Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

I think we are conflating The Federation with StarFleet. The Federation is a governing body that encompasses several worlds and organizations. StarFleet is an Earth centric organization dedicated to the ideals of the Federation just like the Vulcan Academy is a Vulcan centric organization within The Federation.

At least that’s how I’ve always envisioned it. Spock can still be the first Vulcan in StarFleet, but Vulcans are an integral part of the Federation.

^That.

Give the viewers a little bit of credit, scriptwriters.

Completely disagree. This is easily the best Trek series in the last 20 years. The character moments in season two alone are worth it. I thought the most recent episode was a bit clunky, but it's still better than most of the crap we had to put up with in Picard and the last few seasons of Discovery.

well, the best since DISCO S2

Complaints about wimmenz and GAYZ!!! aside, those first two seasons did what they could with the boundaries of the source material.

Not their fault that TOS was such a clusterfuck that trying to stay within the lines was impossible without a micrometer

I hadn't noticed this, but apparently there was a bit of a refit between S1 and S2.

I'm seeing it where the neck meets the saucer, but that's about it?

That connects to why i think the script was so strong - if you're LGBT you see yourself instantly but I suspect that Jews could also, and if you think of another culture, if you're Muslim in China or India or Israel it may be in your interest to "pass" if you can.

I'm sure other examples abound. The painful bit about BC is he wants to pretend that no prejudice exists at all (or ever has?) but there was a time when one dare not be known as Catholic in some settings - or Protestant in others. A history-aware person, even if they are a Christianist bigot, SHOULD recognize that at some point in human history (and in current events) virtually anyone COULD be Una.

I don't think we CAN identify the ACTUAL "Prime" timeline - the best you could do is go back to the first (chronologically) time travel destination and say that whatever happened before that is Prime, but we can't know if there was one earlier than the one we know about.

So that's a path to insanity, we're therefore forced to act AS IF TOS was our Prime stand-in since it's the first one we know about. Then from there you can speculate as you will whether or not, say, Time's Arrow" created an altered timeline that we are watching thereafter. The exceptions being when the GoF says "everything is as it was" which we can only assume is a correct statement.

For me, and I admit this is entirely head-canon, Enterprise and all the 3rd Wave Trek happen in a variant timeline created by the Borg incursion in First Contact. You can attribute all the incongruent tech to the Borg in the Artic they found in Enterprise and other rationalizations can flow from that if you apply the Butterfly Theory (i.e., did Spock even HAVE a stepsister that he never mentioned in TOS or did, somehow, that occur only in the variant timeline?

Spock isn't the first Vulcan in Starfleet, and never has been. I was upset about T'Pol breaking that when Enterprise came out, posted, to my eternal chagrin, an all caps-titled thread about it on TrekBBS (even more to my eternal chagrin, I managed to typo Spock into SPOK). But there's no actual onscreen statement that he was the first Vulcan. It's not in Journey to Babel, Balance of Terror, Whom Gods Destroy, Sarek, Unification, or anywhere else that people cite. Near as I can tell, it first appeared in a few of the novels in the 1980s, but those are not canon. This is an urban legend that won't die (to the point that StarTrek.com! says it and twists itself into knots trying to make that work), but just an urban legend.

Speaking of contradicting canon - if it is as it appears to be, I appreciate that the next episode is not going to leave "our" Jim Kirk with a memory of having galivanted through time with a descendant of Khan.

Umm. no. Discovery was a shitshow from the start, and it only got worse over the passing years. And TOS was in no way a clusterfuck.

We wouldn't even be talking about SNW without season two of DISCO.

I presume he's a time-copy from an alt-future, like movie-uniform-Pike.

I don't think there's any need to have things spoiler-tagged since the episode has aired, but to respect your choice:

Starfleet at the time of TOS/Discovery/SNW and forward is a military/diplomatic arm of the Federation. We have yet to see a regular Starfleet ship where humans were clearly not the majority of the crew (the only one I can think of was the racist Vulcan captain who was Sisko's nemesis and who had an all-Vulcan ship in Take Me to the Holosuite"), and a handful where the Starfleet captain was not a human. And while many of the Federation presidents have been of different races, the fact is that the Federation is headquartered in San Francisco, and there have rarely been times when the Federation's values differed from conventional American ones.

There’s an all Vulcan crew on a ship we don’t see in the TOS episode with the giant amoeba.

Intrepid.

I remember it, because its descendant is the basis of Voyager's class.

You know I was thinking that Trek really should start moving away from allegory be a use people like you missed all the messaging in classic Trek but the fact that you're this mad shows that the messaging is getting across loud and clear.

Die mad, toots.

At any rate, I gotta admit that this episode is the first of the streaming era that's felt like a true return to form for what drew ppl to the franchise to begin with. It's also the first since TOS where they use actual lawyers rather than have the Captain play one, so that's neat.

Also loved Spock's line "I apologize you had to witness that outburst" Clearly someone in the writer's room had just watched Lower Decks when they wrote that into the script.

Have you been watching Star Trek with your ass instead of your eyes again? You really gotta stop that.

