Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x01 "The Broken Circle"
Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x01 "The Broken Circle"
Logline
A distress call from Lt. Noonien-Singh compels Spock to disobey orders and take the USS Enterprise and its crew into disputed space, risking renewed hostilities with the Klingons in a bid to aid their shipmate.
Written by Henry Alonso Myers & Akiva Goldsman
Directed by Chris Fisher
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Overall, a pretty good episode! I am slightly conflicted - I really like the character development of this Spock, but it's also less and less feeling like the Spock we'll eventually see in TOS. As the Klingon captain said, 'the least Vulcan like Vulcan ever' - whereas Spock in TOS is trying to suppress his human side and it takes him till like Star Trek VI to actually act on a hunch. But I am also conflicted as I really like this character too.
The stealing the Enterprise scene, I think Search for Spock is laughing... The CGI of the Enterprise manuvering away from space dock and escaping to warp was amazing though - one of the best uses of 3D space in Star Trek ever but pausing for like 5 minutes whilst stealing a ship to decide what his 'line' is going to be... I wish the new series would stop their pre-ocupation with this, it's kind of famous because Picard uses Engage and Make It So enough to be memeable, but most of the time people from Kirk to Janeway to Sisko also use Engage. (Kirk also frequently uses warp speed Mr sulu, and ahead warp factor 1, take her out, first star to the left and straight on till morning.) And so every captain doesn't have their thing. Pike's 'hit it' is ok, but 'Let's Fly' is kinda dumb and 'I want to go, now' is out of character and just a really unnecessary part of the story. It's also not going to be memeable when it's forced.
I really didn't like the scene where M'Benga and Chapel use some kind of drug to give them super strength to fight off a whole ship of Klingons and then the torture scene? Star Trek should be cleverer than that and made me lose respect for both of the characters. At least the Klingons look like Klingons again.
I like the new chief engineer a lot more than I thought I was going too though!
Star Trek has always been kind of lax when officers disobeying orders save the day, but I thought the admiral should have been angrier and I really hope there's a scene in episode 2 where Pike and Spock talk about it.
They soft landed Spock's thing.
Next time he'll give the order, and the crew will wait for the full delivery, and he'll juat say Now. And the jije will be complete.
I suspect we'll see Spock go so far in the other direction over this series, to try to compensate, that it puts him back where TOS starts.
Yeah the 'line' stuff.. ugh. But hopefully he'll get a second chance and do better :D this was only his first day of his 3 day command! lol
My watch partners also thought that the super serum drug was a bit out there, but I think it was expressed well with M'Benga's trauma from the Klingon war, my guess is that he "always" carries that around because he was always under threat of being attacked on whatever moon it was he was stationed on, and sometimes had to use it. Old habits die hard, especially if you're going into action with the people you were at war with.
It's not like they had time to work out a diplomatic solution in this case. And likely they wouldn't have been able to. Pass off the diplomatic resolution to later in the plot, for Spock, the future master diplomat.
I imagine Pelia is going to be a gem of a character. I hope she gets more time, too.
Admirals tend to relax when it turns out that the actions the officers took were the correct path.
Also, the Klingons looked much more Discovery like than TOS like, but with the dark skin tone and hair from TNG.
I'm not necessarily suggesting that they'd need to use diplomacy, but they could have somehow captured phasers or it turns out that Chapel was with Pike on Discovery (as at least the saucer of this ship was Crossfield class) and she knew where the Jeffries tubes were to get them where they needed to be. They could have told one of the Klingons that they'd had a medical emergency reported in the transporter room and they needed to get there fast. If they were playing the trauma from the Klingon war angle, I think all of the references are really too abstract for us as an audience to get that and I don't think the scene was quite good enough to give us a mystique.
There was so much blood in the air, it rained red. hmm.
Yeah the scene for nurse chapel and M'benga felt out of place for star trek.
I think it could have been interesting exploring war trauma from the kilingon war, I just don't really see how violence and vengeance is the best way to do that.
I think the play is that they're going to spend an episode or two setting up either withdrawal symptoms, or more likely, a resumption of the guilt he felt after the war (casualties he caused as a result of using the super soldier serum. Perhaps he even created/isolated it in the first place and is disheartened by the violence it enables?).
I don't think this episode was meant to explore the trauma, but 'teasing' future plotlines about M'Benga's culpability and/or guilt over the stuff. Remember, Chapel reminds him that he hates it and wonders why he keeps some on him, and he responds that while he does hate it , it might come in handy someday.
I think that serum is what gets him demoted. He and/or Chapel are certainly going to use it again in a situation where he can't just omit it from the after-action report. And if it's S31, then he definitely will get in trouble for holding some.
Stopping to discuss his departure line in the middle of stealing the ship was so cringy and immersion breaking for me. "I want to go" also seems very illogical for a Vulcan to use as a command. Wants are irrelevant, what are your orders? Wants don't always align with needs.
Drugs turning a doctor and nurse into super fighters that can easily take out masses of Klingons seems a bit over the top and not like a great message to send. Sometimes fights are unavoidable, but the best self preservation is to find ways to sneak around and gain an advantage in numbers and location (pluck one person off away from the group or set up a bottleneck, incapacitate with environment controls or drugs), not hope you can overpower a dozen or more enemies when you've only got two people. More contact means more risk of injuries, surely there's no such thing as an immunity serum that prevents all injury.
I am curious to see if they touch more on the war trauma because that is an interesting story itself. It was shoehorned in awkwardly here, but I'd like to see it explored more.
I'm not loving the new engineer, her personality is a bit grating for me and I don't see why you'd be allowed to transfer from a teaching position to working on the ship you just helped steal. It's one thing to not want to replace an entire ship's crew after an incident, it's another to reward non-crew for misbehavior with a choice assignment to the ship. She also has such a weird way of introducing herself to her friend's son. I don't get it.
"I want to go" also seems very illogical for a Vulcan to use as a command.
"Make it go" was already taken.
What I hope for with M'Benga and Chapel is that we'll get to see some consequences of using that super soldier drug. Like, it has bad health effects, but M'Benga is like the traumatized soldier who can't sleep without a knife or gun under his pillow in case he's attacked (Chapel remarks that he carries the green stuff with him). It could be used really well to portray several different trauma/addiction issues. Now we wait to see how they handle it.