Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

TheSupernova

How did we get so dark?
Citizen
Checks out. I do think Dake is right though, the way things worked out seems good for pacing. This last episode - not much of it rang true for me, it had the "and everyone clapped" energy of Unification III, and it wrapped up Una's secret augmentations plot just after the previous episode drilled down on the impending Gorn threat, which is exactly the reverse of what I'd like to have happened with those two arc threads. But as a matter of pacing, coming back on a big adventure episode with lots of laserbeams before getting dropped into a court drama was the right decision, and it lent some time for Una's situation to build up some tension.

I'm not saying the best thing about these two episodes was the order in which they were presented but.
Plus, episode one did get La'an back onto the canvas, which was better than her just being there with, say, a single line of dialog explaining her return. But....I kinda wish we had Pike for it, too? I dunno.

That first episode had some good ideas, but I just didn't feel like it executed all of them well. That said, I do understand how an adventure episode does work better for jumping into a new season, and I do like a good adventure episode.

I did like this week's episode having an allegory that many people of different walks of life could relate to, plus it had that hopefulness that maybe things could be better someday (though canon did constrain it). It gave me similar vibes to last season's premiere, which is why I wished it came first.

But it did feel good. Until they clapped. That ruined the moment for me. 😂
 

Dake

Well-known member
Citizen
Well I thought that was a great episode: another classic Star Trek trope but managed in a slightly different way. Plus, it explains away one of the sources of uh "discourse" we saw in the trailer for the season.

This Kirk WASN'T born on Earth therefore he doesn't know how revolving doors work.

Probably my only minor quibble is that she seemed to fall for him fairly quickly. I guess the idea that he has no idea about her heritage (plus the inescapable Kirk charm) just created an instant spark?

But the main story line is an interesting twist on the "Hitler" thought experiment: that, leaving a homicidal dictator in place is actually better for the future than removing him and saving all the lives lost. It's a bit cynical on the one hand to me. Like, perhaps there's an option C where Khan is removed, but then humanity is shepherded through the rough patch?
 

tec

Maystor missspelur
Citizen
I loved ep1 of S2 but did not like ep2 I was so bored and done with the ep right after Pike got Una a lawyer cos I knew how it would go so I just skipped ahead
Ep 1 had humor and action and some of the past war trauma creep in and Nurse Chappel kicking seven shades of ass
Never a fan of trail eps

But todays ep should be good
 

TM2-Megatron

Active member
Citizen
Liked the attention to obscure detail in this... the holographic UI on that device La'an was given was clearly TCARS, last seen used aboard the USS Relativity in Voyager.

Also, it was a real pleasure to see my hometown displayed so prominently, and as itself for once, not dressed up as Chicago or New York.

It was also quite interesting some of the historical events we now have discovered have their beginning in Canada, of all places.
 
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MrBlud

Well-known member
Citizen
I’m VERY confused about the episode

With the Romulan spy saying she tried this since 1992 and had been stuck for 30 years that would place it in 2022…which is 26 years after the *adult* Khan left Earth on the Botany Bay after losing the Eugenics Wars. So who is 2022 child Khan? A clone? What genocide and strife does he cause as the Eugenics Wars ended decades ago. WWIII is four years away but I don’t recall a 16? year old (or any) Khan playing a role since AFAIK he’s deep-sleeping on the Botany-Bay. So, what the hug?
 

Dake

Well-known member
Citizen
Haven't the Eugenics Wars been pushed ahead due to various timeline shenanigans?
 

MrBlud

Well-known member
Citizen
Haven't the Eugenics Wars been pushed ahead due to various timeline shenanigans?

No? The future is still the future without change.

Voyager is the one who originally fucked things up because they wanted a time travel story set in the then “modern day” of 1996 and instead of Earth being in the midst of the Eugenics Wars (as they should be!) they forced it to be instead some spy cloak and dagger crap they expanded in the non-canon novels so Paris could hang out with Sarah Silverman on the Paramount backlot instead of the rightful Mad Max hellscape we all expected the Eugenics Wars to be
 

TM2-Megatron

Active member
Citizen
Haven't the Eugenics Wars been pushed ahead due to various timeline shenanigans?

That was my take on it. Romulan lady was slightly unhinged after her 30 years among the post-industrial barbarians, however she seemed to be describing it as a type of fixed point that the timeline inevitably flows towards. It wants to happen, and may not always happen exactly the same way or on the exact same timeline, but the Universe wants it to happen, and so it will.
 

Dake

Well-known member
Citizen
No? The future is still the future without change.

Voyager is the one who originally fucked things up because they wanted a time travel story set in the then “modern day” of 1996 and instead of Earth being in the midst of the Eugenics Wars (as they should be!) they forced it to be instead some spy cloak and dagger crap they expanded in the non-canon novels so Paris could hang out with Sarah Silverman on the Paramount backlot instead of the rightful Mad Max hellscape we all expected the Eugenics Wars to be
Terry Matalas: "We discussed endlessly. We came to the conclusion that in WW3 there were several EMP bursts that kicked everyone back decades. Records of that 75 year period, the 90s on were sketchy. Maybe Spock was wrong?" In response Khan's own references to the 1996 date, that they simply have be ignored to make the series more relatable to the present; "No easy way to do it if you want the past to look and feel like today. Maybe because in 1967 they didn't anticipate the show still going for another 6 decades." Aaron J. Waltke added: "There's also the ripples of the Temporal Cold War shifting the Prime Timeline in Enterprise — at least until the Temporal Accords put an end to that wibbly wobbliness." [1]

So yeah - guess it's "complicated". Just another discontinuity of the new Trek that's totally in the same universe as TOS wink, wink. (Which I've grown to be ok with)
 

MrBlud

Well-known member
Citizen
Bah!

