Reportedly, one of Gene Roddenberry’s dictums for TNG was that there would be no space pirate stories. He thought they were too cliché. In the seventh season, TNG did the “Gambit” two-parter, which involved space pirates, and the story goes that executive producer Rick Berman, whenever that two-parter was discussed in his office, would tie a cloth around the eyes and ears of the bust of Roddenberry he kept on his desk.
(Frankly, I find the fact that Berman had a bust of Roddenberry on his desk to be the weird part of that story, but whatever…)
Roddenberry had a bunch of dictums that were pretty ridiculous and took all the fun out of things (like his belief that twenty-fourth-century humans should never, under any circumstances, disagree or argue or be mean), and many were ignored by the various spinoffs that came after his death in 1991 because they get in the way of a good story.
And WHO DOESN’T LOVE SPACE PIRATES?
One of the things I’m really loving about SNW so far is that they keep trolling us with regards to Spock and T’Pring. Thanks to the original series’ “Amok Time,” we know that some time in the future, Spock and T’Pring will not be anything like a regular couple. Their bond will still exist in some form, as Spock will be compelled by the pon farr to fulfill it, but T’Pring will, by the time Spock succumbs to the pon farr, have moved on to Stonn, having grown weary of being affianced to a legend. She will manipulate Spock and Kirk to get out of her marriage.
Every single time we’ve seen T’Pring on SNW, it’s been set up to appear to be where T’Pring gets fed up and walks away. We saw it writ small in “Strange New Worlds” when Spock interrupts their nookie-nookie to go rescue Number One. Both “Spock Amok” and this episode set up situations that seem tailor-made to sunder their relationship—
—and both times, it just deepens the relationship. This is, frankly, delightful, and I love how the show is messing with our expectations.
Ethan Peck and Gia Sandhu continue to be a joy. I love T’Pring trying to “spice things up” by embracing Spock’s interest in pursuing his human half, and she does so by reading Henry Miller. Spock’s utter nonplussed response to this revelation from T’Pring is magnificent.
But the endgame of Spock-T’Pring isn’t the only way the producers mess with our expectations. One of the regular comments that’s been made ever since it was revealed on Discovery that Michael Burnham was a ward of Sarek and Amanda Grayson and that Spock considered her his sister, is the question, “What about Spock’s half brother Sybok?”
Introduced in The Final Frontier, arguably the nadir of Trek as a movie series, Sybok—born of Sarek and a Vulcan woman he was mated to prior to Amanda—has never even been mentioned outside of the fifth movie.
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Until now. Formally identified as V’tosh ka’tur (Vulcans who reject logic and embrace emotionalism, the term coming from Enterprise’s “Fusion”), Sybok is revealed at the end of the episode to be the prisoner that the space pirates want freed.
Now let me be clear: I hated The Final Frontier with the fiery passion of a thousand white-hot suns (“Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain, why is he climbing a mountain?”), but Sybok is still a character who is worth exploring, particularly since the notion of exploring Spock’s younger days pretty much became a thing as soon as Discovery debuted.
That exploration of Sybok hasn’t happened yet, mind you, but this whole episode is there to set it up. And it does so in a way that is an absolute blast, because as good as Peck and Sandhu are, the episode is entirely stolen by Jesse James Keitel as Angel, the pirate captain. Angel starts off posing as Counselor Aspen, who works with colonists on the edge of Federation space. They arrive at the site of the colony ships they’re supposed to be helping only to find a ton of debris. Pike orders the Enterprise out of Federation space, not waiting for permission, as there is concern that the colonists will be sold into slavery.
As Aspen, Keitel is charming as all heck. The counselor is disarming, compassionate, flirty, insightful, and clever. They have some very useful insights into Pike and especially to Spock.
And it’s all a grift. When the space pirates board the Enterprise—beaming in at the same time a landing party beams out—Number One locks out command functions. Spock and Aspen go to engineering to take control of the ship, but as soon as Spock lifts the lockout, they reveal themself as Captain Angel of the Serene Squall.
At this point, Pike, Number One, Ortegas, M’Benga, La’An, and the rest of the bridge crew are prisoners of the space pirates, but with Angel on the Enterprise, their subordinates are in charge. And they’re, um, not great at it. Just as Angel plays Spock like a two-dollar banjo, Pike and the gang do likewise to the space pirates, using the promise of good cooking to sow dissent in the ranks.
We don’t get much by way of details of the landing party’s adventures, which is fine—it’s actually funnier this way, to go straight from sowing those seeds to taking over the bridge of the pirate ship. I’m more amused by the fact that through half a dozen episodes, nothing mussed Pike’s hair—not even sex with Adora last week—but being captured by pirates, that musses his hair!
And it turns out that the Enterprise in particular was targeted by Angel because of Spock’s connection to T’Pring and her work trying to rehabilitate Vulcan prisoners, as established in “Spock Amok.” One of those prisoners is Sybok, though Angel identifies him as “Xaverius.” Spock obviously recognizes the name, but we don’t get the explanation of that until the episode’s end.
Angel tries to use the threat against Spock’s life to get T’Pring to play ball. Spock counters by “admitting” to an affair with Chapel so that their engagement will be off, and T’Pring won’t suffer the dishonor of letting a prisoner go.
This is especially fascinating (ahem) because Jess Bush is very nicely playing Chapel’s interest in Spock. She knows it’s a bad idea, and she knows that he won’t have feelings for her in any case, nor would he cheat on T’Pring. Bush plays it very subtly, and it works nicely.
It’s also instructive to rewatch, not just “Amok Time,” but also “The Naked Time” again in light of SNW. That’s the first episode of the original series where Chapel admits to being in love with Spock, an admission she makes due to being infected with the Psi-2000 virus. That admission was generally assumed to be a new one, and one based only on recent associations with Spock—after all, on 1960s television, people were falling instantly in love all the time. But it actually works better now if the two characters have some history, which SNW is giving us.
Once again, an opportunity to give Number One a chance to shine has been passed up. The person who’s supposed to be the best first officer in the fleet, the uber-competent first officer from “The Cage” and Discovery season two and Short Treks has not been in evidence this season, and it’s getting irritating. Here, Number One is the one in charge of the ship when it’s taken over by space pirates, which is not exactly a crowning achievement, and her only contribution to the landing party’s fighting back is to roll her eyes at Pike citing a prior mission that he’s using as the basis of this plan. Oh, and saying, “Please stop” plaintively to Pike when he decides to talk like a pirate for no compellingly good reason at the end of the episode. (I was right there with her. But then, I mostly find Talk Like a Pirate Day to be massively annoying…)
Still, this is a fun episode, mostly because of the focus on Spock. Peck continues to hit it out of the park in giving us a younger, less sure of himself Spock who is still struggling with many of the same issues that Leonard Nimoy’s iteration will be a decade hence in the timeline, but with less confidence. Peck continues to channel many of Nimoy’s mannerisms while still making the part his own.
Plus, SPACE PIRATES! And Angel escapes in the end, which means, hopefully, we’ll be seeing them again.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three short stories out soon: “A Lovely View,” a tale of Zorro, in Zorro’s Exploits, edited by Audrey Parente, from Bold Venture Press; “What You Can Become Tomorrow,” a story that puts together author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson, in Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, from Fantastic Books; and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a Super City Cops story, in Tales of Capes and Cowls, edited by C.T. Phipps, from Crossroad Press.
I liked this one. And Of Course Sybok is dating a campy, nonbinary space pirate, because why wouldn’t he be?
My only problem was that the pirates took over the Enterprise too easily. And reminded me a little of “Rascals” in that regard. And where, oh where, is Hemmer? I hope he gets a focus episode before the end of the season. Arguably, this week’s was Chapel’s.
What shameless swab be this that cries up Space Pirates yet bewails TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY?
Stap me vitals and d— me for a lizard if that be not the double-tonguest hypocrisy, by the Powers!
Keith, while Jesse James Keitel employs she/her pronouns, both Captain Angel and the Doctor Aspen they replaced were identified as they/them.
I’m afraid this episode was the first dud for me. The first moment it lost me was when they said Starfleet doesn’t like its ships entering non-Federation space — just minutes before Pike’s narration repeats that the mission is to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before. Being in non-Federation space is the entire point of the Enterprise‘s mission and the exact thing this show is named for!!!! How could they let such a stupid conceptual mistake not only make it past the first rewrite, but actually get repeatedly harped on, like when Pike and Ortegas talked about navigating without beacons as if it were unusual?
Plus, how do they get “far outside Federation space” in a matter of hours? I’m so sick of modern shows forgetting Roddenberry’s rule that deep space travel should never be portrayed as an easy, casual commute.
As for the space pirate stuff, I didn’t care for it. It was pretty silly and cliched overall. Pike using food to manipulate them was a cute touch, but he defeated them way too easily and comically, and I couldn’t get past the fact that there was an actual old-style steering wheel on their ship’s bridge. (Also that their “cargo hold” was pretty obviously a warehouse.)
