The whiplash continues! After the glorious lunacy of the musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody” last week, Strange New Worlds ends its second season similar to how it ended its first, at least tonally speaking: with an intense high-stakes episode.
Unfortunately, while the tonal shift itself is fine, the actual episode is something of a dud.
[Spoilers ahead.]
Let’s get the first thing out of the way here, because it was the subject of a great deal of speculation in the comments last week, which had Batel going off on a priority-one mission, and many commenters were assuming that meant she’d be dead meat in this finale. Others thought that was too obvious, so they wouldn’t go that predictable route.
Turns out they were both right. Kind of.
The Cayuga is resupplying a human colony that is deliberately outside the Federation. They’ve tried to re-create small-town Earth life of the past, which could be a chance for a look at a future version of the Society for Creative Anachronism if it wasn’t just an obvious way to save money by doing the location shooting in a Toronto suburb. Chapel is also on board, as the Cayuga is giving her a lift to her fellowship with Roger Korby.
And then the Gorn attack, shortly after Chapel has beamed back on board. (More on that in a bit.) Batel is among the survivors on the planet trying to keep away from Gorn patrols. Pike and the Enterprise go to rescue them, made more complicated by a scattering field the Gorn have put in place that blocks sensors, communications, and transporters. (Why the Enterprise is the only ship sent when they have a personal stake in what’s happening due to Chapel being there and Pike and Batel’s relationship is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Pike is part of the rescue party, and he soon discovers that Batel has been implanted with Gorn eggs, so she’s living on borrowed time. However, Pike urges her not to give up the way Hemmer did and at least give them a chance to try to cure her. And, in fact, when our heroes manage to knock out the scattering field, Batel is placed in stasis in sickbay in the hopes of finding a cure. So she’s not dead yet, but she’s not not dead yet, either, if you know what I mean.
The method by which the scattering field is taken out is, alas, a big reason why I really really really really dislike this episode.
Because the Gorn are watching, and because of the scattering field, Uhura and Pelia come up with a way to take out the scattering field on the surface: place some explosives on a piece of Cayuga debris (most of the saucer section) and make it look like it’s falling out of orbit naturally and have it crash on the field generator.
Spock announces that he’s the only one who can do it because of his superior Vulcan strength and reflexes, even though there’s nothing in this job (flying around in an EVA suit and planting explosives) that requires either, plus there’s the fact that Number One also has some enhancements.
(Points to the designers of the EVA suit, by the by, which looks about halfway between the ones we saw on Discovery and the ones used on the original series.)
As he’s placing explosives, we see Chapel waking up, surrounded by bodies, and trying to get Spock’s attention when he happens by the window she’s near to place more explosives.
This was the point at which the episode totally lost me and never really got me back. Let’s start with the fact that Chapel survived. This means there are probably other survivors. The fact that nobody even considered this as a possibility is despicable. The fact that nobody (not Chapel, not Spock, not Number One, not anybody) thought to even try to find out if there were any survivors is a level of depravity wholly unworthy of the protagonists of a Star Trek show.
But hey, they’re just extras who don’t have speaking parts and whose names we don’t know, right? They don’t count!
The fact that the only survivor of the Cayuga being blown to smithereens is the one in the opening credits has already cut off the air supply to my disbelief. As has the fact that her ex-boyfriend happens to fly right by her window. And then they get into a fight with a Gorn who’s poking around the debris for reasons the script never bothers to provide, except to give us a Big! Action! Scene! in an episode that already had plenty of those.
Oh, and the pathos of Spock finding out that Chapel is alive and him saving her and them coming back to Enterprise together all cute.
Down on the planet, meanwhile, we’ve got, not just the survivors of the colony and the Cayuga landing party, but also a Starfleet engineer who was the only survivor of the Gorn’s previous target to the Cayuga and the colony: a station observing a nearby star. Said engineer is a junior-grade lieutenant with a knack for improvisational engineering, and he talks with a Scottish accent.
Yes, it’s Montgomery Scott! The fourth person to portray Scotty is Martin Quinn, and his main distinguishing feature from the other three is that he’s actually from Scotland! Born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Quinn is a veteran of the Scottish theatre, and it’s nice that, after James Doohan (born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), Simon Pegg (born in Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England), and Matthew Wolf (who voiced Scotty in last seasons “A Quality of Mercy,” born in London), we finally get a genuine Scotsman in the role of popular culture’s most famous Scottish engineer.
And Quinn is tremendous fun as the younger version of the miracle worker. I especially love that, when he encounters Pelia, we find out that she considers him her best student, but he also got the worst grades in her class. Which is pretty on-brand for Scotty, truth be told…
There are other good moments here and there in the episode, including Melissa Navia’s big grin as Ortegas performs piloting derring-do with the shuttle trip to the surface, every scene with Pike and Batel (Anson Mount and Melanie Scrofano have adorable chemistry), every time Carol Kane’s Pelia is onscreen (she is a treasure, and she’d better be back next year), and Number One actually acting as first officer.
Another big part of my disdain for this finale is my general lack of interest in this incredibly derivative, boring, and contradictory iteration of the Gorn. One of the most tired accusations against the current crop of Paramount+ shows in general and SNW in particular have been the cries of “alternate timeline!” and “they’re breaking canon!” because of any continuity violation, real or imagined. And yet, SNW has gone out of its way to not break continuity or canon, going so far as to contrive a silly promotion to fleet captain for Pike in order to make his meeting with Kirk in “Lost in Translation” work. It’s even done yeoman work in enhancing the existing continuity in the recontextualizing of things like the Spock-Chapel relationship and Spock’s actions to save Pike in the original series’ “The Menagerie.”
And yet, they have continued to inexplicably piss all over the original series’ “Arena,” and done so in the service of making the Gorn spectacularly boring and turning them into an Alien/Predator knockoff.
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It’s especially frustrating because it’s not necessary. They could’ve created a new species, or used another established species we know very little about (my original suggestion last year was the Tzenkethi, and I stand by that, as they’d plug in perfectly here). Instead, they decided to contradict one of the quintessential Trek episodes in “Arena,” and contravene the entire point of that episode by turning the Gorn into irredeemable monsters.
Now it’s possible that the second part of this story will do the work the show has ignored up to this point in making the Gorn more complicated than they’ve been made out to be. Because, yes, the episode ends on a cliffhanger. It’s not even a very good cliffhanger. Several of Pike’s crew and many of the colonists have been kidnapped by the Gorn. Uhura has just relayed orders from Starfleet to withdraw. And then we get several seconds of Pike being indecisive.
Which is ridiculous. Why is he being indecisive here? Of course he’s going to disobey the orders to disengage and try to rescue his people! Either that or he’s going to leave his people to die, which is not the way heroes of TV shows behave. And in this case, he shouldn’t—the orders are coming from a source that is unaware of the kidnappings. It’s a weird cliffhanger, that ends a sour episode on a sour note.
We have no idea when it’ll be resolved. And I’m totally fine with that, as the reason why is that the writers and actors are on strike, with very very good reason. While I am not part of the writers union that is striking (prose writers don’t make enough money to have a union), I support them wholeheartedly, as I do the actors. The people who do the work should be the ones who get paid for the work.
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support the Kickstarter for Grandma Got Kidnapped by Aliens (and Other Holiday Disasters), edited by Hildy Silverman, to be published by Crazy 8 Press, and featuring Trek scribes Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Derek Tyler Attico, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Aaron Rosenberg, Paul Kupperberg, Geoffrey Thorne, and, if stretch goals are reached, Esther M. Friesner and Keith! The stories will be sci-fi, horror, and/or fantasy tales about holidays gone horribly wrong, including Christmas, Dia de los Muertos, Easter, Hanukkah, Tisha B’av, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Groundhog Day, National Leave A Zucchini On Your Neighbor’s Porch Day, and more. Please consider supporting it!
On the other hand, it beats the hell out of timewarping back to 1944 and fighting Space Nazis.
WRONG!🧐
It is to Star Trek’s great detriment that you are “only” a prose writer!
I kind of understood this episode to be hinting that Pike and Starfleet’s conception of the Gorn as simply monsters was wrong, but of course they won’t really find that out until “Arena.” A monster wouldn’t put on a space suit to go crawling around the wreckage of an enemy ship, but an intelligent species trying to gather data about an enemy would do that. The lines about their interest in solar activity I thought also was a bit of a tease.
There were conversations about how unlikely it was that there were any survivors in the saucer section, but I agree that issue should have been readdressed after Chapel was found. But there wasn’t really time, either.
I really like Martin Quinn as Scotty; I think he even kind of looks like a young James Doohan. I really hope he sticks around for season 3 so we can see him grow into the miracle worker we all know and love. I have to say though that I think he looks too young unless we’re ignoring the age that Dr. Crusher provided in “Relics.” Right now I’d say it’s going to be a very rough seven years on poor Scotty to age him like that. Honestly, if he and Paul Wesley could just swap ages they’d both be absolutely perfect for their roles.
I was dreading this episode, because I loathe this show’s take on the Gorn, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. A lot of it worked, and was quite clever. I liked the way they played with the expectation that Batel was going to be fridged and then subverted it — not only is she alive, but Pike refuses to let her repeat Hemmer’s sacrifice, which is like the show admitting that was a problematical trope.
And while there were some absurd contrivances like Chapel coincidentally being the only survivor, there were some things I cheered because they were so clever. For decades, when Trek ships have faced communication outages or interference and assumed there was no way to send a message, I’ve been yelling at the screen, “Shine a light out of the windows, or blink your running lights, or something!” And here, finally, someone in Starfleet is smart enough to think of alternative ways to send a message. Deorbiting the Cayuga saucer to take out the surface beacon was also refreshingly creative, and they had the sense to have Pelia point out that they’d need to make a late course correction to avoid tipping off the Gorn. (Although why the second rocket needed to be placed inside the bridge was bewildering.)
Also, it bugged me when Pike literally said “Sometimes a monster is just a monster,” but then the episode had him wonder if it was a mistake to fight them instead of trying to reach them. So there’s a hint that he’s meant to grow beyond that starting position, and that the show may actually intend to move toward the “Arena” lesson after all. Though how they pay that off without getting ahead of events in “Arena” is still a mystery.
Anyway, how the heck do you draw a border in space between a planet and its moon? Planets move. It could easily cross to the other side of the border, and if it didn’t, the moon inevitably would as it circled the planet.
It’s increasingly contrived how many TOS characters show up here, but Martin Quinn was great as young Scotty. I realized who he had to be before he introduced himself, not just from the accent and the engineering skill, but because he looks the part and gets the mannerisms right. He even folds his arms or holds his hands behind him the way James Doohan did to hide his missing fingers. (Although there’s a shot of Quinn’s hands confirming he has all ten.) Personality-wise, he does a good job splitting the difference between Doohan’s and Pegg’s versions.
With Scotty here, that just leaves McCoy and Sulu for future seasons. I hope they resist the temptation to include Chekov, who should be 14-15 as of the end of season 2.
The colony recreating small-town America (or Canada) for the sake of the location budget was very TOS-ish, though annoying. Why do 23rd-century Federation colonists have this obsession with recreating historic Americana?
Speaking of TOS-ish things, I finally noticed that Spock’s console recreates that swirling moire effect in the circular screen behind the hooded viewer. Although it’s obviously just an animated graphic on a rectangular video screen.
I hate that it ended on a cliffhanger. No telling how long it might take to get a conclusion.
I bought Pike’s indecisiveness, not because his choice was between rescue and obeying orders, but because the choice was between rescue and saving the people in front of him—the Enterprise was getting outgunned by a force that already took out their sister ship.
I also don’t mind the reimagining of the Gorn, because the original Gorn is nothing but hilarious. Maybe the nuGorn are xenomorphs sans serial number, but original recipe Gorn just looked like a lower-, lower- — no lower- — tier Ultraman foe, even then. (Not to mention the real original, from Brown’s “Arena,” was just an angry yoga ball.)
I do agree wholeheartedly the appeals to “canon” are tiresome in the extreme. If I had been involved in last week’s story-planning, I would have pitched a meta song about how fans ruin so much, inspired by South Park, called “Blame Canon Nerds.” Canon has its place, I guess, but for IP that’s multiple lifetime’s old, it’s a straitjacket wielded by the least imaginative people on earth.
Good season, though. Let’s say four-and-a-half Class M planets out of five!
I really disagree with this dismissal of the ‘Arena’ Gorn: while the technology used to evoke it is fairly limited, the impression is has always left me with is of a huge saurian that can think like a trained killer, which never ceases to intimidate me.
