Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

An okay episode.

Finally Una got to do something instead of being completely on the sidelines. The whole ensemble got something to do, except Ortegas who slowly turns into SNW's Travis Mayweather: that one cast member that is just there physically but doesn't get anything to do.

My personal highlight was the scene were Spock and Chapel play chess, and he passive-aggressively pushes her to play faster. Very Vulcan.

What irked me: everyone and their mother immediately started calling the First Officer of another Starfleet ship by his first name. That was weird.

Another weird thing was Pike's promotion to Fleet Captain. We've never seen this in Star Trek, particularly not when it's just two ships on a mission. So I checked the transcript of The Menagerie were Kirk speaks about the one time he met Captain Pike. And there it is:

MENDEZ: You ever met Chris Pike?
KIRK: When he was promoted to Fleet Captain.

SNW's producers were sneaky with that one. I'm both annoyed and impressed.

My personal highlight was the scene were Spock and Chapel play chess, and he passive-aggressively pushes her to play faster. Very Vulcan.

My favourite scene too. I am glad they only got one scene together this episode to avoid it veering too hard into the soapy relationshipy aspects after last week. But damn those are two well-written, well-acted characters with insane chemistry - they gave them one scene together, playing chess no less, and it stole the whole episode.
- From the "previously on SNW" showing pretty much Soapy relationship drama of half the crew I had worries for the episode but was not realised
The whole ensemble got something to do, except Ortegas who slowly turns into SNW’s Travis Mayweather: that one cast member that is just there physically but doesn’t get anything to do.

I get the feeling the writers don't really know what to do with Ortegas beyond that she "flies the ship".
- "I fly the ship"
- She also delivers the many one-line commentaries on dire situations. It's funny at first, but it does get old pretty quickly.
So I checked the transcript of The Menagerie were Kirk speaks about the one time he met Captain Pike.

Well caught!

PIKE: Lieutenant Kirk.

KIRK: That's right! It's an honour to meet you, sir. Congratulations on your promotion to Fleet Captain.

I was so focused on Pike's face since he has met Kirk before. But this is the first time Kirk has met Pike and this is the first thing he says to him. So of course that stands out in his memory in The Menagerie.
@UESPA_Sputnik “everyone and their mother immediately started calling the First Officer of another Starfleet ship by his first name. That was weird.”

SNW seems to take a *far* less strict view of military discipline and procedure than most other Trek shows. There’s a lot less “sir”ing and other formalities and a lot more casually talking back and contradicting superior officers.

Nurse Chapel fiddling with a butt plug while playing with Spock. I will show myself out.

Zombie Hemmer was freaky! Nicely done, wardrobe/makeup.

This clearly took a lot from TNG's Night Terrors right? A bit of Firefly's Bushwhacked in there too.

I liked it overall, but my favourite Star Trek episodes are when the crew gets to use their extreme competency to overcome a difficult challenge. This episode, the crew was... not so competent.

Una's team can't identify that there's been sabotage even though it's just like, phaser blasts from a half-deranged man
The dude easily escapes from sick bay and blows up a nacelle (had the stun setting not been invented yet? What about locked doors?)
There's no way the medical team could keep Uhura around and try to do some tests when she's having an episode, they can only put on the brain scan screensaver
They can't shut down the dang refinery! The lever's stuck and they're out of WD-40!
Pike blows up the quadrillion dollar infrastructure project immediately, not even just targeted laser blasts to the parts that are doing the murder. The whole thing has to blow up.

I guess this is just trek being trek and I shouldn't take it so seriously. Emotionally, the crew was at the top of their game: intuitive, perceptive, empathetic, trusting. good stuff.

But yeah, I feel like I would have enjoyed this more had the problem been made more difficult instead of the crew less capable.

They can’t shut down the dang refinery! The lever’s stuck and they’re out of WD-40!

I actually had the least problem with that. It's entirely plausible that huge machines can't just turned off in an instant. Even real life nuclear reactors need something like +12 hours even for an emergency shutdown. A city-sized space-refinery probably has so much momentum in it's spinning parts that it is faster to just shoot that thing.

I was gearing up for a Gorn episode and they faked us all out!

I liked it thy gave most of the cast (sorry Ortegas) screentime and moved a lot of side plots a small amount.

Moderately bummed they retroactively made Thor (George Kirk) seem like a less good father, though.

I was gearing up for a Gorn episode and they faked us all out!

Yeah, totally. I mean building a gas station right next to Gorn space and all you got there is 2 starships, what could go wrong. Turns out its not Gorn.
I didn’t get the impression George was a bad father. Sam certainly struggles with their relationship, but no father is perfect.