Even TNG for as picturesque a depiction of Starfleet as we've ever seen in the franchise was pretty clear that they had blind spots. The way Data and Lal are treated are two glaring examples as is that one Admiral asking Picard to genocide the Borg.

DS9 was written explicitly to challenge the cost of utopia and those who sacrifice to make it happen.

VOY was on the other side of the galaxy so they had very limited opportunity to go up against Starfleet, but the type of hate B'Elanna experienced growing up was traumatic enough for her to consider hiding her kid's forehead ridges.

ENT was about all the founding species getting over their prejudice with one another to form the Federation.

Even on LD, people do microaggressions against Tendi like....a lot

If you missed all of that, please take a media studies class for college prep next semester.

Seriously. This is a tactic I see employed often on the soap opera I follow, often replaying a flashback for weeks at a time. Trek is better than this.

You need to understand that just because someone complains about something or disagrees with something or criticises something, it doesn't mean they are angry. JFC.

Yep, okay, we really buy that it just rolls out of you as raw passionless output like calculator app.
Mmm, hmm, that's totally who you are.
(Stifles a snicker)

So Startrek.com still lists Spock as the first Vulcan to enlist in the Federation Starfleet, as does the Star Trek Encyclopedia. Again, contextual clues show this is a valid assumption, there are quite a few humans that aren't comfortable with Spock in TOS, and the Enterprise still has issues dealing with Vulcan specific medical issues. https://www.startrek.com/database_article/spock

So I think @14thDoctor probably has the right of it that other Vulcans were allowed to move from the Vulcan Defense Force to the Federation Starfleet with rank intact. That's the only way these things can still be true. That still doesn't mean there are many Vulcans in a Starfleet overwhelmingly dominated by humans in the 23rd century. That fits with an air of superiority we see in Vulcans across the 22nd and 23rd centuries.

In this we see the Intrepid, no doubt crewed by former members of the VDF, but instead of being integrated into Starfleet at large they prefer their own company and take one of the 12 Constitution class ships as their own. Hell, they are still doing Vulcan only crews in the 24th century in DS9. Starfleet being originally a human institution takes some time to successfully integrate the other founders of the Federation, but it appears those humans just love fucking with space stuff more than their peers.

Spock has to deal with the distrust of the Vulcans over this time period (and after Enterprise, that makes a lot of sense) but not only acts as an ambassador for Vulcans among the humans in Starfleet he also popularizes Starfleet to the Vulcans, leading to Sonak, Saavik and Valeris of the next few years.

So a little bit of head cannon necessary, but that fits with everything stated to this point.

Wasn't me that said that, but the idea fits. There's more than one way to earn a Starfleet commission, like when Wesley met the first Benzite to get into Starfleet Academy, then a year later met another Benzite with a Starfleet uniform and a rank of full ensign serving on the Enterprise through the officer exchange program.

Also when Bajor almost joined the Federation I remember some background dialogue about folding the Bajoran militia into Starfleet.

Oh yeah, and we see Michael come aboard the Shenzhou seemingly straight from Vulcan, with none of the social skills you'd expect her to have picked up at the Academy.

Exactly my point.

A way to write around canon implications.

Also, if I'm not mistaken the lighting on the bridge in that clip is subtly different.

Here's something else, from a You Tube video:

On the left is an image from the Voyager episode "Relativity" (with the 29th century time cops) and on the left is from the preview


Hmmmmm.

And the plaque says "UEF Enterprise"

Okay, so this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities.



Now, don't be thinking as simple as we suddenly get the Reverend Jim staggering around the Enterprise. No, no, no. We can have him and Doc Brown staggering about the place. Now, isn't that a mindfuck?

I thought she looked familiar.

The showrunners seem to understand that Trek is often more about the character interactions than the larger story.

The Spock scene was great, along with Pike hugging Una and then quickly pulling back to act more formal.

I think those moments are largely missing (or fall flat) from Discovery, which is one of the reasons why SNW is the superior show in so many ways.

Or possibly you just don’t like the character interactions in Discovery. They are there. And enjoyable to some people.

sounded it, too.

Love Carol Kane, but she's been using that accent for 40+ years.

perhaps, but SNW benefits from not really having to breaking new ground with those characters and how they interact. We already know who half of them are going into the series and what to expect, so it's easy to play off of them. Like, we knew that the secret #1 had Spock referred to in the teaser would be a call back to the Short Trek, or to expect something like the "apologize for the outburst" gag.

They've also benefitted from DISCO being so blatant... bi/pansexuality is pretty much the default setting for most of the characters, it seems, in either series. Just those personal relationships are less the focus in SNW and after being acknowledged take a back seat. Like, we've been reminded Chapel is bi at least half a dozen times. There're (unrequited?) overtones between La'an and Una. Pike is in an open/poly relationship with Batel, the new transporter chief is clearly NB... let's not even get started at the raging hormone bags that are T'Pring and Spock. Let's jsut say everything we've seen of them together conflicts with what we thought we'd been told about Vulcan intimacy and libido.