Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

there's the thing, they don't exist in an alternate.

more than would you kill baby hitler, the question of "should you" is addressed.

also, I just got a major leak for S3 from someone who is a friend of a bridge cast member.

Oh.. and forgot to mention that "The Lakeview" diner is a real place.

They're famous for milkshakes.

okay, I will concede this - the event that ostensibly caused the divergence...

But I'll allow it.

Yeah, since they never establish was year it is, you could headcanon it that Adam Soong either fled America for Canada and kicked off the project that led to the Khan we see some years later, or that he fled to Canada and joined up with the people that had already been working on the Khan project for some time. Either is entirely plausible.

I mean.... destroying Toronto also would have killed Khan, and humanity overcoming Khan was one of the necessary steps on the way to the Federation. Plan A is just easier for the Romulans because the size of the attack makes it harder for anyone trying to stop them to figure out exactly why the destruction of Toronto caused the Federation to cease to exist.

I gotta say, the more convoluted the timeline stuff becomes, the more trouble I have keeping track of it. And, just like I didn't think Enterprise needed to come up with an in-universe explanation for Klingon foreheads, I didn't really care about the whole "Khan should have happened in the '90s" thing.

But it was a fun episode, and I've sort of given up on keeping track of Trek timelines.

Other stuff:

- I like that the episode title is a Shakespeare reference. Feels very TOS.

- This Kirk feels more like Chris Pine's brash, flippant Kirk than Shatner's confident but contemplative Kirk, but then there's no reason he should have to be the same as Shatner's Kirk since he literally isn't the same person.

- The accidental mispronunciation of La'an's last name as "Soong" was a nice little wink-and-nod.

- I assumed Sera was going to be the stock "person from the past in a time travel story who somehow gets it and ends up helping the heroes" character (Rain Robinson, Gillian Taylor), so it was nice that they were less predictable.

Thanks, I need to scrub that from my mind

Sorry bud, people wanted to pretend ENT wasn't canon either once upon a time too.

They're honoring Archer with spacedocks in the 32nd century.
I'd say he's left this mark on the timeline.

I get that it's "official" canon, just not in my headspace.

I'm still kind of confused about the whole bridge over lake ontario... like, why build it in the first place? There's pretty much nothing on the other side worth connecting to that directly.

thinking about it, the direction it was pointing (SxSW) wouldn't even have taken you out of Canada.

Another strong episode. And this further establishes SNW as the best Trek since the 90s.

Come on! I think it would've been so "James T Kirk" to get some of that "Noonien Sing Super Cookie."

He's Captain Kirk!

Seriously though, the loneliness and isolation La'Ann feels makes me like this character more. I'm very interested in her story arc now.

Canon and alternate timelines are two different things.

Translation: SNW didn’t play out exactly according to Federal Farmer's wishes, therefore Star Trek is dead.

YMMV, but I think Shatner's Kirk has many a brash and flippant moment. The one that comes to mind first is when he snarks at the ambassador in Trouble with Tribbles: "I have never questioned the orders or the intelligence of any representative of the Federation. Until now."

I do like that SNW basically looked at the camera and said "Stop bitching about deviations from 'canon.' If it helps, temporal war/time itself did it."

What's so bad about Kirk and La'an doin' it?

I detested Discovery (and no, not because it had women or blacks or that fat ass redhead) and had hoped SNW would be better, but it just feels like more of the same. Maybe not as much crying, but it just feels like more of the same for some reason. It doesn't feel like Trek should.

In a lot of ways everything after Roddenberry was finally pushed to the sidelines just stopped feeling like Trek. I can look at so much of the first two seasons of TNG and see TOS in them, in the structure of the stories, the morality tales wrapped up in Wagon Train to the Stars, even in the interaction between Picard/Data/Riker in the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic of Logic versus Emotion and the Captain weighing which way to go. And there were some amazing episodes like Measure of a Man and Skin of Evil. of course, there was also a lot of garbage. But once he was gone, it just seemed like more of the show turned to generic sci-fi pap with some great episodes and so much forgettable ones that are wrapped in nostalgia.