This is also the most information we’ve ever gotten on George as a father, so there’s nothing retroactive about it.

Overall a solid episode, a little different but ultimate felt very core Star Trek TOS with strange alien life and coming to a resolution.

Paul Wesley continues to impress me in the role of James T Kirk but his character did not need to be in this episode, they need to be careful with how they use him going forward.

SNW is such a good show with strong cast and characters and storylines. They totally can stand on their own without trying to bring back legacy characters or storylines. I am not sure why the producers seem to be hell bent on trying to weave these characters back in.
- Agreed, I didn't mind Kirk being in A Quality of Mercy or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. However, him being in this episode just felt he was in it for the sake of it.

I loved this episode. Some really great relationship progress... Chapel/Spock, Uhura/Kirk, Kirk/Kirk, Kirk/La'an, Pelia/Una, even a taste of Kirk/Spock at the end. Pike exhibiting remarkable and badass trust in his bridge crew. And Hemmer lingering over it all in such a bittersweet way. I was so here for all of it. And I actually thought the reveal about the aliens in the deuterium burning out Uhura and Ramon's "receivers" was a super cool sci-fi concept. Might be my favorite episode of the season so far to be honest!

“Eyes in the dark, one moon circling”
- Oh man that episode was about hydrogen (deuterium) too. They couldn't even change the element for this one.

Ramon froze pretty quickly out there in space. Wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago this show was trying to convince us people could survive in space without a suit for two whole minutes?

Yeah star trek right now really can't seem to decide whether "space is cold" or not.

Of course, that's because the truth has just alittle bit of nuance to it, and nuance is hard for writers.
Space can be cold, depending on where you are, but its also barely even there. No atmosphere means no convection, and that means you're gonna be losing heat much too slowly for it to be your number one problem if you've just been spaced without a suit.
- Maybe because they're in the stellar nursery. The deuterium was like having an atmosphere.
He was extra warm too before getting to empty space. Larger differential in temperature.

The Kirk bros. 😅

A Short Trek with them bickering, please.
- Didn’t realize I wanted that until you said it. Maybe have them on a shuttle trip back to earth for a holiday. The two of them in a shuttle for a week would be hilarious. Imagine “Shuttlepod One” with those two.

Pike once again demonstrates his faith in the crew without second guessing Uhuras decisions. What a boss.

A little bit of a dip from last week but otherwise an enjoyable episode even if it learned a bit too much on the fan service.

Although kudos to the writers for cleverly weaving around existing continuity and throwing in the Gorn misdirection.

Enjoyable episode, down a bit from the last few but at least we're staying well ahead of ep1 in terms of quality. I am getting a bit of Kirk fatigue though, they have him technically meeting people for the first time in this episode but it feels like there's no impact because we've seen them together in alternate timelines already.

Also, did I miss something or did they gather no proof whatsoever of the nebula aliens? I'm fine with Pike taking Uhura's word for it in the climax but it just felt like there was a bit missing in between "taking the hallucinating person's word for it" and "we now all accept that this was definitely happening and are writing scientific papers on it".

Anyway now for my truly controversial opinion: I don't like Pelia. The character is a great idea, but the execution is terrible.

I was excited at first, Carol Kane is great, but she just doesn't work here imo. She's hard to understand, every line seems to be delivered exactly the same, I don't know she just seems like a joke character but without many jokes. It's a little uncomfortable to watch.

Fully accept I am the only one who thinks this, though!

@TeaHands @ValueSubtracted you're not the only one, the way Pelia delivers her lines irks me quite a bit.
Plus, I was shocked at Pike giving Uhura so much liberty with something that he said was so important for the federation, especially since she didn't have any proof. 🤷‍♀️
- I was 100% braced for a deluge of downvotes so thank you for standing with me on this one 😅
I agree with you on multiple accounts. Seems like the writing was lacking. In addition to not securing the hallucinating guy, they also made no formal announcement to security or to warn others about his dangerous presence. You would think with such a huge crew complement that there would be more people walking the halls in the scenes when they were trying to apprehend him. Or at least folks trying to figure out why it is dark, etc.

Also agree with the lack of direction on Carol Kane's character. In fact, the way they included Hemmer as a hallucination, in the pre-recorded video, as well as in commentary by Una and Pelia, it almost seemed as if they were apologizing to the audience for getting rid of the Hemmer character. I am unsure of the reasoning behind it, but I thought he was a great character and wish they hadn't killed him off.

