In many ways, this is a historic episode of Strange New Worlds, as we get two first meetings between characters whom we know will become very dear to each other in the future history of this fictional setting. And there’s another first meeting between characters that will likely have a tiresome segment of the fanbase once again screaming “ALTERNATE TIMELINE!” at the tops of their lungs because they don’t understand how fiction works.
What’s great about it, though, is that these things happen in what is pretty much just a run-of-the-mill Star Trek episode. Which is totally fine.
The meetings all involve James T. Kirk. Though this is Paul Wesley’s third appearance as the younger of the Kirk brothers after “A Quality of Mercy” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” it’s his first (substantial) one as the one we know from this timeline. The Enterprise and Farragut are both involved in getting a deuterium collecting station up and running inside a stellar nursery. Said station is horribly behind schedule, and engineers from both ships are sent over to help the station crew.
For his part, Jim is about to be promoted to first officer of the Farragut. He comes over to Enterprise to say hi to his brother. And here we get something SNW can give us that the original series never really could (because dramatic adventure TV didn’t do that sort of thing much in the 1960s), which is dig into backstory.
Jim has risen to the rank of first officer faster than anyone in the fleet since George Samuel Kirk Sr. on the Kelvin. Meanwhile, George Samuel Kirk Jr. is still a lieutenant in the sciences, and apparently the elder Kirk doesn’t think that’s all that great. The tension between Wesley and Dan Jeannotte is very nicely played, as Jim doesn’t see what the problem is, and Sam very obviously feels the weight of parental disapproval that’s sailing right over Jim’s head.
After Sam stomps off in a huff, Jim goes over to talk to Uhura, who pretty much blows him off. Uhura has been hearing weird noises, and also hallucinating a decomposing Hemmer (a welcome return from Bruce Horak, both as Uhura’s hallucination and in footage of Hemmer showing Uhura how to recalibrate stuff). When she leaves the bar, she has a much nastier hallucination involving a whole lot of dead people, and it ends with her being attacked by an image of herself, against whom she defends herself.
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Except in reality it’s Jim, checking on her to make sure she’s all right, and getting a bloody nose for his trouble. They go back to Uhura’s quarters to fix his nose, as going to sickbay would require reporting officially that she assaulted a superior officer, something neither Jim nor Uhura want to do.
At first, it’s believed that Uhura is suffering from some deuterium poisoning, combined with her not sleeping very much, as she’s been overworking. But then on the station, Pelia discovers that the reason why the station has been delayed in coming online is because of sabotage.
The saboteur is one of the station crew, Lieutenant Ramon (Michael Reventar). He’s also been hearing the weird noises and hallucinating just like Uhura, but he’s been hearing it for longer and it’s been causing him to try to keep the station from coming online.
It isn’t until after Ramon does some serious damage, killing himself in the process, that Uhura is able to figure it out: There’s a life form inside the deuterium that’s being killed by the mining process. Uhura’s hallucinations all relate to death, with an emphasis on Hemmer (though she also hallucinates the death of her family in the shuttle accident, as established back in “Children of the Comet“). When, at Uhura’s urging, the Enterprise and Farragut destroy the station, the image of Hemmer changes from that of a decomposing one to what Hemmer looked like alive—and smiling.
During this process, Jim meets Pike, and this is the “OMG, THEY’RE BREAKING CANON, HOW DARE THEY?” moment. In “The Menagerie,” Jim said that he first met Pike when he took over commanding the ship from him. This violates that, technically, but it’s one line in one episode. Trek has always revised itself, as Captain James R. Kirk of the UESPA ship Enterprise and his Vulcanian first officer Spock can attest. Is it worth twisting the storylines into knots to keep Chris Pike and Jim Kirk from meeting on SNW to satisfy one line of dialogue? Obviously, the producers of this show don’t think so, any more than the producers of Star Trek Generations thought it would be worth not having James Doohan appear in the prelude of their movie to satisfy one line of dialogue from TNG‘s “Relics” when Scotty thought Kirk was still alive. EDITED TO ADD: As several people pointed out in the comments, the exact line in “The Menagerie” that Kirk had when asked if he’d met Pike was, “When he was promoted to fleet captain,” and in this episode Pike gets a temporary promotion to fleet captain because he’s in charge of both Enterprise and Farragut. It’s one part clumsy, one part clever, but, at the very least, it’s true to continuity.
Along the way, we get some fun stuff with Number One and Pelia, as the first officer has a real problem with her new space-hippie chief engineer. Pelia does things her way and doesn’t always obey orders—in this case, to good effect, since her not doing things the way Chin-Riley wanted her to enabled her to discover Ramon’s sabotage—and the very by-the-book Number One doesn’t like that.
What I particularly love is that Pelia cuts through the bullshit. Number One tries to make out that she resents that Pelia gave her a low grade in a class at the Academy years ago, but Pelia has been around too long to fall for that. She knows that she’s replacing someone beloved who died tragically in Hemmer and that some folks have trouble warming to her because of that. (Pelia has a similar conversation with Uhura earlier.) However, Pelia’s also been around long enough to know a psychological coping mechanism when she sees one, so she tells Number One to go ahead and keep resenting the C grade Pelia gave her if it’s too uncomfortable to think about Hemmer. It’s a beautifully played scene between two great actors in Carol Kane and Rebecca Romijn. (Romijn also has one of the best lines in the episode early on when Pike is waxing rhapsodic about the next great age of exploration, and Number One rolls her eyes and says, “Oh good, I was afraid I missed the speech!”)
In the end, we get our third and final first meeting, between Jim Kirk and Spock. Uhura and Jim are sharing a drink after it’s all over, and Jim mentions what a pain in the ass his brother is, and Spock—who just last week was seen bitching about Sam’s inability to clean up after himself—chimes in his agreement. Uhura then introduces the two of them, and Spock joins them for a drink. The closing shot is these three legends having a seat at a time waaaaaaaaaaaay before they became legends, and it’s kind of fabulous.
And wonderfully low-key. There’s something fitting about these three historic introductions happening in a very simple manner during what, it must be said, is a very bog-standard Star Trek storyline. The we’re-accidentally-harming-the-strange-aliens plot has been a staple of Trek since the original series’ “The Devil in the Dark,” and has been used constantly, from TNG’s “Night Terrors” to DS9’s “Playing God” to Voyager’s “Heroes and Demons” to an inversion of it in Discovery’s fourth-season storyline.
But it’s still an important story to tell, because the hallmark of Star Trek has always been compassion and conversation over violence and ignorance. The solution to this story is exactly what it’s supposed to be on a Trek show: saving people and being nice to each other.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at ConnectiCon XX in Hartford at the Connecticut Convention Center this weekend. He’ll have a table where he’ll be selling and signing books, and also will be doing some panels. His full schedule can be found here.
“deuterium poisoning”? It’s just hydrogen though…
I loved the character work. Celia Rose Gooding is excellent as the recipient of the secret message of the alien of the week, we deal with backstories of the Kirk brothers, of Chin-Riley, and of Uhura, we have further proof that Pike would do anything for his crew and we get the historic meeting of 3 of the TOS legends.
What annoyed me was that we went from discovering the existence of the extra dimensional aliens straight to the destruction of what is an important strategic resource which Starfleet has obviously expended considerable resources to creating. Uhura as communication officer should have been advocating for opening a communication with this new species, Spock should’ve been trying to get the extra-dimensional organisms back to their own dimension, someone (Una or La’An) should’ve been advocating that the space gas station was critical for fighting off the Gorn. We all seem very blase about the “Lets blow up the thing everyone’s been trying to do for months!!!” plan. It just didn’t feel justified that we had to do it that way. Also I thought the “It doesn’t turn off!” trope was obnoxious… the automated systems are broken what about the manual ones? WHat about cutting power to the giant vacuum cleaner at the end of the ship. We just jumped to the end game directly.
Random question… with the exception of Voyager has any other show ever actually used the Bussard collectors for the way they’re intended?