I liked the relationship between “Dr. Aspen” and Spock, and I loved seeing a non-binary character call out Spock for his ’60s-style definition of human and Vulcan identities as a rigid binary. But it had its problems, like treating Kolinahr as a default practice for all Vulcans, when it’s really more like taking religious orders. And once Angel dropped the act, they just became an annoying, cartoonish supervillain. And it revealed the one thing I liked best about the episode to be just a trick all along, which ruined it for me. The whole “I meant all of it except for lying the whole time” dodge didn’t help much.
Also, the ritual for Spock and T’Pring to dissolve their bond raises massive questions. If it’s that easy for Vulcans to break an engagement, then the entire premise of “Amok Time” goes out the window and the episode doesn’t need to happen at all. But if they invented it as a pretense, then Spock would’ve known T’Pring was playing along, so evidently it’s meant to be real, which makes no sense.
I did like the Spock/Chapel stuff, and it’s surprising to see Nurse Chapel of all people becoming the breakout character in the show. I do wonder how far they can take their relationship when “The Naked Time” is still something like 7 years in the future.
Even though I mostly didn’t care for this one, I was delighted by the reveal of Sybok at the end. I’ve always felt he was the best part of ST V, and that he deserved more exploration. It’s great that we’ll finally get the chance. Although a large part of what worked about him was Laurence Luckinbill’s performance. I wonder who they’ll cast to play his younger self.
I really, really hope we’re going to be getting Sybock at his chummy Best; there’s nothing quite as disconcerting as a villain with a Messiah complex who really would be the nicest boy, if only he could keep out of other people’s heads.
This was a decent episode, until it wasn’t.
I thought we might be in trouble when it started with a T’Pring log entry, but then it improved. I was liking Aspen. I thought they might be building to something interesting with her and Spock. The non-binary discussion wasn’t at all subtle but still thought-provoking.
Then suddenly she’s a third-rate comic book villain doing the most cliched baddie performance I’ve seen in a while and my interest flew right out the airlock.
Maybe Roddenberry had a point about space pirates.
@krad, the episode’s dialogue uses they/them pronouns for Angel (and Aspen), not she/her. (The actor, Jesse James Keitel, does use she/her though.)
@5. ChristopherLBennett: I don’t expect this to happen in a million years, but my own pet theory is that Mr Zachary Quinto would make an excellent casting choice for Sybock of Vulcan – after all, who could be a more memorable casting choice for the black sheep of Mr Spock’s family than an actor who not only played the man himself, but happens to be a dab hand at villains too?
Captain Angel’s cheesiness worked for me. I think they’re basically the 2020s’ answer to Harry Mudd.
This series just continues to pump out quality week after week and I am loving it. I really hope we get more Angel in the future and they’re not overshadowed by their boyfriend Sybok (which was an awesome reveal that made my eyebrows go through the roof). I’m wondering if Angel’s line about love being the only thing to keep you going in space was a dig meant for Chapel because they saw that she had feelings for Spock. It’s also nice knowing the ending and going back through the episode to see how Angel manipulated the crew from the beginning (like helping Spock find a way out of the trap that they obviously set).
One question I have about the timeline as a whole that I don’t know if anyone can answer. This is supposed to be happening 10 years before TOS, correct (I think that’s right, because Pike’s accident is still a decade away)? In Pike’s opening monologue, he mentions their “5-year mission.” How long have they been on it? Since Pike came back at the beginning of the series, or were they already on it when the Enterprise showed up on Discovery? Regardless, it’s obviously going to end before this show catches up to TOS, so what happens in the interim? Does the Enterprise just keep getting assigned 5-year missions one after the other?
Another enjoyable episode. I loved the extra layer about Angel and Spock’s relationship. Not only is she playing him to carry out her plan, but she is genuinely interested in who Spock is because he is the brother of the man she loves.
I’ve always wanted to see more Sybok. I’ve also felt that someone really should do a Director’s Cut by Shatner of Final Frontier with better effects and editing. I think there’s a lot of great concepts in the movie like Nimbus III, Sybok, and the idea of messing with the locals. Get rid of some of the dumber comedy like Row, Row your boat and the needless banging of heads and it becomes….decent.
Speaking of Final Frontier, this episode also didn’t seem to know whether it was a comedy or not. The Sybok curse?
Was Rebecca Romijn busy with other projects, or do the writers just not find Number One that interesting of a character?
@9 At this point in the series, it’s either 2259 or 2260, which is 5 years before Kirk takes command. Pike’s accident happens in 2266, so it’s actually only 6 or 7 years away. I think Pike thinking it’s 10 years away might be how it ends up happening; he thinks he has more time left than he actually does and is caught off guard.
Anything involving pirates of any kind is a win in my book. I loved Pike’s Long John Silver routine and thought his pirate talk at the end was adorable and understandable.
Doctor Aspen was referred to with they/them pronouns, but I don’t think that was ever clear for Captain Angel.
I think it’s funny that both of our reintroduced Vulcans, Sybok (I was very excited when I realized who the prisoner was) and Stonn were both previously played by dudes named Laurence.
I didn’t love last week’s episode, but this one was a great return to form. Perfect episodic storytelling.
@1 The Enterprise being way too easy to commandeer is well established in TOS, where everyone from space hippies to a pack of kids and their friend the Gorgan managed it at one time or another. If anything it’s the existence of an effective lockdown process that has to be circumvented that’s the innovation.
I’m also a bit non-plussed by the lack of work for Number One. She was the most intriguing character for me from THE CAGE, and I was truly interested in seeing how they would meld her persona with Rominjin’s warmer, more genial personality.
And, sorry, folks, but I enjoyed Captain Angel and their cons; if you’re going to be a super villain, enjoy the ride and chew the scenery. (OK, I’m biased, I wrote a pirate queen story that I’m producing, so I might be prejudiced….but STILL…..).
The Final Frontier gave us an excellent Jerry Goldsmith score, so it’s not a complete waste…
@7/ED: I’d prefer an actor who has a similar voice and personality to Luckinbill. Quinto doesn’t strike me as the type.
@9/ViewerB: “This is supposed to be happening 10 years before TOS, correct”
I’ve heard the show’s makers say that, but it can’t be, because Discovery season 2 ended in 2258, only 8 years before TOS. So this must be ’58 at the earliest, and pre-release materials indicated it was 2259.
“Does the Enterprise just keep getting assigned 5-year missions one after the other?”
There’s no reason every mission should be 5 years. The 5-year duration is specifically for a general galactic patrol and frontier exploration tour. Into Darkness indicated that it was a new program in the Kelvin timeline, and clearly not every starship mission in the Prime 23rd century is 5 years. Discovery wasn’t on a 5-year mission. The Enterprise in TMP had a single short-term mission: to stop the intruder. Evidently the trip to the galaxy’s edge in the second pilot was not part of the general 5-year patrol, but a specialized assignment of its own, which would’ve taken months of travel time alone. The Excelsior in ST VI was coming back from a 3-year survey of the Beta Quadrant. Clearly 5-year tours are just one category of mission.
In a couple of my novels, I suggested that the 5-year duration isn’t a strict absolute, but more a recommended maximum length of time before a ship should be brought in for refitting and crew rotation. A mission could end early for various reasons, or could be extended beyond the recommended limit if there were reason for it.
@14/Chase: “Doctor Aspen was referred to with they/them pronouns, but I don’t think that was ever clear for Captain Angel.”
There was a direct reference to Angel as they/them, yes. I believe it was toward the end when Pike was talking about tracking them down wherever they might be.
While I agree it makes little sense to consider going outside Federation space a big deal, I do kind of like the way they’re making communication issues explicit in this episode and the last one, and giving an idea why sometimes they can communicate in real time and sometimes they’re days from an answer.
If I wanted to no-prize it, I’d probably take a page from Poul Anderson’s Flandry stories, where he points out that the bubble of space the Terran Empire (not that one) claims includes so many stars that only a minority have actually been visited and incorporated. So Starfleet would mostly be doing exploration within its acknowledged volume rather than outside it.
But I agree that’s not consistent with how exploration and contact has been treated in any show from Enterprise to Discovery. The presumption is always to boldly go, except when limited by the Prime Directive or specific treaty or military considerations like the Neutral Zone.
(Which they’ll frequently at least bend anyway, but they’ll talk about it first.)
Maybe 23rd Century exploration missions are like the Lewis and Clark expedition, meaning that the Federation has claimed a vast area through various treaties and such but much of it is a mystery.
This episode was fine, as long as you can tolerate cheesiness, because it revels in how hokey it is, from the broad use of comedy to Pike talking like a freaking pirate from the command chair. Indeed, the tonal shifts in this episode – from a serious exploration of the love triangle between Spock, T’Pring, and Chapel, to dumb-dumb cliché bad guys, was whipsaw inducing.
What nearly ruined the episode for me was Jesse James Keitel’s role though. She was fine as Aspen, although she seemed a bit…fanfic-ish…of a character, insofar as we’re suddenly introduced to this new character who the episode is to a large extent built around and develops a solid rapport with a well-known character. But once she sheds the Aspen persona for Angel, she becomes a giant ham…admittedly a fine tradition in Trek, but one I have difficulty with here, as she basically does everything short of winking at the camera to let us know she’s an actor playing a role rather than let us just be submerged in the story. All of this may have been fine if everything was hammy (like say DS9’s MU episodes, or much of TOS) but surrounded by the more understated/naturalistic performances of everyone else it comes across very jarring, at least to me.