I honestly enjoy the elements of later Movie Monsters grafted onto the Gorn – if only because, properly written, these elements add an intriguing element to Gorn/Federation relations that help explain why they’ve only rarely showed up to date: how does one maintain positive diplomatic relations with a species that is, at least on a straightforward physical level, unrelentingly horrifying?
If nothing else, being forced to balance the monstrous elements of the Gorn life-cycle (and what appear to be the Hegemony’s traditional method of coping with it) against the fact that the Gorn should NOT, on the whole, be uniformly treated as Monsters – certainly not in the STAR TREK galaxy, though the Imperium of Man would have been reducing the Gorn Homeworld to bedrock by this point* – creates a potentially fascinating dramatic tension.
Well it certainly should and hopefully will when Season 3 allows the other foot to drop.
*It bears pointing out that the WARHAMMER 40,000 is always at it’s best when depicted as a setting wise cautionary tale, not as ‘Goals’.
People tend to interpret the Gorn as a dinosaur, and certainly the redesigns in ENT and SNW have leaned into that; but what Wah Chang designed and built for “Arena” is really a crocodile man (with insect-like compound eyes). Like a crocodylian, the Gorn captain is strong, but doesn’t have the speed or endurance of a human. Later productions tried to turn them into Jurassic Park raptors or Alien xenomorphs, so they really aren’t anything like what “Arena” depicted.
I feel like your response to the Gorn in this episode aligns precisely with the opinions behind those tired accusations. This isn’t the first time Secret Hideout has swapped out old Star Trek concepts with newer ones that are superficially edgy but bland on the inside — I’d argue that Discovery’s early Klingon concept and design had similar issues, save that the Gorn at least never had an on-screen culture of their own to compare to.
But this is also a much more traditional Secret Hideout episode. Action and CGI heavy? Check. Easy to hate villains whose motivations are straightforward? Check. Disregard for extras? Check. Plot point (the captain’s indecision) that doesn’t necessarily make sense save as a way to add more drama? Check.
@@.-@ After Hysperia was introduced in Lower Decks, I’m not sure we should be surprised as the existence of any kind of themed human colony world. There are so many inhabitable planets, it’s not weird to me that the 23rd century equivalent of a subreddit devoted the mid-20th century Midwest (and don’t tell me such a thing wouldn’t exist!) would one day decide “Hey, we should just find a planet and live our fantasy!”
I personally love the appearances of TOS characters. We know they’re going to end up on the Enterprise eventually, why not show us how? Scotty in particular makes sense, because I don’t think Carol Kane was ever intended to be the show’s permanent engineer. After this, I would be personally offended if for some reason they never give us McCoy. I don’t ever want to see Chekov, but I was thinking this morning a line in a future episode about a Russian math prodigy (or whatever) would be pretty fun.
I assumed that the reason Spock had to be the one to place the rockets on the Cayuga is that they had to be placed manually in exactly precise locations, without communication or aid from Enterprise or its computer, and only a Vulcan could perform all those calculations as mental math. (It doesn’t justify Chapel’s miraculous survival among hundreds, though. For that matter, it doesn’t justify SCOTTY’S survival as the only one of his crew. For an episode with hundreds if not thousands of deaths, we keep being oddly reminded of the impenetrable plot armor of any TOS character.)
Anson Mount was awesome in this episode. Pike was a man on a mission here and you could see his desperation to save Batel.
Speaking of which, a part of me figures she’s safe because why would they kill off a character during a season premiere? But a part of me realizes that shows have done that!
I’m interested to see where they’re going with the Gorn. They have to be redeemable somehow or at least understandable. We know relations have improved by the 24th century but we have “Arena” to contend with.
I loved seeing Scotty, but the actor seems too young. But I guess I can ignore that.
It was a decent season finale, though not great, in my opinion.
@7/Chase: “There are so many inhabitable planets, it’s not weird to me that the 23rd century equivalent of a subreddit devoted the mid-20th century Midwest”
Sure, but it’s annoying that we only ever get to see the ones based on North America. Where’s the colony world recreating Meiji-era Japan, or India at the height of the Mughal Empire?
“Scotty in particular makes sense, because I don’t think Carol Kane was ever intended to be the show’s permanent engineer.”
Why couldn’t she be? I was thinking we’d end up with Scotty being a recurring assistant engineer under Pelia. It doesn’t make sense for a lieutenant junior grade to get promoted to chief engineer so quickly.
I do like the idea of Scotty having a history with the Enterprise for years before Kirk comes along. It’s a nice foundation for his love affair with the ship.
“After this, I would be personally offended if for some reason they never give us McCoy.”
I wouldn’t mind that, but I’d rather keep him off the Enterprise and away from Spock for now — I think their prickly relationship in TOS makes more sense if it’s fairly new. Maybe season 3 can show us the Farragut and have McCoy serving there with Kirk.
It just occurred to me… in a Facebook thread asking for potential candidates to play Roger Korby, I suggested Melanie Scrofano’s Wynonna Earp co-star Tim Rozon. But on second thought, he might be a good choice to play McCoy.
“I don’t ever want to see Chekov, but I was thinking this morning a line in a future episode about a Russian math prodigy (or whatever) would be pretty fun.”
As fantastic as the late Anton Yelchin was in the role, I wish the Kelvin films hadn’t retconned Chekov into a prodigy (and moved up his birthdate by 4 years) to justify his premature inclusion. TOS Chekov was hardly a prodigy; if anything, despite being introduced as a science officer, he tended to come off as a bit dimwitted.
NCC-1701 isn’t just a ‘love affair’ she’s the Love of Scotty’s life, by dand! (Also the love of James T. Kirk’s, but Enterprise is a grand lady, she has room for a little ménage a trois).
Most of this season was a dud, for my tastes. It was courteous of them to restrain their hackneyed interpretation of the Gorn to a single episode this season, but somehow the Gorn aren’t even the worst part of this episode. My eyes didn’t even roll when Scotty revealed himself as a miraculous lone survivor, because that’s the shamelessness I’ve come to expect from Familiar Old Worlds.
I agree with Keith about how disappointing It was for there to be no real attention paid to the other members of the Cuyahoga crew, except for lingering shots of their bodies strewn about the ship. Not only does Chapel survive, she barely has a scratch on her. And when she revives herself and restores life support, she immediately checks on the remainder of the crew to see if there are any other survivors. Oh wait, no she doesn’t.
I thought it was funny when they restored communications and Spock said “two to beam up”, the crew on the Enterprise all smile with relief, because they know Spock has managed to save his woman.. How do they know it’s Chapel? Because it has to be Chapel. As Ben says, she has the impenetrable plot armor of a TOS character. Even when they kill one, like they did with Jim Kirk a few episodes ago, his alternate timeline version is right there to the rescue, lol.
This was a more old school action plot of course, although for all its cliches and sparks showering down on the crew on the bridge, and desperate lunges for guns floating just out of fingertip range, … At least they weren’t singing f***ing showtunes. (Yes, I know I’m in the minority, but I’m still salty about last week’s cringefest).
The beginning looked way too much like an Independence Day retread, although I have to admit I did enjoy the special effects of the shuttle crash followed by the appearance of the Gorn ship in the sky.
As has been touched on, I think my favorite part of this episode was that moment where Pike ruminates about whether they could actually ever make a connection with the Gorn rather than focus solely on plotting their destruction. I hope they pick up that ball whenever the series is able to resume.
I have finally, after I can’t remember how many years/decades since, got to see a new Trek episode on the day it aired. So this is fun.
I have loved this season, but this is the weakest episode for me of it. And pretty much for all the reasons already stated. I do not like it when Star Trek makes an irredeemable bad guy. Like the Dominion. I keep hoping that they turn out to not The Gorn after all. Or at least get a more complex story regarding them.
And I agree with your take on Chapel and the saucer section. Talk about powerful plot amor.
But I did love the acting here, no complaints. And the worse of a wonderful season is still a good episode. I eagerly await more in an unknown future.
And while I do not want Pavel to come aboard, I did give myself a chuckle with the idea of some time when someone is walking across the grounds of Star Fleet Academy. And having a mopped-topped Russian being chastised for getting his history grossly wrong.
And no more cliffhangers, please.
@8/Ben: “For that matter, it doesn’t justify SCOTTY’S survival as the only one of his crew. For an episode with hundreds if not thousands of deaths, we keep being oddly reminded of the impenetrable plot armor of any TOS character.”
Isn’t it the other way around, though? Scotty’s the one who becomes a TOS character because he’s the one who survived this incident. It’s just the weak anthropic principle — the characters we end up seeing stories about in the future are the ones who survived the present.
It’s contrived in Chapel’s case because she’s already been an established character for two seasons and is the one person on the ship, besides Batel, that the other main characters or the audience have a reason to care about. But Scotty’s a newcomer; Pelia’s the only one who knew him before, and she knows tons of people in Starfleet because she taught them. So it isn’t an implausible coincidence in the same way. It also makes sense that Scotty would be the one who was able to escape, because he’s Scotty and he teched up a solution.
@10 Because she’s Carol Kane and is credited as a guest star this season, I’m just assuming she’s not intended to be a long-term cast member. Even if she only stays one more season with Scotty as her assistant, I’d like that.
And I fully agree about Bones. I’ve long advocated for him being a friend of Kirk’s from the Farragut or even before (their relationship in the Kelvin movies was great), who eventually follows him to Enterprise as CMO. I think a brief meeting between him and Spock would be fine, but nothing substantive.
@2
Seriously, Keith, why aren’t you a writer on any of these new series? (Other than, perhaps, a lack of interest on your part?) Heck, I would love for you to be a showrunner.
I’d be cautious about calling them irredeemable. But they can’t be redeemed in this series, since it must obviously end before “Arena”.
Canon schmanon, I’m a fan of SNW’s Gorn and this episode built on everything that I liked about them.
I’m continually surprised at the general lack of commentary on the deliberate dramatic irony that the writers have repeatedly engaged in with the Gorn considering that we *know,* and have known *all along,* that they are not an existential threat to the Feds and that there will be at least some level of detente by the 24th century.
Are we going to overlook the significance of the Gorn communique to Starfleet in the teaser? This indicates that not only did they deliberately engage a non-Federation planet, but that they have spent more effort in trying to peacefully communicate with Starfleet than Starfleet has expended in trying to peacefully communicate with THEM!
Ironically given their pseudo-classic nature, the Gorn are one of the better examples of a multiple-episode really “alien” alien that we’ve seen. They respond to instincts that they may not fully control or understand (who among us can throw stones?), such as their seeming need to destructively sample humanoids to reproduce, their deadly rivalries, and their reactions to Spock’s signal and the solar flares. But they are extraordinarily intelligent, with a spacefaring interstellar society, their almost uncanny ability to trick other creatures (also seen in “Arena”), and their interest in accessing Starfleet computers.
We may not know when we will see it, but I am very much looking forward to what the xenoanthropologist, the doctor, the veteran, and the survivor/expert encounter aboard the Gorn starship…
I actually really like the idea that the Gorn are cursed with a monstrous anatomy, but not dyed-in-the-wool monsters one and all (If only because the Gorn being fundamentally incompatible with the Federation, but not actively hostile to it is a dynamic that has never, to my knowledge, been explored in STAR TREK).
The main problem that I have is that I can’t see how they can add nuance to the Gorn without undermining their initially apparent monstrousness in “Arena”, and they can’t keep them pure evil without making Kirk seem like an idiot for sparing the Gorn captain’s life. I really wish that they’d just called them something else (we want new alien races! Or at least I do).
Anyways: hopefully we get a resolution at some point. It could be a while–not just because of the strike, but because the streaming market seems due for a crash.
Quoth Joe: “It is to Star Trek’s great detriment that you are ‘only’ a prose writer!”
Quoth Austin: “Seriously, Keith, why aren’t you a writer on any of these new series? (Other than, perhaps, a lack of interest on your part?) Heck, I would love for you to be a showrunner.”
Not so much a lack of interest as a lack of experience. I have no qualifications to be a scriptwriter, much less a show-runner, which only comes after years in the trenches. My attempts at screenwriting are few, and were all decades ago.
But I do appreciate the compliment, thank you both!
Quoth jaimebabb: “The main problem that I have is that I can’t see how they can add nuance to the Gorn without undermining their initially apparent monstrousness in ‘Arena’, and they can’t keep them pure evil without making Kirk seem like an idiot for sparing the Gorn captain’s life. I really wish that they’d just called them something else (we want new alien races! Or at least I do).”
Yes, this precisely!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Keith Spock wasn’t setting explosives, they didn’t need to blow up the saucer on impact, it was thruster packs to get it moving and turn it into a giant kinetic weapon.