Discovering a repeated need to check every random iron deposit to make extra sure it’s not sapient dovetails nicely with the last Lower Decks season finale, where not inspecting minutely for life signs was considered an utter dealbreaker for an otherwise promising exploration program. (Before other problems emerged.
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Though I really can’t blame them. Not remotely expecting life to emerge out of *deuterium* seems like the way to bet.
I do kind of wish they’d used UESPA for the alternate timeline Kirk a couple of episodes ago.
@1 Dueterium poisoning is a thing although usually not by itself. When Heavy water is used in nuclear power generation it can pick up a decent amount of radioactivity from neutron bombardment. Perhaps the 23rd century engines “leaked” fuel which wouldn’t be a problem since it would normally be confined within the nacelles and engines and the engineers might take medicine prophylactically to counter the effects. Regardless of all that supposition as far as made up medical problems it’s not the worst one we’ve encountered.
@1 Deuterium can cause health problems if it’s consumed as heavy water due to the mass affecting chemical reactions. (Though I think you have to consume quite a lot.) But I’m pretty sure simple exposure to gaseous D2 isn’t a problem beyond the usual issues involved with mixing hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of possible sparks.
I admit that I knew exactly where this story was going as soon as it started–with entities within the nebula trying to contact Uhura. However, the predictability of it didn’t bother me. I still cheered at the end when Uhura convinced Pike that they had to get rid of the deuterium refinery in order to save the entities.
The Pelia/Una dynamic was interesting just because I didn’t expect them to clash the way they did. I certainly didn’t expect so much push back from Una. I liked her explanation as to what her problem with Pelia was (interesting that her paper was called “sloppy” when that was exactly the word Una used to describe Pelia) and how Pelia saw through that and pointed out what Una’s problem actually was.
It was great seeing Kirk again! I loved how he believed Uhura and did everything he could to help her. Plus, there was no Lt-ensign dynamic. He didn’t treat her like a junior officer, he treated her like a person. I love that about him. Also I did the math–Jim is 26 years old now. First officer at 26! Wow!
Which brings me to the Jim/Sam dynamic. Sam comes across unreasonable here but that’s sibling rivalry. It’s not always going to make sense. Sam takes Jim’s accomplishments as a personal affront and of course, Jim’s not going to apologize for moving up in his career.
The handshake when Kirk met Spock–just an epic moment.
One thing I liked about this episode was that it included most of the main cast. Most of the episodes have been light on Pike or Una. But here, not only do we get a lot of Pike and Una but we also had a nice moment between Chapel and Spock. It felt like a more inclusive episode.
Actually, Keith, “The Menagerie” had Kirk say he met Pike when he was promoted to fleet captain. This episode accounts for that by having Pike temporarily promoted to fleet captain, which I thought was clever at first but now feels rather contrived for the sake of the continuity fix.
This was a good one, and I like how it handled Kirk. He was in character, but not in a forced and obvious way. When Uhura was talking about how you face death in Starfleet, I was waiting for a Kobayashi Maru reference or a line about no-win scenarios. Instead, Kirk gave a response that was consistent with all that but didn’t overtly reference it, which is a level of subtlety you rarely see in the Secret Hideout shows when it comes to continuity. I also really liked getting the chance to see Jim and Sam Kirk interact at long last.
I find it rather intriguing that the premise of this episode is strikingly similar to one of my 2005 story pitches for the Constellations anthology, a pitch that later became the basis for my most recent Trek novel, Living Memory. That also had Uhura recognizing signs of communication that turned out to be from another universe, though a lot else was different. Of course it’s coincidence, but it’s interesting how different people working with the same characters and concepts often hit upon the same ideas.
I did find the plot very obvious, though. As soon as they called attention to opening the Bussard collectors and gathering deuterium from the nebula, I said “Okay, the deuterium is sentient and that’s what’s trying to communicate with Uhura.”
I found the final meeting between Kirk and Spock a bit disappointing, because I felt the ideal way for them to meet would’ve been for Kirk to challenge Spock at chess.
As for “deuterium poisoning,” there ain’t no such animal. There are some fringe-science claims that too much heavy water can promote cancer and cardiovascular disease, and people sell “deuterium-depleted water” as a way to fight such things, but it isn’t supported by solid science.
The VFX people on these shows continue to drive me crazy. The opening shot of the collector station in the stellar nursery made it look like the station was far, far larger than the protostars — entire stars, mind you. Granted, that’s consistent with Prodigy‘s completely nonsensical depiction of a “protostar” as some incredible super-energy source that can fit inside a small starship, rather than just a relatively warm and dense clump of hydrogen far, far larger than the Earth. But it’s still ridiculous.
I actually think that they went out of their way to preserve canon with this one; I think Kirk’s precise wording in “The Menagerie” were words to the effect of “I met him just after he made Fleet Captain,” and it’s just kind of been assumed for the last 56 years that Pike was only promoted upon leaving the Enterprise; here they make a point of (rather contrivedly) promoting Pike temporarily just so that he can meet Kirk.
I appreciate the momentousness of Kirk meeting Spock and Uhura for the first time (and I particularly liked that they wrote his first meeting with Uhura such that it echoed what we saw in the 2009 film), and it was a delight to see Bruce Horak as Hemmer again (and the visual of him as a decaying zombie right before the credits is pleasingly dark). Celia Rose Gooding was good throughout and Uhura may be emerging as my favourite character (which is a bit surprising, given that I was disappointed when her inclusion on this series was announced). But I’ve got to say that the script left quite a lot to be desired.
Not only is it basically a paint-by-numbers Star Trek story, it feels sloppily executed. Uhura is delusional and Kirk knows that she can be violent; there is absolutely no reason why she should be given a gun and allowed to roam the hallways after Ramon does his runner. Moreover, they never even get proof that these higher-dimensional lifeforms even exist; just a theory from an individual known to be suffering from paranoid hallucinations, which is apparently enough for Pike to blow up a strategically important refinery. And it’s frustrating because it could be corrected so easily: just have Sam run some tests to detect higher-dimensional lifesigns in the deuterium samples or whatever; maybe establish that Ramon was also a communications officer, and that his hallucinations matched the same pattern as Uhura’s in terms of the sentiment that they’re conveying. The only reason why the plot works at all here is because it really is so bog-standard that we already know what its beats will be.
(Incidentally, it occurs to me that the idea of high-dimensional aliens bonded to deuterium is probably an attempt to retcon some of the scientifically sillier plots on Voyager like “Demon” or “The Haunting of Deck 12”)
Kirk doesn’t actually say in “The Menagerie” that he met Pike when he took over Enterprise; he says he met him when Pike was “promoted to fleet captain.” I think it’s kind of funny that they gave Pike an apparently temporary and kind of meaningless promotion to fleet captain in this episode just to preserve canon. Overall, though, I agree that it’s stupid to limit your storytelling based on a single throwaway line from 50 years ago. Unless they make it a running gag like Anakin never meeting Grievous in The Clone Wars.
I also really loved how simple the meeting between Kirk and Spock was. In my experience, that’s how a lot of my best friendships began. Uhura being the one to introduce them (her little smile when they shake hands made me think she knows they’re a good match) was an especially sweet and fun touch.
Paul Wesley has been good before, but this episode really sold me on his Kirk. His blunt, but inspiring pep talk with Uhura about facing death was brilliant and very Kirk. I also really liked his genuine praise of Uhura when she asked why the aliens chose her. He really is an excellent judge of character. His interactions with Sam were also very funny to me as a younger brother. It’s kind of weird how much older than Sam Jim looks though.
Great episode.
Generally speaking, I agree with everything our humble recapper said in his post. It was a standard Trek episode, in the best way. I did love the use of James Kirk this week.
But I will say that I absolutely loved Kirk’s speech to Uhura about dealing with Death. I went back and watched that scene again. Plus it called to mind, at least a little, his conversation in The Wrath of Khan, where he told Saavik that “How we deal with death is just as important as how we deal with life.”