@19/mschiffe: But it renders the whole “It’ll take two days to get an answer from Starfleet” nonsensical when they’re able to call up T’Pring and talk to her in real time, and she’s able to get a ship out there within a matter of hours. Granted, the rehab facility was on a moon of the nonexistent “Omicron Lyrae” system rather than Vulcan, but why would it be so far away from the core worlds that it was in instant comm range when Starfleet wasn’t? I mean, doesn’t Starfleet have a ton of starbases and such all over space?
Look, if you’re going to use being out of communication as a plot point in your episode, then stick with it. Don’t throw it out the moment it becomes inconvenient. This is just a badly written script that they didn’t think through.
@21/Karl: There’s nothing wrong with building an episode around a guest star. The reason it became a common fanfiction trope was because it was a common trope of episodic television in TOS’s day and afterward. People today tend to assume that any story focusing on an interesting or prominent guest character is a “Mary Sue” story, but that’s misunderstanding the term. Before home video, there was no guarantee you’d get to see every episode, so the priority was on making each episode a self-contained whole rather than a piece of a larger continuity. That encouraged focusing on guest stars, since they could have transformative story arcs in ways that the regulars couldn’t. Look at “Where No Man…,” focusing on Mitchell and Dehner, or “Mudd’s Women,” focusing on Eve, Harry Mudd, and Ben Childress, or “Charlie X,” focusing on the title character.
“Mary Sue” stories are examples of that trope done badly, where the guest character is just a wish-fulfillment exercise and isn’t written well enough to deserve being the center of attention, or when the rest of the cast is written out of character to make them less competent than the guest star. A guest star-centric story done well is perfectly valid. And that’s what the first half of this episode seemed like with Spock and “Aspen,” but once they revealed themself as Captain Angel, it all fell apart.
Before I start, I think we just saw a teaser of the Tholians and their webs. I’m sure that will play off soon.
However, what annoyed me was the just stupidity of the “Incompetent Take Over of the Starship” plot but I guess every series has to do it- Starship Mine, One Little Ship came immediately to mind. Apparently this was also the day that the Enterprise decided to leave a BUNCH of it’s crew behind since apparently only the senior staff got transported over. At least put in a line of dialogue that most of the crew is locked in a cargo hold somewhere else even if you don’t show it to us. Also we had the cliche of one unlikely main character going all commando as Nurse Chapel the civilian geneticist starts taking down pirates left and right, which is more than I can say for everyone else. I agree with our intrepid recapper that Number One is getting completely jobbed here. And why exactly is Pike so entertained by everything? He gets captured, his ship is seized and he’s making quips and having a laugh manipulating everyone into a mutiny. The pirates (at least the ones who are allowed to talk versus the extras who aren’t allowed to) are more easily manipulated than little children, which doesn’t speak much for the Enterprise crew since they got severely beaten by said idiot pirates. And then the extra pirates do what extras unfortunately always do when things happen to speaking part actors- absolutely nothing. (how many times did we see the extra playing helm on the Ent-D do absolutely nothing as senior staff gets pummeled by the bad guy of the week?). Oh yeah, and the crew were idiots again for never checking on the story made up by Aspen/Angel. I get they were far away from Starfleet command but presumably they were in touch with command prior to going out to the edges of Federation space and could’ve asked a question or two first.
One thing I did appreciate was the allegory of non-biaryism (I think I made up a word there) which the writers took about as far as they could before it got to “beating you over the head” levels. Making the comparison of non-binary gender and Spock’s non-binary nature was a very interesting sub-text. Jesse James Keitel plays the part beautifully and has good chemistry with Ethan Peck (really who doesn’t) and we further the love triangle with Spock/T’Pring/Chapel. Being a prequel we do know what happens, but they are doing a great job of showing us the road to get there. As the producers said SNW doesn’t give us story arcs, it gives us character arcs and the development of Spock is being handled very well.
And lastly we have Sybok show up albeit played by an extra meaning we’ll get a name actor at some later point in time.
This episode is going to be great fodder for the “previously on” bits before each subsequent episode since we get so much development with Spock and the introduction of Angel and Sybok, but overall it just didn’t do it. The nominal A-Plot with idiot pirates taking over the ship from a supposedly crack crew just kills the episode for me as it always does. At least no one is shrunk down in this one.
I want the writers to torture us with Spock/Christine. I want the relationship to build up to the point where Spock is actually considering leaving T’Pring to be with Chapel. Then come to moments when, preferably in the same episode just twist the knife, Spock meets Leila Kolami and Christine hooks up with Roger Korby. Of course, Spock can’t remain with Leila, causing him to commit to the doomed relationship with T’Pring, even if his heart is no longer into it. Then of course, Korby will disappear leaving Chapel pining for him, leaving both of them wishing things could have gone differently. Make us suffer, Strange New Worlds. Make us writhe in agony.
@24: Clap, clap, clap!
I appear to be the only one here who completely missed Aspen being nonbinary. The character appeared to MY eyes to be inarguably female, and if plural pronouns were used in dialog, I completely missed that.
Am I the only one who completely figured out early on that Aspen was the bad guy? And that it felt a bit too similar to last week’s character twist?
Everyone complaining about Not Enough Number One™ seems to have not noticed that Hemmer was completely absent from this episode, which, considering that an important scene was in Engineering, makes it especially conspicuous. I would also mention Sam Kirk’s absence if Sam Kirk were a regular cast member, but he’s not; at any rate, I keep hoping and looking for his eventual return.
I squeeed at the return of Stonn (with hair parted on the side! YASSS!) and Sybok. I was concerned about T’Pring becoming too much of a recurring character but if the final three episodes show her and Stonn developing a relationship, that should be very interesting to see.
I would love to see some harmless, throwaway lines about characters we haven’t seen. For example, let’s say that M’Benga needs to examine Pike in Sickbay for some reason. Pike says to M’Benga something like, “You know, before he retired as CMO, Dr. Piper told me that… [something].” That would be cool.
And if Pike DIDN’T talk like a pirate for at least one brief scene, people would be complaining about that, too.
@26/Eric: It would be Dr. Boyce who preceded M’Benga on the Enterprise. Piper comes later, in the second pilot.
Also, did Gia Sandhu mispronounce Stonn’s name? I’m pretty sure it was pronounced “Stone” in “Amok Time,” but I think she said it like it’s spelled, with a short O.
At least Una is still appearing in this series. Hemmer, where art thou? You know, he’s only chief engineer. Not that important a role on a ship that… survives on technology…
Seriously, isn’t the point of having a gruff character with a heart of gold that we can get to know that person?
That’s definitely the correct response to that anecdote.
I freely admit that Star Trek V is not a good movie. However, I really enjoyed the character of Sybok and am delighted that we’re going to get more of him in this show, even if he isn’t played by Laurence Luckinbill.
As for the rest of it, it was alright. I agree with CLB that it had problems, the biggest of which, for me, was how over the top Jesse James Keitel was when she was playing the pirate, since I really enjoyed her performance earlier in the episode. At any rate, the whole thing didn’t seem to be taking itself very seriously, so I had a hard time taking it seriously, too, which means I couldn’t hate it, but I couldn’t really get into it, either.
@27: Christopher:
Nossir. Sandhu pronounced it exactly as Arlene Martel (and, for that matter, Leonard Nimoy) did, with a short O.
That was kind of a flop. Not to sound like a miserable stick-in-the-mud, but it felt like the episode was grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me and saying “HAVE FUN! LAUGH! WE’RE DOING A CAMPY PIRATE STORY!” and I couldn’t muster up more than a faint smile at best. It all came across as very knowing and deliberate, which is antithetical to what makes me enjoy campy/pulpy nonsense. You can still have an intentionally funny and ridiculous story without making the antagonists a non-threatening joke (TNG’s “Gambit”, while not a great two-parter by any means, is a fairly good example of successfully walking the line, being knowingly ridiculous while still making an attempt to provide some real tension and stakes for the characters. Many Voyager episodes managed it too).
People have already mentioned some big plot holes and logic inconsistencies – I get the feeling the writers came at it with the attitude of “well, it’s clearly a breezy fun romp of an episode, nobody will care too much about technicalities”, but of course the end result is that if the writers aren’t taking things at all seriously, it’s hard to get invested in what’s happening on-screen.
Still, taken in the broader context of the series, it’s not an outright bad instalment – a strong season can handle, and even in some ways be enhanced by, a silly kind of episode like this. I suppose only having ten episodes to work with changes the game a little for SNW though. This would have worked fine as a mid-season comedy episode for, say, season two of ENT, but SNW can’t really afford deadweight given what limited output they have. Plus, unless they abruptly drop the plot point, they’ve also set themselves up for a future Sybok plot, which I can’t say I’m excited for…
@26: I missed the nonbinary thing too, except with the opposite assumption – I thought the character was meant to be male, possibly because I have a friend from my goth days who looks and sounds eerily similar. Pretty much the same haircut too. Whatever the case, I was impressed by how the character’s appearance didn’t come up at all in the story, indicating that such a thing isn’t remarkable or unusual enough to take notice of in the 23rd century.
