Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

Bruh

Good episode. Agree with @Nova that it's probably the weakest so far of the season but that's not saying much, since the other episodes have been stellar.

AAPA and T&T&T are both tough acts to follow.

Side note, but I'm enjoying the light touch with referencing previous events. First the nod to Una's welcome back party that La'An skipped, and now Batel (whose name I've seen spelled 17 different ways online) losing the promotion over said the trial. It's not a big thing, but it's a nice balance between the other modern shows and the one-and-done attitude of classic Trek outside of DS9.

I had to stop for a minute to parse this, and it made me wonder why some episodes end up commonly referred to by abbreviations and some don't.

Most fans on a board like this will know immediately what BOBW refers to, and probably AGT, but wouldn't refer to any other TNG episodes that way. Maybe this is in part because most of the TNG episodes with long enough titles to be worth abbreviating just weren't that memorable.

TATV is commonly used, as is ANIS (which conveniently sounds like the orifice from which that episode was pulled), but not TDATN or IAMD.

Besides maybe WYLB, I can't think of any DS9 episodes that get turned into acronyms, despite that series' fondness for long episode titles, some of which are attached to well-known and popular episodes. (TDIC? TWOTW? ITPM? IAESL?)

COTWOF is one of the most well-known TOS episodes but nobody calls it that.

The sort of memory loss depicted seemed to mimic Alzheimer's, where the emotions and reflexes/instinct remain intact.

Pike mentioned that the first visit to the planet was only four hours, and La'an started showing symptoms after they'd been walking for six hours.

But also,

They could have done this because they were also experiencing the very early stages of memory loss, perhaps temporarily forgetting proper first contact procedures, or basic security precautions, or maybe how to use their weapons. That would explain how things went off the rails so quickly and how a Starfleet away team armed with phaser rifles got beaten so badly by bronze age aliens with swords.

How? The radiation stopped the Enterprise from using transporters, I'm guessing it screwed with communications as well. Once Enterprise leaves orbit, he's on his own. (Much like Tom Riker will be one day.)

Saw a video by "Popcast" on Youtube making reference to timelines and thought "this might be an interesting take" but....NOPE.

Just started out basically bitching about S2E3 and how this made no sense and that made no sense and I just...clicked out.

It's depressing that there's a market for such shit.

That said, the question that the professed subject raised is interesting. We tend to always speak of TOS as the "Prime" timeline though we can't know for sure - but what we can know is that TOS isn't OUR timeline because of the historical events that didn't happen yet. For example, for Khan and the others to be grown men in the 90s, the augmentation experiments would have had to begin in the 50's. That very radically different from ours.

So, if the Romulan keeps pissing on that project so that the rise of the supermen keeps getting delayed, but not effectively keeping it from happening at all, then do we speculate that each of her actions creates a different timeline, or that it simply shifts that one "original" timeline?
Moreover, she said she'd been at it 30 years so she must not be the first agent since such an agent would have had to have been mucking up the augmentation projects in the 50's in order to push back the advent of Khan. a 70 year process rather than 30.

And where the fuck was Gary Seven all this time?

To me the most interesting thing that this episode confirms is that according to the time agents, what happened - saving Khan in 2022 - is what was "supposed" to happen all along - so how can that not imply that the Eugenics War described in TOS was itself not actually supposed to happen when it did? Or do the agents simply have some sort of "close enough for government work" policy wherein getting the kings out of the thread at least well enough that what has happened since isn't too heavily altered?

All of which is to say...you can't presume to make sense of any of this time travel stuff - just roll with it.

WTF

Fun story: the first time I ever heard the acronym WTF was on TBBS.in response to the season 3 finale. As I was headed out of town the next day, it was five days before I could discuss the episode and when I came back to TBBS, I was met with a flood of WTF comments.

Who could've known Enterprise would be the one to predict a future where a Nazi was running the White House?

It's easy for me to accept the premise that naturally occurring radiation could impose general amnesia and/or brain degradation. It's easy for me to accept, as in TNG's Conundrum, that someone could invent a device that would impose selective amnesia that would leave in place useful skills but wipe away other knowledge in order to manipulate them. It's harder for me to accept the premise that naturally occurring radiation could be work to effectively remove certain knowledge but leave others intact, and that it would work in a cycle as on the planet. It's also less easy to accept the premise that the radiation that was so present that it affected everyone on the planet's surface and also in this episode on the ship was not detected until its effects were felt so sweepingly.

The prior mission again seems like it must have been done way more incompetently than one would expect of Pike and Spock. A landing party of at least 5 -- the two KIAs, Zack, Spock and Pike -- got their assess kicked by Bronze Age people and left behind a bunch of tech. They didn't stop to think that they needed to clean up that cultural contamination, get the bodies of their dead,

And yes, I think we have to accept that the society was Bronze Age as it remains so minus Zack's advancements.

Lead protects from radiation causing additional damage. It doesn't reverse the damage done by the radiation previously.

I suppose it could be just coincidence that the palace was made from ore that prevented the forget-me-now radiation and that the warriors randomly already had hats made of the ore that shielded them from the radiation.

Yes, Captain Tracy went bad in The Omega Glory, and Zack went bad here. It seemed Zack went a far more sadistic version of bad and far more unnecessarily. But people's mileage will vary.