@2/MikeKelm: “What annoyed me was that we went from discovering the existence of the extra dimensional aliens straight to the destruction of what is an important strategic resource which Starfleet has obviously expended considerable resources to creating.”
It worked for me. After all, there were lives immediately at stake, ongoing deaths that needed to be stopped. Humans today would be callous enough about death to waste time arguing over whether people were really dying and whether their lives mattered more than our own self-interest and profit, but people in the Federation are better than us, and would immediately default to taking action to prevent even the possibility that they were killing innocent life forms.
I mean, even aside from morality, it’s a post-scarcity economy. They can afford to waste those resources, so it doesn’t cost them anything to err on the side of caution.
The one thing that didn’t work for me was Uhura ordering the torpedoes fired. That’s Pike’s place, not hers.
@4/MikeKelm: “When Heavy water is used in nuclear power generation it can pick up a decent amount of radioactivity from neutron bombardment.”
Would that work with a matter-antimatter reaction, though? Let’s see, any un-annihilated deuterium that made it to the nacelles would presumably be a leftover from the reaction, so maybe there’d be some stray un-annihilated neutrons too. However, that would mean there’s also some unreacted antideuterium, and you sure as hell don’t want antimatter leaking out into the nacelle control room, so how the hell is the system so badly designed as to allow the deuterium to leak out?
@6/Mary: “First officer at 26! Wow!”
The Making of Star Trek said that Kirk’s first command was a smaller “destroyer-type” vessel, and I get the strong sense that SNW is going to canonize the Farragut as that ship, since they’ve given it a design that fits that description. Which would blow my The Captain’s Oath out of the water, along with all the other stories that have posited different names and classes for Kirk’s first command. But TCO is already on shaky ground after this one, since Kirk meeting Uhura, Pike, and Spock this early doesn’t mesh well with what I asserted there.
I really liked this episode. It showcased so much of what makes Star Trek work, from the character focus on Uhura’s unresolved grief to the cooperative problem-solving with Uhura, Jim, and Sam trying to grok the unseen aliens. Unlike some episodes this season, everyone was given a role to play as well.
That said, the episode had two flaws for me.
1. The Una/Pelia stuff was a tiny fragmentary B plot which was largely unrelated to what else was going on. Una frankly acted a bit out of character from what had been established before in order to get the interpersonal drama to work. I thought it was clunky overall. The show has been really struggling to give Una continued relevance since we welcomed her back in Episode 2 of this season, which I have a hard time understanding, as an XO should always have relevance within the command structure of the ship. Still, we seldom see her…you know…do her job.
2. I felt like there was just a little bit of story missing from the third act involving Uhura convincing Pike to destroy the deuterium mining operation. I mean yes, from a character perspective, I get why it’s more impactful to have Pike trust Uhura, but in a real setting of the chain of command, a captain would not trust an ensign without some corroborating evidence. This could have been solved with a few lines of technobabble where Spock detects them after some sort of scan, so fixing this would not take much.
@12 I’d have to go back and watch that part again (which I probably will do), but I got the sense that Pike went with the plan because not only does he trust Uhura, his experience at the end of last season has also given him an implicit trust of Kirk’s judgment. Seeing the two of them both advance that theory made him go along with it immediately, plus what Christopher said about Pike erring on the side of saving lives when it’s not that hard to “build a new gas station”.
Am I the only one bothered by this show’s near-pathetic unwillingness to let Kirk go? The show has its own large cast.
The actors playing the Kirks do look like they could be brothers, so kudos to whoever cast them.
In the US Navy, whenever two or more ships operate jointly, the more senior commanding officer will command the operation. It’s pro forma, and it’s not something everyone would be congratulating the senior captain on, so that whole “fleet captain” silliness was just that for me.
I liked the business with the cookie.
“Emergency beamout! Of two of the three people in this room! Leave the third one to die!” That moment really bugged me.
After Hemmer died last season, Bruce Horak hinted that we might see him again. Was he referring to this episode? Could he already have known about it?
@15,
My understanding is that Season 2 was already filming when Season 1 aired, so Bruce Horak probably did know already that he was scheduled to appear in Season 2.
@7 Toxicity from D2O is supported by solid science, e.g., this canine study from the 60s. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajplegacy.1961.201.2.357
But you need to consume enough for it to be north of 20% of your body fluids to even start seeing effects, which clearly didn’t happen to Uhura. Though the aliens contriving to become part of the Enterprise’s water supply and possessing crew members a la Return to Tomorrow would have been an interesting alternative strategy.
@11/Christopher L. Bennett:
Given what SNW textually established a few weeks ago about TOS now seemingly existing in an altered timeline from what we originally saw on the 1960s show (thanks to the Temporal Wars), it probably allows novels like your own Living Memory and The Captain’s Oath to take place during the “original” timeline, with SNW’s version of events (Kirk, Spock, and Uhura’s first meetup, etc.) now occurring in the “revised” timeline, post-interference.
At least, that’s how I’m taking things at the moment — it lets me have my cake and eat it too, without throwing any recent books out with the bathwater (to slightly mix my metaphors).
@11 CLB Not necessarily Maybe the anti-deuterium system has better containment than the deuterium system…. leaking deurterium is a small health risk that can be managed- anti-deuterium would be somewhat more problematic (and explosive) I imagine even in the 23rd century the term “Acceptable risk” is still around so Starfleet is willing to live with a modicum of leakage in the nacelles in order to get the powerful Constitution class into space. It’s also possible that deuterium is a component of the cooling system OR a remnant of having just used the Bussard ram scoops- perhaps that system leaks into the nacelle and has to dissipate.
As far as living in a post scarcity society we’ve had a number of discussions about that over the years but I imagine while it applies to things like fundamental staples of life there is likely an upward limit to what you can simply replicate. It’s why Starships are still built, not just replicated. So while presumably Starfleet can get it’s hands on more materials- and that is an assumption as we do know there are some things that CAN’T be replicated hence the need for so many miners in danger around the galaxy- there still is the time and strategic implications of having to gather all those materials and re-assemble it. It may be a post-scarcity but the loss of time is a consideration.
I actually had less issue with Uhura ordering the torpedoes because it’s only after Pike nods at La’an that she fires. So yes Uhura did the shouting, but the order was still from Pike
@14
Yes, but then “unwillingness to let ____ go” is basically the business model for a large portion of the entertainment industry. Pathetic but profitable.
Also Chris, we’re making an assumption that Kirk hasn’t had his first command already. Kirk is well known to be the youngest commander (and apparently youngest XO) of a Starship. NCC-1701 was originally designated a “Starship class” and only later retconned as “Constitution Class”. But what if that’s not a retcon- what if Starship is distinction in and of itself and that Kirk had previously commanded a “destroyer class” which might be more similar to World War II PT-Boats. It’s not without precedent- the pre- and early-ironclad era nomenclature of Frigate referred to a fully rigged ship with a single gun deck (as opposed to a multi-decked ship-of-the-line) and could be quite large and powerful. However when the frigate class was re-introduced after World War 2 they were now the smallest ships in the fleet. So since we know classification nomenclature does change, it’s possible Kirk commanded some small patrol ship at some point early in his career but since it wasn’t a “Starship” than it’s accurate to say he hasn’t had his first Starship command.
I was “meh” on this one. It reminded me most of TNG’s “Night Terrors” and then also TOS’s “Devil in the Dark.” It was nice to see Hemmer and his actor back, but at the same time, I couldn’t connect much with Uhura’s feelings on him because he was so underdeveloped and seldom used in the first season. And maybe it’s a symptom of me staying up late to catch these episodes as soon as they’re available but some of them I’m finding a slog to get through like the one where La’An and Kirk go back in time. Usually I welcome episodes that are longer because in theory it’s more material to enjoy. But if the story isn’t that interesting, it’s a longer slog to get through and I’m checking how much time is left. Likewise, I felt like this episode was moving at a languid pace and drained of energy.
