Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

I repeat - NOT THE SAME GUY.

memory alpha seems to disagree.

I get that the argument is that Babs is a decade older than Booker, but we'd hit a similar problem comparing Anson Mount's RL age to Jeff Hunter's, even allowing for the intervening in universe years.

Stepping down as chief medical officer isn't necessarily the same thing as a demotion. While they definitely seem to be foreshadowing that he eventually loses the position due to fucking up, there could be other reasons. Like, he discovers a potential breakthrough in treating his daughter's condition, but conducting said research while remaining chief medical officer would spread him too thin, so he needs to step down from running a whole department and just be a regular physician for a while.

But, yeah, Starfleet officers are usually super-ambitious and expected to always be advancing, so, more likely than not a demotion due to fucking up, but there are other possibilities.

His daughter's condition got resolved - well, OK, she wasn't cured, but she aged to adulthood in seconds (from our perspective) so chances are she's dead by now.

Doctors/scientists might view ambition a bit differently from other Starfleet officers - advancement for them is not just rank, but research output. M'benga might just have decided to focus more intensively on Vulcan medicine, particularly on studies of hybrid physiology?

Remember that classmate of Bashir's who got the "plum" assignment but was actually envious of him since he got to see a wider variety of cases and a chance to do a lot of discovery research?

I'm guessing he gets drummed out of Starfleet.

Is it really a demotion? He's not the CMO by TOS, but there's no indication his rank dropped. Does the Enterprise even have other doctors right now? He could just have better things to do during that era, so he relinquished the job to McCoy while still picking up shifts whenever he's not busy with his other pursuits. (The Enterprise does have over twice the crew during TOS compared to SNW.)

ENT-D had Doctor Selar.
Even though we rarely saw her, I got the impression she was full co-doctor, just on a different deck than our leads.

According to the Tech Manual, the E-D had multiple sickbays each with it's own head and staff, we just only saw the main one and Crusher/Pulaski were the overall department heads.

Discovery has Doctor Culber and Doctor Pollard, neither of whom is ever identified as CMO.

Yeah, DSC went odd with the medical staff - we never saw the CMO. It was almost like Gene's vision for Engineering on the E-D back in the early days of TNG, that the ship was so big it would have multiple Chief Engineers.

We've never seen the chief engineer of Discovery either. A lot of people thought it was Stamets, but it's not.

I thought Reno took on the role? Maybe not. I never thought Stamets was - it was pretty clear he was a scientist who just happened to be focused on science that had propulsion applications.

Suzie Plakson!

It may be as simple as a matter of seniority, either as a doctor or as a medical officer?

Q MILF and Klingon MILF

I was thinking it'd be a matter of who wants to deal with all the paperwork.

Huh. I actually never peeped that from DSC TBH.

Well, his TOS rank is unclear -- Booker Bradshaw wore the short-sleeved version of the medical uniform in all his appearances, so we don't know his rank.

M'Benga is a commander in SNW and McCoy is a lieutenant commander in TOS. I guess it's not impossible that he kept the rank of commander but relinquished the title of CMO for his own reasons. Similar to an academic department in a university where an associate or assistant professor might serve as department chair, even though there are full professors who outrank them.

Considering M'Benga only appears on TOS twice, once in season two and again in season 3, it could be he's only onboard the Enterprise intermittently after McCoy takes over as CMO. There's no way he was onboard while Spock was going through pon farr and no one else knew what the problem was.

Anyway, I can't see M'Benga getting fired or demoted if "the truth" comes about about his killing Rah, considering that Rah was eventually revealed to be a piece of shit by both Federation and Klingon standards. The Federation should be happy that M'Benga disposed of an untrustworthy "ally" they'd foolishly placed in a position of influence, and the Klingons would be happy that Rah redeemed himself at least a little by dying in honourable combat, and was no longer in a position to share sensitive information with Starfleet.

More importantly, did Rah intentionally get himself killed? He knew M'Benga was a war veteran with a grudge, he personally made sure M'Benga could put up a decent fight, and then when he realized his time on the Enterprise was to be cut short he rushed to antagonize M'Benga in a room full of surgical equipment and refused to back down after he'd made him visibly upset. I think Rah knew exactly what he was doing.

Hunter would have been roughly 38 filming an episode that ended up set in '54, the first season of SNW is basically five years later so the target age would be about 43...Mount would have been 47 filming the first season of SNW

That's kinda close enough when actors often "play younger" than they are. But when you combine RL age and in universe timing were talking about around 18 years with M'Benga. The concept can't stretch that far IMO

I would like to register a preliminary concern with the musical:

Lt. Kirk AGAIN??

