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Star trek continues.

S1.E1 ∙ Pilgrim of Eternity

S1.E2 ∙ Lolani

S1.E3 ∙ Fairest of Them All

S1.E4 ∙ The White Iris

S1.E5 ∙ Divided We Stand

S1.E6 ∙ Come Not Between the Dragons

S1.E7 ∙ Embracing the Winds

S1.E8 ∙ Still Treads the Shadow

S1.E9 ∙ What Ships Are For

S1.E10 ∙ To Boldly Go: Part I

S1.E11 ∙ To Boldly Go: Part II

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Episode 3 Review – Jinaal

The search for the next clue that will lead them to a powerful alien artifact takes Discovery back to Trill in an hour that’s more about interpersonal dynamics than adventure.

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This Star Trek: Discovery review contains spoilers .

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Episode 3

After a pair of episodes that leaned pretty heavily into the adventure vibes of season 5’s central treasure hunt, Star Trek: Discovery goes back to what it does best: Talking about feelings. Best, of course, is a relative term in this context. If you find Discovery’s tendency to have its characters verbally hash out every relationship conflict and moral quandary they encounter to be a refreshing sign of maturity for the franchise, there’s a lot for you to enjoy here. If you think all this talking and self-reflection is a massive waste of time…well, you’re going to wonder where the high-speed sand chases and drone fights went. 

“Jinaal” is an hour that sees the Discovery crew continue their hunt for the puzzle pieces that will allegedly lead them to the Progenitors’ mysterious unnamed alien technology that may or may not be capable of creating life. It is certainly a less flashy episode than the two that immediately preceded it, and seems to be set on Trill largely so that Gray and Adira can break up. Technically, Burnham and company are there because the clue to the next piece is being held by a Trill symbiont , who still possesses the consciousness of Jinaal Bix, a host who lived at the same time as the Romulan scientists who started all this and joined with the symbiont upon his death. Team Discovery is hopeful the symbiont will not only be able to point them toward the next clue but help them get answers to what they’re searching for in the first place. 

Thanks to a Trill ritual that allows Jinaal’s consciousness to be transferred to another body for a limited amount of time, Dr. Culbert suddenly becomes a central figure in this particular adventure. This twist seems to exist largely to (finally) give Wilson Cruz something substantial to do, but he’s clearly having such a blast playing something different from anything he’s done on this show in the past that it’s difficult to resent it too much.

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Jinaal is all sorts of curious about what’s changed in the 900 years since and takes Burnham and Book on an unnecessarily convoluted mission to find the next puzzle piece. It involves a seemingly unending hike through a random canyon and an unexpected face-off with some very aggressive giant insect creatures with cloaking abilities and laser eyes. Space is awesome, y’all. 

In typical Discovery fashion, the face-off with the cloaking creatures isn’t so much a real fight as it is a test. The pair of them are guarding a nest, and Jinaal merely wants to know if Burnham and Book are the sort of people willing to do harm and kill innocents to advance their own agendas and get what they want. When they stand down and apologize to the creatures for invading their space (thank goodness for Book’s handy Doctor Dolittle-style mental abilities!), Jinaal’s convinced they’re trying to find the Progenitors’ tech for the right reasons. Of course, he still won’t just tell them where the group hid whatever the McGuffin is, because that would derail the plot of the entire season we’re watching. (He says it is because whoever retrieves it must be a “worthy seeker” who “followed the full path,” which is probably code for “the real Progenitor tech is the friends we made along the way” or something ridiculous like that, but I guess we’ll find out in seven more episodes.)

Meanwhile, back on the Discovery Captain—now Commander—Rayner arrives to take over as the ship’s first officer, and handles it about as well as anyone who saw last week’s episode probably expected: He’s basically being a jerk to everyone. Fully embracing the Not Here to Make Friends vibe, he resents being told to spend his first day aboard getting to know the crew, and repeatedly clashes with Tilly, who insists that he needs to connect with them to be an effective leader. Rayner, not a huge fan of talking, completely half-asses it, but still manages to glean quite a bit of genuine information out of the literal 20 words he allows each to speak to him. His presence makes for an interesting—and honestly, refreshing—change, particularly as there is (and should be) space on this show for characters who aren’t entirely in favor of excavating every emotional trauma they carry in the name of team cohesion. Rayner isn’t Saru, he shouldn’t have to be, and it’s a bit annoying that his very valid point about friendship and leadership roles being vastly different things gets overwhelmed by Tilly’s repeated insistence that he serve as an emotional support resource for everyone on board.

Speaking of our favorite Kelpian, now that he’s no longer part of the crew of Discovery, Saru is attempting to settle into his new role as a Federation ambassador. Admittedly, it feels a bit strange to have such a central Discovery character so removed from the season’s larger story, but he’s adorably nervous about the whole thing, and it does give us plenty of time to bask in the adorableness of Saru and T’Rina’s relationship, which is something that I, personally, will never complain about. (Is anyone else a bit peeved that we missed the entirety of their romance between them deciding they were into each other and getting engaged? Just me??) 

T’Rina is eager to announce their engagement now that Saru has been officially transferred to Federation Headquarters, but he’s taken aback by the political realities of what the sitting president of Ni’Var choosing to marry a Kelpian means. Ni’Var, after all, is a planet of competing factions, and we’ve seen T’Rina have to make compromises to appease the more hardline or conservative Vulcan purists in the past. It doesn’t help that her right-hand advisor is more than a bit pushy about the issue, insisting that Saru’s work could destabilize T’Rina’s position among her people. But T’Rina’s not having it, and rather resents the implication that she needs a minder or doesn’t understand who own political interests. Are our faves having their first fight? Yes, but don’t worry, they’re fine. They’re great, actually, because the one thing Discovery and its love of talking about feelings means is that all its romantic relationships are remarkably mature in the ways they navigate problems and emotional conflict. Within the space of 15 minutes, Saru has his first real disagreement with someone he loves, T’Rina steadfastly refuses to hide something she’s not ashamed of, and it’s all rather lovely in the end.

