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The first episode is kind of a fake-out as you'd think they'd wrap up the cliffhanger at the end of the previous season where Una "Number One" Chin-Riley was arrested for being an Illyrian, who use genetic modifications that Starfleet doesn't allow.
Instead, Pike leaves the ship to go find a lawyer for Una and leaves Spock in charge. And when they get a transmission from security chief La'an indicating she's in trouble, Spock and the other main characters steal the ship like a bastardized version of Star Trek III.
Which really gets to one of my main problems with the show, mainly that it's a prequel. Including original characters like Spock, Chapel, and Uhura has this unfortunate effect of devaluing the original series itself. Because now we're saying Spock didn't really learn to be more human from Jim Kirk; he learned it from Michael Burnham and Christopher Pike and the prequel Enterprise crew. Chapel and Uhura's inclusion is less problematic because they didn't do a whole lot on the original show with those characters. Still, it increasingly makes it seem like Kirk was the coach who takes over a loaded team and wins a championship, which kind of lessens his greatness. Mini-rant over.
Anyway, I didn't really understand the whole thing with Chapel and the doctor taking some kind of drug like Venom in Batman comics that suddenly made them totally badass; it's even green like Batman comics! I'm not sure we really saw that before in any of the shows but my knowledge isn't exactly encyclopedic. I was one of those who was happy to have more TNG-era looking Klingons back versus those weird ones in Discovery. Overall I'd say this was just OK. (2.5/5)
The second episode finally resolves the Una problem. As you'd figure, it gets to be a courtroom battle. Star Trek series have done legal episodes a few times so it was not that unusual. The lawyer Pike recruits uses a clever tactic to get Una reinstated, something akin to Miracle on 34th Street. Which a really good scene might have been if like in the 1994 version one of the judges had told Una's lawyer that they really wanted not to convict Una because she's a good officer but they can't just invalidate the law because they don't like it--you listening Supreme Court? (Of course not.) Una's lawyer basically gives them that same way of being able to reinstate Una without having to rule on whether the law against augments should stand or not.
For me the problem with this episode was the lack of a real B-plot. Series like DS9 would do that a lot where there would be the main plot or A-plot of whatever big thing was going on and then there'd be the secondary plot or B-plot involving some of the other characters. Like on DS9 there might be a Bajoran religious thing for the A-plot and in the B-plot something about Jake and Nog getting into some kind of trouble and then maybe the two plots would dovetail together at the end. In the case of this SNW episode there's really no B-plot. Once he recruits the lawyer, Pike mostly just sits there watching the trial except for a couple of brief discussions about why he shouldn't testify. A couple of times they tease that La'an might find someone who leaked what Una is but that didn't really happen.
There's a nice payoff but it would have been good to involve the rest of the cast in something. (3/5)
The third episode is one of those "let's save money by traveling to near-present day" episodes. In this case, La'an finds a dying time traveler, who gives her a device. After he dies, everything changes and while she's on the Enterprise, it's Jim Kirk in charge and it's not Starfleet, it's the United Earth Forces or something like that. In a Pleasantville kind of setup, La'an and Kirk are fighting for the device when it goes off to send them back to Toronto in close to the present.
There's a little bit of the usual stuff where they have to find clothes (by stealing them whilst framing someone else) and Kirk makes money by beating people at chess, which is a good reminder for those who thought he was just the pretty boy who seduced green women and fired phasers all the time. Then it starts to get into the main plot of trying to foil an attack. Which then becomes one of those "if you went back in time would you kill baby Hitler?" things only with La'an's distant relative instead of Hitler. Some of the stuff kinda invokes the "temporal Cold War" stuff on Enterprise that my sisters watched a lot more than I ever did.
Anyway, while I mostly liked the episode it felt a bit long and there are a couple of instances where they hand wave details that are sort of unbelievable. First, La'an and Kirk have no ID and no credit cards but they can check into a nice hotel? Dumpy motels will let you pay in cash but there are no really nice hotels that would let you just pay cash with no ID and no credit card for incidentals. So how did they get in there? Scene missing! And then they just go to Vermont and hand wave it by saying they bribed a border guard. Seems a little too easy considering there was just a "terrorist" attack on Toronto. You'd think American border security would tighten in case the attackers tried to go south.