While it seems entirely plausible that the ups and downs of their relationship ends with T’Pring wanting to end it, the more we get to know her the harder it is to see her deliberately compassing the likely death of a Starfleet captain she doesn’t even know.
Even if she’d reached the point of wanting Spock dead (or finding the logic compelling), which, sure, breakups can be very bitter, so far we haven’t seen the ruthlessness that would have her put a stranger (one clearly at a physical disadvantage to Spock) on the wrong end of a lirpa to straighten out her personal life.
Unless maybe all her efforts to meet Spock’s humanity halfway get distilled into antipathy for humans? But that would be a very emotional reaction from a Vulcan. (Albeit one pretty easily subsumed into the usual Vulcan superiority complex.)
Or maybe the logic of getting with Stonn is just that persuasive.
Like I said, I’m pretty sure we’ll find out that Pon’Farr effects women as well and T’Pring is not the sort of woman who plots murder normally.
@32
There was some discussion on a previous episode’s post about this – to be honest, I have trouble reading “Amok Time” as being anything other than T’Pring having no choice other than to invoke combat to escape the arranged marriage with Spock. Given that it’s shown not to work like that in SNW, the writers have set themselves the challenge of trying to show us how we get from here to “Amok Time”, which might be a losing battle. It’ll take something pretty spectacular to explain why T’Pring would end up wanting to kill Kirk and/or Spock, apparently entirely out of uncharacteristic malice, without any apparent external pressure to do so.
At this point I wouldn’t mind them just overwriting parts of TOS, or at least tweaking them to help everything fit together better, but I imagine they’ll be very very averse to doing so.
@34
By that point in the marriage, Spock is willing to kill Kirk with his bare hands in order to mate with T’Pring. I feel like this is really the case of timing but I also agree this is something of a major retcon to make it so the Vulcans are a society that sin’t so wedded to misogynist tradition as the Sixties were willing to imply.
Really, making it so this was a matter of timing and both sides being psychotic due to heat would be all the more interesting.
Like, “T’Pring really wanted to break it off but didn’t because both she and Spock couldn’t quite bring themselves to do until both of them were out of their minds due to space biology.”
I keep waiting for the development of a triumvirate analogous to the one at the heart of TOS (Kirk/Spock/McCoy). Pike and Spock are clearly there already, but the third leg, if indeed that is even intended to happen, isn’t. Logically it ought to be Number One, but as noted repeatedly above, she’s not getting developed at all. Chapel, M’benga, Uhura, and the rest of the main crew are mostly being given good independent character development and story arcs, but nothing in the context of a thematic linkage to Pike/Spock. Maybe the writers just don’t want to be constrained by that kind of construction?
#WhereisHemmer?
Well, it seems like people I either liked or disliked this episode. Me? I’m in the former camp and thought this was a return to form for the series, since I was a bit bored in the previous episode and this one was a lot of fun. I was surprised right off the bat how T’Pring is seemingly becoming a prominent recurring character and I’m all for it the way it’s progressing. The character stuff with her and Spock and Chapel are all great. Then we get the Aspen character and there seems to be a spark there between them and Spock. I like JJK’s performance both as Aspen, which was really calm and serene, and then Angel, which was, um. not. Yes, the latter character is way over the top but it goes with the nature of this space pirate story. It did remind a good deal of that Osyra character in Discovery‘s third season, however. Although, Angel is even more of an extreme character.
I like that Stonn was introduced already, and the reveal of Sybok at the end had me grinning and was a nice way to end the night right before going to bed. More Sybok in the future and his interplay with Spock sounds like a great thing to me.
I think maybe SNW needs more than 10-episode seasons. This is definitely more of an ensemble-based show than Discovery, Picard, and even Enterprise. However, there are 9 regulars in this cast, and even with 10 episodes this season, some characters are noticeably getting more focus than others. And with only a few more episodes left this season, it looks like not everyone will get their chance to shine which is unfortunate.
I also have to chime in and say, that while I know Keitel is trans and goes with she/her pronouns, I also read the character of Angel/Aspen as a woman as well and totally glossed over if the character was supposed to be non-binary and they/them pronouns were employed.
@37 I caught the they/them (easy with captions), but I still thought of the character as a woman.
Ah, well.
I’m no expert, but I think the point of non-binary identity is about not being bound by other people’s expectations of what gender you appear to be. Which is why paying attention to pronouns is important.
Anyway, am I the only one who thinks “The Serene Squall” is kind of an ugly title? It’s trying to sound poetic, but it’s just awkward. And I don’t think it really means anything with regard to the story, beyond just being the name of a ship that appears in it.
It does feel like they are making the common mistake with Una that has been made with other “strong female characters” where they portray them as “the only adult in the room.” Pike wants to have fun and be funny, Una rolls her eyes and asks him to stop, the status quo is maintained. They even refer to her as “where fun goes to die” in a previous episode, and they only other officer we see her socialize with is the similarly fun-less La’an.
We as fans are used to the dynamics shown in the TNG era, where they first officer gets to go off and be awesome while the captain applies the brakes. In TOS and apparently SNW it is the opposite, the captain goes on adventures while the XO keeps the ship running. I think anyone expecting Una to be a female Riker were setting themselves up for disappointment.
Also, I chuckled at the references in the name of the system from the previous mission that inspired the pirate mutiny plot, Alpha Braga IV.
And, if the closed captioning on Paramount+ is any sort of authority, the character’s name was spelled “Xaverius.”
Well, I’m no expert either, but if the point of non-binary identity is about not being bound by other people’s expectations — and our moldy old language is a part of those expectations — perhaps they should consider investing in a different, more individualistic set of pronouns. New words perhaps?
They/them fly right by me sometimes without me even noticing they were talking about an individual, as happened with this episode. I know “zhe” and other alternatives have been proposed. Practically speaking, I know even my thick brain would catch that. Just my opinion.
Not trying to cause ruckus there. I know this is a sensitive topic, but you know, it is an issue sometimes.
@41/Buster: How other people choose to identify themselves is not about what we’re comfortable with. If I tell you I prefer to be called Christopher, you wouldn’t say “I don’t like that name, perhaps you should go by Chip instead.” You’d respect my own choice of what to call myself. If we can respect other people’s name choices without judging them by our own standards, we should be able to do it with pronouns too.
People have been trying to make “new words” like “zhe” or “xe” catch on for ages, and it’s never worked. But singular “they” has been part of English since before Chaucer’s time. It’s a natural part of the language that’s always been used to refer to a single individual of unspecified or unknown gender, even when grammarians invented arbitrary rules saying it was wrong in formal usage, because it’s simpler than “he or she” and more widely used and understood than some invented alternative. And it has become the accepted norm within the past few years.
Yeah, it’s an established part of Number One’s character that she’s serious and reserved while they’re contrasting that with the more affable and silly Pike.
Space pirates do NOT do it for me. It seems to me that distances in space are so vast that it would be difficult to even FIND another ship to prey upon. And running a space ship should be costly enough that the plunder would have to be extremely valuable to make the effort worthwhile. It just seems to me that piracy in space doesn’t really work. (Sure, Aspen/Angel is trying to get their lover back, but the rest of the band are regular pirates.)
And Sybok, really? The writers went to the worst of the TOS movies for inspiration? That seems like rather a bad sign…
I didn’t hate this episode, but to me it’s by far the weakest of the SNW episodes we’ve seen so far. But that’s the great thing about making the series episodic; I’ll probably like next week better. :-)
@44/Corylea: In a realistic SF universe, space piracy would be difficult to pull off because you could see another ship coming from quite far away, from its engine emissions. But then, I suppose that’s true of nautical pirates to an extent (literally, that extent being the distance to the horizon). I guess the idea is to conceal your intentions until you’re close enough. Or to lure a ship into an ambush, which is what they did here.
As far as finding ships goes, I think that in space, as on the high seas, most ships would follow established routes between inhabited worlds, and pirates would know to frequent those routes. I figure there’s a reason that historical pirates were known for frequenting coastal areas, since that’s where you’re most likely to find prey. Space pirates might operate on the outskirts of planetary systems, as an equivalent.
As for Sybok, a weak story can produce an interesting element or character that’s worth exploring further, in a better way. I’ve always felt it was unfair that a promising character like Sybok had the movie he was in held against him.
@45/ChristopherLBennett: Thanks for your thoughts; I always find you interesting and insightful.
Personally, I prefer to politely pretend that TFF did not exist, the way one pretends that one’s companion has not just farted. :-)
@46/Corylea: Well, this series is set nearly a quarter-century before TFF, so it’s not going to reference it directly. So just think of Sybok as a brand-new character. ;)
Both Aspen/Angel’s pronouns and the spelling of Sybok’s alias have been fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, remaining grateful for the edit function
Every week this show is simply fantastic. The entire cast is charming. Everyone gets some spotlight. This one had plenty of colorful characters around.
Was this week’s perfect or any of them? No. Some were darn close. But of all the shows I’m watching right now or I’ve seen in a while, this is the only one I always feel better for having watched. I can offer no higher priase.
Sybok, as a character, was wasted on Star Trek V. I’m looking forward to seeing more of him.