"The Abandonded" DS9
From the transcript.
SISKO: Sisko to O'Brien. Release the security fields around the airlock, Chief.
O'BRIEN [OC]: Aye, sir.
"Aye, sir." No further comment needed. No, "that's crazy" or "I wouldn't do that." Just "Aye, sir." That's the difference between NuTrek and oldTrek. Gene was in the Air Force, knew the structure of command and if Star Trek is Horatio Hornblower in space and Starfleet is a military organization, then rank and command matter. Rick Berman and Co. at least understood this, Kurtzman and Co. do not. Kurtzman never served. There always has to be some sort of quip or snap-back, they copy Marvel's formula of only being serious for short periods of time before more jokes are inserted. I haven't been able to properly explain this until I saw that exchange just a moment ago. I see these little differences every once in a while when watching old episodes of Star Trek.

Or!! Maybe different commanders have different styles, and their subordinates follow suit.
By DS9, we already had Kirk who was more of a rules bender, and Picard, who was more by-the-book except when the book threatened his ethics.

Kirk being a rule breaker is a myth. We've been over this.

Are you seriously stating how Kirk "beat" the Kobayashi Maru was not breaking the rules?

Idiot.

Prior to Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman bullshit answer, I wouldn't have thought he actually cheated. All kinds of "tests" can be passed by "altering the parameters". But, clearly Abrams' Star Trek - which is now canon - clearly shows Kirk broke the rules.

That is not the same Kirk, that's an alternate timeline. I'm talking about Shatner Kirk, you know, the one we all grew up with.

Injected a virus on a flash drive, flipped the pin switches on the 80's arcade machine circuit board; same thing.

Doesn't matter.

Also,

Season 1, Episode 8 - in rescuing children and getting them vaccinated interfered with the natural development of an alien world
Season 1, Episode 21 - despite a planet's development continuing after a Federation ship lands, removing the ship interfered with the planet's natural development
Season 2, Episode 5 - under Kirk's direction, the enterprise destroys a large machine that meets the needs of the population. Destruction of the machine interferes with the planet's natural development
Season 2, Episode 11 - by preventing the natural succession of leaders by saving a woman and her unborn child, they interfered with the prime directive


I'm not going to type them all out, but .. for fuck's sake, just google "Kirk breaking the rules"

Kirk was a rule-breaker when he had to be. The area where the mythology around his character has obscured the original portrayal is in the pop-culture image of "Kirk as an irresponsible playboy, bopping around the galaxy boning alien babes left and right."

Again, this is super-selective. You are ignoring all the times in TOS when people questioned Spock about his orders (See, for example, the Galileo Seven) or his point of view (see virtually every episode where McCoy blasts Spock for being a cold-blooded Vulcan even though Spock is his superior officer). You are ignoring all the quips in TOS which obviously predate the MCU.

You are romanticizing TOS and ignoring that different characters react differently. Some characters are more quip-oriented, and some less. Some characters are more by the book, and some less.

O'Brien has a different, drier sense of humor and is more by the book. Even so, I would put 1 million quatloos that there is some other point in TNG and DS9 one can find where O'Brien does tell a superior officer literally "I wouldn't do that."

Also, as far as O'Brien's personality, etc., those in charge would also have knowledge of O'Brien's personality and would not ask him to do something they felt might not be strictly "above board".

wasn't it established as far back as in TWOK that Kirk cheated by reprogramming the K-M?

err... they sent him undercover into the Orion Syndicate.

Yes.

SAAVIK: Sir, may I ask you a question?
KIRK: What's on your mind, Lieutenant?
SAAVIK: The Kobayashi Maru, sir.
KIRK: Are you asking me if we are playing out that scenario now?
SAAVIK: On the test, sir, will you tell me what you did? I would really like to know.
McCOY: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.
SAAVIK: How?
KIRK: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.
SAAVIK: What?
DAVID: He cheated!
KIRK: I changed the conditions of the test. I got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose.

O’Brien didn’t exactly follow the rules early on when he helped the dude from the Delta Quadrant who was being hunted for sport get away.

I guess the women in modern Trek can do no wrong then.

no, it's just that your premise was nothing other than wrong.

Like the men and women in TOS and TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT (I presume by "modern Trek" you mean Kurtzman-era Trek so excluding the series up through ENT), the women in Modern Trek are human or some close analogue and do wrong with a great frequency.

Sometimes they are saved from their terrible decisionmaking by writer's fiat (such as Jurati getting seduced by the Borg Queen working out to create a splinter sect of the Borg that was not hellbent on assimilation or Beverly being forgiven for the incomprehensible and unethical decision to withhold from JLP that he was a father for 23 years).

But the bug you have up your ass about women in Trek has nothing to do with the point you were trying to make about how there was respect for the chain of command back in the good ol' days and now there's not because Kurtzman (who absolutely didn't touch your childhood in the no-no zone) hadn't served in the military. The objective evidence is that TOS had plenty of people disrespecting the chain of command despite the actual military experience of its writers. TNG had people disrespecting the chain of command even though (I assume, but don't really know and don't really care enough to find out; I know Ronald D. Moore served in the Navy but don't know about the rest) most of its writers had little to no military experience. DS9 had examples of people disrespecting the chain of command, regardless of the military experience of its writers, etc. etc.

Gee, almost like the Youtubers he listens to are grinding away at an agenda, and don't give a fuck about facts.
I wonder what the agenda could be.
Green Party.
Totally Green Party.
Yep.

I reread the entire chain of comments leading up to this, just to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and I still can't figure out where that came from.

Issues, much?

Wasn’t he sorta voluntold by Section 31 to do so?

perhaps, but they still sent him in to do things that weren't above board.