And this series really wants to use James T. Kirk as much as possible it seems. It seems like an obvious ratings/viewership ploy. I don’t feel like it’s really that necessary though or even this early on in this series. Like in the plot for “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” that didn’t need to be Kirk. It could have been any random character that was captaining the alternate timeline Enterprise, but of course it’s Kirk because that’s supposed to get the fandom more excited. It just comes across as blatant pandering to me.
This was great. Superb work from Gooding and Wesley. Wesley really is Kirk, I completely buy him as the character.
The plot itself was pretty standard and the kind of thing that was done time after time in the 90s shows, but if SNW is proving anything, it’s that formulaic episodic Star Trek can still make for great TV in the modern age.
@18/Bandsaw: “Given what SNW textually established a few weeks ago about TOS now seemingly existing in an altered timeline from what we originally saw on the 1960s show (thanks to the Temporal Wars), it probably allows novels like your own… to take place during the “original” timeline…”
Not necessarily. The idea was that the past was changed, but the present, the 23rd century, still happened pretty much exactly the same — as evidenced by the lengths they went to here to avoid contradicting “The Menagerie”‘s throwaway line about when Kirk met Pike.
Sure, the revelation allows for the possibility that some 23rd-century bits and pieces might be different too, but it’s not something I need to believe. The point of writing tie-ins, like the point of writing science fiction in general, is not to try to “get it right,” but just to offer interesting conjectures that you fully expect to be contradicted by reality one day. To the SF writer, it’s satisfying enough just to be in the ballpark of what eventually happens. The way SNW has explored Uhura, and to a lesser extent Kirk, is agreeably similar to my approach in general intent and characterization, although the specific facts disagree.
@21/Mike Kelm: “we’re making an assumption that Kirk hasn’t had his first command already.”
He’s a lieutenant. He’s about to be promoted to first officer and it’s presented as a major step up in his career. Also, he’s on the Farragut, the same ship we know he served on under Captain Garrovick several years before this, per “Obsession.” Implicitly, he’s remained on that ship as a lieutenant for the past few years.
I liked the episode-although I guessed the explanation pretty early on. Can you not fire a phaser on stun in a nacelle? (We were wondering why she didn’t shoot the other guy) I’m annoyed by Uhura’s backstory. Why does every character have to have a tragic family background? (Although it fit the plot). Seems to be an issue-not just in the newer ST series-but throughout other media. It’s like a soap opera.
Ensigns have really nice quarters. Wow.
I like Sam. Too bad he’s doomed by a flying pizza.
Anybody who’s read either my Facebook page or my blog knows that this past week has been marred by family awfulness, so I’m going to plead emotional distress as to why I totally missed the fleet captain thing. So yeah, they didn’t break canon or violate continuity or anything.
I’ve adjusted the post accordingly with a mea culpa. As I said there, the solution was one part clever, one part clumsy, but hey, it worked….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Susan: Sam is not doomed by a flying pizza.
It’s a flying omelette.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who takes his food metaphors way too seriously
@27/krad: I’ve always thought of it as a flying pancake.
The only part of this episode that disappointed me was that we didn’t really get to see Kirk and La’an interact at all except for one quick blow-by during the search for Ramon. If they don’t get to have that drink before the end of the season I will be severely miffed.
@26/krad: I’m so sorry to learn this! You and your family are in my thoughts.
@6 Coincidentally enough, Robert Fitzroy was 26 when he took HMS Beagle out on her own five-year voyage.
@25 “Ensigns have really nice quarters. Wow.”
I wonder if certain Lower Deckers will have anything to say about that in the near future. (Though maybe Uhura was just better at gaming the room lottery. :-) )
“Can you not fire a phaser on stun in a nacelle?:
I wondered about that too. A throwaway line about not igniting all the ambient deuterium floating around might have helped cover it. (Though phasers on stun generally don’t seem to be spark hazards.)
I stand corrected. We have one flying omelette and one flying pancake. Clearly Sam was killed by breakfast food. I’m hoping the time travel changed things enough and Sam and his wife survive.
I don’t get hung up on Star Trek’s continual insistence upon ascribing wacky attributes to common chemicals. Deuterium poisoning is just par for the course. At any rate, I thought the episode was pretty good, though it was definitely a case of putting the characters way ahead of the plot, which was pretty basic stuff and felt a bit rushed toward the end. I do feel like they stuck in the line about not being able to shut the refinery off just so they could have an excuse to end the episode with a big explosion, but that’s alright. I will say as someone who was not in favor of Paul Wesley’s being cast as a young Kirk (he looks too old) I have been impressed with him this season. He’s been very good in both of his episodes.
Oh, one other science pet peeve: They used the totally wrong cliche of someone instantly freezing when exposed to vacuum. Vacuum is an insulator! That’s how Thermos bottles work!!! You lose heat much slower in vacuum, for the exact same reason you lose heat more slowly in air than in water — because there’s less stuff to draw heat out of you. Spaceships and spacesuits need cooling systems to keep from overheating.
Incidentally, that shot of Kirk and Uhura at the top of the article reminds me of the old TOS publicity photos, particularly this one: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/318277898662320276/
I DO appreciate that Una was on screen and got lines (Rominjin Is GREAT at sweet sarcasm). The final scene between her and Pelia was quite deft in the non-verbals, particularly when she knew Pelia was calling her on her crap. More of that, please.
My least favorite episode of this series so far. Predictable, and I was getting Discovery-like PTSD when Uhura spent a good portion of the episode weeping. I was expecting Michael Burnham to show up and join in. She loves a good cry.
I’ll say this though, whomever was at the transporter console deserve some sort of a medal. I mean, Kirk grabs Uhura and I swear the transporter was already engaged before he finished saying “beam us out”.
Also kind of dug the gratuitously grisly shot of Ramon’s body twirling in space. Surprised no one’s commented on that as a lot of people seem to dislike It when Trek goes gruesome. And on that note, not a fan of the dead Hemmer hallucination… He looked a little too Walking Dead.
Lots of fan service here of course, But as cool as it was to watch Spock meet Kirk, the duo I want to see together more often La’an and Jim Kirk. I love the way that short scene between them was played. She obviously has lots of complicated feelings about him, to which he was oblivious, yet somehow the chemistry was still palpable….
I really can’t comprehend the mentality of resenting the sight of a character crying over her entire family dying.
Really good episode — Kirk’s speech to Uhura about death also had a lot of resonance because we know Sam is going to die in six or seven years. He is the comic relief of this episode, but he’s a ghost of future tragedy too. The episode spends a lot of time on Sam’s annoying qualities, though he gets to help solve the problem of the week. Jim is vexed but also clearly loves him. Pike knows what’s going to happen to him, but Sam is similarly doomed and doesn’t know it.
I don’t understand why no one else seems bothered that Kirk didn’t include Ramon in the emergency beamou
@40 I don’t recall him saying who should beam out. There must be some reason we can make up why the transporter operator couldn’t grab onto Ramon.
@41 That’s easy, the transporter locked onto Kirk’s communicator and because he was holding Uhura she was beamed out as well.
I thought it was pretty cool to see inside the nacelle, with its angled access tunnel, little holes in the distance one way, spinny red stuff in the other direction.
There were a few hints at continuity that didn’t quite play out the way I expected, I thought Kirk would mention the “let me help” line he uses in City on the edge of Forever, but he just riffed on the same theme.
I also thought he might pinpoint on Uhura’s inability to express certain feelings and tell her it’s ok to be afraid as a Starfleet officer. This would have been a somewhat ham-handed way to explain her “Captain, I’m frightened” line from TOS — as if they have a history of her turning to him and expressing her fears in tough situations.
This was a fantastic episode. Like “Children of the Comet,” “Ghosts of Illyria” and the trip to Rigel VII a couple weeks ago, it just felt more like good ol’ week-to-week Star Trek that we’ve not seen since Enterprise went off the air – and yet those little continuity bits with La’an and Kirk and Chapel and Spock were reminders that this show does things with more sophistication really than any of the other shows – including DS9.