So far this is the first episode that kind of disappointed me in the new series. It almost felt like it was filler to create the establishment of relationships between Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew.

The whole season is very, very good. Really loved this episode and the characters development in it. Mayby the overall story of this episode wasn't the best, but who cares it is real classic trek 🖖

It'll be a while before I can watch this one, but I predict that Jim Kirk was an hallucination the whole time.

I look forward to logging in and seeing just how badly I've been roasted for being wrong.

One man’s hallucination is another’s parallel dimension.
Well, dang it.
Literally the only guy that wasn't. Lol.
Hahaha actually very close.

I'm starting to get DS9 vibes among the crew. I'm liking that things are complicated. This season doesn't feature Pike much, does it? DS9 of course handled politics and religion well and I suspect SNW is steering clear. I knew that (blank) would return but I didn't expect him to be a decomposing corpse.

Anson Mount had a new baby just as filming this season began, so they worked around his schedule a bit so he could spend more time in Canada with his family.
Anson Mount's wife had their first child just before the filming of the season, so he was given a few episodes off

New life goals - get uhura's linen and pillow sets and start life as a space hippy 🙃

I thought this one was...fine. I don't think it will go down in history as one of the more logical episodes, but it told the story it was trying to tell.

I do wish they'd given Spock an actual reason to approach Kirk and Uhura in that final scene. I get that they wanted to commit that meeting to film, but it was strange for him to just sort of...wander over.

Spock cleaned up Sam Kirk's mess once again. That's why he approached the table. (and I presume that's why that one snippet from last week was in the "previously on" segment)
- Yeah, it was an awfully specific snippet, really just shown to setup the last scene of that episode. Bit wrird but it felt nice seeing Spock, Uhura and Kirk together. I guess just a bit of fanservice.

Fantastic episode. Great to see Bruce Horak back.

I was a little thrown by the interactions between Sam and Kirk, and Una and Pelia. Their early scenes kind of felt pissy in a way you don't usually see in star trek.

Their early scenes kind of felt pissy in a way you don’t usually see in star trek.

I liked them, personally. I often think about what conflict would look like in a post-scarcity people... and sibling resentment, minor grudges (re: Una) feel like the sort of thing that stand the test of time.
- We saw some of that pissy-ness in season one of Discovery, and the frictions between McCoy and others in TOS were far more extreme.
  
  We shouldn’t expect 23rd Century crews to behave like mid 24th century crews in TNG. Human society has had another century of evolution and peace by then.
Nice to see Bruce Horak back, but very much want more. More Hemmer, more Aenar, even more Bruce Horak as a completely different alien or character.

I like the episode a lot, and it hit so very many wonderful notes and gave us so many coup d’oeil moments….but…it’s also getting me to the point where wanting just to settle into something just focused on the entire main cast together. That won’t be next week’s crossover with Lower Decks or the musical episode. And we’re promised a ‘Moretegas’ episode too. Would be sad if the finale is the only episode that features the whole cast coalescing as a team.

We got more from Una in this one, but still not enough. They had her in an oppositional situation with Pelia, somewhat as she was with Hemmer in season one. Even though I liked the resolution, and it’s great to see this kind of friction between two female officers with very different temperaments, somehow it’s not quite hitting the mark in making us see why Una is such a great officer. I feel like other than in the focus episodes for her each season, the writers just don’t know who she is as well as Chabon did when he wrote Q&A.

I’m also having very mixed feelings about how Kirk is overshadowing main characters in the episodes in which he appears. This Kirk is growing on me, but do we really need so much Kirk so early in the multi season run of this show? Especially when it’s getting Paramount+ ratings enough to make the case for many seasons to come.

All to say, as much as I really am sold on the ensemble, with so few episodes, I’m feeling that adding in so much Kirk is taking away from the opportunities to have other ensemble characters be featured teaming up with each other. I’m still not feeling that hankering for Pike’s Enterprise, that I’ve had since I first saw the reconstruction of The Cage, is quite getting satisfied.

I liked this episode, and Uhura's futuristic looking pillow

Makes me nervous about the....safety of the ship if one guy who I don't think was even supposed to be posted on the enterprise (like Ramon was part of the refinery crew before Enterprise got there) was able to cut the power (no backups?) And blow up the nacelle , maybe starfleet should review their backup and security procedures there

As we all know, operational security is Starfleet's #1 priority.

I have to imagine there's a seedy bar in San Francisco where all the Chief Security Officers meet up to bitch about how no one ever listens to their recommendations but its their asses who get chewed out when the ship gets so easily taken over on a weekly basis.