Stealth is hard/impossible in space in a realistic universe, but very doable in Trek via multiple methods. Cloaking, of course. (And while pirates aren’t going to leapfrog cutting edge Romulan technology at this point, there may be building block technologies that are less comprehensive but reduce detection range. The Orion craft managed to delay detection for a long while in Journey to Babel.) Nebulas and other regions where sensors are ineffective or hampered (as seen just a few episodes ago). Deception, as here: the target saw the pirate, but it’s a distressed merchant or trusty patrol ship or uncontacted alien till it hoists the figurative Jolly Roger.
There’s also just being faster and better armed: the target sees the pirates coming, but if they’re too slow to run and too far from help to rescue (if they can even get a distress call out through jamming), then they’re out of luck. Not something that will work against the flagship, but a colony craft or freighter presumably has different design limits from a predator for profit.
And maybe after a few attacks the next “colony ship” turns out to be stuffed full of Starfleet security officers and packing military grade shield and phaser generators where the agricultural equipment is supposed to be. Or civilian ships organize into convoys with Starfleet vessels for safety and the cost benefit of pirating drops. No one said pirating is safe or easy.
But the sense is that Starfleet is stretched pretty thin, and unarmed or lightly armed ships are common. And while Space is Big, two ships coming across one another isn’t at all rare, judging by how often the Enterprise does it, and presumably most shipping and settlement activity isn’t particularly secret. Piracy doesn’t seem implausible under the circumstances.
I am just loving this show. I have enjoyed every single episode. So happy to see what I wanted in Star Trek back.
Pike does a wonderful pirate impression.
Since Star Trek V: TFF is on the brain due to the reintroduction of Sybok, I thought of another parallel between that film and this episode. Just as in that movie, here we have an armed group of ruffians connected to Sybok somehow able to take control of the flagship of the Federation. I thought that was also a fun callback.
I would love to see this younger iteration of Sybok using his trademarked “let me release your pain” on a whole ‘nother set of characters.
@45 – “In a realistic SF universe, space piracy would be difficult to pull off because you could see another ship coming from quite far away, from its engine emissions.”
Another problem with this episode. We see the Enterprise approach the missing ship. Pike asks if they’ve detected the Enterprise yet and we’re told they’re still out of sensor range. Except, the scene just before showed the Enterprise almost on top of the other ship. It could be detected using the simple optical sensor known as looking out the window. Is the colony ship’s sensor range measured in feet?
This is my favorite episode of the series to date. I’ve enjoyed everything leading up to this one, and I’ve loved a lot of moments along the way, but this is where I started getting all of the things I wanted. I wanted SNW to be more queer…and along with an apparently bisexual Chapel we now have a seemingly male Orion pirate flirting with Captain Pike and the non-binary Angel / Aspen – who completely stole the show for me! Having just started the new Queer as Folk series this was the second time Jesse James Keitel won me over this week. I also prefer episodes of the prequel shows that set up stories that pay off in later series and this is another one of those. I’ve loved all the T’Pring / Spock / Chapel stuff up to this point and this was the best installment yet. It’s one of the reasons why I’m torn on Discovery jumping to 3188 / 3189; I love that we’re finally getting to see the future of Star Trek but I also loved seeing how Discovery explained the reasoning for Sarek’s disappointment in Spock for joining Starfleet and how his marriage with Amanda could work; brilliant stuff IMO. And about half way through this episode I again started feeling a bit disappointed that Sybok had not been explored previously on DISCO and feeling like Xaverius would have been a brilliant reveal if only he were Sybok; him being v’tosh ka’tur seemed perfect to me. And then he was. And I was very happy. And we get another mention of the Qu’Vat colony. And Stonn. Stonn is introduced here! And I love how this series is taking “Amok Time”, an episode that I already loved, and is making me love it even more by developing those characters and giving me a backstory that I never even knew that I wanted or needed. Enterprise did some work on this as well with the introduction of T’Pau and the lirpa in that show’s excellent 4th Season Vulcan arc. Anyways – I loved it. And I want more episodes like this one. And with the ending suggesting we actually will get more episodes like this one, I’m now even more invested in this series than I already was. Kudos!
This episode actually makes me want to rewatch Star Trek V, something I haven’t done in many, many years. Yikes!
Maybe I’ll just watch all of the Sybok stuff and skip the rest!
Is SNW really so good that it makes TFF better by association? Tune in next week to find out!
Seriously though, I love lore mining.
@57/JasonD: “Seriously though, I love lore mining.”
Is lore mining the evil twin brother of data mining? :D
I’m rewatching all of Trek in release order. Since I just started TNG it’ll be over a month easy before I reach The Final Frontier, and I’ve only ever seen it the once when it came out, but I’m definitely more interested to revisit it now.
The old trope of a pair of characters who may harbor attraction to one another (whether they know it themselves or not) put in a situation where they have to kiss is not a favorite of mine — yet I enjoy these versions of Chapel and Spock having a close friendship that may sprout romance, even though it’s impossible for me to reconcile with their incarnations on TOS.
I know T’Pring was seen at work as we heard her personal log but it got me wondering if personal logs are not, as I’d thought, oral journals kept explicitly by Starfleet personnel, recommended if not required as supplementary to their duty logs as part of service. Do a large swath of people keep personal logs in everyday life? While I can see the act of typing as less of a thing in a future where oral commands to technology are commonplace, I find it so much easier to gather my thoughts in writing than by speaking extemporaneously that it’s hard to imagine doing the latter for anything more than quick memos to myself.
“The Serene Squall” is a seeming oxymoron that suggests duality. We’re likely not supposed to read that into Aspen/Angel being nonbinary, at least in-story as it’s not a contentious gender identity in that setting, but it could apply to their masquerade given how as others have noted they became a cackling villain after the deception was dropped. Given the Vulcan practice of using extreme mental discipline to mask if not successfully quell raging emotions, I think “serene squall” is a good way to describe them and Spock in particular; unfortunately, despite some lip service being given to his duality in this episode there was no visible struggle with Vulcan stoicism in evidence.
Not only were Hemmer and Uhura both missing this episode, with the chief engineer’s absence glaring, but I have to agree that even though we obviously don’t see everything happening everywhere on the ship the Enterprise’s complement appears to have been severely reduced. I’m with KRAD on Pike’s gambit being all the more amusing given that we don’t see how it works, just that it does.
I’ll admit that I missed the plot glitch where the Enterprise was going to be 2 days from contacting Starfleet, but the pirates could just call T’Pring on a moment’s notice and have her pop out with a prisoner for exchange. Vulcans would, presumably, need more paperwork than that, at least, much less the logistics and time involved to get there.
But I was really thrown when, near the end, Angel disappeared in a puff of transporter, leaving behind her entire group of armed pirates with only Spock and Chapel and one phaser on the bridge, and Pike asks Spock to emergency beam the entire crew back to Enterprise. Uh, okay? Using who?
THAT seems to have been the place for at least a serious nod to Number One and La’an. Have Pike and a small team take the pirate bridge, drop the Enterprise’s shields, and beam a team over to retake the Enterprise, or even just the transporter room. Even if it all happened off screen, having the crew beaming back onboard would make far more sense as a reason for Angel to cut her losses and run with none of her people.
Not even mentioning that the ship was still full of armed pirates who now have their backs well and truly up against the wall is even sloppier writing than letting them take over the ship without a fight in the first place. The ship was on alert, for God’s sake, investigating PIRATES. There should at least have been some “how the hell are they beaming on board?” or “Oh my god, they’re beaming our entire crew OFF! How!?!” dialogue.
@58. ChristopherLBennett: Is lore mining the evil twin brother of data mining?
It’s not even 8 a.m. but I’m fairly confident in saying you’ve won the Internet for today.
@59/Arben: “The old trope of a pair of characters who may harbor attraction to one another (whether they know it themselves or not) put in a situation where they have to kiss is not a favorite of mine”
Agreed. I’d forgotten that was another thing that annoyed me — it was such a sitcommy cliche to have Spock pretend to be having an affair with Chapel so they’d have to kiss and she’d start to fall for him for real. And the way they justified it didn’t make much sense. Why would T’Pring suddenly no longer be willing to trade a prisoner for a hostage just because she wasn’t engaged to the hostage anymore? Whatever happened to Vulcans’ basic reverence for life? It was just really clumsy and contrived the way it was set up to force things to end up with Spock kissing Chapel.
Not to mention that it’s way too early for that to happen. It’s still years before TOS and her confession of love for Spock. They should’ve stuck with the friendship and slow-burned anything beyond that.
“Do a large swath of people keep personal logs in everyday life?”
I could see T’Pring doing so as a supplement to her official logs with the rehab project. But yeah, maybe “Personal journal” would’ve been a better way to head that, except I guess they were keeping to the usual conventions of the franchise.
“Given the Vulcan practice of using extreme mental discipline to mask if not successfully quell raging emotions, I think “serene squall” is a good way to describe them and Spock in particular”
In terms of the concepts, maybe. But “serene squall” just sounds clumsy and unpleasant to my ears. The rhythm seems off, da-da, da. And “squall” is just an ugly word.
@18. ChristopherLBennett: Your point is excellent, cogent and the little imp cackling on my shoulder keeps whispering “Do it, do it …” anyway because he wants to see Mr Spock Vs Mr Spock (Technically, that should probably with “again” after ‘Spock Amok’).