Count me among the ones who wondered how Chapel survived only and why they didn’t check for other survivors. I was also rather annoyed that Spock started the thruster packs before he had actually cleared the ship. If he had waited to turn it on, then he and Chapel could’ve checked for other survivors before they left. Or at least give us some heroic redshirt action with the other survivors doing a holding action against the Gorn intruder while Chapel and Spock at the last desperate moment got the thruster into position and activated.
The Gorn tail thing is also tripping me out. I appreciate the redesign, I do…but Gorn didn’t have tails. I just can’t. I’m too used to STO’s Gorn design.
And the map….I mean, that border looks like it was drawn specifically though Enterprise in orbit of the moon wouldn’t have to move. If they’d made it the whole system then Enterprise has to stay still power down, and rely on stealth to avoid being attacked, that makes MORE tension right?
I like that Starfleet had some anti-Gorn equipment already deployed to ships, though it’s a small amount for ship defense. Perfect for an assault squad or away team though.
Erica as always is a joy, watching her dead drop through the atmosphere like Joker was a blast. Though it did kinda look like they were biting off of the Millennium Falcon in Episode VII. “Why do I keep asking that?”
I was very proud of myself for realizing it was Scotty before he actually said it. At first I thought it was the ensign that Batel was talking to at the top of the episode about losing comms, then everything started clicking into place. Martin Quinn, my hats off to you, absolute fantastic. He does look a bit young since Scotty and McCoy are supposed to be the elder officers of the ship, but he’s got basically everything else, so I’ll take it. Not exactly “I will not drop the shields” level of Scotty bravery yet, but he’ll get there. I also love that Pelia was so happy to see him, versus him dreading seeing her again.
Pike’s indecisiveness I take as being shown in dramatic slow mo. His adrenaline is through the roof and he’s stuck. Withdraw, save who you do have onboard and obey orders. Disobey orders, stand and fight, and he’s got a one on five battle, and you’ve got more ships inbound.
I’m also again annoyed with Starfleet Command, since they didn’t have more reinforcements on standby. The Gorn started the day by destroying a Federation Starship, then claiming the territory where there was already a colony. Another problem with using the Gorn is basically, we know this isn’t going to stop they pulled the same thing at Cestus III (only difference being that actually is a Federation colony), so the resolution is not going to be very satisfying. They will keep attacking human colonies until “Arena”.
All that said, I rather enjoyed the episode. The problem of the scattering field and using the saucer colony drop to take it out was very nice, satisfying in fact, Scotty was an ace, and the on the ground action was good. Though I don’t know what use Batel thought she’d get out of doing the I was bitten by a vampire/reaper/werewolf/zombie and I’m not going to tell anyone bit. I thought the transporter for the colonists was a little weird looking so the Gorn kidnapping clicked.
Can’t believe they did the cliffhanger. It’s like being back in the 90s again. Now young fans will know how it felt waiting that summer for Best of Both Worlds Pt II.
@15/Chase: “Because she’s Carol Kane and is credited as a guest star this season, I’m just assuming she’s not intended to be a long-term cast member.”
Tig Notaro was a recurring guest star on Discovery for two seasons before getting promoted to a regular in season 4. Plenty of DSC cast members have been recurring guest stars for anywhere from 2 to 4 seasons, with one more on the way. For that matter, Deep Space Nine had plenty of recurring guest stars who stuck around for years — Andrew Robinson, Max Grodenchik, Aron Eisenberg, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher, etc. And let’s not forget, Doohan, Takei, Nichols, and Koenig were only recurring guest stars in TOS, and even Kelley wasn’t a full regular until season 2.
Being a guest star just means you’re in a limited number of episodes per season. It doesn’t put an expiration date on how many seasons you get.
@19/jaimebabb: “The main problem that I have is that I can’t see how they can add nuance to the Gorn without undermining their initially apparent monstrousness in “Arena””
Now that I think about it, maybe that’s not too hard. After all, throughout the entire attack on Cestus III, the Enterprise crew had no idea who the ruthless enemy was. It wasn’t until both ships got caught by the Metrons that they were identified as Gorn.
Of course, “Arena” makes it clear that Kirk hasn’t heard of the Gorn before, which is next to impossible to reconcile with this. (Did La’an mention the Gorn to him in his previous two episodes?) But we don’t really see what the rest of the crew thinks of the Gorn once they know it’s the Gorn.
On Scotty’s age, he’d be around 37 at this point, and Martin Quinn is 29. That’s closer than the 41-year-old Paul Wesley playing the 26-year-old Kirk.
So the Gorn are back, and they’re still just monsters, and Pike even spotlights this in his dialogue with April. They throw a little bit of a carrot to those of us who are unhappy with this depiction, by having Pike later muse that there must be a way to communicate peacefully with them, but it feels out of place in yet another episode where the Gorn are depicted as feeding intelligent beings to their young and implanting eggs in them. And, of course, as other comments have already mentioned, they can’t even really do much to transform the Gorn on this show, because they still have to look like the bad guys in TOS. If they wanted to use the Gorn as adversaries, they should have just stuck to the TOS template of having them attacking colonies that trespass on their idea of Gorn Space without going the whole Xenomorph route, or else they should have just invented a different species to be their space monsters.
Other than that, I thought the episode was alright.
Oh, I forgot to tell you you should be ashamed of yourself for the headline on this, if you are in fact responsible. (Over on Vulture they used “The Gorn Ultimatum.” You’re all terrible, terrible people.)
@24/Puff: The review for “All Those Who Wander” should have been titled “Children of the Gorn.”
Not a bad episode. Couldn’t agree more re: Pike’s indecisiveness, though. He’s a wonderful person, but I think at this point it’s safe to say he’s a pretty poor commander. I assume the writers want him to feel human and relatable, and for his command style to make the ship feel more like a community than a quasi-military vessel, his authority rooted more in empathy than in discipline. Those are fantastic aims which I totally agree with in theory, but in practice he’s consistently come across as inept at worst, weak at best.
Even worse because his entire bridge crew, including ensigns decades his junior, remained relatively cool-headed. It’s just him blanking out and panicking, wasting crucial seconds during a crisis. It doesn’t look good when the First Officer is calm, rational and ready for action, while the Captain’s bricking it and quaking in fear. Makes me think Una should take command of the ship.
Wasn’t happy with yet another TOS character showing up under contrived circumstances, but all credit to Martin Quinn for a great performance – if Scotty is later reintroduced in a more natural way and becomes a recurring character, Quinn’s definitely the right actor for the job.
As for this episode’s implications for “Arena”, I was thinking that it makes Kirk’s actions seem a lot less relevant. The Gorn of “Arena”, presumably, were impressed enough by Kirk’s show of mercy that they reconsidered their approach to the Federation and became amenable to diplomacy. But here, the Gorn already meet plenty of humans who show restraint, and are familiar enough with the species to know that it’s normal for them not to shoot on sight. So it’s no longer clear why Kirk doing the same thing has such an impact, and what the Gorn captain was meant to have done afterwards. He goes back to the Hegemony and says “I met a human who let me live, and said that Cestus III was just a civilian colony!” and the response would have to be “yeah, we know all that, this has happened plenty of times now”.
Puff: I write my own headlines, so I get all the credit. And all the ire. 🤣
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@26/Descent: We don’t really know what happened after “Arena,” except that somehow peace was made and Cestus III ceded to the Federation by the 24th century. The episode only established the possibility that Kirk’s act of mercy could be a foundation for peace; there’s nothing in canon to confirm whether it actually was.
There’s an IDW comics story where a Gorn crew decides to help a crashed Reliant shuttle with Terrell and Chekov aboard, because the Gorn commander remembers Kirk’s act of mercy and doesn’t want to get one-upped by the Federation in the decency department. But there was an earlier Marvel comic where Kirk encountered the same Gorn commander (named S’alath in the comic) and matters are still tense and on the verge of conflict, though Kirk’s actions help defuse the situation. The TNG novel Requiem offered a version where the Gorn hadn’t been contacted for decades until Picard took tentative steps toward detente 20 years before TNG, then made a bigger breakthrough in the series present (which is incompatible with what DS9 subsequently established).
This episode was a disappointing finale to an outstanding season. It was like watching an athlete give a terrific performance, then fail to stick the landing. I wish that they had made Subspace Rhapsody the season finale and left everybody on a high note (no pun intended).
I don’t care too much for the Gorn episodes of Strange New Worlds, not-so-boldly going where the Aliens franchise has gone before. The appropriations are obvious and kill the suspense. For example, even while Capt. Batel was staring down the Gorn, you knew that she’d been implanted with alien eggs, just like Ripley in Aliens 3.
This episode was mostly notable for the introduction of Scotty, who seems more like the comical oddball of the Kelvinverse than earnest, long-suffering TOS Scotty. I wonder if he’ll be a regular member of the crew from now on.
Why is Spock the only person who could place the rockets on the Cayuga’s saucer section? I thought I had missed a line of dialogue explaining it, but there wasn’t one. Spock simply asserts that “no human could do this” and “I am the only member of the crew who can pull this off.” Why not say that in order to put the rockets in the correct positions, you’d have to do extremely complicated math on the fly, and only Spock was competent to do it?
And would Chapel really be able to recognize Spock as he floated quickly past her window, upside down?
Oh, that cliffhanger! Pike looks completely out of his depth, frozen with indecision. How does this guy make the list of Starfleet’s all-time best captains? This cliffhanger seems intended to evoke the one in Best of Both Worlds, Part 1, but that’s unfortunate, because Riker acts promptly and decisively in BOBW, and Pike suffers by comparison.
Pike is not well served by these season finales. At the end of Season 1, we see that his less aggressive approach would have caused Romulan War II. And the end of Season 2 sees him paralyzed with indecision while his crew calls for orders. He looks scared! Good acting from Anson Mount, but a bad look for Pike. And that’s the image we’re going to be left with until SNW returns, whenever that will be.
Can I try a recap?
Captain Battel, being a character we sort of care about goes to a backlot that looks like it should be a lemonade commercial to let you know these are good folks. Suddenly the special effect from ID4 happens and it’s the Gorn. The enterprise responds but Admiral April seems to not give a hoot that one of his ships is destroyed and a bunch of humans are presumably lunch because they’re on the other side of a map line. The crew does what they do and disobey orders. Then they take Star Trek Engineering solution 17 and turn everything off and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver seat which of course works because the super intelligent hunter species can’t be bothered to figure out why some piece of space debris is making a beeline for the colony.
Once they’re on the colony they discover it’s permanently night, on fire and covered in blood. They shoot a small dinosaur from Jurassic park then go to the diner where they discover Scotty because of course they do. After taking naps the Captain decides to wander off without telling anyone but is stopped by his girlfriend who insists on going along. When they reach the shuttle they recreate Ripley and it’s discovered that the disposable character is potentially dead woman walking. Meanwhile in space Spock wanders over to the ship where of course Chapel is alive because she has to show up in The Pld Scientist series. Why? Because as a Vulcan he’s the only one who can resist shouting “Hello boys I’m back” as the saucer crashes into Chekovs jamming tower. But since we are running out of time most everyone gets Gorn napped. Pike who hadn’t bothered to listen to Starfleet all day does for some reason what both SNW and Disco do which is have the captain walk to the front of the screen and stare into camera to build tension and then it’s To Be Continued albeit without the TNG DUH DUH DUH music.
Oh yes and Spock has a fight with a Gorn who for some reason is chilling on the destroyed ship putting in command codes after his girlfriend plays hide and seek with it so they have an excuse to go the destroyed bridge and have a slow mo fight
This was the weakest SNW episode because it just felt like parts of other things we’ve seen before, plus most of the characters have plot armor so I know nothing is going to happen to them. I don’t mind that the Gorn are not dudes in Rubber suits (that’s not a bad thing) and kind of like that our scary alien species is in fact alien it’s just that this episode didn’t engage me at all
I won’t know what I think about this episode until I see the end of the story … probably sometime in 2025. But I do know what I think of this season: WOW!!!
I didn’t love every episode equally, but overall, this was a stunning season! The trial episode, the time-travel episode, the crossover episode, the musical episode — there was so much goodness in a season only ten episodes long.
I do wish they weren’t using Spock for comic relief, and I miss Captain Pike while Anson Mount has a reduced role because of his paternity leave. But this cast is so strong that even with Mount mostly missing, Chong, Bush, Olusanmokun, Gooding, and the others carried the season most ably.
The only bad thing about Strange New Worlds is that its seasons are so short! I hope the studios decide to pay the writers and actors what they’re worth soon, so they can all get back to making great Star Trek.