In any event, I just can't get past the feeling that SNW is like a modern drama pretending to be Trek more than it is Trek.

There may be something to that. Wouldn't surprise me to learn there is a revolving door for writers to hop between STD and some teenager soap opera on the CW.

Stylistically, I think Trek has three eras:

1) TOS and the first two seasons of TNG (the Roddenberry era). Spandex, brassy soundtracks with lots of dramatic stings, a little Buck Rogers, a little on the cheesy side.

2) TNG Season 3 through ENT Season 4 (the Berman era). More muted colors (that continue to tone down over the course of the era), music that with relatively few exceptions fits Berman's "aural wallpaper" ideal, and still relatively slow-paced action scenes compared to 21st-century sci-fi. Lower Decks, through chronologically part of the Kurtzman era, belongs in this era stylistically.

3) DIS, SNW and PIC (the Kurtzman era). The music is less wallpaper-y, the colors aren't brighter but they're higher-contrast and the overall look is colder and more metallic, the action scenes are faster-paced, little ships are zippy and big ships accelerate and decelerate with improbable delta-vee.

TMP and ENT being weird mutant exceptions, IMO.
TMP's color palette and pace are stolen from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and ENT's score brought in guitars and drums, and weren't quite as boring.

And 2001's palette was ripped off of what NASA was actually working with at the time. TMP was a reflection of what the makers thought the reality of space travel would be like. TOS had loud colors because color TV was a new thing and it was a way to make color so much a part of the show (not to mention the whole late 60s and color was everywhere). They thought you wouldn't need to see eyebleedingly loud uniforms when some muted blue or grey or beige jumpsuit worked just fine. And while it worked great for NASA, it just didn't make for a fun viewing experience.

One could make the argument that TMP and ST5 were the closest to TOS in terms of story and tone. Obviously both made serious missteps in execution, but the basic stories would easily fit in TOS episodes (and very obviously in TMP's case did since it was a big budget remake of The Changeling.)

I always thought the TOS primary colours were for B&W TV and the grey scale?

sort of like the munsters set...

Are you trolling with this?

Literally the only thing worth remembering about that is Tasha Yar biting it and Mariner's prank call to the blob.

Trek was always a space drama, buddy.

I'm dead serious about it. Yeah, it has cheesy SFX, but it's a good story, has a death that actually matters (at least until Yesterday's Enterprise) and isn't just some red shirt, the showdown between Picard and Armus is great, and even the sappy funeral scene is better than the rest of Yar's entire existence.

Except for Wesley's part. I wish she would have encouraged the boy to walk out an airlock. I just have the consolation of knowing he has an eternity of rape at the Traveler's gnarly hands.

Also, Trek was a space opera, but now it's devolved into "feelings...in space!" and "feelings...with time travel!" and "feelings...with CGI!"

damn... that's who it is?

I thought skin was castle?

I enjoyed this episode. I liked how they were able to not violate established continuity with Kirk and La'an by having Kirk from the alternate timeline and La'an not being able to mention meeting the alternate Kirk. Also the unexpected twist with Kirk not winning the bluff he tried with Sera. A younger, cockier Kirk but with apparently less experience.

The breakdown La'an had was rough, she has a tragic past and then experiencing a possible relationship only to lose it with the alternate Kirk dying and then knowing she can't pursue one with her universe Kirk.

not seeing why she couldn't hook up with him? Sure, he's not the one she lost, but he kind of is.
What if the Kirk she went to the past with was from the future as well as an alternate timeline?

I'm all of them. Skinofevil, castle, Storm, Ramen, Dayton, even Spaceturkey. I am every single person who has ever registered on WF, TBBS, or TK.

You figured me out. Congrats, you put Sherlock Holmes to shame.

I get the impression she mainly felt safe opening up to alt-Kirk because he'd never heard of Khan, and she assumes prime Kirk has.

I just fucking love this show. That is all.