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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- I am 100% here for the chaotic energy that Carol Kane is going to bring to this show.
- The Klingon captain had exactly the right amount of swagger and sassiness that a TOS-era Klingon captain is supposed to have. I’m glad that they’re moving on from some of the Discovery Klingon characterization while also resisting the urge to jump right to them behaving like TNG Klingons.
Hemmer was my favorite character from season one, and is very difficult to replace in my heart. But Carol Kane is one of those actors you just can’t help but love to see on screen (in any capacity). It’s going to be very hard to be upset knowing she’ll be around.
I do wish we were able to keep Hemmer around longer.
Completely agree with both points. The Klingons were altogether great - makeup and hair were perfect, and the captain at the end was the icing on the cake
Well here we go. Let’s try this out
Carol Kane is such a gem for this show, I can tell already.
She’s so good! Already I really like her character!
personally I find her gramma Addams act a little hamfisted, but maybe it’ll make sense as the season goes on.
You shut your whore mouth about a legend kid.
Is this post tagged NSFW for spoilers?
That was the idea. Is it having a visible effect?
Loved the episod! Ethan Peck owned it and now I can’t wait to see even more of Carol Kane’s character.
I am curious though, are the writers hinting at a future “Jekyll & Hyde” plot line when it comes to M’Benga and that green battle juice that he apparently keeps with himself at all times?
My thought is that his plotline this season might include some resolution of Klingon War era trauma, of which we’ve been told just a little bit in this episode, and which brings him to carry the super soldier serum on him.
As President of the Spock/Chapel fanclub and a sucker for Klingons, I feel that this episode was plucked out of my brain.
I loved it.
I’m also glad they began to explore a bit of post war PTSD through M’Benga. It’ll be interesting to see how far they go with the Gorn.
Was that a TOS style California-class docked next to the Enterprise early on?
I think it was an Archer-Class, same ship Number One was one in the first episode.
Season 2 is released? I just finished watching season 1 yesterday!
Good timing!
So we’re not going to talk about the drugs that supposedly give you the strength to beat teams of Klingons and have no side effects?
I wonder if it is less that it gives you the strength, but more that it helps with pain blocking and reaction, but with the downside that you got to take it RIGHT before the fight, and that the aches and pains will still be there when it wears off. I don’t recall them mentioning that it had no side effects, so I would imagine that the side effects weren’t quite plot-relevant enough to devote time to, and were handled “off camera”, so to speak.
They put it in there like it was no big deal though. It kind of sends the wrong message and makes you ask the question, “Why don’t they just use it all the time?”
I can’t imagine that’s good for your physiology. Probably one of those things that will quickly kill you if you use it more than a few times.
Little known fact…The Boys share the same universe as Star Trek.
Forget the Space PCP. Where did they get the training?
I suppose on that moon where it rained blood?
There was heavy implication that M’Benga at least was deep in the shit during the war, and Chapel was also seemingly a veteran. Maybe hand to hand training was standard for facing off against Klingons.
I seem to recall from S1 that Chapel was more sneaky and preferred using hyposprays to incapacitate someone rather than brute force. I don’t think we got any indication before this that she’s had any combat experience at all.
They may be doing some slight retcon to justify future developments they seem to be setting up with the Gorn. Giving a couple of the characters some previous combat experience isn’t a bad idea if they’re planning on doing a bit of war this season.
Not to mention it seems generally pretty dark to suggest that Federation officers were regularly taking performance enhancers during the war…
A smart doctor with a nerd at his side. I feel that their super serum is not standard issue.
Have we seen them use Compound V before? I don’t recall it in the first season.
@Razzleberry @arod48 i get the feeling it’s going to tie into a klingon war trauma storyline
Nah that’s clearly venom from the DC universe.
It even looked like the adrenaline Bruce uses in the climax of The Batman when he’s fighting that sniper.
Nice episode, I was expecting a cliffhanger at the end showing what Pike was up to.
I am curious about the Lanthanites, I’ve had visitor before, like Guinan in 1890s, but a whole species living among side humans, maybe they don’t have a big population, I bet they could be the origin of many human myths. I wonder what was their reason.
Maybe It will help with Una’s trial, since both pretended to be humans.
Also, in TOS there was about an Immortal Human, maybe he was a Lanthanite and just didn’t know.
Her accent is Dracula. She’s a vampire. 😊
I am unsure how Lanthanites can have a distinct accent if they spent centuries successfully blending in, but I agree that it’s interesting.
Maybe they first arrived in Romania, centuries ago, or some such.
Then once Earth discovered Romanians (or whatever) are actually different species, it put a lot of things in perspective.
(like, the legends of vampires?)
@FormerGameDev I hope not. Romanians being another species is too close to pushing on bigotry against the Romani.
Could easily just make a whole new country/geographic location up, like Marvel did.
@FormerGameDev yeah not a bad idea. I don’t recall them doing so for Earth locations before but that doesn’t have to stop them.
TOS explained our ancient deities as aliens (basically), why not an entire segment of earth people? :D I guess it depends on just how many of the Lanthanites there were on Earth. But there’s a bit of a clue that there’s at least enough that there’s a known accent, even if it’s not very common.