@30/MikeKelm: “because the super intelligent hunter species can’t be bothered to figure out why some piece of space debris is making a beeline for the colony.”
As I mentioned already, Pelia specifically said they’d rig the saucer to make a last-minute course adjustment once it was in the atmosphere. So it would’ve looked like it was going to crash somewhere unimportant, and thus the Gorn wouldn’t have been tipped off.
“then go to the diner where they discover Scotty because of course they do.”
Rather, because they were following the false life signs he rigged up to lure the Gorn into his trap.
Chris, Newtonian physics still apply. The saucer should be floating around going in whatever direction it’s going and whatever speed it’s going. It has no propulsion. So Pellias comment isn’t applicable, it’s the fact that suddenly the saucer is doing something different that’s the problem. The Gorn presumably can recognize the change in course and velocity and investigate- we can in 2023 with RADAR so should they in the 23rd century.
And I got that Pike and company went because of the beacon but it’s a big galaxy and big fleet- there’s zero reason it has to be Scotty. The writers of SNW are struggling with a nostalgia problem that they seem to feel they HAVE to make sure everyone pops up. If the brilliant engineer was a woman from Archer IV does it make a difference. My point is that the fact it’s Scotty adds nothing
Well, that was… so-so. I can’t say there’s much here to write home about, especially as a season finale. It all seemed pretty mediocre to me. On the plus side, I like the new Scotty. Martin Quinn is big improvement on whatever Simon Pegg was doing. But I still cringe at what they’ve done to the Gorn, and the fact they keep going to that well. As others have pointed out, just call them something else! Better yet, come up with something with more depth than space monsters. Good grief…
I mean, they’ve written themselves into something of a corner, too, haven’t they? Keep them as monsters and they continue to be a tiresome ripoff of Alien. Move past the point of monsters and they’re doing “Arena” before “Arena.” Worse, that would be repeating a TOS episode, and this series already has too much ‘been there, done that’ in the way of Star Trek.
The most disappointing part, however, was when Pike gave the command, “Barbershop NOW!” and the landing party didn’t launch into a rousing rendition of “Hello My Coney Island Baby.” Come on, people.
Sorry, that should be “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby.” It’s been a long time since barber college.
@34, C.Varrick,
They JUST managed to stop singing. They’re not gonna belt out any notes for a WHILE. Except Uhura.
‘Member Scotty?….Christ, is this the best the writers can do?
I’ll have to co-sign the suggestion that Pike is looking a bit emasculated lately. Anson Mount is wonderful, and I don’t mind a Star Trek captain being empathetic and hooman. But two episodes ago, he was looking positively constipated when rationalizing a murder committed by his chief medical officer. Last week He had somewhat of the same look on his face when his girlfriend suggested going to pleasure Island for cocktails and downtime, and I’m still not sure why.. And in this episode his continence ssues extended to his long frozen stare to take us into the cliffhanger ending, I understand he is faced with a dilemma but come on man, every microsecond counts. Make the call.
The worst part of the way the SNW writers have chosen to write the Gorn is that we have to watch Starfleet officers kill babies with zero remorse.
‘Juveniles’ would be more apt: it’s worth pointing out that the Gorn appear to practice what’s known in evolutionary biology as the ‘r’ strategy – that is, they focus on quantity and not on quality, in terms of broadcasting their young and apparently not investing much parental care in their offspring (With their young fending for themselves from the start), as opposed to the ‘k’ strategy practiced by most mammal species (Including humans), which emphasises a greater level of individual care for youngsters, resulting in somewhat lower mortality rates at the cost of a much greater investment of time and energy on a child-by-child basis (because infants are born helpless).
Hence my reservations about describing any Gorn – however young – as a ‘baby’, for these beings are not born as partially-developed as a human infant.
@33/MikeKelm: “it’s the fact that suddenly the saucer is doing something different that’s the problem. The Gorn presumably can recognize the change in course and velocity and investigate- we can in 2023 with RADAR so should they in the 23rd century.”
Orbital debris can change course due to collisions, or due to decay from atmospheric friction. A fragment as large as the saucer section would be subject to more friction and decay faster. True, the depiction of the sequence overlooked that aspect, but I gave up expecting SFTV to depict the details of space scenes accurately decades ago. I just figure we’re seeing an imperfect dramatization of the underlying reality. A few details aside, it’s still a cleverer plan than you’d see in a lot of SFTV. Too many screenwriters assume the only possible way to bombard something from orbit is by firing weapons at it. Realizing that gravity alone makes a powerful weapon of any piece of random debris is refreshingly physics-savvy, even if they didn’t get every last detail right. I’ll take what I can get.
“there’s zero reason it has to be Scotty.”
There’s zero reason it had to be Uhura or Chapel or M’Benga or Kirk. Stories have an intrinsic selection bias in favor of situations more interesting to an audience than those resulting from random chance alone. For instance, there must be hundreds of colony support visits where everything is routine and nothing bad happens, but those aren’t the ones that get episodes made out of them.
And yes, it’s contrived, and yes, I wish they’d focus more on Pike, Una, and the original characters, but we got Scotty, and Martin Quinn did a great job, so I’m fine with it.
That was dreadful. As if SNW had been taken over by the Marvel universe people. Just one cliche or contrived scene after another.
It’s actually kind of offensive that Chapel was the only survivor of the Cayuga, and not just the only survivor, but the only person that anyone in the show ever seems to even consider might have survived. The contrast between Matt Decker’s lament for his crew and Marie Batel’s apparent disinterest is staggering.
Hopefully if and when this show returns it’ll get back to what it does well. I never need to see this crap again.
The combat drop in the shuttle was a lot of fun. The use of lights for signalling and that passive sensors (spectographic analysis) still working despite the jamming was good. As was dropping the debris onto the source of the jamming. I liked Scotty’s vibes and the whole miracle engineer thing. I hope Pelia sticks around because otherwise it seems like they created her backstory just for the time travel episode, which seems unfair. Stealing the survivors and rescue team off the planet was a nice twist.
Chapel on the Cayuga needed an extra sequence about looking for survivors (preferably finding them but they should have at least looked). I think streaming means they could have pushed the run time longer for it. They could have also cut the entirely unnecessary space battle at the end. It’s a much better cliffhanger if we don’t know how the Gorn are going to react and have just found out everyone was stolen.
Is there a rule about which Star Trek two-parters are disappointing? Every fifth one, perhaps?
ETA: I did like that the small town “America” wasn’t all white, which is a mistake Star Trek would have made once upon a time.
Maybe they’ll retcon them to being nonsentient until a later stage of development. Which doesn’t really help matters. But yes, the whole “evil biology” thing has turned the Gorn into the Magog from Andromeda and I’m not a big fan of this choice to say the least. Especially since it makes all of the adult Gorn culpable in what essentially are [insert verb for sexual assault][ camps.
I will give that the Gorn actually did something very proactive and more than the Klingons did this episode by putting up the demarcation line.
They, more than anyone else, have established the terms of peace for the Federation and them.
I honestly feel that making the Gorn inherently-monstrous, very much along the lines of the Magog, is an inherently intriguing element that lends itself to plots that can’t really be run with any other species in the STAR TREK galaxy.
I also feel that this potentially-interesting angle on the species has been underdeveloped by the STRANGE NEW WORLDS writing staff, in favour of one too many straightforward horror episodes: I’m hopeful that the Season 3 opening will allow the series to finally start deepening the Gorn characterisation beyond ‘Scary’ without losing the fundamentally intimidating element of this Species (After all, as Rev Bem of ANDROMEDA proves, there’s no reason that a species cursed with a monstrous anatomy must be condemned to be monsters forever).
If nothing else, it would be potentially-interesting to see a Gorn negotiator or scientist point out that human reproduction can be an equally-horrifying process for the mother (Even setting aside the nastiness of ‘Rape Culture’, pregnancy and childbirth are accompanied by blood, pain and serious risks to human life to this day, even after epochal improvements in medicine: we’re just better equipped to cope with them in the modern era).
Pike’s indecision reminded me of Commodore Stocker from The Deadly Years. He’s taken the Enterprise someplace he shouldn’t have and the Romulans are pummeling the ship and Stocker has absolutely no idea what to do. It’s not a good comparison for Pike to find himself in.
I wonder what Batel’s priority one mission was. Certainly not giving a ride to Chapel and running an inoculation clinic.
They’re sure not trying to hide the fact that they’ve turned the Gorn into the xenomorphs from Alien. From the face to face between Batel and the Gorn to the scene with the adult dropping down behind Spock, it feels like the just finished watching an Alien marathon. I honestly don’t see how Arena can unfold as it did at this point. The first time the name Gorn is mentioned is by the Metron. The second time is when Kirk says “that the Metron called a Gorn”. Maybe they’ll pull a Discovery and order everyone to never speak of it again..But that means that Spock, Uhura, Chapel and Scotty follow orders. Unlikely in the extreme.
The bit with Chapel must be the single most contrived sequence in all of Trek. Just how many coincidences can happen in such a short time?
I agree with krad. Change the name and it would work a lot better. Between Lorca’s Gorn skeleton, La’An’s experience as a child, the destruction of the Peregrine and now this, there’s just no way to reconcile this with Arena. Maybe it’s going to turn out like Eugenics Wars retcon. Kirk fought a Gorn but he knew what he was facing. No “Who are these guys”?
Keeping Pelia and Scott together next season could be fun. Hopefully it would lead to Carol Kane getting more to do. And the new, actually Scottish Scotty is interesting if a bit more fan service than necessary.
Actually, if you give the Xenomorphs space ships and intelligence then they’re closer to the Brood from the X-men.
And they are, in fact, Space Wasps.
@45
At long last, they actually cast a Scottish actor to play Scotty. This show gets so many things right.
The saucer is irregularly shaped and, given its state, probably subject to random explosions and outgasing. Given that the Gorn wouldn’t be overly familiar with its configuration our inner workings, they probably can’t project its orbit perfectly, and any sudden change due to Spock’s rockets might just be interpreted as plasma conduits rupturing or the like.
@29 Chris Uhl said: “while Capt. Batel was staring down the Gorn, you knew that she’d been implanted with alien eggs, just like Ripley in Aliens 3.”
Heck, I’ve never seen an Alien or Predator movie, and I knew she’d gotten egged just from watching these two seasons of SNW (and only an episode here or there of any Trek since the 1960s).
Oh, and the “previously” segment (which is clearly chosen to, ahem, give away topics of each new episode) replayed first visible gorn, coming out of the large unnamed alien.
Every one of the landing party whom the Gorn kidnap are people who don’t remain on the Enterprise in their current roles by the time TOS begins. We know that at least Sam and M’Benga are still alive then but this hints that none of them will return to duty for a while and thus lose their places on the crew.
@1/Mitchell Craig? As in, Mitchell B. Craig? Of UFT/Imaginapa fame from many years ago? Is that you?
Just a quick note, I’m just starting to read the review, may have more to say later. They didn’t film the colony portions of the episode in a Toronto suburb. The Reacher T.V. show on Amazon Prime built out a fake town in a cornfield north of Toronto, and after S1 wrapped, “Reachertown” was sold off, and is now rented out to various productions, including Strange New Worlds and Titans.
The reason they retreated to the barber shop? It was the only place on that stretch that had an interior. The place they met Scotty? That was the police station in season 1 of Reacher. The place they all hid for the night? The diner in Reacher.
I only know all this because I worked up there for a few different productions, unfortunately not SNW.
@50/Ina Hark: “Every one of the landing party whom the Gorn kidnap are people who don’t remain on the Enterprise in their current roles by the time TOS begins. We know that at least Sam and M’Benga are still alive then but this hints that none of them will return to duty for a while and thus lose their places on the crew.”
That seems unlikely, as we’re still at least five years before “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” so there’s no rush to get to the TOS-era crew composition. And I doubt they’d drop cast members as effective as Christina Chong and Babs Olusanmokun.
It seems to me the selection was done more for character reasons. La’an has her traumatic history with the Gorn, Sam has his baggage from “All Those Who Wander,” and M’Benga and Ortegas both carry baggage from the Klingon War.
@52/Cameron Hobson: Thanks for that! It’s always interesting how assets created for one production get reused elsewhere, like how the White House sets built in Vancouver for X2: X-Men United allowed Stargate SG-1 to do a story arc involving the US President, or how the Battlestar Pegasus sets from the Battlestar Galactica remake were recycled from John Woo’s failed Lost in Space reboot pilot, IIRC. The 1989 Alien Nation TV series reused the police precinct sets from Cagney & Lacey, and I think the precinct set in Continuum was reused in a subsequent Vancouver-made show (I want to say it was the first season of Lucifer, but I can’t find confirmation). On my Patreon, I’m currently reviewing the Richard Dean Anderson/John DeLancie steampunk Western Legend from 1995, which was filmed in Mescal, Arizona, a standing Western town set built for the 1970 film Monte Walsh and used for films like Tombstone and The Quick and the Dead.
