Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

Something, something, something, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, when you don't have the budget to do things, you just have a character make a long-winded speech to explain things you can't afford to shoot.

It's exactly what you're talking about.

Well that was in minutes, as the Doctor said 'You just left.' If the time compression rate is 100000 to 1 or more, why would it be interested in playing a game with her at all? And of course the 'god-like entities just spontaneously form' was about the least Trek thing I've heard. Trek is normally about science, not magic. This entire episode was magic. You are welcome to like it, but the cover of a child's bedtime story applied to this entire episode, even when outside that framework. I did like the fantasy aspects of it and thought they were fun, but the framework that created that was pretty mediocre at best. And IMO the moral choices were not well thought out.

But she wasn't curing her - she was offering an incorporeal existence. That means her body was going to be destroyed. If they created more drama here and showed the little girl actually getting sick it would have been a lot more believable. As a parent I doubt I'd trust a completely alien entity who just enslaved everyone around me and was promising to destroy my child's body. The entity even said 'merge' with her - what the hell does that mean? Does she retain her individuality? As a doctor I'd think he'd want more time to cure her, and time he had because of the transporter buffer. He already knew that a cure was possible from a previous episode.

But instead of a scientific based story investigating the human condition, we get a faerie tale where everything works out fine despite there being lots of reasons to think it might not have.

Quite frankly I thought they should have kept this arc going on for a lot longer, and not resolve it with a dubious deus ex machinae. It's a far, far more interesting, and IMO believable story, if he doesn't let his child go with the unknown alien entity that clearly had underdeveloped morals. They could have run great stories off of that for a long time, including his own guilt over whether he did the right thing.

Yeah, it could have been a True Q moment, or at least Kore ascending to be with the travelers. We've spent all this time developing a sense of sympathy for M'Benga and it just gets airlocked...

I was kind of hoping the renn faire motif was going to allude to Billups on LD instead of what we got.

Still for all the silliness, there were some heartstring tugging moments and the costuming was great.

Well, OK, that was basically "If Wishes Were Horses" meets "QPid."

Which on the one hand is fine; seeing the actors inhabit different characters can be fun. On the other hand I don't feel any burning need to watch it again.

Damn!! That does sound a lot better than what we got. I don't know if I will be watching this one again any time soon, but I did like how they wrapped it up at the end.

Did anyone else get a feel that this nebula entity may be related to the DS9 wormhole aliens?

if she'd called it "Jennifer" at the end...

but I like the theory. Prophets need to be born somehow.

I didn't catch this.

Is the panacea to Discovery and Picard's inability to sustain a serialised season-long arc & overall rubbish writing this goofy, screwball approach? For a lot of Trek fans - the answer is yes.

If there's one thing every iteration of NuTrek has in common, it's that overall, it's just boring. I'm afraid with SNW, just as I was starting to get on board I've slipped off again.

How many ways can they reanimate and flog the same horse before we just accept the best we can hope for is reheated plot. Hundreds upon hundreds of episodes, no. of total series now in double digits - when will we have had our final fill?

I think they've overcorrected here. In any event I'll watch bits and pieces of Trek as it comes along, but it's "must watch" status has long since expired. NuTrek at it's best (SNW) isn't even punching into the middleweights.

To each their own, and I certainly have been highly critical of the last two episodes.

But the first 6 were great shows and great Trek.

And that's a pretty fantastic hit rate for any scifi show these days.

I find myself like the older series I was critical of in the past for one simple reason - I can ignore the ones that aren't up to snuff.

What threw me for a loop is that it almost seemed like the daughter had the final decision.

The last two episode had good moments but overall were not so great.

Yeah, I think we're venturing into forgettable filler material territory now. But I will reserve judgement until the season finale.

How many eps are we getting in S1? These seasons are too short for filler, IMHO.

IMDb and Wiki both say 10.

And I agree, which is part of why I didn't care for this week's. If you're doing 20-something a year like TNG, you can have a "Qpid" every now and then, but SNW doesn't have that kind of time.

I personally think there should be 13-15 per show, but if you’re going to do season long arcs then you need to make each episode count for something instead of having five episodes worth of story stretched out over ten episodes.

I saw someone post the other day (Twitter?) that regardless of what you think about the actors and such, the story structure of ENT S4 was pretty good in that regard, with short arcs as well as several stand-alone episodes.