Again there was a nice payoff as La'an contacts the real Kirk and confirms that reality is back to normal. For obvious reasons the rest of the cast isn't really involved, so this time it didn't really matter. (3/5)
The elevator pitch for the fourth episode: What if there was a whole planet where everyone was like the guy in Memento? That's basically what happens when Pike, La'an, and the doctor go down to a planet called Rigel VII. Some "radiation" there causes everyone to lose their memories and so they have to create reminders for themselves of who they are and what they do and stuff. Then the phenomenon starts spreading to the Enterprise. This would actually have been a good concept for a Voyager episode because then the Doctor could have been the only one not affected and had to find a way to save everyone.
The end gives a spotlight to the annoying helmswoman but then they cheap out by not showing the ship flying through the asteroids so much as her flying the ship, which is mostly just pushing buttons or moving icons with her hand or whatever. The rest was pretty blah. Even for a Trek show I'd say the science here was pretty dubious. I mean there's "radiation" that makes you forget but if you go inside one place your memories heal? Uh-huh, sure. That's some Silver Age Stan Lee bullshit there. (Not ragging on Stan Lee but that's the kind of bullshit they did in comics back then, like the Fantastic Four being created by "cosmic rays" or Spider-Man being created by a radioactive spider or the Hulk being created by gamma radiation. This episode definitely leans into that sort of pseudo-science.)
I would say this was a pretty forgettable episode. Get it? (2/5)
The fifth episode has Spock turned into a full human on the eve of a big important meeting with his Vulcan fiancée's parents. The concept was similar to a Voyager episode where something split the half-Klingon engineer into a full Klingon and full human, which was probably better than this. There were some funny bits, but I kept thinking that the year before they did an episode where Spock and his Vulcan fiancée switched bodies so this was kind of in that same area. And then at the end Spock and T'Pring go on a break so he can make out with Chapel. Cue the Friends theme song! Ugh. (2.5/5)
The sixth episode was pretty boring. I figured it out about ten minutes in. The ship is trying to get a deuterium cloud mining station online and Uhura starts hallucinating stuff. Immediately I thought, "There are aliens in the deuterium clouds!" And guess what? There are aliens in the deuterium clouds. It was one of those things where it dragged on so long I started to wonder if they might come up with something else but nope. They mentioned the Gorn so I wondered if maybe hidden Gorn were somehow messing with people, but nope. After all the stuff with the "10-C" aliens on the last season of Discovery who communicated in some weird way, this felt pretty derivative.
The only thing that salvages this at all is the first real in-continuity appearance of James T Kirk. The first appearance last year was in an alternate future and the second appearance was in an alternate timeline. So other than a brief cameo at the end of that third episode this year, we hadn't really seen him in the main Trek reality. The big deal for fans then is that he meets Uhura and tries to help her figure out what's going on and then at the end of the episode he meets Spock and he, Uhura, and Spock are sitting together. Squee! While it's nice getting a spotlight for Uhura, this was really just too derivative. (2/5)
The seventh episode was the one that really made me want to watch this season: a crossover with Lower Decks! It starts in animation with Mariner leading the usual Lower Decks team down to the surface of a planet with a "time portal." When Boimler stands in the thing and gets his picture taken, he's beamed back in time--and into live action! To Boimler the crew of the Enterprise are legends while they just think he's weird. And you know what they say: never meet your heroes. Then Mariner also beams in to "rescue" Boimler and only makes the situation worse. It gets even worse when Orion pirates steal the gate. But of course everything works out in the end in a pretty brilliant way.
This episode was really all I hoped it would be: funny without being too stupid. They really managed to weave the two shows together without it feeling unnatural even though one is live action and one animated. I suppose some people might find that jarring, but I didn't. And there were some good messages and character development. It's too bad they didn't do a live action Rutherford and Tendi but that might have been more expensive and the actors might not have been able to do it. Still, for me it was the best of the season. (5/5) (Fun Fact: they do the credits for the show in animation, complete with a giant alien worm/bug thing biting the Enterprise's nacelle.)