It’s always fun to see this sort of continuity in a production – for example the Gatiss/Moffat DRACULA filming Castle Dracula scenes in Bray Castle, spiritual home (and frequent soundstage) of Hammer Horror – since it’s almost an evocation of “We see so far only because we stand on the shoulders of giants”.
@51: It’s me, it’s me, it’s Mitchell B!
If I had seen you comin’, I would know what to do, I’d have throwed up my arms and wove at you!
Dang. C.Varrick @34 took my “Barbershop now!” comment. I’ll just add that it would be one wild musical adaptation of a Coppola film…
I agree with all of the eye-rolling and head-steaming over Chapel’s survival and her failure to check on anyone else. Hell, Batel and Chapel are literally the only people name-checked by the main characters in the context of rescue. It’s personal for the Enterprise crew, no question, but even in that regard a better version of the script would include mention of a couple more folks brought up by the crew as friends or notable colleagues to fill out the world, Pike or Number One then following with acknowledgment that everyone on the Cayuga has people who’d miss them.
There’s an intersection between the show’s awful revision to the Gorn and the sad ramifications of the Klingon war on those who served in it but M’Benga in particular, beyond Ortegas’ reference to her well-honed flight skills: Sam Kirk says he’d like another chance to “study [the Gorn] up close.” “With a phaser?” L’an asks. “How else will we determine how best to kill them?” Kirk replies. “I’d like to aid in that study,” chimes in M’Benga, in a towering moment for the fields of both medicine and xenoanthropology. I understand their pain and horror yet I’m also kind-of sick.
@55/Arben: Good point. Hearing sentiments like that in a Trek episode should only be in the context of a story where the characters end up rethinking them and choosing a more compassionate path by the end of the story, like Kirk in “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark” (both classics, but Gene Coon basically told the same story twice). Maybe that’s where they intend to go in part 2, but making it a cliffhanger dilutes it, since there’s so much separation between the setup and the payoff (especially since we have no idea when season 3 will be shot or aired).
@55 at least with M’Benga, he’s plausibly reverting to old, bad habits.
I would like to know if there’s a story about why the show forgets the possibility of other survivors on the saucer section. If it’s obvious to us, it must have been obvious to the writers. I can think of a number of constraints which caused them to do the plot the way they did and I’m curious which, if any, apply.
noblehunter: I think you’re giving the writers too much credit. There has always been an appalling tendency in dramatic fiction to only focus on “important” characters (those in the opening credits or the dramatis personae) at the expense of those who aren’t. There’s been movement against that over the past couple of decades, but, like all progress, it’s incremental.
It’s a trope that I particularly have paid attention to because it’s something that bothered me when I was reading/watching things as a kid in the 1970s. Every character is important to someone, even if they’re not necessarily important to the viewer/reader, and I never liked it when someone who didn’t have a speaking part was killed and nobody seemed to notice or care. Death should never be casual, but it’s portrayed as such all the damn time.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was really confused by the Gorn’s line of demarcation going across a star system, apparently on the planets’ orbital plane. Wouldn’t that mean that each planet would spend a portion of its year on both sides of the line?
I suspect this ‘line’ could very reasonably be construed as the Gorn defaulting to Keep It Simple Stupid as they attempt to communicate with an alien species (Something that might reasonably be interpreted as quite unusual for their culture): I’d be very surprised if this were not meant to be a short-term expedient, as opposed to a long-term solution.
@58, KRAD,
I refute that statement, Death is very casual, she’s with us all the time, eating our food in the refrigerator and waiting to do her part.
@59, Elcinco,
Actually…I mean if they think people are dumb enough to come back to the planet then allowing them time outside their space to recolonize is basically restocking te nursery pantry. In all seriousness it only makes sense if they knew Enterprise was there and just dropped the line there so it wouldn’t be instantly forced to engage. I’m also wondering if this is just the Gorn trying to actually start a war.
I’m also wondering how far they’ll go with the Xenomorph parallels. Are Gorn children incubated in humans going to take on more human traits? Is that how the Gorn Captain Kirk will face ends up with no tail, he was one of the ones that grew up from La’an’s camp?
@58 I guess I find this particularly egregious. It’s one thing for the narrative not to care about other possible survivors but another thing for it to forget the possibility entirely. I’m also assuming they have at least some science fiction chops.
Pause to note that in ARENA Kirk says “the creature the Metrons called a Gorn”. Same noise, not necessarily the same species as what the (Gorn/Federation) call a Gorn. Thread that needle!
” I especially love that, when he encounters Pelia, we find out that she considers him her best student, but he also got the worst grades in her class. Which is pretty on-brand for Scotty, truth be told…”
Did anyone in Pelia’s class get good grades? Says more about her as a teacher than any of her students.
@63/EveZ: “Did anyone in Pelia’s class get good grades? Says more about her as a teacher than any of her students.”
I think she’s mentioned the grades of only two people, Una and Scotty. And that’s out of who knows how many thousands of students she’s taught. Statistically speaking, it’s not that unlikely that a randomly selected two of that number would be in the lower half of the grade range.
I wonder if little bro. Jim’s recent visits have ignited a bit of a fire under Sam, so he’s feeling a little more inclined toward action. Btw, shouldn’t Sam already have like 2 or 3 kids at this point? How have we never heard anything about them? Maybe this is what causes him to leave Starfleet.
I’ve seen this theory before, but maybe Kirk’s comment “Something the Metrons called a Gorn” is essentially being retconned as way of Kirk saying I’ve never seen a Gorn that looks like that. A “hegemony” often refers to one species dominating over another, so maybe “Gorn” is a generic term for different reptilian species that have banded together.
The Gorn and Klingon Mego figures I had as a kid sported the same brown outfits — as well as phasers and communicators that were just like the Starfleet ones, but red instead of blue — which is more than enough visual evidence for me to retcon into existence a bizarre Gorn/Klingon hybrid…
@54: Nice to see you here, Mitch! It’s been too many years. Would love to reconnect with you. I’m on Facebook!
@65/Chase: Pike asked after Sam’s family in Sam’s debut scene in the series premiere.
“A “hegemony” often refers to one species dominating over another, so maybe “Gorn” is a generic term for different reptilian species that have banded together.”
Which is how I wish they’d explained the Klingons. Trek is too prone to equate nationality with biology.
I suspect they’re going to slightly “humanize” the mature Gorn in episode one of season three, or in subsequent episodes.
If they overdo that, though, it won’t make sense when Kirk encounters one in “Arena.” Surely, his brother would have told him about the Gorn invasion.
I thought the Gorn on the Cayuga could have been a good way to address the question of survivors. Have Chapel see a crew member and the Gorn transport them away. Wouldn’t have solved the whole issue, but better than crashing the saucer without even looking for anyone. But I guess that might have spoiled the kidnap from the planet later.
Blame Spock if you want to, but Chapel had no way of knowing why he was floating around the wrecked ship and had time only to grab a suit and save him from the Gorn attacker.
@68 I’d forgotten about that. Now it feels like one of those perfunctory, we have to get the canon out of the way kind of things. Oh well.
I have long thought it interesting that the Klingon Empire was supposedly this aggressive, expansionistic power, but we never see nor hear about any races they’ve conquered or eradicated (except for the Tribbles, of course). Star Trek Online features an Empire that returned to those ways and conquered both the Orions and the Gorn Hegemony, which I liked. Weirdly, I think the only Trek group other than the Dominion (and the Borg, but they hardly count) that we know conquered and integrated other species is the Son’a.
The way I had been lampshading this in own head was that mainline Gorn society had discovered some artificial substitute for implanting eggs in living beings and having their young savagely fighting it out. In this scenario, the Gorn that we’ve been seeing some sort of regressive, Make the Hegemony Great Again, sect that wants to go back to ‘the old ways’.
Overall I really liked the season, but I don’t think it is nearly as strong as the first. It gave us plenty of S without enough NWs. Even so. this show is still in the running to be my all time favorite Trek incarnation.
Another reason I’m disappointed with the use of the Gorn is that I keep waiting for this era of Trek to finally give us its own iconic Big Bad, and I don’t think the Gorn fit the bill. Not by a long shot. They’re too simplistic and not at all original.
TOS had the Klingons and Romulans. The TNG-DS9-Voyager era had the Borg and the Dominion. When are we going to get that original, really interesting alien species that reaches beyond Trek fandom into the broader pop culture realm again? You know, something that gets people talking. Of course, that culture is so fractured and diluted now it may be impossible. Regardless, I don’t think they have a chance of getting there with lizard xenomorphs with really long tails. They’re not even talking to our heroes. How ya gonna have a catchphrase if all your baddies do is hiss and growl?
Answer us this, Star Trek.
@72/Chase: TNG: “The Mind’s Eye” established Krios as a planet under Klingon rule. And TOS showed their attempts to get around the Organian Treaty by proxy conquest, backing indigenous leaders on Capella IV and Neural who would presumably rule in their name once they were in power.
But yes, Trek has generally been terrible at portraying alien “empires” as actual empires with subject peoples. That’s why I was so pleased when Nemesis introduced the Remans.
@75 If only the Remans themselves had been more interesting. I suppose JJ Abrams killed them all, so I guess we’ll never know.
I’m still thinking about the Gorn, and maybe this particular species Pike and co. have been encountering are sort of like the Gorn skirmishers. They’re physically impressive but their sentience actually is questionable. I like the idea that the Gorn captain Kirk battles is actually the Federation’s first encounter with the “true” Gorn, the species that actually leads the Hegemony.
@74 / I’ve been thinking about this, and it occurs to me that, really, the only new aliens that have been added since 2017 who feel like they’ve been given any proper development are the Kelpiens from Discovery and the Vau’Nakat from Prodigy. Maybe the 10-C as well, but they’re not really in a position to turn up elsewhere in the franchise.
The trailer for Lower Decks season 4 was teasing a new threat; maybe something will come of that?
I was already tired of the show insisting on depicting the doomed romance between Spock and Chapel. Spapel will never work and they quickly and repeatedly point out that they can’t be together. In this episode, they pursue it to the expense of the larger story. As you mention, Keith, some of the dumbest and inexcusable decisions in this episode happen just so Spapel can hold hands in space while watching possibly dozens of their colleagues plunge to their deaths on the Cayuga.
As for slavish continuity with TOS, I like to think of those teleplays as being loose reenactments based on “the historical documents” using 1960s technology, rather than the contemporaneous recordings of actual events now available to us advanced 21st century folk.
@79/jeffronicus: ” I like to think of those teleplays as being loose reenactments based on “the historical documents” using 1960s technology”
That’s exactly how Roddenberry saw them. When TMP came out, he suggested that everything looked different because TOS had been an inaccurate dramatization and TMP was a more accurate one. Roddenberry got his start in TV adapting real police cases to be dramatized on Dragnet, and TOS has a very Dragnet-like format in the way it’s framed by narration in the form of the lead character’s official reports. Implicitly, we’re seeing a dramatic recreation of those reports.
“rather than the contemporaneous recordings of actual events now available to us advanced 21st century folk.”
No, the new stuff has to be dramatizations too. That’s the only way to explain VFX nonsense like Discovery‘s turbolift roller-coaster hammerspace that’s somehow bigger than the entire ship, or the space station in the stellar nursery in “Lost in Translation” being enormously bigger than the stars themselves.
And don’t forget — TOS looked advanced to 1960s audiences. Our children and grandchildren are going to find SNW just as old-fashioned and cheesy-looking as we find TOS. Ultimately it’s all just the best approximation of the future that we can manage in the present.
I agree with the criticisms of this episode. I never liked in old Trek (or old TV/movies in general) that so many nameless people could die as long as the main characters lived. This was really regressive this week. Everyone dies on one ship except Scott and everyone dies on the other ship except Chapel. And really, if they didn’t die, Spock was just apparently going to kill them. I also didn’t like using the idea of a small American town on another planet to save money. I’ll throw in as well that I don’t find the Pike-Batel relationship as fun as some others.
This episode was just a bad action movie. There was a lot of shooting and fighting, but none of it was especially interesting. The cliffhanger was like a bad variation of “The Best of Both Worlds.” It’s too bad because this is a great series with a lot of great episodes. If this is the worst episode, then I can definitely live with that. If we’re going to have pure action episodes in the future, I’d like to see more consideration given to realistic strategy and tactics. From the admiral to Spock to the Gorn, none of their actions hold up under scrutiny.