I enjoyed the ep but I feel like lots of eps this season have followed the pattern of something messing with their heads, character development, revealing an ineffable alien thing. Which is fine from time to time, and those were good eps, but it would be nice to have more alien sociology type stuff with more humanoid species

Like last week? And the second episode?

Great episode with serious and feel good moments.

Watching Kirk and Spock meet was fun.

Annotations up at: https://startrek.website/post/433024

Can anyone explain why a space station that seems to break down when you sneeze at it wrong, or smash one of its power conduits, requires photon torpedoes to shut it down?

First Uhura said destroy it, then she said release the deuterium, then she gave the order to fire photon torpedoes like that's even a thing she has the authority do. Make up your minds, writers.
- When I watched it, it looked like Uhura was so eager to fix the situation that she yelled to fire the torpedos, but I noticed right after she said if that Pike gave a nod to the crewman to approve the order. Uhura was just a little excited.
- I thought she said to release the deuterium from the nacelles (of the Enterprise), but to destroy the mining station (as @[email protected] points out, Pike confirmed the latter order).
- Hydrogen burning would be bad too right, (the frieball seems large, how much oxygen was on the station?).but burning the D in the explosion is bad too right
They sneezed at it wrong... and the shutdown measures malfunctioned.

And they couldn't very well just let the deuterium-creatures continue being butchered while they sorted it out.

This was the weakest episode of the season so far, and I still loved it. I couldn’t get over the fact Uhura wasn’t confined to sickbay or quarters by mid episode, but the rest of it showcases why SNW is quickly becoming my favorite Trek series.

I'm with the others that say it's a really good episode, until you start picking apart some of the decisions. Pike taking the word of a person who has been suffering hallucinations, with no evidence, then preceding to destroy a massive infrastructure project with no real hesitation...it didn't feel earned. I know he trust her, and Kirk, but damn that was an extreme leap of faith.

@deweydecibel @ValueSubtracted

That's frankly what caught my attention, even as I was watching the episode. The decision turns out to have been right, but on thin-to-nonexistent justification.
- I think what justifies it is the second case that they encounter. The other guy provides them with scientific evidence that Uhura was experiencing something that wasn't unique to just her.
  
  It was definitely a leap of faith for Pike, but his decision was bolstered by someone (Kirk) that he knows can make the right decisions too.
They could have fixed that by analyzing the signals in her brain in such a way that they could actually show to Pike.

So Uhura punched Kirk under hallucinations and then years after they kissed forced by telekinesis and some guy remembered me that in the prime universe when they met she thought he was hitting on her and he got punched (unrelated). In the kelvin-verse when they met he actually was hitting on her and he got punched (related).

This /r/Daystrom thread from last year is kinda funny, the OP correctly predicts how Pike and Kirk meet, but then he and most of the commenters dismiss it as "unlikely".

This leads us to three possibilities

Pike was promoted to Fleet Captain and Kirk took over Command from him as a result, which is where they met. Traditionally, especially in many of the novels, thats when the met before.

Kirk met him on two distinct occasions, firstly when Pike became Fleet Captain and secondly, when he took over Command (its possible that the order was reversed).

Kirk met him on at least two notable occasions, which he mentions.

With James T being confirmed for Season 2 and Sam being on the ship and friendly with Pike, enough to call him "Chris", no 3 seems to be the most likely answer

It's a fun thread to scroll through now that we know this episode.

I don't know if it was intentional as to be a call back to TOS, but I loved the absolutely senseless way nobody secures potentially dangerous actors that are in sick bay.

I like that they did the Kirk/Spock meet as an almost throwaway thing, rather than trying to make it a big deal. We already know it's a big deal, so any attempt to increase the drama would've made it cheesy, IMO. Plus, we've had lots of media about their friendship, already: we know it inside out. Instead, we got to focus on Kirk's relationship with a different legacy character, one that hasn't already been explored to anywhere near the same extent.

Although, on that note... was anyone else hoping the 'doctor on the Farragut' Kirk referred to was going to lead to a cameo from Bones? I don't remember if they served together pre-Enterprise, so it might not have been strictly canon!

Does anyone know if these are new Hemmer shots and if the Hemmet actor was also the zombie?

I remember seeing articles that Bruce Horak was acting in season 2 so think he was back for hemmer shots, I assume zombie shots too as why not.
- Still pissed they killed him off.

I liked this episode! Although one thing that irked me was “deuterium poisoning.” Deuterium is just a hydrogen isotope; is breathing it actually poisonous? It felt like the writers didn’t realize it wasn’t a fake substance like duranium.