Though the ongoing threat of L’ak and Moll is little more than background noise during this episode, they catch up to the Discovery on Trill just in time to put some sort of tracking device on Adira, who’s busy watching Gray lead what appears to be a farewell ceremony for the symbiont who contained Jinaal. (In case anyone was wondering how they’d inevitably find the location of the third clue next week.) And despite Book’s insistence that his personal connection to Moll—through his former mentor—won’t impact his ability to help Michael find and ostensibly bring her and L’ak to justice, or at least stop them from selling off a deadly weapon to the galaxy’s worst people, the episode’s final moments certainly linger over a shot of him considering Moll’s picture. Long enough to make you wonder if there’s any way that statement could ever actually be true.

Lacy Baugher

Lacy Baugher is a digital producer by day, but a television enthusiast pretty much all the time. Her writing has been featured in Paste Magazine, Collider,…

• April 12, 2024 | Interview: Wilson Cruz On How “Jinaal” Sets Up The Rest Of The Season For Culber On ‘Star Trek: Discovery’
• April 12, 2024 | ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Renewed For Season 4; ‘Lower Decks’ To End With Season 5
• April 12, 2024 | Podcast: All Access Goes To Trill With ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ For “Jinaal”
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• April 11, 2024 | Recap/Review: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Tries Too Many Connections In “Jinaal”

Recap/Review: ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Plays A Game In “Charades”

| July 13, 2023 | By: Anthony Pascale 298 comments so far

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 5 – Debuted Thursday, July 13, 2023 Written by Kathryn Lyn & Henry Alonso Myers Directed by Jordan Canning

A lighthearted episode delivers mixed results with a handful of laughs along with some big character implications.

I can smell something, Captain, is that Old Spice?

WARNING: Spoilers below!

“Do I really sound like that?”

In sickbay, Christine is struggling to find a fix to reset Spock and isn’t persuaded by M’Benga’s attempts to assuage her survival guilt over the accident. Because she’s so distracted, her fellowship call ends up a disaster as she faces a very rude interviewer (even for a Vulcan). When she runs into Spock afterward, he senses her pain and empathizes with her by saying “Vulcans can be such jerks,” even offering a hug. She notes this is a bit different for him and he agrees, oversharing, “Sometimes I don’t cry in the shower.” (He kids.)

Spock’s next test is reuniting with his mother, so he hides his human ears with a silly knit cap. A flustered Pike backs him up, agreeing that it’s a regulation cap. T’Pring’s family is threatening to call off the wedding, but Amanda has gotten things back on track by getting them to agree to hold the ceremonial dinner on the Enterprise. She is there to prep him for the dinner ritual and the knit cap isn’t enough to hide Spock’s real “I don’t care about logic!” feelings over the news. Amanda sees through the hat and sees her son is now as human as she is. “Hi mom.” Aww. With T’Pring’s mom looking for any excuse, Amanda says they have to stick with the plan, so she is going to have to teach her son how to do something against his Vulcan nature… learn to lie like a human. Let the hijinks commence!

Naturally, the plan starts with some fake ears, courtesy of Dr. M’Benga. Uhura leads a class on how to talk like a Vulcan, with La’an, Una, and Ortegas chiming in with advice like “more robotic” and tips on how to raise just one eyebrow. Fascinating… and pretty funny. The V’Shal dinner is comprised of three rituals, starting with serving the family tea—which requires holding the scalding hot pot as you get the pour just right. Amanda demonstrates, revealing time on Vulcan has taught her a thing or two about suppressing pain. You go, Mom. The second ritual involves the parents listing off all the faults of their children’s prospective mates. Fun! The final ritual involves mind-melding with your parent to share a childhood memory, and Spock struggles in the practice session. Una chimes in that he looks constipated, which doesn’t help. The only hope rests with the medical team coming up with a cure before they get that far. A stressed T’Pring comes on board complaining of her overbearing mother, and Spock doesn’t have the heart (or perhaps too much heart) to burden her with the news he isn’t exactly Vulcan anymore. Soon enough it’s time to meet the parents and mom T’Pil arrives as advertised, complete with a fusillade of passive-aggressive condescension. On the other hand, dad Sevet seems cool when not kowtowing to his imperious wife, who comments on the “odor” of Captain Pike’s quarters and even insults his amazing Vulcan tevmel appetizers. That’s too far.

I’m available for weddings, quinceañeras, and bar mitzvahs.

“I miss him as he was”

After exhausting everything Starfleet medicine has to offer and with only 24 hours left before the change in Spock becomes irreversible, Christine starts looking for other options. The idea is to go back to the source, and even Ortegas hesitates—briefly—before agreeing to fly her into another dimension to talk to some ancient aliens. Uhura comes along to help and suggests they “wedge” the shuttle into the interdimensional tunnel, where things go all wobbly until the trio finds themselves in a blobby void where they meet “Blue,” a bureaucratic Kehrkovian not interested in listening about they messed up Spock. Eventually, they get through to Yellow in this quantum customer service center, who wants to know who is lodging the complaint because “friends” aren’t allowed to do so outside the response period. Egged on by her friends and without a box to check “it’s complicated,” Christine admits Spock is more than a friend to her, and even though he is more fun and easy to talk to as a human, she wants the original recipe back… the Spock she was “connected to.” As they await a reply to their complaint, Yellow reveals that Spock risked his own life by diverting the shuttle’s shields to protect Christine during their accident. Fascinating.