@73 TribblesandBits Your theory about regressive vs mainline Gorn made me think of the original 1970s “Land of the Lost”! The baddies were green Sleestaks who’d hiss menacingly and attack the Marshall family on sight. A different, brown Sleestak was the humans’ friend, spoke intelligently, and wore clothes so you couldn’t see the zipper of his costume. He thought he’d come from the future to observe his species’ animalistic forebears. Then it turned out he was actually from the past, and the hissing green Sleestaks were his species’ regressive future. D’oh! And now I’m worried that after cribbing from Alien, SNW will copy from classic Sid & Marty Kroftt.
I agree 100% on the seemingly cavalier attitude towards survivors on the saucer section. It would have taken *one* line from Chapel after she woke up to check for other life signs. One line. Either the writers or editors made a poor choice here.
I’m more relaxed on the Gorn issues. I don’t think it takes anything away from Jim Kirk’s accomplishment in Arena to have the Gorn already be a known and feared thing when Jim affirmatively choses against killing the Gorn Captain. In fact, opting against killing a member of a species that once terrified and imprisoned his brother says *more* about the strength of Jim’s beliefs and the Starfleet ethos (in my mind). No killing for revenge. I understand that every fan’s mileage on this will vary.
@74,
Same re: this era’s Big Bad.
More and more, I think they missed an opportunity and should’ve just used the Tholians.
Christopher and/or Keith need to be hired as consultants to point out these types of problems before filming begins.
@84.
I like the Tholians just fine, but I would prefer a new species.
In retrospect, though I think it ended up being a whole lot of nothing, I do appreciate Enterprise making that attempt with the Xindi. Gotta give them credit.
I’m not saying it’s easy to create something that’s iconic. It’s damn hard. Sometimes it works and more often than not it doesn’t. TNG had to go through a few tries before getting to the Borg. Though, they did usually aim for a level higher than biting space monsters, early Ferengi notwithstanding.
<<Now it’s possible that the second part of this story will do the work the show has ignored up to this point in making the Gorn more complicated than they’ve been made out to be. >>
I noted that one of the landing party offhandedly observes that the Gorn younglings looked hungry. Nothing came of that in this ep, but it may have been planted there for resolution in the follow up. Could also come to nothing; you never know with these wacky producers!
I compare Pike standing impotently on the bridge to Riker giving the order to fire at the end of “Best of Both Worlds Part 1.” There are right ways and wrong ways to set up a cliffhanger, and this was the wrong way.
When Betel was face to face with the baby Gorn, I was expecting to see its baby mouth open and have another wee baby mouth come out. This show really rides the fine line between “rip-off” and “homage”.
I’m glad y’all are mentioning the Klingon paradox. Canon adjacent stuff always showed the Klingons and Romulans as, together, about the same size as the Federation. Half a Federation is somewhere between 50 and 500 species. Klingons, however, seem to be the only species in the Klingon Empire. Kor says, “Should one Klingon soldier be killed, a thousand Organians will die”: a fairly genocidal statement. So it seems like there is a lot of unaddressed backstory to have the Federation and Klingons be allies in the TNG timeframe.
The question “How would Starfleet deal with the Xenomorphs?” could be an interesting one. I don’t think SNW is doing much that is interesting with it. DS9 gave us the anti-Federation in the Dominion, and although it was never a major theme onscreen, I can imagine some species choosing the Dominion over the Federation with eyes open. In the Dominion, you never have to fight in a war: the Jem’Hadar do that. You never have to do diplomacy with people you don’t like: the Vorta do that. All you have to do is send 10-25% of your Gross Planetary Product to the Dominion and you get left alone. The downside, of course, is that having given up control of your future, if the Dominion decides you should serve by going extinct then thems the breaks.
Nothing so interesting has come from the Gornomorphs. “They would probably shoot them” is the obvious answer, and that’s what they seem to be going with. I mean, you know who hates parasites that eat you from within? Everyone! Everyone hates that! The Gorn existing like this should be the greatest force for unity ever seen. The only species that would not be on team “kill the Gorn” are the Changelings… now there’s an idea. It is just not interesting to watch the humans of Star Trek fail to rise above “kill them”. The Horta would like a word!
Whenever someone is making a new Star Trek show, I feel that in the first meeting they should ask, “Do we want to tell a story where like 6 people do everything?” If the answer is yes, put them on a ship of about 6 people. It is good they aren’t doing redshirts so much, but Spock’s little speech should have prompted a “Calm down there with the Vulcan supremacy, lieutenant. We are sending five humans, that’s at least 2 Spocks. Backup in case you end up in the middle of an Alien movie is also good.”
Best album: Gorn To Run. Location of the high command: GornHub. Vanguard of their army: the For Gorn Hope. Ok that’s out of my system now.
I’m amused that Jammer chose the exact same headline I did for his review of the finale….
https://www.jammersblog.com/2023/08/10/snw-hegemony/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thanks for that link @krad. I made the mistake of scrolling through the comments. Lots of people who REALLY don’t like having their opinions challenged. I have a newfound appreciation for what you’ve got here.
Could it be that the reason Pike is just standing there indecisively at the end of the episode be that the writers themselves haven’t decided how they will end this cliffhanger, seeing as they have a very long time to work on it?
@91/David Pirtle: Michael Piller didn’t know how to end the cliffhanger when he had Riker say “Fire” at the end of “Best of Both Worlds.” It was standard practice on TNG to do season-ending cliffhangers without knowing how they’d be resolved. But a writer’s indecision is no excuse to make characters appear indecisive.
Although really, Pike’s apparent indecision struck me more as a directorial and editorial issue than a writing issue. The scene could’ve cut more tightly so that Pike didn’t stand there frozen for that long. Or, they could’ve skipped the Gorn bombardment entirely and just had the cliffhanger be the announcement that the crew had been abducted.
@92 – I don’t see it as apparent indecision. There’s shots of the bridge crew turning to look at him and Number One saying “Orders, Captain “. It’s obvious that Pike’s indecision is real
Pike’s indecision also took me out of the scene, but for another reason. It reminded me too much of Star Trek Into Darkness where young Kirk does pretty much the same thing. Only he apologizes to his crew for being a big dummy. Doubtful Pike is going to do that, but who knows?
@88/BrianDolan:
I agree with your comment about red shirts (or gold shirts, if you grew up in TNG era). This latest SNW episode might have been a step back in treating “nameless” people with respect, but we seem to have moved beyond having a nameless ensign killed each week.
I had no idea so many people seemed to love the Gorn. This episode has flaws, which have already been pointed out. And yes, the Gorn are too Alien. But as for Arena? I truly don’t understand the criticism, besides the odd continuity line here and there.
After watching Arena last night, I found the attempts to explain the Gorn perspective to be unconvincing. Did the Gorn warn the settlers to leave the area? Did they try to petition the Federation? No, they just kill. I don’t feel bad SNW is making them a blood-thirsty villain. That’s what they were from the limited screen time in Arena.
The thing is, what with SNW being a prequel, so far it’s been stuck in this holding pattern of the Gorn as blood-thirsty monsters. Understandably, it’s difficult to progress towards anything with them as a people with a perspective or else contradict “Arena.” (Which they may end up doing anyway.)
But as it is… where’s the interest in this story? If there can’t be a resolution, where can it go? Is it just going to wallow in monster violence for a while? Canon aside, for that reason, I don’t find it very interesting as a Star Trek story. It’s Jurassic Park with lasers. Might as well be watching Dinosaucers.
@96/M: It’s not about “loving” the Gorn, it’s about recognizing the importance of the theme that “Arena” was meant to convey — that what seems evil may just be misunderstood, and understanding could be the first step toward peace. What’s frustrating is that SNW seems to reject that fundamentally Trekkian message in favor of a far more shallow and morally bankrupt “What seems evil is just evil.” This episode did offer a slight glimmer of hope that there may be more to their approach to the Gorn, but that remains to be seen.
“Did they try to petition the Federation? No, they just kill.”
So did the mother Horta in “The Devil in the Dark,” another Gene Coon episode with the same basic plot beats and the same message as “Arena.” So did the Xindi, but Archer still made peace with them in the end. The point is not that the Gorn are saints, the point is that people often do the wrong thing for understandable reasons, and you can use that understanding to convince them to do things differently. Meeting violence with hate and revenge just perpetuates the destruction; you have to try something different if you hope to move beyond the violence.
Morality is not about blaming others for what they did wrong. It’s about choosing what you will do next. That’s why the climax of the episode was Kirk choosing not to kill, even though we don’t see the long-term effects of that choice. The choice itself was what mattered.
@97/C.Varrick: “Understandably, it’s difficult to progress towards anything with them as a people with a perspective or else contradict “Arena.””
Good point — that’s part of it too. The very nature of the Gorn’s introduction means that little can really be done with them in a prequel, beyond using them as one-note monsters, which just isn’t that interesting. If they’d introduced a new species instead, there’d be much more room for the storyline to evolve over time.
@98 Yeah. I have a hard time seeing the Gorn as anything OTHER than one-note monsters, given “Arena”. Granted there might be some interesting storylines testing Federation principles against an implacable monstrous force, but all of those storylines would be better if there was some ambiguity or chance for progression in understanding the monstrosities.
(And though we’ve beaten Kirk’s “womanizing” ways to death, it just struck me the other day that at this particular point in time, with Kirk in a relationship with Carol Marcus, we would NEVER see ANY trace of womanizing in him, even if it existed. I think everyone would agree Kirk doesn’t cheat on his partners).
@99/gwangung: I think the point of “Arena” was that the enemy in a war always looks like a pure monster, but they may see you the same way and believe their extreme actions are justified in self-defense (like how the mother Horta believed she was justified in ruthlessly killing the monsters that were murdering her unborn babies). Remember, Kirk was just as willing to ruthlessly hunt down and destroy the ship that destroyed the Cestus outpost. War makes everyone a monster. And the only way to end it is to change how you behave, to be willing to end the violence no matter how risky it seems to try.
Hmm… I often say that “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark” are the same Gene Coon story twice, but “Arena” has a much more ambiguous ending — “Devil” ends with humans and Hortas cheerfully reconciled, but “Arena” just ends with an inconclusive hope that peace through negotiation is possible. I wonder if that’s because Coon or Roddenberry wanted to leave the door open for the Gorn to be a recurring foe — still antagonistic, but with more nuance than just mindless predators.
One question that the overall Gorn arc in the franchise may need to answer is, if the Gorn are really just predatory monsters is it still possible to live peacefully with them? SNW seems to be saying no, while TOS answered possibly. DS9’s mentions of Cestus III indicates the ultimate answer is indeed yes.
But SNW may be taking a different tack. We know how relations with the Gorn are ultimately resolved, so perhaps this story isn’t a macro story about Federation Gorn relations, but a personal one about our characters and how they relate to this threat. Nothing’s going to change with the Gorn, so perhaps the change will be in our heroes. I don’t know.
@88, BrianDolan,
Mr. Dolan, I play Star Trek Online.Earth Spacedock general zone chat often degenerates into a cesspool that would make Twitter blush. On other days, or at the Summer Festival on Risa, chat turns into a storm of Gorn puns that can last for six hours at a time. So I want you to know I speak with some authority when I say, GornHub is NOT the location of their high command not even close. It’s GornCom. Gorn to Run is an excellent album, but I prefer Gorn in the USA. The Gorn Embassy is on an island on Earth off the coast of Costa Rica they renamed Isla Gorna.
@97, C.Varrick
Thanks, now I have the Dinosaucers theme in my head. The USA Cartoon Express will never stop rollin.
Brian Dolan & mr_d: And of course, the best movie is Gorn with the Wind, though Gorn on the Fourth of July and Gorn in Sixty Seconds deserve some mention.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who has Gorn to lunch
All these puns leave me feeling rather gornless.
@102/The River Temarc: “Well, that’s pretty much inevitable when you choose to go with an episodic, rather than a serialized, structure.”
Nonsense. Enterprise was an episodic series, and it did a great job avoiding the “redshirt” trope of treating death casually. It just waited to kill a crewmember until it had room within a single episode to address the impact of the loss.
And look at “Balance of Terror.” Other episodes have crewmembers dying and being forgotten in the final scene as the heroes laugh and joke, but “Balance” remembers and gives proper attention to the loss. Same for DS9 episodes like “The Ship.” It’s not about episodic vs. serial. Format does not determine quality, and serial writing is not intrinsically better than episodic. There are plenty of serials that feature frequent death without giving it any weight. And good episodic writing means that everything a story needs — including an acknowledgment of its consequences — is covered in the episode itself.
