Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1
SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.
201: The Broken Circle 2023 June 15
(First watched 2023-06-15) Seems like a bold choice to start the season with an episode almost entirely absent Pike. I wonder if next week we see what he is up to during this time?
Definitely pulling some Star Trek III vibes with running away with the Enterprise to help another crewmember. Maybe a bit TOO much.
I... really dislike the bad guys in this episode. There are lots of bad folks in Star Trek, but "reignite a war that was killing tens of millions, to take the price of our goods from High to Really High" is insane in the amount of collateral damage done to give themselves excess wealth.
202: Ad Astra per Aspera 2023 June 22
(First watched 2023-06-22) Well, Pike's adventures during the time frame of the last episode only covered a few minutes, so not exactly what I guessed.
All the regulars were here, but... most of them spent most of their time watching a trial on TV, which felt pretty unusual.
We know the prohibitions against genetic engineering remain to the late 24th century at least so this trial wasn't going to cause some sea change. But "Una gets off by having Starfleet grant Asylum from the Federation" seems like a really damn narrow loophole.
203: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 2023 June 29
(First watched 2023-06-29) Son of a bitch. At the end of Picard season 2 I thought it was pretty dumb that they were retconning Khan to be several decades later than the 90s... and here that is explained away. I'm still not totally on board with the decision, but the ability to provide an in-universe explanation for such a thing in a totally separate branch is kind of the beauty of a megafranchise.
There are probably more connections to Picard season 2 that really eagle-eyed people like Jorg will notice but that went by me. Like... logos or wording or something that would be familiar from Bob Soong. This is also I'm almost certain the closest we've seen Star Trek do two "trip to the near-present" episodes, with Picard season 2 being just over a year ago.
The rest of the episode worked well enough. With it being set up very early on that Kirk was from a timeline that shouldn't be, I had a pretty strong feeling he would have an "Edith Keeler moment". Close enough.
So after two episodes with a large amount of ~alternate reality versions of James Kirk, we finally see the real deal very briefly at the end.
204: Among the Lotus Eaters 2023 July 6
(First watched 2023-07-06) Watch enough sci-fi TV, you're gonna see a few "lost our memory" episodes. This one did enough its own way to not just feel like retread. The lower class essentially having no long-term memory but being convinced that's a good thing, with a system of symbols to keep track of where they live. Closely following Ortegas, getting a front-row seat to how a confused person on a starship ends up in their quarters and ends up back out of their quarters realizing they have to act even if they don't know exactly what they're doing.
Revisiting Rigel VII is interesting. A few years back we saw Talos IV, and here we see another planet from the early Pike era that ~60 years ago was just viewed as a short memory. They kept the style reasonably similar, though the building we saw was much larger. And the native warriors less... animalistic?
A low level Enterprise crew member being lost and contaminating the local population is a lot like the backstory to one of the better Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1 episodes.
Pike's bending of the Prime Directive this time was... a pretty big bend. "An asteroid influencing the culture can't count as its natural evolution". Come on, that's bullshit. That's... literally nature! Can they go around beaming people from deserts to oases without anyone calling foul?
(First watched 2023-07-13) People having part of themselves suppressed, or even split into multiple aspects, is something with plenty of precedent in Star Trek and science fiction in general. At first I was a bit disappointed in how it was handled with Spock, since repeatedly over the years (including in this episode) we've heard that Vulcans have strong emotions. So wouldn't a more human Spock have weaker emotions but with his full Vulcan upbringing still in place to help him suppress them? But I felt it was sufficiently handwaved away by saying that the fully human emotions were different than what he was used to and thus hard to come to terms with. In time perhaps he could have suppressed them.
Though I'll still say the science of having the weird aliens make a human Spock is probably pretty borked. All of us are combinations of our parents and their parents and so on. It's not like Spock literally had Vulcan parts and human parts taped together. And if somehow they could remove the Vulcan parts, wouldn't he end up some sort of incomplete inbred clone of his mother?
T'Pring's parents were a pretty humorous addition. And after coming up occasionally in Enterprise, it was funny to have the Vulcan nasal suppressants come back into play. One of the parts of the Vulcan engagement rituals reminded me of Festivus's Airing of Grievances, where future in-laws would go on at length about what was wrong with you.