Back at Pike’s place, Spock white knuckles through teapot pain, which leads to the “awareness” ritual when T’Pil unloads, accusing him of abandoning T’Pring to gallivant around the galaxy. Siding with Sarek, she calls him a failed son and failed Vulcan. Luckily, the timer cuts her off and Spock can excuse himself to go scream into a cushion. Pike tries to buy time by insisting they honor an Earth tradition: playing charades. T’Pil is skeptical, but Sevet is intrigued by “the sacred word.” Just in time, Christine shows up, pulling Spock back into the bathroom where things get tense as the pair struggles with how they “feel many things.” The devastated nurse injects Spock with the cure, allowing him to finish the prenuptial rituals with a successful mind meld with his mom. T’Pil acknowledges the conclusion of the dinner and backhand compliments Spock for pulling it off, despite his “handicap” and being “diluted.” Racist much? Spock has had enough, taking off his pointy ears and vigorously defending his human side, specifically his mother who has suffered this kind of Vulcan judgment her whole life. T’Pil can only sit there, chastened by this genuine moment. Two words, first word, one syllable. Sounds like… truck?

Can I speak to your manager about this tea?

Later, T’Pring lets Spock know she is not happy to be the only one on the ship who didn’t know the truth. She has shown him nothing but support, understanding, and acceptance for his human side, and with this breach of trust, it’s time they take a break. As for Christine, this whole experience filled her with a new confidence, so when she gets denied that fellowship she tells the prissy Vulcan Science Academy guy they aren’t ready for her, oh and by the way, he can read all about her groundbreaking medical mission where she encountered interdimensional ancient aliens when she publishes her paper. So there! Spock has a nice goodbye with his mom, talking about the memory she shared of the first time Spock was accepted by the other Vulcan kids. He could feel what it was like for her and just how hard it is to love a Vulcan. Reflecting on this gives Spock a new insight as he realizes he must talk to Christine, only to find her already at his door. Now that he and T’Pring are taking time apart, he feels conflicted over his other feelings for someone else, feelings he doesn’t want to suppress any longer. She gets the hint and they kiss and then kiss some more, leaving questions about what this all means for another episode.

You know this actually works out great for me T’Pring.

A funny thing happened on the way to Vulcan

“Charades” is definitely one of the episodes where the new season is taking one of its vaunted “big swings,” and while there are a lot of fun moments along the way, it doesn’t entirely hit its mark. Perhaps one of the issues is that this episode almost feels like a bit of redo of the season one episode “Spock Amok,” another romcom-style episode with a wacky sci-fi setup, in that case, Spock and T’Pring switching bodies. Maybe because it was first, “Spock Amok” is the funnier of the two. Regardless, “Charades” was well crafted as a comedic episode, helped along by director Jordan Canning, a veteran of TV comedy, as well as co-writer Kathryn Lyn, who has jumped over to Strange New Worlds after writing 10 episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks , including the fan-favorite episode “Wej duj.” Together they delivered an episode of Star Trek that seems inspired by the best of TV classics like I Love Lucy with all the hijinks surrounding hiding Spock being human. Humor is always relative, but some gags fell a bit flat, especially following elements derived from old-fashioned sitcom tropes like the overbearing mother-in-law with a henpecked husband.

The Strange New Worlds cast were delightful as they indulged in the comedy, with Anson Mount being a particular highlight as he navigated through the Vulcan minefield as Spock’s wingman. Ethan Peck continues to impress tasked to play this new human side of Spock, reminding fans of Leonard Nimoy’s performance in the similarly themed TOS episode “This Side of Paradise.” Gia Sandhu was right there with him this time, giving her most relatable performance as T’Pring, adding some nuance and sympathy to the character who was initially introduced as more of a Vulcan ice queen. And while the role may have been cliched, guest star Ellora Patnaik (T’Pril) was far more than “adequate,” chewing up the scenes as the sort of villain of the episode, with Michael Benyaer’s Sevet providing laughs as the hapless husband who actually liked Pike’s cooking. By the way, even though this was a bottle show on the Enterprise, the Vulcan costumes and props made it all work, and kudos to the food stylist for making the Vulcan appetizers look delicious. And on the subject of food, Pike should have said something as Spock – a vegetarian – started gorging on bacon.

Are my ears on straight?

The return of Mia Kirshner was also very welcome, showing us more layers to Amanda Grayson as she both embodies the best of Jane Wyatt’s classic portrayal as well as continuing to make it her own as she did on Discovery . Her presence also helped set up the key epiphany for Spock as he came to fully understand Christine though his mother’s eyes, and the price she pays for loving Sarek. Speaking of Sarek, given how this show has been playing it fast and loose with canon, it was welcome that they stuck with Spock’s estrangement from his father as established in The Original Series , since that is a key part of what drives Spock. One thing sadly missing from the episode was Carol Kane, with her Pelia only mentioned in passing due to her established relationship with Amanda. Maybe it was due to scheduling, but Kane’s unique wit could have helped make this the comedy episode it was hoping to be.

To stick with the romcom style, the episode was set up with low stakes, with only Spock’s big dinner event on the line. So his transformation into full human was played mostly for laughs, and there were certainly laughs to be had. However, what he was going through was actually quite profound, and yet we never saw Spock explore what he was missing without his Vulcan side — beyond being able to pull off the rituals. Introducing how his transformation had a ticking clock halfway through the episode feels like an afterthought, especially as he was never informed of this key information. It might have been interesting to see him consider if he should take that cure, looking beyond the impact of the dinner hijinks. One Star Trek theme that was welcome is how the episode demonstrated the value of friendship as the crew rallied to help both Spock and Chapel, showing us both a fun side but also love and bravery, especially for the mission to return to Kerkhov. Chapel, who was the one character playing it straight, is confronted with facing the truth, although the aliens saying being “friends” wasn’t good enough to make a request belies that important Star Trek theme, all so Christine would have to just admit she not only likes Spock, she likes likes him. What did land was how Chapel actually wasn’t into the human Spock, as she loves the real Spock, the half-Vulcan who isn’t handing out hugs in corridors. While this Chapel, especially after that final scene, has completely veered off canon from the original TOS character, she continues to be a strong and relatable character with her own agency.

Are his ears crooked?