Clearly my Imp of Mischief has a thing for stunt casting.
As a nonbinary Trek fan, I loved Captain Angel. Blu del Barrio does fantastic work over on Star Trek Discovery, but the writers have given them one of my least favorite tropes–the angelic queer kid who is mainly here to serve as Good Wholesome Queer Representation. You can barely hear their dialogue sometimes over the writers’ room patting themselves on the back for how evolved they are.
The trans YouTuber Verity Ritchie did a whole video called “Good LGBT Representation is Boring (and why that’s a problem),” and specifically called out Adira and Gray: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cR3b2Gblq0
I do see the point of portraying wholesome queer people and queer chosen families on TV, but we also need nonbinary space pirates who show up to spout terrible campy dialogue and ruin everybody’s day and bang the villain from Star Trek V. I get it, though. Adira walked so Captain Angel could fly.
I find it interesting that a lot of people didn’t pick up on Aspen/Angel’s pronouns. The scene between Chapel and Spock at the very top of the episode started off with a bit which seemed to me like it had been very awkwardly inserted just to establish that this week’s guest star used they/them pronouns. I see that it was too subtle for some folks, and on the other hand I’m sure if I looked in the right forums I’d find people complaining that the woke devil Kurtzman was shoving nonbinary people in our faces again.
@41/Buster, I get your point about new pronouns. Some nonbinary people do use what we call “neopronouns” (though as @42/CLB pointed out a lot of them aren’t actually new) but people often get even more bent out of shape by having to learn new words than they do over having to use the singular “they.” There’s really no perfect solution, sadly, though to be sure English is a lot more accommodating of nonbinary genders than a lot of Indo-European languages. In the end, though, it’s really about finding the pronouns that work best for each person, and as nonbinary identities become more normalized, I think picking up on stuff like this will get easier for all of us.
Since I’m also mixed race, the analogy between Spock’s dual heritage and Aspen/Angel’s nonbinary gender makes for a provocative conversation. I’m not sure it entirely works, though. Race and gender are very different in how they work in society, on and off of Star Trek. I’d love to be able to just define my own relationship to my complex racial identity, but I don’t get to. It’s a constant negotiation with communities that will never fully accept me. Being nonbinary at least gives me a space and a community in which to define myself.
Angel’s advice to Spock did remind me of Picard’s words to Data in Birthright: “You are a culture of one–which is no less valid than a culture of one billion.” It’s a very Star Trek way of looking at things, but I don’t know if we’re there yet as a society.
One thing I meant to mention in the review but forgot to was that I adored the conversation between Spock and “Aspen” when discussing his halfbreed nature, with Spock saying, “That’s genetics” when talking about his being half human and when he says he was raised on Vulcan, “Aspen” countering with, “That’s geography.”
It’s also yet another case of introducing some interesting psychological notions early on in a story and then making it less relevant later, as with Data’s foreknowledge of being beheaded in “Time’s Arrow” and his burgeoning emotions in “Descent” and the crew’s grief over Picard in “Gambit” and Chakotay’s concern over his kid in “Basics.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@58. ChristopherLBennett: “serene squall” just sounds clumsy and unpleasant to my ears
Yeah. I think maybe I was trying to justify it because of that.
@64. Raven90182: I do see the point of portraying wholesome queer people and queer chosen families on TV, but we also need nonbinary space pirates who show up to spout terrible campy dialogue and ruin everybody’s day and bang the villain from Star Trek V
Hear, hear.
kkozoriz @54: Except, the scene just before showed the Enterprise almost on top of the other ship.
Thank you for mentioning that! For a moment I wasn’t sure whether the show itself would use that somehow, but then when it didn’t, I had to gather up my suspension of disbelief from where it had slipped, before I could move on. I didn’t go back to check whether my eyes had deceived me, but I did expect to see krad call it out—or if not krad then CB.
Meant to ask… Did anyone else nearly do a spit take when Angel referred to Chapel’s “rock-hard eyes” for (implicitly) Spock? This new era of Trek has amped up the sex and crude language, but I was not prepared for that.
I’m honestly surprised at how many people were turned off by a campy, scene-chewing space pirate villain. (Well not that surpised given the current culture of rejecting suspension of disbelief in favor of nitpicking on the Internet. I feel like this episode nailed everything that was fun about classic Star Trek (especially TOS), and I can’t wait to see more of Jesse James Keitel’s Angel.
@68/Arben: “Did anyone else nearly do a spit take when Angel referred to Chapel’s “rock-hard eyes” for (implicitly) Spock? This new era of Trek has amped up the sex and crude language, but I was not prepared for that.”
It did not occur to me to parse the phrase in that way, since it’s anatomically impossible and I wouldn’t have thought of applying such a metaphor to a female character. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean exactly, but I guess what it suggested to me was more along the lines of an intense or unwavering stare.
@69/Tom-A-Lak: “I’m honestly surprised at how many people were turned off by a campy, scene-chewing space pirate villain.”
I don’t know how I’d feel about the general category of scene-chewing space pirates, but in this specific case, I found Keitel far less effective as a scenery-chewing space pirate than as “Dr. Aspen.” Perhaps it’s because I liked “Aspen” and their relationship with Spock, and so the persona that replaced them was far less appealing or interesting to me.
I mean, flamboyant space-captain villains are a dime a dozen. But a character who could be a friend to Spock and talk truth to him from a fresh perspective that never would’ve occurred to 1960s writers? That was something special. And they threw it away in favor of a campy cliche.
@70 But…none of what they said was untrue. A human would dismiss it, but a Vulcan would not necessarily do so. Logic would demand it be considered.
And I find THAT dynamic more interesting than one coming from a friend (which would have, to a certain extent, undermines the isolation and solitude of the Kirk era Spock).
As always, YMMV.
I’d ask the people who didn’t enjoy the episode too much: how is SNW first 7 episodes comparing to the first 7 of any Trek show post TOS? A genuine question.
I really liked this episode, but wanted to agree that this is a point well taken. Though I would argue that the show didn’t “throw away” Dr. Aspen so much as add depth to the character. Aspen still “got” Spock in a way he probably didn’t think possible, and still had an outsized impact on events going forward, and of course can still (hopefully) appear again. Really just a great character. Actually there have been a series of really great guest characters on this show so far, including Hemmer (ba dum dum).
And on the nonbinary pronoun issue, I have to confess to completely missing it until reading this recap, but because I was watching in a loud living room with half a dozen other things going on meaning I didn’t hear every word.
As the father of a non-binary person who uses they/them pronouns, I noted that the pronouns were used very early in the episode. However, it was treated in a very natural way, just used without any explanation, so I can see why some might have missed it.
We had a great discussion about the conversation between Spock and Aspen regarding the false binary choice between being Vulcan or Human. As someone who grew up with reruns of TOS and adored Spock from the jump, I thought that was the kind of insight that felt fresh while also meshing very well with everything we’ve seen of the character before. And for our part, we greatly enjoyed Jessie James Keitel’s performance throughout.
I do understand and agree with the criticisms about the whole “stay within Federation space” and just about everything related to that concept. It just doesn’t ring true, and there had to be better ways to set up the premise.
I’m definitely down for some Sybok appearances, though! That’s going to be a tricky bit of casting.
@27/Chris: re: Piper/Boyce. Whoops. Thank you for fact-checking me. But the suggestion remains.
If they’re not gonna give me any goosenecked monitor displays on the bridge, could they at least show me a phaser cannon? WE KNOW THEY HAVE ONE!
Speaking of Stuff On The Bridge™, was anyone else a bit… surprised? disappointed? that they had phasers hidden in glove compartments around the bridge?
I’m embarrassed that I didn’t notice Uhura’s absence until someone above mentioned it here. Ooops.
@several: re: “flamboyant space-captain villains”: Like, Harry Mudd? The OUT-rageous Okona? My Dear Captain Koloth?
@75/Eric L. Watts: It makes sense to have phasers tucked away on the bridge if they’re needed. Although the culmination of that was the dome-mounted phaser array in TAS: “Beyond the Farthest Star.”
And as I said, my opinion that this specific flamboyant space-captain performance didn’t work for me is not a commentary on the general category of flamboyant space-captain villains.
@74 That’s a very good point about how the pronouns were used. They were just… used. Nobody questioned it, no one did a double take.
@75 I wasn’t that bothered by the hidden phasers actually only that I wonder why it wasn’t more common. I can head cannon two possible explanations- we just got done with the klingon war (and yes I know the Enterprise was held out of it) so maybe it was just something they did given that they thought about hostile Klingon boarding parties. I also can imagine that this is an Una thing, since as the best first officer in Starfleet probably thinks about all possible scenarios and preps for them.
Also, no Uhura, no Hemmer and no about 200 other crew members. Seriously this must have been the week everyone but senior staff took a trip to Risa given how easily the idiot pirates took them over.
I interpreted the “rock-hard eyes” comment completely differently, as we’ve seen Chapel be someone who doesn’t believe in romantic love. Her eyes are hard everywhere she looks, except they soften for Spock, in Angel’s opinion.
