Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

I’ll give you that. Can you really blame us for wanting more of a good thing?

This has always been a problem. Most people watch mindless sitcoms. and, it's probably easier to write mindless sitcoms. But, a small group of people really like stories that are more complex and those are the people who keep really good series on air or, at least, on an ongoing basis. Trek has been around for 60 years. Star Wars - 40 ish. Stargate - 15 (but I'm hoping it's still alive).

Anyway, apparently, these writers want too much money for their creativity because the masses would rather worship actors who play drab characters.

As far as this strike goes, sure, let AI generate scripts and act out those scripts for mindless assholes who like sitcoms, but let actual writers and actual actors create content for people who prefer a more complex story.

For fuck's sakes, get your ears cleaned out.

I literally have not been able to get this tune out of my head for the past two weeks.

Anyone hope next season they wrap things up with The Gorn? I liked the episode and the character beats, but The Gorn aren't a particularly interesting antagonist. At the very least, we need to move on from screechy CGI monster.

Absolutely brilliant. Celia has the pipes.

Yes they need to move away from the Gorn. I find it uninteresting.

Paramount + cancelled.

He fits, but I hate all Stretchy Man characters and would be disappointed.

I still say he should be the next movie Bruce Wayne. He was so wasted as Black Bolt.

Don't forget to re-sub for the final season of Galaxy-Ending Threat Only Mickey Burnham Is Uniquely Qualified to Solve Wrapped in Excruciating Mystery Box with a Side of Intense Whisper Crying!

Yea. Instead they should have a final season Galaxy-Ending Threat Only Jimmy Kirk or Johnny Picard Is Uniquely Qualified to Solve Wrapped in Excruciating Mystery Box with a Side of Intense Mansplaining and Philosophical Diatribes.

live version of DKR maybe... and he woulda rocked it in Titans. Otherwise, way too old.

Maybe I’ll do it for one month when the whole season has dropped.

With the introduction of the seemingly intelligent adult Gorn in a space suit and the Gorn trying to impose borders on the Federation, it seems like they're moving away from the original 100% horror monster version of the Gorn.

It fits in with Arena, where the Enterprise crew seemed to immediately understand that the Gorn weren't really in the wrong if the colony they attacked was inside their territory. I don't remember any "that's no excuse to kill everyone" arguments being made at the time.

My understanding is that Gunn's vision for "The Brave and the Bold" is for a mature Bruce/Batman that has reigned in some of the more...damaged...parts of himself and is now serving as a mentor to prominently featured Damien and other "bat family" younglings.

If this is true, Mount would be the ideal age for a story like that. Neither "old bitter Batman" as in DKR nor young and developing Batman as in the Patteson films.

(to be fair, I'd easily see Clooney or Afflack playing a Bruce of that age going forward but all signs suggest Gunn doesn't want to recycle the previous actors)

Speaking of number of episodes...

"Let's Make 20 A Year": Star Trek Executive Producer Wants More Strange New Worlds Episodes (screenrant.com)

So say we all!!!
(Make it so, etc, etc)

Rule of thumb for Season 3...
S2 E1 dropped about 11 months after S1 E10, and S3 was supposed to start shooting in May but didn't because of the strike.

So if you just tack that on then you're up to 14 months and counting. Plus, S2 was already shooting when S1 was airing so really the gap from starting work to premier was already probably 15 months or more. So if the strike was settled next week you won't get the conclusion of this episode until 2025. How long into 2025 remains to be seen.

We will not see a new SNW episode in 2024. Mid-2025 is my best guess…. If this strike doesn’t last much longer

It looks like they are doing a life cycle thing. Young Gorn are carnivorous terrors, little different from velociraptors. The adult Gorn are lean monsters of reasonable intelligence. The Gorn in the Cayuhoga's saucer is clearly trying to hack into the ship's database, without luck. This is also the Gorn we see in the Mirror universe that Archer has to face while stealing the Defiant. My guess is that the elder Gorn we see in Arena is the final cycle, slower, more mature, and more knowledgeable. No doubt the leaders of the Hegemony. They are smart as hell, and can be reasoned with.

I like the Gorn using a variety of tactics. In Arena we see them replicating the planetary governor so well they have a full conversation with Kirk prior to beaming down and get all aspects of a collegial chat correct. Now we are seeing them use advanced jamming equipment and can react quickly enough to beam aboard colonists before the Enterprise can.