All of this focus on the romantic elements definitely swings this episode towards the soapy end of the spectrum. Even though the episode clocks in at an hour, the actual strange new world gets little attention. The Kerkhovians were set up as a fascinating ancient civilization with a penchant for procedures reminiscent of the   Sheliak from TNG, they were never really explored, and just used to set up the character plot. This might be the fundamental difference that will divide fans regarding this episode, Strange New Worlds puts what would be traditional character-focused “B plots” to the front, moving the mysterious aliens sci-fi plot into the background. More consistent laughs or a richer character exploration could have made up for the big swing of this traditional reversal.

Final thoughts

In the end, “Charades” was still entertaining, especially on a surface level, which may be enough. However, it wasn’t entirely satisfying when one digs deeper in search of a great Star Trek episode. We have now hit the halfway point for the second season of Strange New Worlds . The show is to be commended for trying different things even if they don’t always work out. Luckily there are five more to go.

Spock is such a Miranda.

• The episode starts with Christine Chapel’s personal log and Spock’s science officer’s personal log, both Stardate 1789.3.
• Christine’s prep for her fellowship included memorizing Korby’s 3 principles of archeological medicine, a reference to Roger Korby , who is destined to become a love interest of Chapel’s (if this show sticks with that part of canon).
• 1.) medicine is always ancient and new as cultures’ understand of what medicine is changes over time
• 2.) the keys to solving are often found by looking backward
• 3.) as a result archeological medicine is as much a study of history as it is of science.
• The Kerkhovian moon was said to be orbiting Eridani B, which is one of the 40 Eridani triple star system . 40 Eridani A has already been established as the star for the planet Vulcan.
• Pike wore his green variant tunic, first seen in season 1 (with a similar tunic later seen on Kirk in TOS).
• Vulcans using nasal suppressants around humans was established by T’Pol in Star Trek: Enterprise .
• Ortegas saying “Hold on to your butts” was likely a reference to the same line in Jurassic Park .
• Pelia was off dealing with a dilithium shortage, which could be setting up a plotline for later in the season.
• Hiding his human ears with a knit cap was likely an homage to Spock hiding his Vulcan ears with a knit cap in “City of the Edge of Forever.”

I may be allergic to knit.

More to come

Every Friday, the TrekMovie.com All Access Star Trek Podcast  covers the latest news in the Star Trek Universe and discusses the latest episode. The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify ,  Pocket Casts ,  Stitcher and is part of the TrekMovie Podcast Network.

Season 2 episodes drop weekly on Thursdays on  Paramount+  in the U.S, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Season 2 is also available on SkyShowtime elsewhere in Europe. The second season will also be available to stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with premiere dates to be announced at a later date.

Keep up with news about the  Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com .

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I kept reading it as Kevorkhians – which is an entirely different episode

…”P+ reality tv welcomes the newest generation of Kevorkians in the new series: Kevorkian’s Angels. Follow the juxtaposition of the Dr., grandson to the original Angel of Death, as he and his trans sibling assistant travel the globe in their med-tech business jet performing assisted suicides for the rich and famous, but then back home in Beverly Hills enjoy the hijinks and social events of his three social climbing daughters as they enter their music and modeling careers. And enjoy the banter with their next door neighbor, Dr. Dray. Cry, laugh, and pay P+ $10 per month.”

I heard •kirk•ovians

I expected a lot of baby Kirk-Vulcans.

All made by Sam Kirk in a timewarp

Whatcha want to bet that culture ends up being created by James T. somehow, hence the name?

So … there’s this old screenwriting/writing tip you get, when you first start creative writing: „ask yourself if you’re telling the most interesting story within the story you’re telling. And if you don’t: why aren’t you?“ (roughly paraphrased)

Here we have: 1. An ancient civilization on a moon near another pretty old spacefaring civilisation, that – for some reason – Starfleet is investigation now. 2. Chapel trying to be accepted into the Vulcan science academy as a human, which is a feat almost impossible to accomplish. 3. Spock and his mother getting closer. 4. Spock being silly.

In what world is 4. the most interesting story here? And it’s made all the more unbearable by Pecks terrible acting as a human and the other characters stopping just shy off pressing their bare butts against the fourth wall, when they lampoon „Vulcan acting“.

It’s not a terrible episode. I really liked the parts with Spock and his mother and Pike during the ceremony was the only bit of Humor that didn’t fall flat. Uhura, Ortegas and Chapel in the shuttle were interesting. Having the episode an adventure or theirs could have been fun to finally flesh out those characters a little. Although having the solution to all of this be „let’s talk about our feelings“ was painfully Discovery. >.<

The opening montage was also fun. There’s way too little „normal life on the ship“.

This show has potential but it desperately needs some good writers.

This episode was so awful that this next complaint is like number 978 on the list of awfulness — but really, a highly advanced civilization exists on another planet within the Eridani system, and in something like 2,000 years of being a spacefaring civilization (maybe more), the Vulcans have never investigated the Kerkhovians and instead rely on humans to do so?

Wow, this episode was just joyful to watch, and it’s now one of my favorites. Watching it again tomorrow with the whole family, who are not hard hard-core fans, but who I know will like this.

They hit a home run with this one in my book.

IDIC though.

Yeah that was a bit weird to me too. Why have this very very advanced but mysterious race that lived on their freaking moon has never been explored until just now??? I think it would’ve work better if A. they recently discovered them and B. maybe on another planet in the system. But I guess because the story (kind of) takes place around Vulcan they made them as close as possible. But it rings false to me too. But I really liked Blue and Yellow. They seem like cool (if a bit bureaucratic) inter dimensional aliens.

Very smart comment, and a concept I’m familiar with, but haven’t thought about it in awhile. But you make a really good point. In terms of this supposedly being a sci-fi show, story 1 from your list could have made for a great (and possibly groundbreaking) episode that would rival some of the best alien reveals through the history of Star Trek. To me, it felt somewhat “Interstellar” when they were inside the anomaly. Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, I did find the concept at the end interesting and something that helped stretch the imagination. Even with the nuts and bolts in place, this episode really didn’t push the limits on discovering a “Strange New World” that was right in front of their faces!

