Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

A couple more random things.

1) I hope they get a little more diligent about keeping Federation tech consistent with its previously established 23rd century level. For instance ...

If Chapel can use a simple (albeit unpleasant) injection to make the landing party seem like Kileyans, why would Bashir, 100 years later, resort to clumsy cosmetic surgery to make Sisko, O'Brien and Odo look Klingon? (Ditto for Crusher's surgery to make Picard look Romulan or to make Riker look Malcorian ... Riker and Troi's Mintakan disguises can be justified on the grounds that the Mintakans weren't advanced enough for it to matter, but you'd think fooling 24th-century Klingons or Romulans would require the best tech available.)

I'm gonna ignore the whole "you can alter somebody's DNA and cause immediate physical changes" thing, because Trek has always been weird as fuck in how it has portrayed DNA alteration working.

And while I guess there's no explicit canonical statement that TOS-era transporters can't beam a salve into somebody's eye, there's also no indication I can think of that they're anywhere near that good.

2) The first and second generations of Trek (that is, TOS and the TNG-to-ENT run) tended toward somewhat stilted language. Maybe it was to make them sound military and professional, or maybe it was to avoid ending up sounding dated. The current generation of Trek generally is more comfortable with colloquial speech -- for instance Ortegas' description of the "pretty weird" signature variance, a phrase I can't imagine any TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY officer other than Wesley Crusher using. Does this stylistic choice make the characters and situations more relatable? Does it risk the show getting dated more quickly than its predecessors did?

You're talking about a franchise where in the original incarnation, the CMO asked the captain if he wanted to go through life looking like his first officer or if he wanted to reverse the cosmetic surgery necessary for him to complete that mission. Because, fuck you, that was a thing that happened. And if @garamet was still with us, she could really lay the smackdown on those who thought otherwise.

I was thinking about the first one and I concluded that the technology was too painful/ dangerous/ dodgy so Starfleet abandoned it and went with more conventional techniques. It would explain why Spock always covers his ears, the technique just doesn't work as well on Vulcans.

As for number 2, well, that's been one of the complaints that some of the Youtubers have, they basically talk like 21st century 20 something year olds. But they're all racist, sexist, Nazi incels who just hate the show because of the diversity and offer no legitimate criticism, right?

A scanner that can target the individual atoms of your eye can target your eye.

You really think that a guy trying to score morning-after points in ~2263 is actually going to have to crack an egg? Sure, he might actually cook breakfast by hand, but crack a real chicken egg (or even a replicated one) by hand? Nah. Can't see it.

All of them? No.
The ones you like? Yes.

So Robert Meyer Burnett? John Campea doesn't seem to think that.

Burnett has had a couple swigs of CHUD Kool-Aid, yeah.
I quit Campea cuz I was sick of Burnett's face.

How about the Red Letter Media guys? They’re Nazis too I suppose. What a joke.

No, they just stopped giving a shit, so I returned the favor.

You mean like Pike really doesn't want to be there? And would rather be riding around on his ranch, whilst ignoring text messages/voicemail from folks running the Federation? To the point where they have to show up in front of him and say, "Hey, asshole, we need you to do the thing to save some folks from Starfleet." Not to mention they're doing work on the Enterprise.

I dunno if Pike came aboard using the kind of docking procedure we saw in TWoK, that he'd have to go through the whole inspection thing that Kirk did, but I can understand why he might decide to skip that if the protocols about beaming over versus a commander boarding via a docking port were different. Yeah, sure it doesn't make a lot of rational sense, but then again, so do a lot of a number of other things we believe in fail to make rational sense. We somehow seem to think that a person swearing an oath whilst they have their hand on a particular book (be it religious or otherwise) means that they can't be lying to us or will ever go back on their oath. Yet that is most definitely a thing that has happened for our entire history.

And in the sequence with Spock and his soon-to-be wife, I detect serious word tennis energy.



Not to mention that if Spock went all "I am really tired of all this Lawrence Welk shit." It wouldn't seem to be a bit unusual. 'Cause Lester Burnham just needs some pointy ears in this scene:


Oh, and at the ~12:50 mark of the episode, you can see that Pike's PADD mentions 1st contact with the Gorn. I would have gone with something like having it show up at either the 2 minutes, ten seconds mark, 3 minutes, 30 seconds, or at the four-minute mark. Because I'm just that fucking nerdy to know why.


Jebus titty-fucking Christ pogo-sticking on a cracker, Pike tells Spock that he's seen his own death (the incident where he becomes horribly burned and winds up in the chair). That's a nod to STV, you know when Kirk tells Spock that he's foreseen his own death and that he dies alone. Which isn't exactly how things worked out in Generations. What with Kirk telling Picard "It's been fun" and all.

Then we see Pike saying that he thinks most humans believe that they'll be able to cheat death. Do I have to say exactly why this is a really big fucking callback to TWoK?

Pike says to Chapel, "Man the ramparts, doctor" none of you have said anything about him promoting her from a nurse to a doctor, so any complaints you might have had about the rest of the episode are to be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

I'm maybe alone on this but I will plant my flag: M'Benga on TOS isn't the same guy, age differential is too great. Maybe a son or a baby brother

Also, speaking of relatives, the navigator at one point was referred to as Mitchell. While these folks have indulged in easter-egging a reference to actor Kenneth Mitchell before, until told differently I'm head-canoning her into being Gary Mitchell's sister.

This isn't directly about the doctors but I'm on one of my rolls, I'll get to them.

