farragut handle it. EVERYTHING other than totally sidelining Pike for good leads to Spock getting killed? Even making a change after he has left Enterprise and Spock is Kirk's first officer? I don't buy it and I don't appreciate it. Pike's accident is supposed to be a tragic accident and a heroic sacrifice to save cadets. It isn't supposed to be a power move to save the Galaxy. I don't buy it. And I don't appreciate it.
You aren't really immersing yourself in this prequel thing. Most of us knew Spock played that instrument already.