In general, I can’t completely knock the “Spock being silly” storyline, because I actually enjoyed a lot of it. But it could have been done in a context that wouldn’t have included more interesting stories. I also wish they would have had a deeper story with Spock and Amanda bonding, and I think they really missed out on a great moment of him expressing his heartfelt love and admiration towards her. Instead, when she shows up and he finally admits to the situation, they just move on like it’s anyone else on board.

Hmm. In my opinion that’s a tip for overthinkers who can’t simply tell a good story. My creative writing teacher in college had much better advice: Simply tell a story that you would like to read and don’t worry about anything else.

I think it’s basic storytelling that always works. I don’t think you force an approach of needing a story within a story. That’s too much process over substance. Overthinking it! Just tell a good story — it’s really that simple.

And this ep did just that. It was a solid, fun story. Just good storytelling and fun. It didn’t need a story within a story. In some eps with complex plots, OK, but even that needs to be holistically written by the writer in terms of just writing a good story, not over-analyzing and checking the box of do I have an interesting story within a story…his/her peers can judge that and give feedback. Again, just write the story you would want to read/see. It’s that simple.

I agree with you. I didn’t think I would like it, but it worked. It was funny, light-hearted, had a strange new alien, and the scenes with Amanda were very moving. I didn’t like the chapel -spock of Ep. 1 but this time it was written well and felt genuine.

Your point number 1 was the first thing that got me. Honestly it was a little confusing because it sorta sounded like this “ancient civilization” was on the other side of the galaxy. I mean, it HAD to be, right? It couldn’t possibly be on a moon of a neighboring planet in the Vulcan system. No way. That would be just too ret… Unbelievable. But then I realized, this is Secret Hideout. Of course it doesn’t make any sense.

Your final sentence hits the nail on the head. Not only do the writers talk down to their audience, they also treat their characters badly.

It was an ok episode again this week and i felt it was simply a filler episode. After reading online that this episode was supposed to be a bit comedic i didn’t find it funny.

I disliked T’pring (and her parents) in this episode as i found her to be a lot like the Vulcan’s back in Enterprise who have insulting attitudes towards humans. For example T’Pring claims to love Spock and accept his human side yet she punishes him for a human mistake that he made.

I don’t really care for Chapel/Spock as in TOS i never got from Spock that he had any deep feelings for her and in SNW i feel it’s a waste of time as we know they aren’t going to get together anyway.

It was great seeing Amanda again in this episode and i hope this leads to seeing more Discovery characters too as i want to see Ash Tyler and L’rell again.

Overall the episode was ok i enjoyed S1 a lot more than i did this season (so far) to be honest. Hopefully there is no more filler episodes this seasons and we get some more good episodes like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

does your wife/husband/significant other love you?

do they ever punish you for a mistake you made?

No we are pretty understand of each other when we make mistakes. How about you does your significant other love.punish you for all the mistakes you make?

i’ve accidentally pissed her one once or twice

Sounds messy, but I’m not judging. ;-)

oh you have no idea ;-)

I disliked T’pring (and her parents) in this episode as i found her to be a lot like the Vulcan’s back in Enterprise who have insulting attitudes towards humans.

Those Vulcans at least had legitimate motives for their paternalistic attitudes. Humanity wasn’t quite ready to encounter some of what was out there, as indeed Archer came to realize. Those Vulcans were *afraid* of humans, as Soval admitted.

These Vulcans were just jerks for the sake of being jerks, and the writers pulled idiotic pre-nuptial “traditions” out of their a** for the sake of doing a romcom.

I’m damn close to giving up on this series, although I confess to wanting to see the Lower Decks crossover out of a sense of schadenfreude.

At last, someone who sees it like I do, humans made a slingshot and asked the Vulcans to give them an assault rifle, Vulcans wouldn’t give it, and humans got pissed.

That’s why Vulcans were different, we were petulant demanding children and the Vulcans were being responsible parents.

The Vulcans never truly liking or understanding humans has been there since TOS as Spock himself is prejudice for simply being half human. It’s why I really liked their portrayal on Enterprise because a century earlier they still didn’t look at them as mature or capable enough to explore space. And its humans being so emotional that they feared since humans and Vulcans actually shared the same violent and hateful history; the difference being Vulcans had centuries to be peaceful and cultivated a more civil and enlightened society by the time they made it to space where as the humans literally just had a nuclear war with each other a decade that killed 600 million people after Vulcans made first contact with humans.

So it really made sense for that time period why they didn’t trust them. They were afraid humans were going to go out into space and ultimately cause their own wars and so on because they were still seen as volatile. And up until this point in history, they were. And then we got amazing episodes like Demons/Terra Prime that showed why the Vuclans were afraid humans still weren’t ready yet to become galactic ambassadors in space. In the 22nd century, I understood it. Humans still had to prove themsleves.

But a century later, Vulcans still have bigotry and prejudice against humans. It was obvious how much T’Pring’s mother didn’t like Spock for being half human. She had other reasons too but it was plainly obvious that was a big one. As I said, I do accept that SOME Vulcans, even a hundred years later, can still be racist and suspicious of humans given their history. But they have basically made all Vulcans come off as assholes even though Earth and Vulcan helped formed the Federation together. They go out of their way to show Vulcans still have disdain for humans to the point you wonder why they even bother to be in such a strong alliance together? And frankly Earth clearly doesn’t need Vulcan anymore, so why bother?

But I will say it’s a bit less of that by the 24th century but it’s still there too as we saw with Sisko and Solok. But Vulcans are not the enlighten and color blind race their IDIC PR has been pushing for centuries now, that’s for sure.

You notice that T’Pring’s father was ridiculously submissive to his wife? Was this supposed to be a joke?