The timing of the captaincy doesn't map neatly on five year missions, if we use the launch year and Kirk as fixed points and fill in the gaps...AND if we presume that we just saw the beginning of Pike's second tour (were told this is probably '59 but it needs to be '60 for it to work) then ...
(We kinda need to presume each new tour started on January 1 and ended on Dec. 31 in order to avoid confusion on this part)

April: '45-'49
April: '50-'54
Pike: '55-'59
Pike: '60-'64
Kirk: '65-'69
Kirk: '73-'77
Spock: 78-83 (training vessel attached to the Academy) leading up to events of TWOK

So we could move Pike back a year if we called the "current" date '60 instead of '59 and avoid the overlap with April

But this also means the traditional dating for "The Cage" needs to move by at least enough to get into '55 and I'm not sure whether the dialogue in "The Menagerie" supports that. It's not a complete mess but it needs a little squinting.

But suppose that we set the Launch date in, say, April 2245 then it canbe accurately said:

April: '45-'50
April: '50-'55
Pike: '55-'60
Pike: '60-'65
Kirk: '65-'70
refit
Kirk: '73-'78

As long as SNW begins in 2260, this all works - and The Cage being said to have happened in '54 is ut of place date wise and maybe Disco season 2 slightly but that can be accounted for by the time spent in drydock.

So anyway, Boyce was the Doctor during The Cage, be it '54 or '55 - and this show is set 5-6 years later so it's no shock that an older guy like that may have moved on (Hoyt would have been close to 60 when the ep was filmed)

We don't even know that M'Benga came next, but the actor is 37 and if we do the traditional thing and assume the character is roughly the age of the actor, give or take around five years, then M'Benga here could be maybe in his early 40's (my preference) or in his early-to-mid 30's. Even with the more reasonable older age, there's no reason for him to retire by the time of TOS (since Piper is there) but he might have just transferred out after Pike was promoted and Piper was just a temp assignment while Kirk waited on McCoy to be assigned.

So....
theoretically...
Boyce - '50-'57
M'Benga: '57-''64
Piper - '65
McCoy - '66 onward

And to repeat myself about M'Benga, the actor who played him in '67 or so was 27 at the time - you cant assume THIS M'Benga is 20 or that THAT M'Benga was in is mid-40's without squinting hard. But if the guy in SNW is, say, 44 and the guy in TOS is 25 then he could be a son, or assume 38 and 28 and call him a baby brother - but logically they can't be the same guy. No matter what the show runners have said. And he doesn't need to be because it provokes other questions beyond age, as has been noted.

all that said, it'd be cool if they crossed paths with Boyce, say, working on a Starbase or something somewhere down the line - we might still get that Jeff Combs casting, though to be honest, I'm not sure I'd waste Combson a one-and-done easter egg.

Black don’t crack.

What I’m hoping we see from this show is not only exploring new worlds an new civilizations, but new sci-fi concepts and scientific theories. TOS was always worried about AI. gone wrong. I know Discovery dealt with Control and they did it kind of poorly. I want them to explore some concepts like that. Also, I hope they make things kind of look retro fifties/sixties. I watched “Where No Man Has Gone Before “ and the station they visit has these dome like structures, I’d like to see a return to those types of looks. I like what they did with engineering, they made it look retro looking, but with a modern take. Take some old Jeffries designs and put that on the screen. Let’s see some TAS designs as well, or some Starfleet ships that aren’t Constitution class.

That was my thought as well. The technology ends up being a dead end, Chapel switches over into regular nursing by TOS.

Was it just me, or did this latest episode crib from Garamet's Music of the Spheres?

I'm about 10 mins into episode 2 and I'm just amazed at how this show grabs my interest compared to the other 2 Trek shows. Why can't they do this with Discovery & Picard?

I thought this episode was pretty good.

Just a couple of nitpicks.

1. Defibrillation doesn't start a stopped heart. It just corrects abnormal heart rhythm (ventricular fibrillation) into a normal sinus rhythm.
2. They got music theory wrong. A third isn't 3x the frequency of the root and a fifth isn't 5x the frequency of the root.

Otherwise, solid.

I hope they keep this up. These first 2 episodes is the best Trek has been in decades and for the first time in a long time, I feel like recommending this to a non-trek friend.

You gotta let this one slide. It's a TV thing. While it's true that asystole or "a stopped heart" is not a shockable cardiac rhythm, they've been doing it on TV for so long that I don't even think about it when I see it. I'm actually a little embarrassed that I fell for it all these years.

I know, I know. It's just that I like for the "fiction" part of "science fiction" to be with regards to science we DON'T know yet, not with regard to science we do.

How can this show be so good when there are two white males in the lead and no obvious alphabet people? Doesn't compute!

Just for that, I hope they switch out everyone for the cast of RENT in season 2, and everyone sings in rhyme while they spend 43 of the 52 minute run time talking about their feelings and nothing else.

Yep, ep 2 was fantastic. It was like one of the best novels come to life, but with the production values of a major film. A couple of things of things I could nitpick, but absolutely not interested in doing so, that was such great Trek.

One thing I do hope they do though - they need to run into another of the comets, and when they ultimately communicate with it and Uhura sings to it to understand it's true purpose it's the vocal melody from TOS. And then it will be like it was always Uhura singing that in the TOS opening from then on.

If Lt. Ortegas is straight I will eat this cookie that I have here. And also, if she isn't. Basically I think she's probably a lesbian and I am having a cookie now whether anyone likes it or not.

That's actually a pretty good idea.

They probably will take her that direction. But the hair alone doesn't mean anything. Tasha Yar was straight.