It’s pretty well known by this point that most of TNG season spanning two parters were made without the writers knowing how the season ending cliffhanger crisis would be resolved the following fall. The Kurtzman era mostly avoided the cliffhanger format in its Trek shows, other than Una’s last-minute arrest last season (I don’t count Discovery’s season 2 ending time travel as that kind of cliffhanger – that was a conscious pre-established decision to move the show and premise away from the TOS era). Now I’m left to wonder if Alonso Myers and Goldsman came up with this cliffhanger Gorn disaster while already knowing the answer in advance or have left it for next season. As pointed out, it isn’t hard to predict what Pike’s decision might be.
Still, as frustrating as it is not knowing when the show will be back, it’s not as if the writers could have known there would be a strike shutting everything down. For what the episode is, despite its faults, I was riveted by the choice of leaving things out in the open like this. We’ll just have to wait it out (and hope everyone gets what they rightfully deserve – I for one am tired of people like Iger and Zaslav claiming poverty for the media, all the while sharing the losses and hogging the gains).
One thing I’ve noticed though, it’s that the choice of officers left behind mitigate a potential game of “Who’s going to survive a deadly Gorn kidnapping”? We know M’Benga and Sam Kirk are still very much alive in the next few years. That takes out some of the suspense. That only leaves Ortegas and La’an’s fates wide open. And I would be disappointed if one or both were killed off – they’re far more interesting than Sam Kirk, that’s for sure.
One thing I loved was the strategy for freeing the people on the planet. Sacrificing the Cayuga saucer using the planet’s gravity in order to destroy the Gorn device without tipping them off was a stroke of genius.
And while the lack of care or attention to any potential survivors besides Chapel somewhat stands out – the Redshirt trope in a nutshell – it’s not as if the episode ignored them entirely. Before going out to plant explosives, Spock barked a specific order for the ship and crew to do a minicious scan of the Cayuga saucer, looking for anything that looked remotely alive. Understandably, they didn’t find anyone because they were either dead or locked inside a part of the saucer not visible to the naked eyesight (sensors not working due to the Gorn dampening field, after all).
@106/Eduardo: “One thing I’ve noticed though, it’s that the choice of officers left behind mitigate a potential game of “Who’s going to survive a deadly Gorn kidnapping”? We know M’Benga and Sam Kirk are still very much alive in the next few years. That takes out some of the suspense. That only leaves Ortegas and La’an’s fates wide open.”
I hope they don’t go that route. I think it’s facile to define suspense purely in terms of the threat of a character actually dying. What matters is that the characters don’t know if they’ll live or die. Even if we know they’ll surely survive, the goal is to get sufficiently invested in their perspective that we feel how real the threat is to them, and suspend disbelief about our knowledge of their survival, the same way we suspend disbelief about the fact that they’re totally imaginary and thus nothing is really at stake.
So actually killing off a character is too often just a cheap way to generate shock value. I’d rather see a situation where they all get out and the suspense is in finding out how, and how close they come to failing. The value of the story is in the journey — not just the hollow statistic of who comes out alive at the end, but the emotions they go through as they fear death and fight to survive.
And you’re right that the episode did acknowledge the attempt to search for life signs on the saucer, but that’s exactly why it’s problematical that Spock stopped trying to look for life signs once he was actually on the saucer. And the other problematical thing is the coincidence that the only person who survived was the main-title regular, which is a cheap writing trick. It would’ve been more credible if there had been more survivors, or if there had been some explanation of why Chapel was the only one — say, she was still on the transporter pad when the ship was attacked, and the transporter chief saved her by putting her in the buffer on a time delay, and she rematerialized after everyone else was dead.
@107/Christopher: I agree. Having the survivor be a series regular is always contrived to some extent. And regarding Chapel, the minute the ship fell under Gorn attack, I was very much expecting the transporter buffer option to be used to save her (presumably against her will – no way she would agree to being the one saved at everyone else’s expense).
A family vacation kept me from seeing this one until just now. It was equivalent, for me, to any of the post-“Best of Both Worlds” cliffhangers TNG did. In other words, you could see the strings being pulled to get us to the crisis at the end of part 1. I liked the introduction of Scotty and hope that he hangs around. I haven’t really enjoyed Pelia all that much, so it won’t bother me all that much to see Carol Kane go if that’s the road they take.
My big complaint honestly was the very end of the episode where they drew out Pike’s seeming indecision for a ridiculous amount of time
I worry that Ortegas is doomed, just because they really haven’t done much to develop her character beyond “she flies the ship.” I really hope that they don’t, though, because I love Ortegas, and they already robbed me of Hemmer.
@109/twels: “In other words, you could see the strings being pulled to get us to the crisis at the end of part 1.”
I didn’t. I thought they’d beamed the landing party up to the Enterprise, and that we’d just get a closing scene where they cured Batel and everything was resolved, at least in the immediate term. I didn’t realize they were building to a cliffhanger, and it felt somewhat tacked on when it did happen. I mean, they resolved the crises of this episode, but then they just threw in a new one out of nowhere, the landing party being abducted. So it doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger that arises organically out of the story, just one that was set up at the end as an excuse to have a cliffhanger.
@111: The minute they brought up the demarcation line, I figured that at least one of our crew members was going to be stuck behind it at the end. Also, the fact that we only saw Pike’s team materialize in Sickbay also had me thinking that we’d get to the end with folks trapped on the other side. As to the Batel situation, I got the Alien3 feeling with the face-to-face encounter with the Gorn youngling.
This wasn’t a terrible episode – but like the first face-“-to-face with the Gorn, it was my least favorite episode of the season
@112/twels: “As to the Batel situation, I got the Alien3 feeling with the face-to-face encounter with the Gorn youngling.”
That never occurred to me, because the scene reminded me of something more recent in my viewing experience. I amused myself by wondering if, when Pike asked Batel why the Gorn didn’t attack her, she might answer, “My real name is Wynonna Earp and I’ve been staring down monsters for over 200 years.”
The more monstrous the Gorn appear to be, the more it strengthens Arena. If one truly agrees with the morality of Arena, then it shouldn’t matter how much damage the Gorn cause beforehand.
@114.
It matters to me if I want something more in a Trek story than monster mayhem stretched to the point of tedium, which I do. It also matters to me if I want the antagonists in Trek to be able to express themselves in ways other than hissing, growling, and blowing up stuff, which I do. Say what you want about the Gorn in TOS and Enterprise, but at least they had lines.
Hey, maybe they’ll eventually get around to having a Gorn captain who talks to Pike, but so far, I think this is pretty mediocre stuff.
The Gorn situation kind of reminds me of the first season of Agents of Shield. They had to spend 3/4 of the season going nowhere because the really dramatic stuff had to wait for The Winter Soldier to come out. It’s worse in this case because they’ll never reach Arena so they can’t do anything significant with the Gorn without further straining continuity.
@115
All the evidence in Arena suggests that the Gorn are blood thirsty monsters. They even fake a message just to lure Kirk and co down to the planet… so they can do some more killing. The Gorn are shown that they can communicate. They just use it to kill instead of talking.
The “invasion” explanation is a very thin fig leaf. After all, we’ve all seen news stories where homeowners kill innocent people for just knocking on their door.
@117/M: “All the evidence in Arena suggests that the Gorn are blood thirsty monsters.”
Like I said, the point of the story is that the enemy always looks monstrous to the other side. And that what matters isn’t what the other side does, it’s what you choose to do. Conflicts are never resolved by blaming the other side; they’re only resolved by taking responsibility for your own actions.
I mean, look at the Klingons. They’re obviously bloodthirsty. In “Errand of Mercy,” they occupied a planet of pacifists and executed thousands of them (or believed they had). But the Organians still predicted that peace would eventually be achieved, and it was.
And come on, it’s not like humans haven’t committed all kinds of atrocities and acts of mass murder in our history. But nations whose soldiers once slaughtered each other by the millions, who would have seen each other as monsters during those wars, are now allies.
@cb
“Like I said, the point of the story is that the enemy always looks monstrous to the other side. And that what matters isn’t what the other side does, it’s what you choose to do. Conflicts are never resolved by blaming the other side; they’re only resolved by taking responsibility for your own actions.”
it’s perfectly noble for Kirk to avoid killing the Gorn captain and wanting both sides to talk going forward. I don’t think anyone is making the argument otherwise.
But why does that mean the Gorn *aren’t* monsters at this point?
@119.
Sure the Gorn can be monsters at this point. They’re also quickly becoming dull two-dimensional villains at this point, too. That’s the point I was making. If they can only be that, why bother? Surely there must be other strange and new things this show could be doing.
@120
I don’t disagree with you. The Gorn storyline seems destined to be unsatisfying. Unless…
I wonder if the writers plan on solving it (sometime near the end of SNW run) with a flash forward episode that takes place post Arena. They are very close to already having the whole TOS cast in place.
@119/M: “But why does that mean the Gorn *aren’t* monsters at this point?”
You didn’t say “at this point” before, so I thought you were agreeing with the position some posters have advanced that the Gorn are nothing more than irredeemable monsters, period.
And C.Varrick has it right. The issue isn’t whether it’s plausible that the Gorn seem monstrous at this time. The issue is whether it makes them interesting or worthwhile as recurring antagonists. The issue is whether there was really any point to using them in this series at all, if they’re nothing more than an Aliens knockoff.
@118 – “In “Errand of Mercy,” they occupied a planet of pacifists and executed thousands of them (or believed they had).”
Let’s not forget that Kor said what would happen if there was resistance and the Organians agreed that theyvwould not oppose the Klingons. It was only after Kirk & Spock blew up the ammo dump that Kor took action. The blood would be on their hands as well as Kor’s.
It’s not like Kor beamed down and immediately shot 1,000 Organians. Kirk was assuming that Kor was bluffing. Kirk basically backed Kor into a corner where he could not follow through on his threat, which would make him look weak, or he could show that he meant exactly what he said
@120 said: Sure the Gorn can be monsters at this point. They’re also quickly becoming dull two-dimensional villains at this point, too. That’s the point I was making. If they can only be that, why bother? Surely there must be other strange and new things this show could be doing
Frankly, the sorts of “war stories” that this show should be telling are the “Cold War” ones they did in “Broken Circle” and “Under the Cloak of War.” The Klingons are great adversaries and, as we saw in those episodes, things are not just black and white – and there’s more to tell regarding the history of the two empires.
The Gorn stories – thus far – feel like they’re trying to make the Gorn the SNW equivalent of the Borg. They’re an enemy that can’t be negotiated with and will simply overwhelm whatever they come across. Rather than assimilate you, they implant you with their babies and set them loose to kill you. The problem with that is that we’ve seen a Gorn who is intelligent, wily and ultimately CAN be negotiated with, after a fashion. And that has been our perspective of the Gorn for 50+ years. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible to get from the SNW Gorn to the TOS ones in a convincing fashion, but they’re not doing a lot to convince me that there’s any kind of plan to do so
@124.
Right, and I don’t know how they do this without pretending “Arena” doesn’t exist, but a lot of this could be improved via an actual Gorn character of some kind, who talks and has a personality. You know, you can only get so far with the faceless threat. I mean, TNG wisely moved the Borg in new directions with Locutus, Hugh, and eventually the Queen. Of sure, I know plenty of fans disliked that last addition, but it never bothered me that much. I like for the villains to have a face and a persona, and actors like Alice Krige to get their moment in the spotlight. (And pay those actors well, dammit!)
But just imagine if TNG and DS9 had made that other reptilian species, the Cardassians, like SNW’s Gorn. Nothing but snarling and no speechifying by Marc Alaimo? Now that would’ve been a shame.
@125 said: But just imagine if TNG and DS9 had made that other reptilian species, the Cardassians, like SNW’s Gorn. Nothing but snarling and no speechifying by Marc Alaimo? Now that would’ve been a shame.
Or – for that matter – imagine if the universal translator worked on “baby Gorn” speech and we got them saying things like “kill” “dominate,” “rend the flesh” – anything beyond the xenomorph hiss-growl
The fact that Gorn babies are literal monsters and that Gorn adults are willing to use them as cannon fodder doesn’t actually disturb me that much; presumably they develop sentience at a later stage of maturity, and the idea that parents would necessarily care about their young seems like a mammalian bias. But I have serious questions about their life cycle: we know from “All Those Who Wander” that even newly hatched Gorn can lay eggs in people; what the hell kind of species reaches reproductive maturity that quickly? Moreover, why do they keep growing after this point? They can already propagate the species; it’s not clear why they would have evolved a long period of continued growth beyond sexual maturity (let alone one with sentience, which I understand is actually a fairly costly biological strategy). And how did they form a technological civilization in the first place?