Wait. You disliked T’Pring’s dad? That man was a standout!

The comedy didn’t work because it relied on making Spock a clown. That NEVER works. Spock can be funny when used correctly. In TTWT Spock had some really good amusing lines. Here the writers, if they were competent, should have dialed Spock back. His Vulcan DNA was removed. But not his upbringing. His memories. His training. He should have had a more difficult time with the emotions. Have a little trouble reigning them in. Not go full bore ‘rebellious teenager’ mode.

The writers on this show do not treat Spock with any kind of respect. Peck does what he can. Which is quite a bit. It’s a shame because I think he is better than Quinto and given good writing he could really shine in the role.

I wouldn’t worry about not getting anything about a Spock-Chapel past on TOS. This show doesn’t give a damn about TOS to begin with and they have all but admitted this is an alternate timeline/reboot anyway. So they pretty much are free to change what they want. Would be nice if producers officially said it outright instead of wasting an entire episode to suggest it, however.

I felt pretty happy with this one. A classic Trek premise (weird accident, personal things ensue) that was able to leverage a lot of levity, gave me a few laughs, and let me see into these lives a bit more. Just plain fun.

I liked Chapel more in this episode than I did in all of Season 1. I think they’re figuring her out. And this is the most fun I’ve had watching Spock himself in basically any incarnation. I won’t speak ill of Nimoy or Quinto, but I’m really pleasantly surprised by Ethan Peck. I feel like he really understands the character on a personal level, and that shows in his performance. I also enjoyed T’Pring. I do hope we get to see some more of her.

Of course, because nothing is flawless, I do have criticisms. The writing still feels too “modern” to me. Every Pre-Disco Trek show seemed to go out of its way to sound like it wasn’t from whatever era it was shot in, and while SNW feels closer to that (admittedly) stilted, devoid of popular references language that Trek used in the past, it still feels a little too modern for my tastes. The transdimensional zone could have used 10% more. How did they get out? Were they just dropped on the shuttle? What else did Chapel do?

I get that, to some folks, it’s playing kind of fast-and-loose with “canon,” but I don’t see it that way at all. Sure, history is kind of rewritten, but that has always been the case with Star Trek. Canon contradicts itself all the time. That’s fine. And while a Chapel/Spock pairing might not violate that permissive idea of canon, it certainly makes things feel crowded. We’ve got other great characters – we don’t need to do all the big building with the few that we’ve seen in previous shows.

Still, all of that together, I’m really happy with this. This is 100% the Trek that I want, and I’m here for it.

Canon contradicts itself all the time.

No, it really doesn’t. They’re going out of their way to demolish what came before; if they’re so eager to do that, let them come up with their own, new franchise, like THE ORVILLE did. They can even make it a sitcom.

Respectfully, Trek canon has never been too consistent. A few examples off the top of my head:

• – the appearance of the Trills – do they have funky foreheads, or dots?
• – the appearance of the Symbionts – significant changes
• – the appearance of the Klingons – all over the place
• – the name of the organization that flies the ships around – UESPA, UFP, Starfleet, and at least one other that I can’t remember
• – can a woman be a Captain on a starship? Turnabout Intruder says no.
• – the sex of Data’s cat, Spot
• – is it risky to go to warp in a solar system? TMP says yes, basically every other episode doesn’t
• – is it James R Kirk (as show in Where No Man Has Gone Before), or James T Kirk?
• – can you get to the centre of the Galaxy quickly? ST:V seems to confirm it, but all of Voyager contradicts that
• – phaser fire inside a ship can both set off and not set off alarms (ST:VI)
• – did Scotty think Kirk was still alive after the Nexus incident on the 1701-B? He sure seemed to in Relics

It’s all canon. Inconsistencies and everything.

You also had “Star Service” in The Conscience of the King and “Spacefleet Command” in The Squire of Gothos, not to mention “Space Central” in Miri .

In Star Trek IV: They Voyage Home , Kirk orders warp speed… while still in Earth’s atmosphere!

These are the sorts of things that make me give the whole notion of “canon” a wide berth.

I forgot about the atmospheric warp in ST:IV!

I stand by my central theme: canon is whatever is on screen. Sometimes it’s contradictory, and that’s okay.

And I say Yep to your Yep.

Agreed about the fluidity of “canon”. Complaints surrounding it read a lot like “gatekeeping”. Personally, a fun story is fun!

It’s really easy to forget anything about IV.

100% agree!

“ is it risky to go to warp in a solar system?”

LORD I hate this one. To be fair in TMP IIRC there was some issue with getting their warp field stuck with an asteroid or something? I do remember tho the ep of DS9 where they had to stop Changeling Bashir from destroying the Bajoran star and Jadzia was worried about taking the Defiant into WARP in the solar system. Whats REALLY nuts is Kirk took the Bounty into Warp in the Earth’s atmosphere LOL

Yeah, I seem to recall in TMP there was a “wormhole” or something that made things go weird, and an asteroid was involved.

I forgot about that DS9 episode! Another good point. Also, the wormhole, while not in orbit of Bajor, was still in the system. People warped to and from it all the time.

Yup yup, the whole warp in the solar system thing might just be the most wildly inconsistent thing in all of Trek!

Kirk specifically said “we have to risk” going to warp in the solar system. IIRC, Jadzia said the same thing. Neither said it was impossible.

In real-life maritime navigation, there are plenty of ports that require specialized knowledge to navigate because they’re unusually risky; hence tugboats, harbormasters, etc.

An imbalance in the warp engines caused the wormhole.

Ohhhhhh, I forgot. And they got stuck towards a heading to an asteroid in belt right?