I absolutely loved the fact that Kirk and Spock weren’t “thrown together by destiny” but rather just kinda met in a bar after the big adventure was done and even then were introduced by a third party. That’s how real life friendships often form and it was great to see that the writers and director were able to do it in an understated way rather than having the Alexander Courage fanfare blast as they shook hands.
Also, I think there was a little bit of the sometimes argumentative nature of Kirk and McCoy’s friendship in the exchanges between Sam and Jim. Or maybe it’s just the fact that Spock seems to not like Sam that made my brain go in that direction.
I liked the fact that nearly everyone (save Ortegas) got a great scene in this episode. And bringing Bruce Horak back was a master stroke.
Last season started strong and kind of weakened in the middle before finishing with an amazing episode. This season started pretty weak but has gotten stronger and stronger (barring last week’s so-so episode). Tonight, my 10-year-old asked me what my favorite Trek incarnation was and I told her (as usual) it was TOS. When she asked for the runner-up, I had to pause a minute before saying I really think it’s neck-and-neck between SNW and TNG at the moment. T
Oh – and one other little continuity detail I liked was that – even in relative privacy (and even after they’ve likely slept together), Chapel refers to him as “Mister Spock,” just as she did in the Original Series
@43/madmarie: “I thought it was pretty cool to see inside the nacelle, with its angled access tunnel, little holes in the distance one way, spinny red stuff in the other direction.”
I hate the tendency of the modern shows to put habitable compartments inside the nacelles. The whole reason Matt Jefferies put the engines on nacelles at the ends of long pylons is because matter-antimatter engines powerful enough to warp space should give off lethal amounts of heat and radiation and thus would need to be kept far away from the crew.
Although the move away from that logic started as early as ST:TMP when they put the actual M/AM reactor right in the middle of the engine room… or even before that in TAS: “One of Our Planets is Missing” when they had Kirk and Scotty go into a nacelle without any kind of protective gear in order to replenish the antimatter. So I guess it’s consistent with precedent, but it’s still an annoying failure of design logic. At least ENT: “The Catwalk” had the good sense to establish that the nacelles were only cool enough to enter when the engines were shut down.
@45/twels: “Also, I think there was a little bit of the sometimes argumentative nature of Kirk and McCoy’s friendship in the exchanges between Sam and Jim.”
It occurred to me last night to wonder if they might bring in McCoy in season 3 or sometime. If so, I wonder who’d get the part.
Did anybody else think of the arcade videogame Berserk when they heard the alien sounds?
I was more than a little surprised to find that all the shuttles / escape pods weren’t aboard the main ships yet when the station was destroyed, but I’ll just accept that they had enough distance and shielding.
Although the “fleet captain” thing is rather silly, I really like the black circle behind the delta on Pike’s emblem. (Still hate the lack of black collars and the metallic rank bands at the wrists being of the same colors as the shirts, however…)
I love Trek for its characters being friendly and believing in one another. That goes not only for Kirk listening to and Pike trusting Uhura but Hemmer joking around while teaching her as well.
I should’ve enjoyed the final shot pulling away from Kirk, Spock, and Uhura, yet as nice as it was that it was so understated I couldn’t shake the exact feeling of cheap, manufactured poignancy that I had feared back when a “TOS crew at Starfleet Academy” prequel film was being considered.
@47 I had been assuming/hoping that McCoy would be on the Farragut with Kirk, because their friendship has always seemed older than their tour on Enterprise. Their relationship was one I always liked in the reboot films. Kirk saying the Farragut‘s doctor was a woman seems to have put the kibosh on that idea, though of course even a smaller ship could have more than one doctor. Bones is one of my all-time favorite Trek characters, so I really hope we get to see him at some point even though it’s going to be hard to make lightning strike three times in casting him.
I found the dynamic between Sam and Jim to be pleasantly reminiscent of TNG: “Tapestry.” In this case, the “safe” science career officer is real, and not a possible future…in fact, Sam started on his path first.
I also have a younger sibling, who I adore, who is succeeding on a path that I struggled with myself, so I found the conflict resonant on that wavelength. Fortunately I’m a bit older and wiser than Sam…
Oh yeah the “fleet captain” bit was very funny. It treats the prospect of a throwaway line in a 1966 production preventing writers from using two great characters together in 2023 as a gag, which is exactly what it is. “There, nerds, ya happy?”
It’s a wink and a nod that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the episode at all.
@51: I kind of hoped that at the end of the episode, the Fleet Captain promotion would’ve been made permanent due to the impending Gorn threat. But I see that Pike’s back to the regular delta insignia in the preview for next week’s episode
@47: McCoy is a difficult one. I think it would be a funny in-joke if they cast Connor Trinneer in the role ..
Is it? If that were true, you should be able to get deuterium at no cost to anyone. That’s what “post-scarcity” requires. Yet this station seems to require some human beings to build and maintain it, in which it is like every other resource -extraction facility I can recall seeing in Star Trek.
People in canon have described Federation Earth as a “socialist paradise”, but that’s not the same thing as “post-scarcity”.
@54/ad9: “If that were true, you should be able to get deuterium at no cost to anyone. That’s what “post-scarcity” requires. Yet this station seems to require some human beings to build and maintain it, in which it is like every other resource -extraction facility I can recall seeing in Star Trek.”
That doesn’t make sense. Obviously you need to build and operate the facilities that provide the abundant resources that make a post-scarcity economy possible. What makes it post-scarcity is that the resources are limitless and just need to be tapped, which is certainly true in a galaxy full of billions of stars and countless nebulae.
“People in canon have described Federation Earth as a “socialist paradise””
Only one person, Pelia, has ever used that word for it in Trek canon, and she didn’t even know lasers were real in the 2020s, so she’s hardly a reliable source. The Federation is not socialist; that’s an error made by people who think they know what the word means but can’t be bothered to actually look it up.
Why didn’t Ens. Uhura simply stun Lt. Ramon? This irks me to no end.
For me, the big question remains: does Pike bake the cookies? He’s the one with a fancy kitchen and a propensity for using “real” ingredients…
Also, I can’t remember if we ever actually saw Una interact with Hemmer directly?
As for the two brothers, sure Sam was being a bit petty but I felt like Jim was also being rather condescending and dismissive of Sam’s work and lacking empathy for Sam’s issues with their father. This was what I was expecting an apology for, rather than for Jim being promoted.
When Kirk sounded so dubious about Uhura getting “messages from… invisible aliens?” I was like, are you new? This happens every other week in Starfleet.
A damn good episode. A proof of concept that no matter how familiar the plot is, it all comes down to the execution. Essentially, a “Devil in the Dark” 2.0, it ultimately succeeds because it sheds some serious light on Uhura as a character and just how much Hemmer’s death affected her. Yet another episode that tells us more about Uhura than all of TOS ever did. And giving added weight to Hemmer’s demise last year. Worth every minute.
Like @Christopher, I wasn’t a fan of the VFX during the opening personal log sequence (No way would the Enterprise look that big compared to the deuterium and the protostars. The scale is wrong. The VFX artists should rewatch The Motion Picture when it comes to depicting the Enterprise compared to something truly massive in scale – actually use the show’s widescreen format for really wide shots).
Having said that, I applaud Dan Liu’s work on the episode in a physical and practical sense. There’s a scene of Uhura “hallucinating” that really sells the immense size of the Enterprise corridors. The way he shoots with a low angle really gives size and scope to the sets.
Nice that we get an added subplot of Una with Pelia, giving us a little more insight into Una’s views on how to be a proper Starfleet officer and the way Pelia calls her out on it, as well as tying the whole thing to Hemmer’s passing. The episode even has room to bring up Spock/Chapel, making very clear that any future between the two may be very much doomed sooner rather than later.