It just seems like they went for whatever was scariest and didn’t think it out beyond that.
There is an interview in Variety in which Akiva Goldsman clarifies his thinking about the Gorn:
“…sometimes we forget that real monsters exist. I thought it was important for there to be real monsters in our galaxy. That doesn’t mean that 10 years, two seasons from now, we won’t be having a nice chat with the Gorn. But right now in Seasons 1 and 2 and 3, they’re the monsters. By the way, many of the other “Star Trek” antagonists began as alien, as Other — forgive the use of “alien” — but we learned to connect with them. Not so the Gorn. The Gorn are not understandable to us in this way, not relatable to us in this way. Part of our galaxy is be good, be kind, be empathetic, and also understand that evil exists, because seeing with compassion does mean you should be blind to horror. The Gorn are monsters.”
@128/Chris Uhl, quoting Goldsman: “I thought it was important for there to be real monsters in our galaxy. That doesn’t mean that 10 years, two seasons from now, we won’t be having a nice chat with the Gorn.”
Huh? That’s a contradictory thing Goldsman is saying. If we can have a “nice chat” with them in the future, then obviously they aren’t “real monsters,” they just appear to be due to lack of understanding, which is the whole point of “Arena” and of much of Trek in general.
“Part of our galaxy is be good, be kind, be empathetic, and also understand that evil exists, because seeing with compassion does mean you should be blind to horror. The Gorn are monsters.”
Yes, evil exists, but denouncing entire races/species as monsters is itself evil. Evil is something people do, not a genetic identity. A government may do evil things, but that doesn’t mean every one of its citizens approves of those things or isn’t trying to fight for change. So this is just a horribly un-Trekkish attitude.
And if he wanted a monster, he should have created one rather than re-using an alien from TOS that was famously not (just?) a monster.
I just watched “Arena” again and I can almost see where Goldsman is going with this. The Gorn slaughter the entire colony on Cestus III without giving them any warning to leave (one definitely wonders now how many of those colonists got swept up to the Gorn ship). They then lie in wait and create a somewhat elaborate trap fooling the Enterprise that the colony is still there so they can kill off even more “invaders” without trying to talk. The Gorn captain’s only entreaty to Kirk is to stop running so he can kill him in a way that is “mercy-ful and quick.”
Really, there is only the fact that the Gorn claim that the colonists were invading their space and Bones conceding that they might be “in the wrong” (later Kirk conceded that the Gorn might have thought he was defending against an invasion) that makes the Gorn seem more sympathetic. But if you look at how “history” unfolded (the Federation kept Cestus III), maybe the Gorn really are monstrous and in the wrong at least as much as the Federation.
All that said, the continuity issues that arise (Spock not being able to identify the life forms on the planet as Gorn, nor the ship as a Gorn raider) lead me to believe that being able to have that what they really wanted was to have a Trek-meets-Alien(s) moment and used the Gorn as a way to do it – “Arena” be damned.
@131/twels: As I keep saying, you can find monstrous acts that any side commits in a war. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably saw the United States as monstrous — and that’s not even counting the dozens of other Japanese cities that had been just as thoroughly demolished by the Allies’ conventional firebombing by that point, or the Japanese-Americans forced into concentration camps by the US government. They had no reason to see us as the good guys.
Saying “The enemy did an evil thing, therefore they are pure evil” is always a dishonest, self-serving argument, because it presumes that your own side is saintly and flawless, which is never true. Every culture has the capacity to do evil. Humans have immense monstrousness in our history — as Quark pointed out to Sisko once, we’ve been guilty of far greater evils than the Ferengi, such as slavery and genocide. So it’s hypocritical to argue that another species doing bad things makes them more irredeemable than we are. What made Kirk a moral man was that he recognized his own capacity for evil and thus had the wisdom to restrain it. “I’m a killer, but I will not kill today.” And the whole point of “Mirror, Mirror” was to show how easily humans could have become a tyrannical empire if history had gone slightly differently.
Re: The Gorn’s characterisation: I just figure the show-runners/Paramount wanted an action-issue with monsters, for those people who only know of Trek from watching the occasional episode or movie. True, it’s on streaming, so why they would think someone who hardly knows about the longest-running American tv-series would subscribe to watch it is puzzling, although maybe that’s for when they re-run on non-streaming channels (which explains the previously on… recaps).
As to the Gorn being the Gorn, well, it feels like a nod to Arena while attempting something new, even though, yes, the Gorn are obviously Alien/Predator rip-offs, going back to the show wanting an alien that was familiar to non-Trek watchers. The show hasn’t found it’s iconic antagonist/alien race yet, although hopefully, there are many more seasons and years to come.
Personally, I always felt that there was a larger storyline involving the issue of sentient ascension of humanity/life which has never really been touched upon in Star Trek. The Squire of Gothos/ The Caretaker from Shore Leave/ The Q Continuum/ The Skin of Evil/ The Prophets/ The Nexus/ The Inter-dimensional beings from Charades, and the sentient consciousness nebula from The Elysian Kingdom being some examples.Maybe (it’s never going to happen) a two-part episode could expand on that, while causing numerous contradictions and continuity errors over Trek’s numerous shows, obviously.
Last thought; 20 episodes into Strange New Worlds, and I have to say, there isn’t a terrible episode yet, the show managing to combine the themes (non-musical) from all the previous shows while making its own mark in Trek lore.
Final credit going to the cast portraying the crew, the acting ensemble over Trek’s nearly 60-year existence, always being the true strength of Trek to me.
Thanks for sticking with this to the end.
Edit: #132:
“What made Kirk a moral man was that he recognized his own capacity for evil and thus had the wisdom to restrain it.”
Yes, precisely.
@132 said: @131/twels: As I keep saying, you can find monstrous acts that any side commits in a war
Which is why I said I almost could see where Goldsman was going with his characterization of the Gorn. It feels very much to me like he watched all the way to Kirk touching off the cannon and then missed the last few minutes of the episode
@133/supermanmoustache: “Re: The Gorn’s characterisation: I just figure the show-runners/Paramount wanted an action-issue with monsters, for those people who only know of Trek from watching the occasional episode or movie.”
I figure it’s just that Akiva Goldsman has been mainly a feature film writer over his career, and he apparently has a fondness for big action and spectacle. So he just wants to do monster movies.
It’s not that there isn’t room for monster stories in Trek — Sam Kirk is fated to fall prey to one in a few years, and Scotty will get accused of the murders committed by another a few months after that. But that’s more of a one-and-done, episodic kind of thing. Depicting an entire alien civilization as simplistically monstrous on an ongoing basis, particularly one that’s intelligent, civilized, and tool-using, is ethically problematical and creatively limiting.
@135.
Exactly, and on a practical storytelling level it gets harder to keep it interesting when a simple monster is recurring. They’re obviously looking to the Alien franchise for “inspiration” with the Gorn now, but it’s important to remember that the xenomorphs aren’t the only villains in those stories. There’s also the Company and its various minions that’s a part of the formula. Star Trek doesn’t have that, and shouldn’t, (Oh, please don’t use Section 31 again, I’m begging.) so I have to wonder what else they can do here to keep it fresh.
@135.
You’re absolutely correct.
The Gorn could be better characterised, as noted before by many, they could at least have some kind of language (well, maybe not in All Those Who Wander as they were newborn) outside of Predator rattles.
It’s interesting that you note Sam’s fate, as this episode reminded me of Operation: Annihilate, in that I felt that was a slam-bang season finale which felt like a letdown after The City On The Edge Of Forever.
I suppose that the fact there is room for every type of story in Trek is one of its strengths and weaknesses.
Oh geez, i haven’t even finished the episode, but what the actual f**k am i watching? I love Alien, but not cheap Alien rip-offs. And since when are ST senior staff trained commando forces? or if they aren’t why do they act like one? And really just dropping the saucer section to the planet without checking for any survivors? Even if we are playing with different genres in every episode and this is an action movie thingie, it should keep basic Star Trek rules…this season has both awesome and truly bad episodes and almost zero exploration of strange, new worlds…
@138.
In all fairness about the senior staff as commando thing, we’ve been here before. Such as the otherwise good (but not great in my opinion) “Chain of Command” with Picard going on a secret mission dressed in black because suddenly he’s an expert on a specific kind of weapon or something. But really it was just a contrivance to get him in a room with a Cardassian torturer.
… I liked the way they played with the expectation that Batel was going to be fridged and then subverted it — not only is she alive, but Pike refuses to let her repeat Hemmer’s sacrifice, which is like the show admitting that was a problematical trope…
and strongly hinting that they’re going to subvert that trope more closely. Think about it:
Batel has the eggs in her arm, not her chest or belly or neck.
IRL there is a harsh and time-honored (especially in war) way to stop something deadly in a limb from hurting the rest of the body.
Instead of fridging a disabled character with Gorn eggs like last time, the show can have a character survive Gorn eggs by becoming disabled.
I’ve always thought of Scotty as a decade or so older than Jim Kirk – not his age or younger as seen here.
@141/AndyLove: Scotty was canonically born in 2222 (per TNG: “Relics”), Kirk in 2233 (per ST ’09). Characters don’t have to be the same age as their actors. Look at all the TV shows where high school students are played by actors in their 20s.
Although since Scotty is canonically 11 years older than Kirk, it is unexpected that he’s only a lieutenant j.g. at this point.
@142: “Although since Scotty is canonically 11 years older than Kirk, it is unexpected that he’s only a lieutenant j.g. at this point.”
Well, he’ll be two grades behind Kirk during their five year mission together, so it makes sense he’d be behind him in the command structure at some point. Maybe he joined Starfleet later in life?
@143/cap-mjb: “Well, he’ll be two grades behind Kirk during their five year mission together, so it makes sense he’d be behind him in the command structure at some point.”
Not really, because Kirk is supposed to be the youngest starship captain in history, so he would’ve risen through the ranks faster than most people. Therefore, at this stage of his career, he should be lower in rank than some of the people he’ll be commanding in 5-6 years.
True, it was never canonically stated onscreen that he was the youngest (it comes from The Making of Star Trek), but it’s obvious from the fact that he’s only 34 in TOS season 2. Your typical captain of a military capital ship would be in their 40s at least — look at Matt Decker, Robert Wesley, Ron Tracey, etc. (Although Steve Ihnat was only 34 when he filmed “Whom Gods Destroy,” which doesn’t make sense considering that he was playing a captain that Kirk had idolized in his Academy days more than a decade earlier. Maybe Garth used his shapeshifting to make himself look younger?)
@142:
I suppose the same reason he got poor grades from Pelia might explain why he is slow to get promotions initially.
@144/CLB: “Not really, because Kirk is supposed to be the youngest starship captain in history, so he would’ve risen through the ranks faster than most people. Therefore, at this stage of his career, he should be lower in rank than some of the people he’ll be commanding in 5-6 years.”
It’s an awkward one, I must admit. As someone who’s older than Kirk and relatively senior during their time together on the Enterprise, he’s one of the ones more likely to be higher up the rank ladder at this point. On the other hand, he’s still only a lieutenant commander ten years later, so would he still hold the same rank or have only received one promotion in that time? On the other other hand, he’s meant to have been in Starfleet nearly twenty years by this point, so you’d expect him to have reached higher than lieutenant (j.g.).
I wonder if it might be explained by the fact that there just aren’t that many senior officer positions at this point, with fewer ships and smaller crews than there will be a century later, so people are kind of stuck spending most of their careers as junior officers unless they do something to stand out?
@139./ C.Varrick
I hated that part of that episode as well. it made zero sense there either, but it was easier to forgive it as it was crucial for the plot – have Picard kidnapped. But here?
@145. AndyLove: “I suppose the same reason he got poor grades from Pelia might explain why he is slow to get promotions initially.”
Maybe Scotty has always been such an engineering genius that he rather spent time tinkering around with his own projects than do all the academically required work in the manner that was expected.
@148: That’s how I read the situation – and the same could go for the stuff that gets an engineer promoted.
As a born Caledonian, I would just like to make it clear that Scotty is OUR lad and we love every single one of him: the new lad merely promises to be the Best of a fine breed.
In fact my actual thoughts on first hearing Ou Monty back on the screen appear to have been (based on my notes) “That’s a Braw Scots accent … is it THE Braw Scott’s accent?” followed by “OCH AYE IT IS!”