These examples are all, or almost all, relating to things like improved special-effects and prosthetics technology, higher budgets, or working out the kinks in very early episodes. (You can add the higher pitch of Michael Dorn’s voice in “Encounter at Farpoint” to that list, for example, or the more pastel colors of the uniforms in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”) The few that aren’t are mostly minor or tangential plot points: Kirk’s middle initial, for instance, or the UESPA agency in a few early episodes. (We never had an entire episode built around his middle name before it was changed.) And a lot of these you can reconcile, maybe with a smidge of mental gymnastics. For instance:

• The answer on going to warp within a solar system necessarily boils to down “it’s risky, but you can pull it off with enough navigational dexterity.” (If there’s a bright-line rule against going to warp in one episode, but in the next, which standard is supposed to govern? The last one you saw on screen? You can’t have it both ways.)
• Sybok likely had assistance from “God,” much as Barclay did in “The Nth Degree.”
• Worf’s console had a long history of showing “phaser fire on Deck 7, cap’n!” Programming an auditory alarm would be a trivial matter *today*. Perhaps they took extra precautions after the two crewmen stole the boots, or they did so in light of the tense political situation, or perhaps someone in the security staff was blind, like Hemmer.
• You can read Janice Lester’s statement that “your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women” as meaning it doesn’t admit spouses, or simply the rants of someone who was delusional.

The only point you can’t reconcile is the gender of Spot’s cat. That changed magically for “Genesis,” which was another worst-of-franchise candidate which featured DNA as magic.

Setting aside the “explain the discrepancy” parlor game, again, most of these are extremely minor points, the equivalent of trivial pursuit answers. It’s ultimately television entertainment, and 2020s fans aren’t going to accept 1960s-quality set design. (Even there, they backed off of the DISCOVERY Klingon makeover, which was a bridge too far.) With, what, 800 episodes or so, there’s bound to be mismatches somewhere. It’s fiction.

What I refuse to accept is broad changes in themes and characters that bastardize prior art. In TOS, we saw Chapel as a reserved introvert who quietly had an unrequited crush on Spock. In SNW, we see her as a peppy extrovert who’s had a deep, mutual emoptional relationship. You can’t reconcile those two positions. Vulcans used to be a honorable and philosophical species, even if they could be condescending at times; now, they’re all just grade A jerks. Khan used to be a shrewd tactician from the Global South; now, he’s a genocidal person of European extraction. If you think the source material is that flawed, create your own damn series.

Blithely dismissing the contradictions as “welp, canon is unimportant” is like saying that a mass reproduction of the Mona Lisa that you purchased at Target is equally as sublime as the original.

So, first off, I hear you. I want that to be clear, and I respect that these are steps too far in your view.

Politely, I’m going to challenge your assertions, and an embedded assumption within them. Your take is valid, but here’s a different perspective on it.

• -Chapel: Yes. The Chapel we see in SNW is very different than the one in TOS. I wouldn’t say irreconcilable, however. First, there’s the time difference: seven years can make for a lot of profound changes. If we’re taking the non-canonical birth date of 2237, she’s ~21/22 in SNW, versus ~29/30 in TOS. There’s a lot of growth that can happen there. Whole species have changed in depiction in less than that amount of time (looking at you, Ferengi). Going from a firey youngster to a 30-something who is still pining over a colleague with whom she was entangled in younger days seems at least plausible to me.
• -Vulcans: There were honorable Vulcans, sure, but also famously plenty of jerks. All of ST:Enterprise had Vulcans that were varying degrees of Grade-A Jerks. Admittedly, we’ve not had a huge array of Vulcans on SNW, and the featured ones haven’t all been great. That said, Sevet was delightful, and I don’t recall Commodore Chiv as being terrible.
• -Khan: We get into a bit of a quagmire with Khan and the fact that we didn’t have the Eugenics wars 30 years ago. I’m willing to hand-wave the timeline elements: I think keeping the major divergent events in Trek’s fictional history in our future is integral to the storytelling. Star Trek is not a “What Could Have Been If [X] Happened” show at its heart (some individual stories do this, but that isn’t the show’s overall ethos). It’s resoundingly future-focused. It’s always what could be . I’m not going to get into Kelvinverse Khan because I just think that was a foolish choice entirely. In my headcanon he got similar surgery to the villain in Bond’s Die Another Day (which has the dubious distinction of being the Bond movie I’ve seen the most because we had it on the TVs when I worked at RadioShack)

As to the embedded assertion, I don’t think these bastardize previous art. If Trek were handled more like Star Wars properties, where past versions of movies were systematically removed from availability and retroactively officially deemed noncanonical, then I’d be with you. But aside from the difficulty in getting non-HD/remastered versions of old episodes easily online, the old art is still there . By-and-large, the TOS Remasters are faithful to the intent of the original production. The studio isn’t going into the archives and deepfaking folks into scenes. That reserved Chapel still exists . It may take some stretching to get from one to the other, but if I can buy into a universe where two psyches can exist in one body, where people go faster than light every day, where folks can read minds over vast distances, where both mushroom magic and a prototype terraformer can bring people back from the dead, I can buy into a young person cooling over a few years.

Canon absolutely is important. But the virtue of Trek Canon, and it’s equally a fault of it, is that whatever makes it to broadcast is canon. It’s inherently additive. New stories don’t overwrite the old ones. It’s a big universe.

That was a lot of words. Thanks for reading. I want to reiterate that I don’t need/want you to like SNW and what they’re doing, nor do I think your opinion of them is wrong. De gustibus non disputandum est . I do think that you may gain from a more flexible approach to canon, if for no other reason than it may soothe you when confronting a thing you don’t care for.

Condolences on your Radio Shack experience with DAD; except for that and TOMORROW NEVER DIES, I saw all the Bond films in the theater (multiple times, except for VIEW TO A KILL) until the Craig era, which right from the start pretty much killed Bond for me (no pun intended.)

DIE ANOTHER DAY is definitely something that I would have wanted to walk out during the last hour, on even if I were in a plane (not an insurmountable problem for Bond, though it would be for the rest of us mortals.)

I saw this ep lst night; considering I have hated every episode so far this season, my response to this was mild by comparison, and I only got really bored during the second half of the show. I think when this group does comedy, they need to shrink the runtime down massively, because they just can’t sustain interest or entertainment value.