Could perhaps be that at one time there was a large population, but they decided to vacate Earth after coming out, so their accent is largely unknown to the general population?
i’d guess probably more like they just had a very small community, though, not like an entire nation.
Romanians and Romani aren’t the same thing. But yeah, probably best not to imply that any human ethnicity are secret aliens.
@LibraryLass Yup I know but many don’t. Agreed.
Blending in doesn’t mean they wholly abandoned their original culture. It just means that humans never got to see it.
Structural differences in their larynx, tongue, or lips seem likely.
If my memory is correct, this episode contained more than half of the scenes from the trailers, most of which were theorized to be from different episodes.
That leaves two possibilities:
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this episode is the most interesting episode, which would be unfortunate but not unheardof for Paramount
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the best is yet to come, and we have no idea what’s coming.
I choose to believe the second, for now, and I’m excited.
So, I used to work in TV marketing at the network level and I can tell you typically trailers are made up of the first three episodes or less. No real secret why though - usually the show is still working on the other episodes.
In one of the panels Anson Mount was saying that if you think the Lower Decks cross-over episode was the craziest thing they’ve done for season 2, we would be surprised what else to see, so yeah, I think we are in for a good treat.
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I think this got things off to a reasonable start, but it doesn’t feel like the strongest episode out of the gate. Maybe it’s because the show deliberately chooses not take on the cliffhanger of the last season in the first episode. Starting the season with only part of the cast undertaking the mission I think also makes the episode feel a bit slight.
It’s also a bit of a darker episode than the last season, but I’m not sure if engaging with the Klingon civil war aftermath is actually necessary in this episode. In fact, leaving out the Klingon stuff here would make it a bit less stodgy to me. I guess there is some curiosity as to what SNW characters were doing during the war, but it really feels like here, the only reason they framed this entire episode around the war was so that M’Benga and Chapel could juice themselves up with a substance that they never quite introduce before using it and Die Hard Klingons for a chunk of the episode. There’s maybe some M’Benga trauma, but giving the character another trauma moment where some (particularly Ortegas) remain comparatively lightly characterized feels…meh.
It’s probably all the Discovery elements, both in plot and in set design on screen, that make me feel this way, but I was hoping that Discovery would learn the best lessons from Strange New Worlds. This episode has me slightly worried that instead of that, Strange New Worlds may be learning some bad lessons from Discovery. That said I’m hoping things get better across the season. I thought this was good but just not quite what I wanted from the season opener.
I must say I’m already a big fan of Pelia.
Agreed! Carol Kane is always fun to watch.
@End0fLine @LibraryLass In my head, she is always in an unintelligible shouting contest with Andy Kaufman.
I was first introduced to her in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and I’ve loved her since. She has a quality that just puts a smile on your face.
To me she will always be the witch from Princess Bride.
Edit: “I’m not a witch, I’m your wife! But after what you just said, I’m not even sure I want to be that any more.”
I get a lot of shit for this in my life, but I have never actually seen that movie. But that quote makes it sound up my alley.
It’s one of the funniest, most exciting, most romantic movies ever made. I’ve met in all my life only one person who didn’t enjoy it and she was kind of awful in general. I would bet you would like it too.
I love that you’re hinting that you may be able to tell something about someone who doesn’t enjoy this move. I hope I like it!
I think that came off way more sarcastic than I intended…
Not going to give you shit but I am going to suggest you should watch it at your earliest opportunity. I suspect you will enjoy it a lot and wish you’d seen it sooner.
I wouldn’t give you shit for it, but I would hand you a well-used DVD of the movie and tell you go watch it immediately. It’s a good time.
Not a bad start, although the episode felt somewhat lackluster. The character writing felt a little wooden, too much stuff is explicitly said instead of letting it hang in the subtext. Also there had better be a good explanation in future episodes as to why the hell Dr. M’benga keeps a couple of vials of punching serum handy at all times.
The visuals were great. The Klingon makeup was toned back a bit more towards a TNG-era look, but you can still see the more distinct Discovery skull shape. Overall a good mix between the two I’d say. The visuals from Spacedock feel very Discovery as well-- nice to see those starfleet drones being used outside of Control trying to kill everyone.
undefined> Also there had better be a good explanation in future episodes as to why the hell Dr. M’benga keeps a couple of vials of punching serum handy at all times.
It was immediately before that. Because of what he went through on that moon he was stationed on during the war.
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Also there had better be a good explanation in future episodes as to why the hell Dr. M’benga keeps a couple of vials of punching serum handy at all times.
He was a frontline doctor during a conflict with an enemy that considers medics viable targets.
nice to see those starfleet drones being used outside of Control trying to kill everyone
As long as Dots don’t show back up on the Enterprise, I’m good.
I would like the strange and new to go. Now.
That’s a cryptic comment. Is this going to be one of those “I hate everything new about Star Trek but I keep watching it for some reason anyway” things?He’s parodying Spock’s “I would like the ship to go… Now.”
Not at all. I love the new. I want more new.
This show is great. But I wish the title had gone to something different.
Ah thank goodness. Haters got me paranoid.
I think a lot of us have some wounds from Reddit that will take a while to heal