My main concern when they said he would turn up again this season was that the temptation to overuse him years before he should be important would be too strong and I'm not happy to have been right.

The alt-Kirk bit was fine. If you must see the "real" one once...okay. Done. Now go away for a couple of seasons.

We have to basically handwave various parts of TOS IMO for the stories to make any sense, and among them is the notion that there is a biological imperative in all Vulcans every seven years to go back to Vulcan to effectively mate and die and "Amok Time" is essentially the first time that it generally becomes known to humans/Starfleet.

Especially since a) we know Spock has been part of Starfleet for more than just seven years so he would have experienced pon farr before, and we know that Vulcans have been a starfaring race for centuries. It seems like the secret would have come out somewhere/when, whether it was among the Vulcans who ended up in Carbon Creek in Enterprise or wheneer. I suppose that the Vulcans could have set up all sorts of logistics to try to shield the disappearance of Vulcans every seven years but still. And of course, it doesn't make sense that Spock, knowing his time for pon farr was arriving didn't make arrangements to head back to Vulcan with his ample shore leave.

I'm still on the first series, but the reduction of Vulcans to passive aggressive humans isn't so good. Admittedly it's not the first time that's happened but why can't they just be properly alien?

yet despite the difference in their ages, Babs still looks younger on screen than Booker... The character is supposedly 4 years older than McCoy, having been born in 2223.

Well...

-Spock was estranged from his father, so he probably never got the sex talk from him, and there were no other Vulcans onboard the Enterprise.

-Vulcans are upright weirdos.

-Amok Time suggests this was Spock's first pon farr, he says "I'd hoped I would be spared this, but the ancient drives are too strong" to Kirk. Poor guy must have been a late bloomer.

-On Voyager both Tuvok and Vorik had to deal with pon farr, and it was more clearly established there that it could be resolved through mating, ritual combat, or intense meditation. (The Doctor also suggested that Tuvok attempt mating with a holographic recreation of his wife much to his disgust, suggesting that vigorous masturbation might also be effective if not taboo.)

I'm guessing every other Vulcan that interacted with the Federation was able to handle their pon farr more discreetly up until that point. It's also possible most Vulcans that only travel offworld for extended periods after their first experience so they'd be able to schedule around future occurences.

We're also not sure if Pon Farr is "every seven years since you got to sexual maturity" or just "seven years since you last fucked", in which case SNW's Spock sexytimez tie up quite well with TOS if he hasn't fucked T'Pring OR Chapel since mid-S2.

Spock's estrangement from his father came well after one would think the time for the birds and bees talk would/should have happened, plus his mother was around, plus of course there were any number of non-parental sources that would have explained the pon farr/sex drive thing.

Later things like VOY's Blood Fever are attempts to retcon what was said in Amok Time to make it make sense -- that there is a biological drive to return to Vulcan to mate. But those later things confuse matters too when it shows that Spock 2,9 went through pon farr as part of his accelerated aging from child to adolescent in STIII. Amok Time doesn't specify every seven years or how frequently it happens, so maybe that is just fanon, or maybe it is established elsewhere. Maybe Amok Time is Spock's first pon farr and the only reason Spock 2.0 experiences it in his childhood equivalent is because he grew in such an abnormal way, and without the mental discipline techniques that Spock 1.0 had.

It strains my belief beyond breaking that in billions of interactions with humans over the hundred-plus years they have known Vulcans by the time of TOS and the quadrillions of interactions that must have happened over the time when Vulcans were known to other spacefaring species that Spock was the first time effectively that it was shown that a Vulcan suffered from ponn farr and had to go back to Vulcan to bone or die, or at least, that it was not documented anywhere prior to that.

Did Spock really have to go back to Vulcan in Amok Time, or was he just too embarrassed to say "I urgently need to have intercourse, and I currently only feel comfortable having intercourse with T'Pring, and last time I checked she fuckin' hates me so I know she's not going to travel to meet the Enterprise to have premarital relations with me, so we need to go to her on Vulcan so I can perform a ceremony that will then obligate her to let me get all up in there afterwards?"

It's like when people say they need to "go to the bathroom" instead of graphically describing what they're going to do to the first toilet they find.


And I'm sure M'Benga knows all about pon farr, and Phlox too if he's still around. Lots of people likely know. It's mostly McCoy and Kirk that are ignorant here. Chapel probably knows, but she's not willing to violate Spock's privacy by telling anyone herself. (She was probably trying to offer him more than just that soup, if you know what I mean.)

You'd think the computer libraries would have information about Vulcan reproductive stuff, but there could be censorship that got it removed.