But not all the time. For every fun episode there are one or more serious episodes, such as every Gorn episode. It’s just when SNW goes silly it goes all out.
One of my favorites too. It is a lot of fun to watch.
To muddy the waters even more, Prodigy also seems to be in canon (if you haven’t watched it, it is basically a sequel to Voyager) and mentions the Cerritos by name. It seems clear it is all intended to be in the same universe.
Right. Wack-a-Mole, would you have an issue with a Lower Decks / Prodigy crossover because it would involve characters from CGI and characters from more cel-like animation?
It’s not a “cartoon universe.” It’s the same universe as all the other trek shows. But yes, it is real.
Right.
Totally fine.
That’s always been the case.
One of the brilliant things about Lower Decks, imo, is that all of its silliness and nonsense is based on long-established Trek silliness. They’re not conjuring up just any old nonsense. At most they’re reasonably extrapolating from the nonsense that came before them.
Trek has always been very good at doing nonsense and then completely forgetting about it in all future episodes and shows. But Lower Decks is primarily about what things look like when every single bit of Trek silliness is not only remembered, but respected as foundational lore.
Lower Decks isn’t just canon. It’s the most canon and most internally consistent series in the history of the franchise.
Let me ask another question - could you accept continuity between a movie and a book? Even though one is a world made of images and sounds while the other is a world made of words on pages?
That was a fun (and ridiculous) discussion!
I wonder if different actors playing the same role is similarly confusing. Does having a different Spock actor pull them out of suspension of disbelief?
I found that pretty racist. “Vulcans and one half-breed to beam down.”…i guess with some Head Canoning I can say “OBVIOUSLY given McCoy (And The Savage Garden), peoples sensibilities have changed and people arnt so sensitive about racist comments.”
Like it or not, Vulcans have always been racist assholes.
And Spock has consistently reffered to himself as ‘half human/vulcan’
So I’ve been very skeptical of nu-Trek for some time (by which I mean anything after the end of Voyager), but I decided to finally subscribe to Paramount and give Strange New Worlds a try, because I heard there was an episode that was essentially an adaptation of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin, and since that’s one of my favorite short stories of all time I wanted to see how they handled the subject matter.
The episode in question is “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” from season 1. I watched it blind without having seen any of the rest of the show, and these are my impressions.
I liked it. The guy playing Spock feels a little dry, but he doesn’t get much screentime in this episode. Pike is perfectly cast, and speaking as a 100% straight man he looks absolutely dashing - he’d have made a great leading man in the '60s. Uhura and Dr. M’Benga both got some pretty good screen time in this episode, and the whole thing with him keeping his daughter in the pattern buffer so her disease won’t progress is both tragic and inspiring. Uhura figuring out that the attackers are an offshoot of the Omelas people via linguistic analysis was a really nice touch. The officer who’s bossing Uhura around in this episode is a type of aggressive hardass you don’t really expect to see in a Federation bridge crew. Reading Memory Alpha, I think she’s supposed to be a descendant of Khan? I guess that would explain the hardass-ness. The set design and soundtrack do a good job of emulating the original series while looking much more realistic than the cheap sets they used back in the day, though it’s still jarring to see starships flying around freely in the outer space shots when I grew up with those practical effects shots of the Enterprise miniature slowly moving to the right.
The execution of the Omelas plot I thought was a little lacking. Perhaps it’s because the original story is so old now, and the “alien culture that sees things humans find abhorrent as social goods” has been done in Trek and Trek-like shows so many times, that even if I didn’t know going in, I probably would’ve figured out by the second act that “They’re gonna sacrifice the kid, aren’t they?” There were points when I found myself visualizing how this story would’ve played out if it had been made for TOS in the '60s, and I think that show would’ve been stronger - it would’ve felt more earnest and less cynical, and the slightly-campy dramatic style of the day would have been better suited to the material. I don’t think they really did a good enough job of establishing why their society is dependent on an ancient alien machine that has to be powered by an innocent child, and it seemed pretty arbitrary that Number One wasn’t able to hail Pike and tell him what was going to happen.
The one place where I thought they really excelled was with the kid’s father. He’s torn between his love for his son, his duties as a doctor, and the role that society has placed on him. He’s willing to ally with hostile defectors (presumably the ones who walked away) and endanger his entire society to try and save his son, but at the same time he’s afraid and/or unwilling to ask the Federation for help. He wants to help M’Benga with his daughter, but at the same time he doesn’t seem to want the Enterprise to know how advanced their tech really is. I think he’s ashamed of his own people and doesn’t want the Federation, and by extension the rest of the galaxy, to know what they’ve been doing for who-knows-how-long in order to keep living their lives of plenty. At the end of the episode, he decides to go with the defectors and leave his people behind, because he can’t bear to live with himself as a part of that society knowing that his son had to be sacrificed for it to continue.
Overall, as a story in this particular vein, it wasn’t as good as “Believers” from Babylon 5, or “About a Girl” from The Orville, but it was definitely a solid hour of TV and at least a solid B by classic Trek standards. I think I’m going to have to watch the rest of the show now.
It’s a subjective take to be sure. As it will be for everyone. I think that they did a good job. It is in the Trek tradition to tackle moral and ethical gray areas. That they even went there is proper Trek.
Of course YMMV…that is what makes it good.
While Strange New Worlds probably dances back and forth across the line between “playing it safe” and “return to form” way too often, I think it’s on the whole very solid Trek that gets downright delightful when it stretches and takes chances.
Just like Lower Decks, though obviously to a much lesser extent, SNW isn’t afraid to lean into the deep silliness woven throughout Trek’s canon. That’s what saves it from being a boring “let’s just reheat the leftovers for dinner” kind of show.
This pair is for me, the best Trek since original flavor. Strange New Worlds feels the most like TOS and Lower Decks is just fun and enjoyable and a nice view of not the best ship in the fleet. Probably why Deep Space Nine was my next favorite.
Voyager had some interesting concepts, but too much Lost in Space/Gilligan for me, I guess.
The big problem with Voyager was that they were afraid to lean into the original central concept of a lone ship, lost far from home, with dwindling resources forcing them to make serious compromises. It too quickly became just another ST show, with the ship having pretty standard plots of the week, with occasional nods to being stranded.
Just got to the season 1 finale. As a remake of “Balance of Terror” it’s pretty dang good, and I loved the voice cameo from Scotty.
The actor playing James T. Kirk looks nothing like William Shatner, but he does look like he could be the brother of the actor playing Sam Kirk. That’s a nice touch.
Addendum; maybe this was discussed back when this episode first aired, but the reference in the title doesn’t quite sit right with me. In Arena, Kirk showing “the advanced trait of mercy” to the Gorn is what leads the Metron to spare both their races, but here Pike’s decision to do the same has the objectively worse outcome.
I guess the moral of the story is supposed to be that mercy is a double-edged sword?