Also, my “lore mining” line was pure pun bait, I’m glad CLB took it. ^_^
This was the first one of the season to fall flat for me, mostly for the reasons Christopher outlines in #3. A contrived situation which doesn’t seem to respect the premise of the show or the logistics of the setting – they could have investigated mysterious colonist disappearances anywhere, without all the talk of “not going beyond Federation space” or being cut off from communications, as it didn’t seem to matter anyway. For an earnest-if-jaded former Starfleet counselor, Aspen sure does dress like an evil space pirate, and wouldn’t you know it… I wasn’t fond of Jesse Keitel’s scenery-chewing once their deception had been revealed either.
The mutiny plot on the pirate’s ship was silly but fun, so I won’t take points away from that. I was disappointed in the Serene Squall looking very much like a distressed warehouse, and I’m sure we’ve seen that location before on Discovery somewhere too. The jump from “let’s start a mutiny” to the crew having already taken the bridge while the pirates battle around them was amusing. And I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of Ortegas and Pike’s banter.
Spock and T’Pring, I would have rather we didn’t have so much of. I get that it’s one of the season’s main plot threads, but at this point Spock is one of the most heavily developed characters in the entire franchise – would it have killed them to skip this one encounter in order to give more development to, say, Hemmer or Una?
@72
Just going by IMDB, and without weighting for popularity or accounting for recency bias or anything along those lines, the average ratings of the first seven episodes of each show (counting Farpoint, Emissary, Caretaker, and Broken Bow each as one episode):
Strange New Worlds: 8.06
Prodigy: 7.6
Picard: 7.56
Star Trek: 7.36
Discovery: 7.3
Enterprise: 7.23
Lower Decks: 7.16
Voyager: 7.13
Deep Space Nine: 7.11
The Next Generation: 6.39
@58 – Given what big companies do with the practice, data-mining may be the evil twin.
This was a fun episode. One of my favorite aspects of the series is how liberal they are being with tonal and genre shifts. One episode can be action/adventure, one a comedy, one a drama and you never know what you’re going to get next week. I’m so glad Star Trek has returned to its episodic roots.
It feels like the plot is a bit of a rehash of Star Trek Beyond, with the turncoat warning the Enterprise of a threat. I enjoyed Star Trek V, it was almost a throwback to TOS with its plot of an Enterprise hijack and search for a false god. I’m not sure how I feel about Sybok though. Up until now the show has done a fairly good job of avoiding too much fan service and “small universe syndrome.” I think the Sybok character could’ve been a new Vulcan villain and it wouldn’t change anything. I want to see the narrative universe of the show expanded and not rehashed.
Teasing an upcoming supervillain also feels like it’s falling into a serialized (especially Marvel) trope. But I am happy to say that I can give the show the benefit of the doubt since it has been great so far and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with it next.
Oh and the whole “his name is Xeverus, oh wait no it’s really Sybok” thing is reminiscent of the “John Harrison” nickname given to Khan in Into Darkness. But at least in this case the name Sybok does have meaning to someone in-universe. But it still felt like a silly narrative trick to play on the audience.
This may be my favorite episode of the season so far for the exact reasons most of you don’t like it. I loved the over the top stuff and it was just fun. It was entertaining. The kiss chemistry between Chapel and Spock was absolutely red hot. Pike talking like a pirate? I was rolling. To me the only downer was the reveal that the dickhead from star trek 5 is going to be a thing in future episodes. Ugh.
Queer coded villain. That old trope. Really? In 2022?
Many of you seemed to like this episode but I don’t expect this to age well.
Was Uhura in this episode? Did I blink and miss it? Or any throwaway line about why Hemmer wasn’t in engineering and also wasn’t evident anywhere else?
A fun episode. The one thing I disliked was the “surprise” about Aspen/Angel. They being part of the pirates (if not necessarily the captain) was something that I suspected at once.
What they’re doing with Spock / T’Pring is beautifully devious ;-) And of course Nurse Chapel was great.
I enjoyed the episide. But I have to correct the claim that Roddenberry had a “belief that twenty-fourth-century humans should never, under any circumstances, disagree or argue or be mean,” – they certainly had disagreements and argued and were sometimes mean, look at how the crew of TOS argued their points, quite passionately, but they disagreed and argued an in a mature, intelligent manner, they didn’t squabble or behave in an uncivilized manner without reason. And that limitation wasn’t out of nowhere, Roddenberry’s goal with Star Trek was to show humanity having matured as a culture, similar to how we outgrew money, religion and greed. That takes away many of the easy ‘plot crutches’ that writers tend to rely on, particularly on TV, arguably, but it wasn’t as simplistic as implied.
@85/Bob: “Queer coded villain. That old trope. Really? In 2022?”
The reactions I’m seeing from queer viewers seem to be positive. In Jesse James Keitel’s own words, “Cis actors get to play every shade of good & evil — Let us do the same!” I don’t remember where I read it, but someone pointed out that it’s not true representation if a group only gets depicted in an idealized, inoffensive way, like Adira on Discovery. Of course it’s bad if every character of a certain group is depicted as villainous, but it’s just as bad to have them all be inhumanly flawless tokens.
Besides, if it were the old trope, then they’d have to hide their queerness to be perceived as good. But the crew totally accepted “Dr. Aspen,” who was just as non-binary as Captain Angel.
@86/a_risch: Since the rehab center was established as being in another star system, presumably the idea was that it was indeed closer to the border. But it’s still implausible that it would be that far from Federation worlds. I mean, Alcatraz is in San Francisco Bay, not the middle of the Pacific.
I’m on the limited-commercials plan, and if the lack of filler commercials for other Star Trek series and games is any indication the series must be finding an audience and doing well.
@85 / Bob –
Angel isn’t “queer coded”. They’re queer. And honestly, I am so very sick of the demand that all queer characters be wholesome little lollipops.
Laird: I’m not talking about what Roddenberry might have done on TOS, I’m specifically talking about what he did on TNG later in life when he started to believe his own bullshit. Those beliefs are well documented by people who worked with him, including David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana, and Melinda Snodgrass, among others.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@85 Nothing coded about it. This was a nonbinary character straight out.
In future appearances, I am going to hope that they bring more than over the top antics to the table; I would hope for them to bring keen and true insights to throw the crew off the tracks to go along with the sarcasm.
@90 – “I mean, Alcatraz is in San Francisco Bay, not the middle of the Pacific.”
Australia is on the other side of the planet from England.
You have to feel bad for Chapel. The make out session with Spock is a taste of something she won’t get to have for real with him.
@85. I think it will age very well, because I suspect in the future, non-binary characters will simply be characters, rather than characters who are considered to be coded, so they will be free to be villains, heroes or anything in between, without anyone keeping score.
I found it an uneven episode with plot holes, but still great fun.
Spock obviously does have a thing for Chapel. I enjoyed his debriefings with T’pring and Chapel, both ending with him saying “you know me well.” Liar!
I think the relationship between Spock and Uhura hinted at in “Charlie X” is for future development, which is appropriate to the timeline. I’m enjoying seeing this triangle between him, T’pring, and Chapel, that gives a new depth to everything from TOS without contradicting any of it.
Just like TOS, Spock’s magnetic personality is the warp core powering the show.
I’d just like to see more Number One.
@2 ED : “Do you fancy a fine fabric?” [G]
I am with Christopher all the way. This episode was the first dud for me. What interested me most was the psychopathic, manipulative ship’s captain.
Both my sister and I (she didn’t like the episode, either) found lots of contradictions in the way Vulcan society was presented here compared to the way it was in TOS. I agree the “divorce” didn’t make sense. And, for those who aren’t movie completists, the idea that Spock has a brother, AND that he’s a criminal, comes right out of left field. One starts to wonder what’s wrong with Spock’s family!
And yeah, the pirate cliches were rather obvious and therefore rather boring. Sisko did it better in the alternate universe, IMHO.
I’m finding it quite ironic how much “nookie nookie” Spock has been getting so far in SNW, both on and off screen (“rebonding ritual” indeed), plus scenes like the one here with Nurse Chapel, in contrast to his characterization in TOS, and also compared to Captain Pike’s lone dalliance with Alora in SNW’s episode 6.
Quoth mary: “Both my sister and I (she didn’t like the episode, either) found lots of contradictions in the way Vulcan society was presented here compared to the way it was in TOS.”
Quoth mary again: “And, for those who aren’t movie completists, the idea that Spock has a brother, AND that he’s a criminal, comes right out of left field.”
So it’s okay to not be a movie completist, but not at all okay to be a TOS completist. Got it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is just taking the piss, as the Brits say, as I was amused by the paralogia there….
@101 – Pike also had a dalliance with that other Captain in episode 1
@90, 95 – In addition to Australia, I was thinking about Napoleon’s exile to Saint Helena after his first exile location was rather notoriously too close for everyone’s comfort. Getting somebody really dangerous really far away from where they can cause more trouble is not a new idea.
Another rock-solid entry on SNW. I was thinking the same thing as @krad. I still own a copy of the TNG Companion. The minute I saw space pirates I thought about that Rick Berman story. Some of Roddenberry’s old TNG rules might come across as prison shackles for writers, but I can understand his attitude towards the idea of space pirates. He was at a point where he was losing control of the feature films, and TNG was his last chance at upholding as much of his vision as he still could. And space pirates during the 1980s was not exactly synonymous with prestige drama storytelling (and TNG was as close to prestige on sci-fi as something like Hill Street Blues was to cop shows at that point). It was very much a staple of cheap, schlocky sci-fi. Pirates wouldn’t become blockbuster trendy until Johnny Depp stepped in (Cutthroat Island is a reminder the genre wasn’t exactly audience-friendly, even in the 1990s).
