Noticed that. I wonder if the chair gag was his idea.
It couldn’t have been spontaneous (like Boimler Rikering the saddle) because they obviously made the chair to be breakaway.
So, what’s the deal? Spock is the new Riker?
So: episode 3x05:
I’m wondering about half-Gorn Batel and whole-ancient-evil-Gamble recognizing each other. That’s gotta have some meaning that will be revealed later. Wild speculation, could the Gorn be possessed by evil and the Enterprise crew later does something to wipe out the evil, explaining why the Gorn Kirk encountered seemed to be much less mustache-twirling evil that the SNW version?
I loved the line delivered as homage to Jaws, “We’re going to need a bigger landing party.”
The young medical persons enthusiasm and focus at the beginning has me worried for life. Ensign Gamble I think.
I know its been done other places also, but the bridge was pretty close to Last Crusade, the writers have a Spielberg marathon recently?
That first act was straight out of Prometheus, too. “Let’s all do stupid shit in a dark, spooky alien structure we know nothing about. What could possibly go wrong?” Not exactly the top quality sci-fi street I’d like to see SNW traveling down, but down they went.
It was like Guinan and Q. But with more punches.
I liked the plot. Investigating ancient alien ruins is as classic Star Trek as it gets, the pacing was just way too slow on the planet. The story on the ship was much more interesting. I had been noticing that this show unlike other Trek shows has been hesitant to engage in the Red Shirt trope. Not so much in this one. The highest body count of crew members I can remember.
I like how blatantly they let Carol Kane prove she can act circles around everybody else in the cast.
Why would anything go wrong? Ancient ruins are supposed to be boring, painstaking archaeological excavations, not full of Indiana Jones, Rogue Moon, The Mummy style death traps. Except in certain genres of fiction…
I think they lost 8 in S1:4 - Memento Mori
What a missed opportunity! Instead of the prewarp crew being “the best of us” they should have been Elon Musk style oligarchs prematurely fleeing a dying world. With them out of the way (and becoming greedy space scavengers) Earth would finally be free to become a Star Trek utopia.
Captain V’Rel was a Vulcan who served as the commanding officer of the Federation starship USS Farragut during the mid-23rd century.
Over the decades, we’ve seen the writers make changes to the canon, and most fans are more or less okay with that. (The discussion above about the relationship between Trelane and Q is a good example.) Me, for instance - I’ve been a Trek fan since Sept 8 1966, and nothing ever bothered me enough to complain publicly until today.
V’rel is a Vulcan??? How can that be? What happened to Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet? This is not a minor detail, it’s a major bullet point in Spock’s CV.
It would have been so easy for her to have been from some other race. Or Memory Alpha could describe her as from a “non-Vulcan, yet still pointy-eared and slanted-eyebrow” race. (By the way, despite the makeup, I don’t recall any line in the episode that explicitly labeled her as “Vulcan”.)
What’s going on here? Did V’rel join Starfleet after Spock, yet advance to Captain crazy fast? Or do the writers have a plan to retcon Spock’s back story?
I might be wrong, but I think Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet is like a Star Trek Mandela Effect thing. It’s never explicitly mentioned in the shows or movies, but everyone assumes it. IIRC, T’Pol from Enterprise left Vulcan High Whatever to take a commission in Starfleet. And wasn’t there a TOS episode with a Starfleet ship that was crewed entirely by Vulcans?
After Discovery, it’s a little too late to be worried about that.
Spock being the first Vulcan in Star Trek was only ever Fanon not Canon. It was never stated on the show and was in fact contradicted in TOS itself when they discussed the USS Intrepid being a ship manned by Vulcans.
As for the episode, I enjoyed it even without the twist. The twist reminded of a Star Trek Novel from 20 years ago where 21st Century Earth outpost filled with brilliant scientists had its first contact be with the Nausicaans (it did not go well. They cut off the head of the person who came out to greet them). That led the outpost to degenerate into xenophobia and caused them to evolve into a hostile force the Crew had to deal with Centuries later (basically almost the exact plot of this episode).
I enjoyed the ep but of course “I have notes.”
A bit annoyed that Pike was mentoring Kirk on that empathy bit when he was quick to agree that since even the Gorn saw these aliens as monsters it was “phasers on kill then” … a bit of recognition that stopping this ship from killing hundreds of millions of individuals in their next bite alone was required, that empathy is good but being human didn’t preclude their monstrosity, would have been good.
I also think it would have interesting to have an arc of an ep or so with the one human from the ship surviving. Less preachy and more showing some messaging.
Never saw Discovery. What did they do to his timeline?
I’m generally a casual Star Trek fan, not one who has seen every episode or every show. My wife and I like Strange New Worlds because it feels like well-written(usually) standard Star Trek.
I do wonder, though. Is this supposed to be another universe separate from the original with Shatner? And separate from Chris Pine?
Is this like comic books, where multiple universes exist?
Thank you, all. I forgot about the Intrepid.
My understanding is that while Chris Pine was in another timeline, Strange New Worlds is Shatner’s universe. Everything about SNW is the backstory and development of those characters, and ultimately, will end with Paul Wesley sitting in Shatner’s metaphorical chair.
One thing I have liked about SNW is the way they have handled Kirk. Kirk of most of TOS was pretty serious and often by the book. He really only pushed back when he was dealing with clowns throwing their weight around.
The cliche of Kirk most people have in their head where he constantly breaks rules and does what he wants is more a function of the movies (especially ST III) than the original show.
This show gets that and does Kirk really well.
I like the scene where the one non-TOS character reads the audience’s mind and goes, “Gotta-deliver-this-floppy-to-Enterprise-bye”.