And then there’s that fateful meeting. Kirk and Spock meeting this way feels so much more natural than the forced Kobayashi Maru conflict from ST09 (and it paints Kirk in a better light too). And it makes perfect sense that Uhura, the communications officer of all people, would be the one to introduce the two of them to each other. And I keep adoring Paul Wesley’s version of Kirk. Calm demeanor, professional, and without the quirks that became a part of the character when Shatner went full Shatner (with Pine doing a version of that). I particularly adored the dense look in his eyes when he and Sam kept staring at each other. It’s great that the SNW writers remember that Kirk was very much a Starfleet overacheving bookworm, fully dedicated to the job – a stark contrast to young Picard from “Tapestry”.
I was struck by a valid criticism I saw this morning: This season of Strange New Worlds has had very little in the way of strange new worlds. The season premiere did introduce a new world, Cajitar IV, but it was more about the spy mission and the space battle. Then we had Una’s trial; a time travel story to present-day Earth; a revisit to Rigel VII from “The Cage” (kind of a strange world but not entirely new); another Spock-T’Pring comedy (with strange new cosmic-vortex aliens, but as a minor element); a shipboard episode focusing on Kirk; and next week’s Lower Decks crossover which also looks to be a bottle show.
So overall there’s been more focus on stories fleshing out Trek mythology and continuity as opposed to telling standalone episodic tales of discovery. Which is a direction I was afraid this show would go. They’re still doing good stuff, but I’d like to see fewer episodes revisiting old concepts and more episodes introducing new ones.
33) Susan:
I stand corrected. We have one flying omelette and one flying pancake. Clearly Sam was killed by breakfast food. I’m hoping the time travel changed things enough and Sam and his wife survive.
I personally always thought it was plastic barf!
@CLB 59 your comment popped up as I was about to write mine. I agree with that criticism completely.
i really enjoyed this episode, it was another example of what I love about Star Trek, but I found myself wondering why everything involving this interstellar federation of planets happens to only the same half dozen people. Virtually everybody on the show is a rehash of an old established character. Even the “new” ones, like La’an, are given clear lineages to accepted notables. And they all interact with each other. The only recent visitors to the ship have been Amanda, T’Pring and Jim Kirk. The only places they’ve visited have been Rigel VII, Vulcan and Earth. The only ongoing relationship is between Chapel and Spock.
Star Wars is the gold standard for small universes but Empire gave us Yoda, Lando and Boba Fett; Hoth, Dagobah and Cloud City.
Thank goodness for Pelia but as the quirky engineer she’s probably not long for the show. Got to free up time for more backstory about people we already know.
Quoth kurozukin: “Also, I can’t remember if we ever actually saw Una interact with Hemmer directly?”
She’s the first officer, he was the chief engineer. They would’ve interacted constantly.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@12/Karl: I loved your comment! Thank you!
The show has been really struggling to give Una continued relevance since we welcomed her back in Episode 2 of this season, which I have a hard time understanding, as an XO should always have relevance within the command structure of the ship. Still, we seldom see her…you know…do her job.
Thank you! It does feel soapy; we are rarely seen them operating as a tight military-esque team; almost no one is ever formal about anything. I feel old just saying it, but it feels very 2023 millennial (I mean, on a scale from 1950s suit and tie to WFH zoom in a robe, the current normal feels less like Starfleet to me), and that’d be OK except I think one of the pleasant vibes in all the 60s-90s ST was a sense of orderliness, of people doing their jobs excellently. You’d have people like Wesley half-in and half-out of formal habit, but when people were upset, crying, angry, there was a kind of restraint to it, because this is very important work. The obvious big feelings barely being restrained by decorum was part of the realism and relatability and drama.
Not so much here. The characters act like they are club members hanging out quite a lot of the time. Here, most everyone spends way more time crying, yelling, being childish and immature to one another, or looking lovingly grateful than I think is strictly necessary. :) I might be misremembering but I thought Number One in The Cagerie was less emotional, more of a super pro.
Overall I’m enjoying this season, but like, it gets cringe. There, now I feel less elderly. :)
Also thank you for this bit:
2. I felt like there was just a little bit of story missing from the third act involving Uhura convincing Pike to destroy the deuterium mining operation. I mean yes, from a character perspective, I get why it’s more impactful to have Pike trust Uhura, but in a real setting of the chain of command, a captain would not trust an ensign without some corroborating evidence. This could have been solved with a few lines of technobabble where Spock detects them after some sort of scan, so fixing this would not take much.
So Totally = Very Yes. The easy thing, and something traditional among Trek shows, would be a supernatural hint/hunch/dream leads us to look where we weren’t looking and then SMH going “oh wow, we killed thousands of them!” and the gravity of that settles in, then we blow it up and it’s a big victory.
Instead, it was like “she’s been hallucinating in a degenerating fog for a few days now, let’s blow up this incredibly important station we were sent here to fix, on my mark one two three go.”
It might also have been more motivated if she were actively seeing / interacting with more than Donnie Darko’s “Frank” standing there. Like, once she went through into the shuttle, if someone was there and she could communicate with them more specifically.
It also seems like they are hinting at a love triangle with Kirk, La’an, and Uhura. I hope it’s a fakeout; I don’t need more soap, and as much as I enjoy Kirk on the show, I don’t need him to be all over it. I’m always thinking about ways in which he is/isn’t doing it “right” and it’s distracting.
It’d be better if he were shown doing his job well. So far Kirk has been shown as an A or A- with people skills and a crazy good chess player, but I don’t see him being as much of a problem solving insightful strategizer. I also wish he had better posture. Ok anyway I digress. :)
Enjoying the goodhearted escapism though.
ETA: Oh, also, what made them think blowing it up in a huge explosion wouldn’t just be genocide?! They go from idea to execution too fast to even figure out what these beings are and whether the EMP, the heat, the light, the radioactivity of multiple photon torpedoes blowing up a powerful giant station would be a GOOD idea for them :)
Out of the frying pan into the inferno! It seems likely that a fragile species that lives on energy molecules might not love the explosion we saw. It felt super plot devicey and frankly dumb. Ok i’m good now.
I enjoyed this episode as a variation on “Devil in the Dark” but on reflection that episode had a better solution to the conflict. The Federation didn’t abandon the planet but rather worked with the Horta to mutual benefit.
IIRC the front ends of the nacelles were retconned in TNG as “Bussard collectors” which served to top up the deuterium tank(s). Deuterium is the fuel for the fusion/powered impulse engines. According to the TNG Tech Manual I’m too lazy to get up and check.
Overall there’s a bit too much “fandering” in SNW for my tastes (why Kirk, ever at all?) but I’m sticking with the show anyway. It’s more than good enough.
Thank you! It does feel soapy; we are rarely seen them operating as a tight military-esque team; almost no one is ever formal about anything. I feel old just saying it, but it feels very 2023 millennial (I mean, on a scale from 1950s suit and tie to WFH zoom in a robe, the current normal feels less like Starfleet to me), and that’d be OK except I think one of the pleasant vibes in all the 60s-90s ST was a sense of orderliness, of people doing their jobs excellently.
@63/Jofesh: I think that’s intentional. Early on “The Cage”, Pike has a heart-to-heart with Dr. Boyce about how tired he is of the pressures of military life and having to decide who lives and who dies. Seeing a potential fulfilling life with Vina certainly had an effect on his overall outlook on life. And Discovery had him facing the very possible future of him losing all of that through the accident that will ultimately leave him crippled.
When he’s forced back to duty on the SNW pilot, I figure that Pike has made the choice to live his current life to the fullest until that fateful day happens. Thus, he becomes a very cordial and friendly captain making parties and meals for his crew – a stark contrast to his almost insular personality with the Jeffrey Hunter version literally avoiding the other passengers as he bolted to his quarters.
And we all know the captain sets the tone for the crew under his command. If military discipline is lax, and every officer acts like a 2023 millennial, I figure that’s why. Jellico would kill himself if he had to serve there.