13-15 episode arcs like DSC has been doing can be pretty tedious.

I keep going back to The Americans and Better Call Saul. Watch those shows, see how they tell the story and do that, but with Star Trek. Enterprise season four is a perfect example as well.

A. Not necessarily. I'd say Picard at least sometimes just took alien entities at their word. I think a close analogue to this episode is "Lonely Among Us," where Picard was semi-possessed by an alien that was going to beam the two of them into a nebula to live. But even putting that aside because his thinking was compromised by the alien entity, Picard pretty much accepted the aliens who brainwashed his crew in Clues that they would not do anything harmful to them if they wouldn't destroy them. He didn't question Kevin Uxbridge from the Survivors but just accepted his version of events. Sure, Picard stands up to Q and other aliens, but it's pretty much dependent on when the script calls for it.

B. Assuming for discussion's sake that Picard would have been more skeptical of this alien, Picard<>M'Benga. Picard hates kids generally and doesn't have a family of his own. Picard is a deeply philosophical man. M'Benga is, as far as we have seen thus far and in TOS, is seemingly a pretty pragmatic guy. And of course, we are talking about his daughter. I think most of us are going to have some level of blinders and wishful thinking when it comes to our family and their health.

Yes, it would have been a better episode if there was the debate over whether the entity could be trusted. It could have been a nice back and forth if Hemmer raised all the reasons why the alien should have been scrutinized further and its motives questioned. (Its treatment of Hemmer could have been hostile just as easily as it was a misunderstanding; it took away the will of most of the 400(?) people aboard the ship without justification; it set up a "playtime" that for all they know could have gotten people hurt or killed; it stopped the E from leaving the area because it wanted the daughter as a plaything; it's unclear if it has an understanding or appreciation of anything human; it'd unclear why the alien could not maintain daughter's health indefinitely, or why she can't just go back to the transporter or they couldn't create a different solution for her other than turning into something incorporeal, etc.)

-The entity could maintain the daughters health indefinitely, but only if she remained in close proximity to the nebula. I'm not sure why she couldn't have been moved into a shuttle that could remain there to give M'Benga more time to consider his options, but writers forgetting about shuttles is a tradition that started with started with TOS.

-I believe the entity was making sure everyone onboard remained unharmed, and was actively healing any injuries they might receive. M'Benga was originally called to the bridge after Ortegas fell and hit her head, but she was healed and fine by the time he arrived.

if not, Una is in trouble for those two guys she shot with arrows.

Eh, it was still better than anything Discovery put out in the last two seasons. My primary issue with the episode is that I've never liked any sword and sorcery crap.

But to each his own.

To hell with Uhura's cleavage.

I want me some La'an in this dress.

Unless getting shot by a senior officer is a square in Enterprise Bingo...

pretty sure if one dies, they lose at bingo.

unless being undeaded is part of the square?

I enjoyed this episode more than the last one. The resolution to the Doctor's subplot was definitely too easy but I like that the girl got a happy ending. And I loved the DS9 reference. So Benny Russell was a real person in the Star Trek universe. And maybe there was some connection between Rukiya and Sarah Sisko?

It was fun seeing the actors play different roles with different personalities. I think every Star Trek show has at least one episode like this (as in 'Far Beyond The Stars' or even 'Our Man Bashir') and I liked the D&D setting. The two wizard brothers reminded me of Dragonlance.

I don't think there should be any more of these episodes however. One is enough. Thankfully no holodecks on this Enterprise so the writers can't rely on that writing crutch.

My only criticism is I think the other characters should have remembered the experience also. The memory reset means only the M'Benga got any character development in this episode, everyone else was just cosplaying.

I'm in agreement about Christina Chong in that dress...

Better than last episode in my opinion. Not great but on par with these sorts of Trek episodes. Some of these role play episodes work and some of them don't.

After watching this episode it seems M’Benga’s range is from depressed to just mostly depressed.

Either that or they finally confirmed we are in a parallel reality.

After all, we never knew Benny Russell was a real person prior to this, and he wrote a book called 'Deep Space Nine' in the 50s, and all his coworkers looked like people from the command crew. Seems more likely Benny was just a delusion in the DS9 timeline.

He didn't write a book. He wrote a short story in a science fiction magazine. That magazine was called .... (who's the biggest nerd on the board that knows without going to google?)