The eighth episode reminds me of a meme I saw on Facebook that said how they did a comedic episode and then a violent war episode and then a full-on musical. Which is true. This is the middle of that trio. (Though really you could say the first 4 episodes are mostly serious and then the fifth one isn't serious and then the sixth is serious and then funny, serious, funny, serious to finish.) After the comedy episode this one is largely a flashback to the Klingon war that started in Discovery. It's brought on by a Klingon ambassador arriving on the ship who is known as "the Butcher of G'Jal" but has since become an advocate for peace. Those who were in the war like Ortegas, Chapel, and Dr. M'Benga are definitely not happy to see the guy again. In flashbacks we see a lot of 23rd-Century M*A*S*H* stuff and then in the present M'Benga and the ambassador have a violent confrontation that leads to the ambassador's death. The incident is quickly swept under the rug with Chapel covering for her boss. There have been whole Trek episodes dealing with murder investigations so it seems weird to deal with that so quickly. Anyway, it was a huge tonal shift and a little weird when they show the Discovery Klingons in the intro and then the revised version in the episode. It does at least tie into that first episode by talking about how M'Benga got the Venom-type stuff. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Clint Howard appears in the flashbacks as "Buck," the human in charge of the military camp.)
The ninth episode veers back to funny with a musical. Seriously. Some weird "improbability field" causes people to break into song. Even Kirk, who visits again, gets to sing a little. I suppose we're all lucky they didn't do this on TOS so we didn't have to hear Shatner try to sing. They did a good job of mixing up the song styles from more traditional to more modern. And in the end there's a big one to collapse the anomaly that even gets the Klingons singing, though not in opera like DS9. This does sort of tie up the thing with Kirk and La'an that began in the third episode, though didn't he not know about Carol Marcus being pregnant with his son? Is he going to think she lost the baby? I also wondered why during that conversation they didn't sing; I thought maybe that would be a key to it but it wasn't. Anyway, it was fun though just try not to remember that in the last episode the doctor straight-up murdered someone and now they're singing and dancing. (3/5) (Fun Fact: the opening credits theme is done in an acapella style.)
As the final episode is the final episode it's time to get serious with a bunch of action. So the Gorn are back! This time they invade a colony that is technically outside Federation space and conveniently looks like a Midwestern small town so they don't have to make as many sets. Chapel and Pike's girlfriend, the captain of the Cayuga, are there when the Gorn invade and destroy the Cayuga. So the Enterprise has to ride to the rescue, but they can't just go into orbit because the Federation is too chicken, so they have to infiltrate with a shuttle flying through the debris field. In looking around, Pike and the shuttle crew find a young engineer who speaks with a Scottish accent. Yup, Scotty has arrived. With Scotty's genius, they find a way to hide from the Gorn. Meanwhile the Enterprise figures out how to drop the saucer of the Cayuga onto a Gorn jamming tower. Everything probably could have ended fine but they introduce some complications at the end so it can be a cliffhanger. See you next year! Or whenever with the strikes going on. (3/5)
Overall I mostly liked the season. It's still not really my favorite of the new Trek shows. I like Lower Decks more because it's fun and not a prequel. It's too bad Discovery is ending in the next season because I liked the last few seasons for the most part and it had a more consistent story instead of the episodic nature of SNW, but I suppose people like that because it's like TOS, TNG, or Voyager.
Unless you count a deuterium cloud or subspace anomaly they still haven't really gone to many Strange New Worlds on Strange New Worlds. Rigel VII was pretty much it and it was one of my least favorite episodes, so maybe they shouldn't bother. The prequel stuff kinda bothers me sometimes and now we've got Scotty along with Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and Kirk. How long until we get Bones and Sulu? Maybe they can get a teenaged Chekhov in too.
Other than his relationship to the Cayuga's captain, Pike doesn't get a lot of focus in this season. Maybe since we know his future the writers don't care that much about developing him. After the trial in the second episode, Una doesn't really get much focus. Spock/Chapel, La'an, Uhura, and Dr. M'Benga get the most spotlighting in pretty much that order. The new engineer Pelia isn't given a lot of screen time, maybe since Carol Kane is old and we know she's just a placeholder until Scotty can be tapped as the chief engineer.
1 comment:
I have watched up to the forgettable episode (LOL.) I like the series, but so far not really hooked. I'm curious what the new Scotty will be like. I will get back to it eventually.
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