Of course, it could very much also be a product of the writers blurring the characterization by putting too much of their own 21st century personality and experiences into 23rd century characters. As far as I know, none of them served in the military and fought in a war like Roddenberry or those writers (unless there is some Iraq war vet on staff that I don’t know about) – thus they don’t have that background. But to me, that’s less of a problem here than it is on the Star Wars live-action Favreau shows, where we see performances and characters that are sometimes way too out of sync with the unique style of the SW universe.
@62:
She’s the first officer, he was the chief engineer. They would’ve interacted constantly.
Oh I don’t doubt that they must have interacted. What I was trying to remember was if we had ever actually seen any of it onscreen. I remember Hemmer’s scenes with Uhura, of course, and some with Spock and M’Benga, but I couldn’t think of when we had seen him talking with Una.
Was anyone else struck by the design of the bar at the end? I really like the infusion of 60’s mod theme slightly updated that looked totally in place to find on Kirks Enterprise.
@67. Definitely yes. I was imagining the 23rd century designer going “Hmm, I feel like we should go 1960s with this one!” Makes me wonder if other decades we haven’t yet met are represented in architecture of the Trek universe.
I just realized what bothered me about the resolution of this episode. From the NOAA web page on deuterium:
And:
It seems to me that perhaps blowing up the refinery with photon torpedoes ran a pretty big risk of igniting the nebula and killing the aliens. Deuterium being a main component of starship fuel, presumably a lot of the crew has significant amounts of experience in handling it, and so you would think that someone would have pointed out that maybe blowing up the refinery might not be a wise approach. They got lucky there.
@48
I thought of Disney World’s “Main Street Electrical Parade” announcer voice.
@63/jofesh: “It also seems like they are hinting at a love triangle with Kirk, La’an, and Uhura.”
Huh? I didn’t get any sense that Kirk and Uhura’s interaction was anything other than professional.
@65/Eduardo: “a stark contrast to his almost insular personality with the Jeffrey Hunter version literally avoiding the other passengers as he bolted to his quarters.”
People tend to assume that the way Pike acted in “The Cage” was supposed to be his normal personality, but we were seeing him at his lowest point there, a time when he was depressed and on the verge of giving up. We can’t assume that would be the way he’d act under more normal circumstances, any more than the closed-off, unmotivated way Ben Sisko acted in most of “Emissary” was the same as his behavior in the rest of the series.
@69/lance: “It seems to me that perhaps blowing up the refinery with photon torpedoes ran a pretty big risk of igniting the nebula and killing the aliens.”
Deuterium is easily ignited in the presence of oxygen. Remember the fire triangle? You need fuel, heat, and oxygen for ignition to happen. Not a lot of oxygen gas in the vacuum of space. Also, the gas density needs to be just right for ignition to occur. The hydrogen in a nebula would be far too diffuse to ignite even if there were oxygen, which there isn’t.
Not unless there was a lot of oxygen in that nebula… you can’t have a fire in vacuum. Not to say that the release of energy couldn’t do some damage, of course.
Edit: ah, I see I was pipped to the post.
@CLB
“Huh? I didn’t get any sense that Kirk and Uhura’s interaction was anything other than professional.”
I don’t know, there were a few things thrown in there that didn’t seem to be for any purpose other than to suggest that there might be something between them at some point. The very first interaction between them, Uhura tells Kirk to stop hitting on her. I was a little taken aback; her reaction to a benign comment seemed a little over the top.
Later, during La’an’s interaction with Kirk, he tells her that he’s waiting for Uhura, and there’s just a bit of edge in her voice when she says “I didn’t know you were friends.”
Personally, I hope they don’t try and jam Uhura and Kirk together because I don’t think those characters have anything close to the chemistry that Kirk does with La’an.
She’s been having a very rough couple of days.
@73/fullyfunctional: “The very first interaction between them, Uhura tells Kirk to stop hitting on her.”
Yes, and he made it clear that he hadn’t been. If Jim Kirk were actually flirting with a woman and she turned him down, he wouldn’t lie about it, just accept it graciously.
This show mercifully avoids the myth of Kirk as a womanizer, and correctly depicts him as a serious, career-focused officer. That’s the only thing I saw in his interaction with Uhura.
“Later, during La’an’s interaction with Kirk, he tells her that he’s waiting for Uhura, and there’s just a bit of edge in her voice when she says “I didn’t know you were friends.””
That’s entirely about La’an’s feelings and assumptions, and is not evidence of anything actually going on with Kirk or Uhura.
It never ceases to amuse me that people keep forgetting that Doc McCoy was Chief Flirt, as well as Chief Medical Officer, on NCC-1701.
Star Trek and Star Wars fans complaining about canon don’t seem to really understand how canon works. As long as humans have been telling stories, minute consistency has never been a requirement for canon. Greek myths have different details, depending on the source. Sometimes, the same author uses contradictory details. Then Roman myth changed Greek myths even more.
The same with Hebrew and Christian religious stories. Many writings in the Hebrew Bible conflict with each other, and the Christian gospels likewise have conflicting facts. Self-taught modern-day sleuths think finding these contradictions is a big deal, but believers in these faiths have known for millennia that their stories were inconsistent.
In courts of law, judges and juries accept witnesses as providing truthful testimony in courts all over the world every single day, even though these witnesses often contradict each other in the details of what events transpired. And with courts, we are talking about fact and not fiction (or at least, we should be). Yet we still have the capacity to resolve conflicting narratives while still considering them all to be truthful. (This is not to say there are not people who simply commit perjury, but that’s another topic.)
There are probably many people on this message board that can attest to a friend or family member who is a great storyteller. Maybe it’s an uncle at Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s a coworker during lunchbreak. But there is often someone we know who is an amazing storyteller. We’ve heard the same stories from him a hundred times, and the stories are great every time. Yet the details seem to be a little different every time he tells the story. It doesn’t matter because the stories are too good.
And what politician doesn’t do this? It’s a little more difficult now because we have cable news and social media that can record every speech by every politician. But in the past, a skilled politician routinely varied the details of a story depending on what audience was in attendance. The politician might even shape his or her accent to the liking of the audience. And do you know what the irony is? Now that it’s harder to get away with this, it somehow seems as if politicians have become more dishonest and less competent. Maybe telling a slightly different story in Iowa than you did in New Hampshire isn’t the worst thing that can happen in politics.
For some reason, only in Star Trek, Star Wars, and probably a few other topics do the audiences seem to be incapable of understanding storytelling. Compare Batman and 007. The books, video games, movies, and comics are rarely concerned with detailed consistency. Yet Batman and 007 are some of the greatest characters in our popular consciousness.
For such a progressive genre, sci-fi seems to really draw in audiences with a fundamentalist mindset.
This felt like a Michael Pillar-era episode of TNG more than it did a TOS episode. And that’s a good thing. Lots of emphasis on characters and their relationships.
I’m not sure if it’s because this is the first time we really see a non-alternate reality Kirk but Paul Wesley’s Kirk is finally starting to feel like Kirk, especially with the death speech he gave to Uhura.
The Lower Decks crossover episode is next week! Can’t wait
@71 & 72; yes, you need oxygen… of which there’s plenty in the refinery for the crew to breathe. That’s why we saw the refinery combust when the torpedoes hit.
Maybe not enough to set off the whole nebula, but it might have been enough to trigger a larger local explosion.
@78/lance: “yes, you need oxygen… of which there’s plenty in the refinery for the crew to breathe. That’s why we saw the refinery combust when the torpedoes hit.”
Not how it works. As I said, a gas explosion only happens when the respective pressures of the fuel vapor and oxygen are exactly right, otherwise nothing happens. That’s why cars need carburetors or fuel injectors for the engines to work, because there’s no explosion if the mix isn’t right. (Go watch any of a bunch of episodes of Mythbusters that address this issue.) There’s no way the unconfined deuterium in a diffuse nebula would be remotely near dense enough to react with the oxygen, and the oxygen inside the plant would be an infinitesimal amount on the scale of the nebula.