The Spock/Chapel stuff is one of the things that will be hard to square with TOS. How do they thread the needle between the current passionate connection and a future situation where they're acquaintances with one playfully crushing on the other?
206: Lost in Translation 2023 July 20
(First watched 2023-07-20) So they made sure to give Pike a temporary minor rank change to line up with how Kirk said he met him back in TOS. But now that's spent. We've seen two alternate reality James Kirks and now the real one for an episode, do they really have the restraint to keep him away from the show? Or find more ways that somehow don't involve him running across Pike.
Kind of interesting how for this Kirk appearance they don't go to the big obviouses. No captain-on-captain big deal with Pike. Spock meeting Kirk is a mostly subdued moment kept for the ending fadeout. Instead, he just happens to be at the right place at the right time when Uhura needs some help.
The rest of the story worked well enough, though "some people can hear/see things others can't and it's not just hallucination" and "we're accidentally harming unseen aliens" are both things I feel like I've seen many times.
I still can't believe we lost Hemmer to an episode of Aliens, but it was nice to see a bit of... new archival footage of him here.
207: Those Old Scientists 2023 July 22
(First watched 2023-07-23) What a weird episode. It sometimes felt more like Lower Decks than Strange New Worlds, but all the characters were true to themselves, and the guest characters even worked well at poking further at many of the SNW character storylines: Spock/Chapel, Uhura feeling the newbie, Una feeling the outcast, La'an's troubling time travel experience, Pike and his... limited time remaining as a regular guy.
I wonder how horonium became so rare, when apparently a century earlier Earth was so flush with it that they were shoving so much of it in every part of the NX class that even the little doohicky they found in engineering had enough to power two trips through time.
I keep thinking about Boimler's interactions with Spock and Chapel. Of course the whole episode is a big time loop, but more specifically here could it be a predestination paradox that Boimler's revelation that Spock's period of emotionality is small enough to not even be remembered by history causes Christine to realize their relationship is doomed and so push her towards moving past it? Based on previous history we know sometime within the next two years she should be engaged to someone else.
208: Under the Cloak of War 2023 July 27
(First watched 2023-07-27) This is... gray. Maybe the most DS9-ish episode since DS9? Seemed built very much like something about Kira and Cardassians would be, but here it's M'Benga and Chapel (mostly) and the Klingons. So much is gray it's hard for me to say I liked the episode, though. M'Benga ends up stabbing a damn dude to death, but we're left both unclear about how exactly the fight went down, and what exactly the Klingon general/ambassador's true motivations were.
209: Subspace Rhapsody 2023 August 3
(First watched 2023-08-04) Wow. The sci-fi reasoning for things turning into a musical was paper-thin, but how much do you need to have a good time? They really swung for it and for the most part it worked. Again, like with Those Old Scientists, a goofy episode idea still furthered the continuing stories of much of the crew. And holy shit, those Klingons.
Chapel definitively ready to move on from Spock... man, that recontextualizes things. Not just a past relationship, but in TOS Spock can now be seen as the jilted ex who is especially unreceptive to her advances.
And... Jim Kirk was back. No, they can't keep their hands out of the cookie jar. How much will they stretch this in future seasons?
I was trying to place if the Klingon captain was a familiar actor, but I did not realize it was Bruce Horak.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like the Spock/Chapel relationship went really quick, though with only 10 episodes a year it could be stretched out over many months. After a ~year of seeming interested in him, they got together four episodes ago. Two episodes ago she was broken up about not seeming to have a lasting effect on Spock. Last episode she just wanted to be left alone. And in this one she sings a big number about basically how now that she's got a cool three-month job offer she's ready to drop him like a sack of potatoes.
Coming back yet yet again to Spock/Chapel... whatever the problem was between them, it feels like she's using the internship as an excuse. Seems like every third person on the ship is in a long-distance relationship. The captain, for instance. Sam is married with kids! But a three-month internship would necessitate breaking it off with somebody? Of course, I'm speaking from a position of greater knowledge, where I know this internship leads to... her doing the same stuff on the Enterprise for another decade, just sometimes much more quietly.
Speaking of relationships that seem to have largely happened off-screen, Uhura and Hemmer. Back in season 1 we saw one episode where they worked together in a big way, but this is now the second episode this season where Uhura has referenced how close they got and what a huge impact he had on her.