I hate they just keep leaning into the mistake but doesn’t seem like it’ll change :/
 

Copper Bezel

Revenge against God for the crime of Being.
Citizen
In the Kelvin Timeline, the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" exists. The Kelvin timeline deviates from the Prime timeline somewhere in the twenty-third century. Thus, society still exists in the Prime timeline in 1994, when the Beastie Boys released Ill Communication, two years after the supposed beginning of the Eugenics War, when the Beastie Boys would then reasonably have been sabotaging protein resequencers or something instead.

The Romulan agent said she had been stuck here thirty years since the war was supposed to have happened, but time kept making it happen anyway, like Terminator. This is because they keep making sequels in spite of the passage of time, like Terminator.

It is frankly not the most galling of historical revelations in this episode. The agent claimed that she had never lied to our heroes, which means that all of the conspiracy theories she produced were true, and aliens (her own people, the Romulans) were behind all the events she previously listed. As someone pointed out to me, this means that there was a second disruptor shot from the grassy knoll. The Romulans melted Chernobyl to keep us on fossil fuels, and they exploded a torpedo over Tunguska to keep us distracted with listicles about unexplained historical explosions.

This episode was going great until the heel turn. The scenes with Pelia were fantastic. I liked seeing the realization set in for La'an that the two things she knew about Pelia were that she was an engineer, and that she was an impulsive seeker of new experiences who had thrown herself into whole new life roles in the past, which meant maybe the first fact wasn't as presently useful as she'd hoped.

I haven't been this ambivalent, in the sense of being torn between extremes, about an episode of SNW before. What was good was really good, and then a specific moment passed after which the episode could not stop making mutually contradictory excuses for itself and ultimately disappeared in a puff of logic.

I think the reason for having a story about why you wouldn't really travel back in time and kill Hitler is because in real life there is no time travel and we can't change the past. I think stories that make a whole philosophical thing about it forget that, so I appreciate that La'an's motivations were more personal, that she decided that preserving the timeline was accepting her history. Personally I would go back in time to tell Andrew Probert he should make the navigational deflector also the ram scoop, because one magnetic funnel is as good as another and the Bussard collectors aren't used at warp anyway, plus it makes no sense to put them all the way out on the nacelles and then have to pipe the deuterium back to the secondary hull for storage. I haven't accepted history yet.


I nonetheless do think it's time to accept that retcons made in 1996 are a part of our collective history now and cannot be changed without changing what really makes us, us.

When someone delivers an improvised explosive to my house in an Amazon box and I receive my ultimate payback, the invoice inside the package will say "Khan".
 

Dake

Well-known member
Citizen
Bah!

I hate they just keep leaning into the mistake but doesn’t seem like it’ll change :/
The alternative is either going full MCU and saying everything we've known of Trek has been in alternative timelines. I'd argue that takes away some of the "magic" of the show which is that the collective "we" will eventually make it to that point. It undoes the hopefulness. Or go full James Bond and just say every new show (instead of every new Bond actor) is a soft reboot and nothing that's come before is canon any longer unless it's specifically stated in the new media.

I'm ok with the Terminator solution, that some things are waiting to happen, but we can keep pushing it back. For as much time travel as they've done over the years - it's honestly the most "reasonable".
 

MrBlud

Well-known member
Citizen
That only works to a certain point though if the future keeps being constant. The Bell Riots happened three years after this episode. We know that because the DS9 staff traveled back and that was the year. Same with First Contact (because of “First Contact”) so you can’t use the unreliable records crutch on everything.
 

Dake

Well-known member
Citizen
At a certain point I think we have to ignore their protestations that this is all still the Prime timeline, because that's more ludicrous than the alternative. With that in mind, I'd say the future isn't constant either.
 

MrBlud

Well-known member
Citizen
At a certain point I think we have to ignore their protestations that this is all still the Prime timeline, because that's more ludicrous than the alternative. With that in mind, I'd say the future isn't constant either.

It is date wise though. Pike’s injury still happens in 2266 even though Khan moves from 1990 to 2020 so you wind up compressing more and more history in the interim.
 

Copper Bezel

Revenge against God for the crime of Being.
Citizen
Are we losing any meaningful history though in a story or thematic sense? Why is there a eugenics war and then a World War III? World War II had eugenics too, was the Eugenics War just not global enough to count as a mainline sequel? Something my partner and I noticed looking at the timeline after this episode is that the nuclear Armageddon of WWIII also puts some distance between the Eugenics War on the one hand and Cochrane's generation on the other, the rebuilding from the ashes to create the backbone of the Federation. It's becoming increasingly important lately to explain why Starfleet is so afraid of augments and later synths, and the simple way to write that on purpose would be to make Khan the reason Cochrane was living in a hole.

Edit: In other words, in the Twentieth Century we tried capitalism, and it nearly destroyed us. In the Twenty-first Century, we tried augmentation, and that nearly destroyed us. In the Twenty-second Century, we looked to the stars and became something better. That's the kind of institutional mythology Earth would uphold.
 

Copper Bezel

Revenge against God for the crime of Being.
Citizen
Yeah that works.

Damn though, I am not soon going to get over the reveal that a Romulan shot Kennedy. What the goddamn.
 


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