Interestingly enough, last episode I anticipated that Alora would turn out to be a child killer of sorts. But here? I can’t remember the last time I was caught so off-guard by a plot twist like this one. Angel/Aspen turning out to be a bloodthirsty pirate captain??? I have to say I did NOT see that one coming at ALL. Talk about being convincing as a visiting counselor, even though when we stop to analyze the mission itself, there’s not a lot of data to begin with. Just a bunch of faceless refugees with no names. That should have been a warning sign right from the start, but I missed it just like the crew.
Garak would have loved someone like Aspen. Deceitful to the core. And the actor sold the bloodthirsty pirate side even better.
I loved it that we never see the specifics of how Pike and company stage the pirate mutiny, or any sort of progression. It’s the thing that’s best left to the imagination.
And I love the willingness of the writers to expore T’Pring even further. More and more, it paints the events of Amok Time in a new light. I love it that she plays along with the Spock/Chapel “charade”.
And I’m intrigued if we get to see Sybok eventually – especially to see how/if they’ll play around Jim Kirk’s eventual joining the show next season – assuming Sybok becomes a recurring player at that point. Kirk didn’t meet Sybok until Final Frontier, after all (could Uhura have?). But they’re clearly implying something long-term here. He was always a fascinating character, and I always enjoyed Luckinbill’s performance.
You mentioned Henry Miller, but T’Pring also mentions Erica Jong‘s Fear of Flying, which impressed me greatly. Jong’s book was raunchy and sexy and much adored by the women of my generation.
Sorry I’m late; I had issues getting here but I’m here!
I really enjoyed the first 2/3 and really didn’t the last 1/3.
This is, fwiw, the opinion of a middle-aged nonbinary person. I’ve been nonbinary since even my friends were like “that’s not a thing – is that a thing?!” in the late 90s. so I’m not exactly hip to what everyone thinks now.
But IMO I agree that Captain Angel was painfully cliche. I love a rich fun cliche, but this was painful. JJK seems great, but the way the camera was in luv with her (I mean, doubtless hot and fun, don’t get me wrong), and she was just like, emptily reciting and having a blast rather than grounding the crazy in anything. Are those who think queer representation doesn’t get to be evil enough too young to remember? Historically, including on Trek shows, queer characters were killed off, revealed to be evil, or evil people revealed to be queer, etc in a way that many of us grew up being very afraid of or disgusted by queerness, including our own (and my own).
And it’s where a lot of bigotry comes from – the expectation that people you meet are going to be like the folks in the movies. Take Z-Man from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, take Dr Frank N Furter. If you go as far back as North By Northwest, there’s a character who’s sadistic and twisted, and gay, who dies and nobody’s sorry, because it was all of a piece. This guy’s bad. I mean, it was thought of by medicine as an insane desire to have, and a criminal choice to act upon. It’s a whole thing and I’m not the right grad student for the job.
But, in other news, John de Lancie plays Q kind of queer and ridiculous but it’s great. I think that’s because there’s real sorrow, real pathos, a kind of confused child vulnerability, mixed in with all the power tripping and so on. I liked the Aspen parts better because they were, it seemed, a real person. We had that opportunity to add layers of regret and anxiety and humanity to Angel, because it was for love after all and there were real stakes. But Angel just seems to have no fear or stakes or regerts. Even Double Trouble from the new She-Ra has more depth. Less Frank N Furter, more Hedwig, please.
SImilarly, I don’t mind the cliche fake figurehead pirate captain who can’t cook idea, but the execution wound up like just kinda a doofus. Doofus pirate captain is not that interesting. Give me a character from Galavant, who’s silly rotten but layered, and with a heart of some sort. Give me someone from Guardians, like Yondu. Give me a Jawa who’s stealing your stuff and selling it back to you. The look of the pirates, the warehouse ship, the whole thing just felt cheap & cardboard. I would have enjoyed the humor much more if it were grounded in something and made more internal sense. Even the premise of Pike just assuming he could just go into the galley and cook for everyone real fast is weird; it would have made more sense if he were in the galley at the time so he could check out the supplies. It would have been funny to see him bluff and have to figure it out. Perhaps with Una or someone helping him turn on the stove etc.
Alongside so many other questions herein, I’m wondering how a mutiny happens when the captain isn’t even around. There is a lot of smushed together plot here. I can accept that one but it’s a weird complicated thing and it felt like a lot of disbelief needed suspending.
I did love a lot about this episode anyway, but the whole last part was ugh. I knew Aspen was a fake right off because the story wouldn’t be interesting otherwise. I knew when the reveal would be and it wasn’t very interesting. (And did they just write off that poor marooned counsellor? And why didn’t they know what they even looked like?) And because they came off to me as too edgy and gothy and queer to not be. And wearing a supersexualized outfit. We enbies (and queer folk in general) exist beyond sexiness, clubbing, etc! It’s such a 21st century paradigm, that I find uncomfortable in so many ways, that people think enby/queer/pretty = drag queen over the top fabulous. It’s trying to be inclusive but winds up (to me) feeling pandering, condescending, like the hippies in “The Way to Eden”. Almost good, almost legit, but also, kind of like being used.
I’m sorry… I realize I’m venting more than I’d like. I guess it’s fine that I’m chiming this late, I don’t worry I’ll bore as many people. :)
I think I’m a little more disappointed than I would be just because a femme pirate captain in disguise is usually more fun. You think she’s a victim but she’s the most powerful one around! Buffy did lots of good takes on that. And Firefly, with Saffron. And basically any time a distress signal turns out to be a trap. Which is a lot! But like some of those, it can be a cliche worth repeating.
I wonder if Xaverius is a joke on Les Mis’ Javer. I haven’t seen TFF in so long I have no memory of Sybok but the last shot felt very operatic.
goes to bed
Oh yeah P.S. I think we’re all remiss not mentioning Pirate Jenny aka The Black Freighter. A put upon barmaid who dreams she is secretly the captain of a pirate ship come to infiltrate the town, and soon her crew will come sailing in and she’ll take her place at their command, it’s all been a ruse! With lots of muahaha!
It’s a fantasy in the song, but like, worth saying something.
Pirate Queen Oona from Disenchantment comes to mind.
@104/Eduardo: Given the episodic nature of this show, I’d expect Kirk to be featured in just a few standalone episodes over the season, like how T’Pring and April are being treated. So there’s no reason his episodes have to overlap with any Sybok episodes.
And we don’t know if Sybok will even be in season 2. I’m guessing they’re setting him up to be the focus of the season 1 finale.
@106/jofesh: “Are those who think queer representation doesn’t get to be evil enough too young to remember?”
I’d assume not, given that they still face real-life persecution all the time. The point is that back then, nearly all queer characters were evil, or at least portrayed as weird, and if all queer characters today are required to be good and saintly and flawless, that’s just as much a dehumanizing stereotype. The goal is a world where queer performers get to play queer characters who are as diversely human as everyone else, running the gamut from good to evil, rather than getting lumped under a single stereotype. Trek already has two heroic non-binary characters in major roles — Adira on Discovery and Zero on Prodigy. So for true representation, there needs to be room for non-binary bad guys as well.
Easily the worst episode so far, and last week’s wasn’t much better. There’s strange edits and jumps where a lot happens behind the scenes. I missed Uhura the whole episode. And how do you have a whole scene in engineering without any sign of Hemmer? This whole thing felt amateurish, and was saved only by the stellar cast and beautiful special effects and production design.
Krad, I think you’re missing a crucial word in your response to Mary if you’re trying to make the point that I think you are:
“So it’s okay to not be a movie completist, but not at all okay to NOT be a TOS completist. Got it.”
I added the third “not.”
Was away so caught this a week late..
Communications/plotmentinum is still an issue – at the beginning, Spock and T-Pring are talking real time. At some point later, but not that long, it’s 2 days to get a message rt from Starfleet and they are going further afield, depending on buoys for communication. Then suddenly, real time with T’Pring again, from (I think) still outside Federation space.
Somehow then, T’Pring gets a prisoner released, and zaps to the edge of Federation space in a day? 2?
Other than that, I thought the episode was pretty decent, and didn’t see the twists coming – always a plus.
26. Eric L. Watts,
Count me in, I completely missed the non-binary thing until I looked up the actress because I thought she did a great job. Still had to come here to see that the character was they instead of she. Never even occurred to me.
On the subject of Angel Aspen, the Pirate Captain, I got worried that they were the villain right around the time Spock passed them a phaser in Sickbay. Although not trying to be judgmental the eye tattoo kinda of set off my villain detectors. I was expecting a former pirate/escapee backstory at the very least.
I was annoyed by Angel’s mocking of Spock and company being manipulated. They were insulting them for being easily manipulated when it contradicts them actually being good at lying? It was more mocking them for taking an L when they should’ve been happy that they got the W.
Also, the name Serene Squall just reminds me of that Smokey Robinson song, “A Quiet Storm”