Logline
Uhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source.
Written by Onitra Johnson & David Reed
Directed by Dan Liu
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.
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.
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.
Great episode with serious and feel good moments.
Watching Kirk and Spock meet was fun.
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’d really like to see them bring Bruce Hemmer back as a new character. That’s what I hoped for when I first heard we’d see him again in Season 2.
I’m hoping they just bring back the old character. I mean if Bobby Ewing can come back on Dallas, surely a sci fi show can find a way.
Pull a shax from lower decks. Not sure exactly which old trek that story line was based on but shows it is well troped.
(Senior Bridge officer “dies” on away mission andin next ep just returns with no explanation to rank and file)
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’s wife had their first child just before the filming of the season, so he was given a few episodes off
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.
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.
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 🖖
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That was the only part of the episode I found weird.
Like congrats a captain that doesn’t just leave their ship for every little thing… but not even a lil’ interaction with them? Not even a “howdy?”
I forget, but where is Uhura from?
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This will be the thing we need mentioned at least once every season.
I feel it was appropriate in the context of how it was used. She was trying to humanize herself to a man who thought everything around him was fake.
I do agree, but I feel like we need this every season.
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.
The Canon defenders will complain that Kirk and Pike met face to face, although there was that throwaways line in The Menagerie that they’ve never met. But it was kinda inevitable that it would happen sooner or later. At least we got that out of the way.
Nurse Chapel fiddling with a butt plug while playing with Spock. I will show myself out.
Ribbed for his pleasure.
They 100% knew
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
He was extra warm too before getting to empty space. Larger differential in temperature.
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.
Convective heat transfer in a cold dense gaseous nebula would be a lot faster than radiative heat transfer in empty space.
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.
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.