Also I suspected the hallucinations were coming from aliens in the nebulae because the deuterium collection was harming them pretty early on. Definitely feels like a classic Trek story though!

Also, seeing Hemmer again resurfaced my disappointment that they killed him off! He was one of my favorite characters in the first season. When they showed the flashback of his death in the episode intro, I was hoping they were going to revive him somehow in this episode, haha. I’m still holding out hope that he didn’t actually die but survived the fall and has been surviving on the ice planet (since he is Aenar after all). Unfortunately, I guess they already used the “left behind a crew member assumed KIA” with Zac Nguyen so I doubt this will happen.

Deuterium toxicity does exist, but you’d have to ingest a hell of a lot of it, not trace amounts via breathing. The symptoms mimic radiation poisoning, although since deuterium isn’t radioactive, it isn’t actually that.
deuterium poisoning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_biological_systems
- As may occur in chemotherapy, deuterium-poisoned mammals die of a failure of bone marrow (producing bleeding and infections) and of intestinal-barrier functions (producing diarrhea and loss of fluids).
Deuterium is toxic (in high concentrations) to multicell animals as it changes the angle of.the hydrogen bonds which is key to cellular replication and enzyme prodcution. However you would have to drink all d2o instead of h2o for about a week to begin to notice (need 25-50% of body water). Blocking cellular replication is similar to what chemotherapy does so would.be like bad chemo...eventually the dose is so large it is not useful Cancer drug.

There is also mentions of dizziness and impact on vestibular system (senses) but not the wiki article does not expand on this and the linked article just mentions nystagmus (involuntary eye movements)
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974Natur.247..404M/abstract

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

Interestingly there is also a theory it may affect circadian cycles in some insects https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC433660/ (which could impact sleep pattern in humans)

All in all it looks like the writers may have looked into it afterall.
Yeah when you have "refinarey", mysterious signal, it was well hinted, then acts of sabotage it did seem that way and when the other victim was focussed on jestisoning the gas from the nacel seemed even more certain
I mean, I think it's just reality-adjacent technobabble and you've got to accept it as plausible in universe. Tritium is a real thing used in nuclear fission but it's not so rare that you should don robotic arms and go on a crime spree to get some. On a more Star Trek adjacent topic, protostars are a real thing but (at least as far as we know) you can't shove them in a box to travel ludicrous speed.
@ValueSubtracted @Buziel_411 D is an isotope of H, yes, but H is so light and D has twice its mass. It’s a kinetic isotope effect issue IIRC - throws off our enzymes.

I forget, but where is Uhura from?

It was a good episode, but there are a few things I didn't like:

Blowing up a space refinery on a whim.
Too much romance/interpersonal stuff, still.
Pike needs to grow a spine and be more assertive.

I give it a 6/10; not bad, not great. I'm looking forward to the new episode.

Alright, one of the weaker episodes.

Not a fan of this Kirk, he reminds me more of Carrey than Shatner. Neither he, nor the Farragut needed to be in this episode.

You don't activate the bussard collectors. They are always on. And most nebulas are the birthplace of stars, stop being so amazed. Literally unwatchable.

The Bussards are an emergency backup system for use when fuel replenishment via tanker is not possible, and are not normally active.
From the TNG Technical Manual (for the Galaxy class, but one can safely assume operations haven’t changed that much):

In the event a deuterium tanker cannot reach a Galaxy class starship, the capability exists to pull low-grade matter from the interstellar medium through a series of specialized high-energy magnetic coils known collectively as a Bussard ramscoop. Named for the twentieth-century physicist and mathematician Robert W. Bussard, the ramscoop emanates directional ionizing radiation and a shaped magnetic field to attract and compress the tenuous gas found within the Milky Way galaxy. From this gas, which possesses an average density of one atom per cubic centimeter, may be distilled small amounts of deuterium for contingency replenishment of the matter supply. At high relativistic speeds, this gas accumulation can be appreciable, though the technique is not recommended for long periods for time-dilation reasons (See: 6.2). At warp velocities, however, extended emergency supplies can be gathered.

[my emphasis]

In those three places there are the qualifiers “in the event…”, “contingency” and “emergency”, which indicate that the Bussard collectors are only activated when needed and are not always on.

The reason is simple: the amount of deuterium that can be gathered is usually in negligible amounts unless you’re in proximity to a dense source of the element, like in a nebula. So it’s just not energy efficient to keep the collectors on all the time.
Half of all TNG episodes started with them being amazed looking at a relatively common phenomena. Those old scientists were just passionate about their job.

Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x06 "Lost In Translation"