The reason the explosion looked like a fireball is because TV/movie FX artists make every explosion look like a fireball whether it makes a shred of sense or not. They constantly give us roiling fireball explosions in the vacuum of space even though that kind of turbulence only happens when a fluid mixes into another fluid; there would be no roiling turbulence in vacuum, more just an expanding spherical gas bubble that quickly dissipated. Even in Earthbound scenes, they constantly give us orange fireball explosions in situations where a realistic explosion would look entirely different, with far less flame and more dust and debris (again, see any of a whole bunch of Mythbusters episodes). The reason Hollywood favors the familiar fireballs is because they’re very low-energy explosions, which look impressive because the combustion happens slowly, but are relatively safe to work with. So that’s the default visual language for screen explosions, the look audiences have been conditioned to expect even though it’s totally unrealistic in most cases, and it’s basically the only kind of explosion FX artists ever bother to create.
(I always wished that filmmakers and FX artists would look at all the impressive real explosions the Mythbusters set up and think, “Wow, these are so much cooler than the same-old, same-old orange flame explosions we’ve run into the ground — let’s figure out ways to fake these more distinctive and un-cliched explosion types.” But instead, they just went right on perpetuating the cliche of roiling orange fireballs.)
Incidentally, in case anyone hasn’t heard, Paramount+ released the Lower Decks crossover episode “Those Old Scientists” today, five days early, presumably to get ahead of bootleg leaks after they debuted it at San Diego Comic-Con today. Reportedly they’ll also be moving the last three episodes’ releases ahead one week.
I expect Keith will have a review up soon, so I’ll hold off on comments about the episode until then.
The SNW/Lower Decks crossover has dropped early (and it is glorious). Another new episode will air Thursday, and the week after that is the musical.
I just came here to tell everyone about the crossover episode being dropped early but I see the news is already out! About to watch it now!
Well, that was…cute! And I’m not even a Lower Decks fan, so that was a pleasant surprise.
My review of “Those Old Scientists” will be up here on Tor dot com on Monday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
But this thread will be a TOS spoiler thread in the meantime?
Well, look at that: Commander Chin-Riley is actually in the episode, and doing First Officer Things, and Number One gets a subplot with the delightful Pelia…
Really enjoyed this one. I really like Paul Wesley’s Kirk.
FTR, I think La’an, being emotionally less experienced, showed soap opera jealousy over Uhura for a moment, and it’s probably just that, and won’t be anything more, but for a moment I was like “if this were Picard, they’d be doing a cheesy predictable thing here, and that would be a love triangle.”
Picard really tested my faith in writers :) I’ve been really enjoying this series and I suppose I can trust it more… now to go watch the crossover :)
This was a nice episode, very standard story, where i was missing some originality, but it was well written and well executed, so i forgive the lack of originality. but agree with @ChristopherLBennett that it would be nice to see more Strange New Worlds. :)
I appreciated that Pike was brave to destroy the station, but the thing that bugged me is that after that noone seemed to care to validate Uhura’s claim about those space aliens…cause by the end of the episode, all we had was Sam’s theory and what Uhura said that she saw…if i were a captain who just blew up a station i’d want to make sure i did the right thing afterwards…
Amazing how quickly this show went downhill. Also why is “Kirk” in this, apart from nostalgia bait, when he could literally be any guy?
Review of “Those Old Scientists” has been scheduled for tomorrow morning, likely to give more folks a chance to see it who were caught off guard by the early release…
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@89. / Ollie: i don’t think it went “downhill”, this was a nice and simple Star Trek episode. First season had stronger ones, but this isn’t bad at all, what’s the downhill in it? Also i liked how we get some glimpses how Kirk met some of his future crew members and probably the series will provide a connection to the new crew eventually replacing the one from SNW…i don’t see anything wrong with that. Also, fanservice probably, but it’s not like in Picard S3, here it actually makes sense.
@89: Other than the first episode of the season, I’d say it is pretty hard to see how this season went “downhill” from the first one. So far, the “big swings” they talked about taking seem to be connecting. The writing staff seems to have a solid grasp on Kirk and how to subtly differentiate him from Pike. I wasn’t totally sold on Paul Wesley as Kirk until he gave the “death speech,” which was perfect. He really hit the cadence of something approaching first-season TOS Shatner (before the more histrionic approach of the late second and third seasons).
@90: I get the reasoning for that decision – but I am also REALLY curious to know everyone’s thoughts on “Those Old Scientists.
@92 Another big swing. Not a mss.
@90 Well, OK…but at that time, I’ll be in an all day retreat and in very poor position to engage in the online hijinks.
Pretty enjoyable episode.
As far as Kirk “hitting” on Uhura I wonder if that was a joke on their first interaction in the Kelvinverse, where he really was hitting on her, an echo across the multiverse if you will.
I love how much back characterization they give to Kirk through their conversations. We get to see why the boy scout is the way he is. An inability not to help. And that “as one of those Starfleet helped” exchange, splendid. It makes you wonder if Kirk really came to understand George Sr. as he got older and his life was swallowed up by Starfleet. “Because while you’re there…you can make a difference.”
My initial ethical concern in this episode was tapping an active stellar nursery for Deuterium. I know it’s a LOT of deuterium, but how much star and star system formation disruption does such a facility cause?
@94/mr_d: “My initial ethical concern in this episode was tapping an active stellar nursery for Deuterium. I know it’s a LOT of deuterium, but how much star and star system formation disruption does such a facility cause?”
None whatsoever. Despite the totally idiotic VFX design showing the refinery surrounded by teeny-tiny stars, any human construct would be microscopically small on the scale of actual stars. You might as well worry about a single dust mite’s effect on a nuclear power plant.
And really, it would probably be easier just to extract deuterium from water like we do today, or from hydrogen mined from the atmosphere of a Jovian or Neptune-type planet, or from the ice of the gazillions of comets and outer moons in any given star system.
@94/ mr_d
Certain moments are fixed points in time. The Eugenics Wars; the destruction of the Krenim colony on Kyana Prime; Kirk hitting on Uhura in a bar and her being uninterested
@95/CLB: Honestly, at this point I just pretend “deuterium” is one of the many made-up substances used willy-nilly in Treknobabble, instead of the real hydrogen isotope whose attributes have been so badly described in the franchise since at least Voyager.
@95, ChristopherLBennett,
The classic trope “scifi writers have no sense of scale” and readers too. I took the VFX to be that it was in the accretion disc phase, so they could vacuum from a denser cloud. I was thinking over the course of centuries, but thinking about it from that perspective it is a bit like a butterfly trying to inhale an appreciable amount of a hurricane.
Mass Effect showed me that putting such facilities in gas giants would be much simpler and more common. Conversely, that would’ve worked well with the episode as well. They likely would’ve arrived at the possibility of life earlier if it had been on a planet. Though extra-dimensional life forms entangled with hydrogen would probably be a big leap anyway.
It was nice that they showed the Bussard Collectors in action, though I surprised to see them physically open up. Also weird that Pike was concerned about burning more than they collected in that thick deuterium soup.
@98/mr_d: “Also weird that Pike was concerned about burning more than they collected in that thick deuterium soup.”
Rather, a hydrogen soup; if the isotope ratio in the cloud is the same as in Earth’s oceans, no more than 0.0156% of the hydrogen atoms are deuterons. That’s why hydrogen or water has to be processed to extract the teeny-tiny amount of deuterium in it.
Canon be darned, the scene at the end of the episode with the three of them sitting together sent a shiver through me.
If Doc McCoy does appear in STRANGE NEW WORLDS one would hope they’ll introduce him as somebody James T. Kirk already knows: it’s hard to imagine the series being able to top one of the best scenes in STAR TREK 2009 (and while it seems unlikely, it would be fun to see Mr Karl Urban show up as Bones McCoy, both because he’s very good in the role and as a sly hint that Leonard McCoy M.D. is just himself in any timeline).