As long as they bridge the gap between what we've seen so far and what is to come in TOS I'm good with how they are presenting the Gorn. Fun to see a species with such distinct life cycle.

Bats is stated as 55 in DKR, and we know Mount can play bitter and vengeance driven.

One more Bat-flek flick wouldn't be a bad thing.

It does make sense that baby Gorn are different from adult Gorn. I mean, human babies are essentially physically helpless and scream and cry when they want something, whereas most adult humans aren't physically helpless, and some of them don't scream and cry when they want something.

I don't see how SNW baby Gorn are incompatible with TOS Gorn either. If human babies had the agility, teeth, and claws that baby Gorn have, they'd be pretty terrifying too, and older humans would probably stay far, far away until they mature, as the adult Gorn seem to.

I'm old enough to distinctly remember people never wanting Trek on a network channel again after ENT and saying correctly that ENT's shortened final season (which had finally lined up to what the rest of TV was doing at 22 episodes) helped to tighten up the writing and get rid of a lot of fluff.

I have to think that people who want to return to that are either looking at history with rose-tinted glasses or too young to remember why filler episodes got the reputation that they have.

I think that even the best broadcast Trek shows would have some stinkers in their best 20+ episode seasons. But those stinkers would not taint the rest of the seasons because there were so many good or great episodes.

With Streaming Trek, when you only get 10 episodes, if just one episode sucks, that's 10 percent of the season that sucks. The trouble is that Discovery and Picard still seemingly had a lot of filler episodes in their 10, whereas something like SNW could (hopefully) add 4-5 more and hopefully not suffer a major drag in plot arcs or quality.

Didn't really know what I felt about this episode, I watched it again last night. And overall it probably is the weakest episode so far. The episode could have used just about any new antagonist and the outcome would be the same. While the Gorn have barely appeared on Trek, only one episode dedicated to a single Gorn, and a few minutes on Enterprise, and a few mentions of them. Using them doesn't really make them come across as what they've been built up to. More like an enemy that sends in velociraptors to thin out the resistance and then come in an take the rest. I preferred them in Arena, they used weaponry to attack and then move in. Even the cliff hanger didn't do much for me, aside from Batel, Pelia, Ortega there aren't any other characters that we know their future. And those three are on the Enterprise so they could die, but aside from Ortega we haven't had enough time to really care about them.

I guess you've been watching a different version of SNW than me.

One thing that bugs me about modern Trek - not just this show - is reference to "Enterprise" rather than "the Enterprise". Not sure why. Probably the former is more in keeping with naval nomenclature.

The producers say there's going to be more TOS characters, and if they last long enough, they'll prequel it right up to TOS.
But!
They do say we're not going to get an explanation for the "Arena" Gorn, and we're not going to ever see "Arena" Gorn.
And, like the Gorn, the set differences won't be explained, we just have to accept it's "a different interpretation".
I guess we can also apply that to the Discovery Klingons.

https://trekmovie.com/2023/08/16/st...season-3-gorn-scotty-and-more-tos-characters/

My explanation:

All of televised Star Trek was written an unspecified number of years in the future by artists tasked with dramatizing the early days of space exploration.

The first person assigned to dramatizing Kirk's five-year mission was a little sloppy. They had watched a bunch of 1950s and '60s sci-fi, and that subconsciously informed their design aesthetic; and because they didn't really research 23rd-century society, they saw Kirk's mostly-male command crew (in an egalitarian society, throw enough crews into space and statistically you're bound to get a handful of mostly-male command crews and a handful of mostly-female command crews) and assumed that 23rd-century society had a 20th-century level of sexism. (Think of a writer today who gets sloppy with research and keeps mixing up the Dark Ages and the Renaissance.)

So Janice Lester really did take over Kirk's body, and she really was jealous of his career, but the idea that it was because women couldn't be starship captains in the 23rd century was thrown into a bit of dialogue by a future author who didn't do their research.

Similarly, when documenting the Metrons' interference in "Arena," the writer simply assumed that incident represented first contact with the Gorn and wrote Kirk's lines accordingly. Kirk's actual logs could have been lost, or the writer could have gone "you know what, I think the Gorn being mysterious makes for a better story."

Meh. On one hand, having the Gorn appear now on SNW makes the prospect of re-doing Arena less exciting, but I think there's room there to re-do some TOS episodes to flesh them out. Like Amok Time from T'Prings and Chapels perspectives, or an extended version of The Changeling that explains how Uhura actually got her brain unwiped.

To TOS, not through TOS.