BTW, was the Enterprise flying on maneuvering thrusters for this whole show? It was said they were doing sub- impulse in the Eridani system. Did they mean sub-warp?

Scientific curiosity would have gotten the better of most Vulcans I’ve seen on screen or read about in novels; the idea that this mysterious unknown force and race went undsicovered till the E passed by seems utterly at odds with the nature of Vulcans, who strive to understand things as a cement for their logic — when they’re not being dicks. (and yeah, this is me not hating the show, but still finding tons wrong with it.)

You said what I did better.

I reconcile the Lester thing as she was mentally deficient. In HER eyes she wasn’t captain because she was a woman. But the reality was that simply wasn’t true. She wasn’t captain because she had too many issues.

Yes, with so very many episodes there are bound to be small inconsistencies. And for TOS the ones people often cite I cannot consider violations because the show was still figuring out what it was. So I don’t think it fair to rag on those.

You did mention that audiences won’t accept a duplicate of the 60’s Enterprise and you are correct. But what they did was a bridge WAY too far. I’ve said this lots of times. They could have updated the ship to not duplicate but evoke the FEEL of TOS Enterprise. As it is, nothing on that ship feels anything like Kirk’s. The one and only one thing that feels kinda sorta like it is the circular bridge. Nothing else. The PD on the show is really piss poor, I gotta say.

The bulk of those aren’t really canon violations. Small things like the first appearance of an alien not quite working right or stuff from a pilot just don’t really count in my book. Fictional events count. I wouldn’t count the Scotty thing, either. It’s a quick line before Generations was even considered. It’s like not having the NX-01 in one of those pictures in the Rec Room in TMP. I will give you playing fast and loose with galactic geography. That’s always bugged me. But time doesn’t exist on screen and the only time it REALLY bugged me was in the KU features. And the phaser alarm wasn’t a violation. VI was the first time it was used and could have easily been implemented. before that.

So I would argue that other shows usually did their best to stick with the big canonical stuff. But let some minor production issues slide because they just aren’t that important.

Voyager Futures end, take place within the time Khan left earth, there are no indications of the Eugenics Wars. Picard season 2, no indication of sanctuary districts. Star Trek First Contact, Zephram Cochrane is not from Alpha Centuri. Star Trek First Contact, why did the Borg need Locutus as an individual avatar when they had a Queen Voyager, why weren’t the crew of the D turned into salamanders? Star Trek has a history of retcons, it’s frustrating that the old generation of fans seems to draw the line.

Lol, exactly. How soon some fans forget.

Well, at our age, some of us are prone to be forgetful, not to mention a touch cantankerous

That one hit close to home — 100% correct. LOL

IIRC TOS stated the Eugenics wars took place mostly in the middle east and asia but it’s been a LONG time since I saw TOS. A certain friend of mine might come here and totaly correct me lol

PIC season 2 did have a sancutary District sign.

Locutus was never meant to lead the Borg, he was meant to be a bridge between the Borg and humanity. Although I admit she was a total retcon of the “hive mind” as the Queen is not a hive mind.

Yeah. Just as WWI & II didn’t have one battle on US soil. The Eugenics wars (or WWIII as TOS also suggested) very well could have been fought in Asia, Australia or anywhere but North America and people’s lives in ’96 Los Angeles would still go on. At least, that was how I figured it. The one touch that could have helped would have been newspaper headlines about it. But I don’t consider it a big deal. It’s not like they changed when certain alien species were encountered or enter personalities of known characters. ;)

Not me. I accept a definition of canon I found online. “‘Canon’ means that the material was produced by the official source for the show/movie.” That means as new creators take over a property, canon can be changed. I’ve been around long enough to just go with the flow on this canon stuff.

Well, that’s one way to re-open the gates of ijtihad.

Picard season 2 had sanctuary district signs in the background I believe.

Lol, Enterprise was much worse, and TMP completely reinvented the visual canon of TOS, much more so than SNW is now doing.

It seems like most fans (at least those who continue to watch the show) have accepted the “visual canon” and the fact that technology has advanced and it doesn’t make much sense to recreate a 1960’s set. What isn’t as easy to accept is that beloved and well-known characters are changed (in some cases completely), previously non-existent relationships come out of nowhere, fictional timelines are completely changed to make a fictional show “more relatable”, and complete alien races have become almost unrecognizable.

People didn’t complain about TMP due to the visual changes, because many people were just blown away to see the Big-E in all her glory on the big screen. Plus, the characters were all still there, and they were still the people that fans and grown to love through the original run and reruns.

Like many of the other details listed earlier in this thread, “visual canon” isn’t a dealbreaker for a lot of fans. But trying to claim that a character who doesn’t even resemble their previous counterpart is the same person and attempting to re-write the timeline of one of the most significant plots in franchise history tends to rub people the wrong way.

I don’t disagree with some of what you are saying, but (and I was in my teens and involved in fandom at the time of TMP) some fans in 79/80 were in fact complaining about the changes in the visual canon, especially the Klingons, the uniforms, the transporter effects, Vulcan and the warp effects (especially the wormhole scene). But the redone E was a big hit of course.

People didn’t complain about TMP due to the visual changes

I was in high school when that came out and I can assure you that people did.

I was in HS as well. And a big reader of Starlog and all those other mags. I understood the reasoning behind the change in looks for the feature film. And from what I read most everyone else did, too. Complaints were few and far between.

What isn’t as easy to accept is that beloved and well-known characters are changed (in some cases completely), previously non-existent relationships come out of nowhere, fictional timelines are completely changed to make a fictional show “more relatable”, and complete alien races have become almost unrecognizable.

Except for most of the ship exterior, I hated a lot of the TMP redesign. The lighting coming from the floor, the palette, the consoldes molded into walls, the huge stretches of dead space, the stupidity of oval monitors and the massive visual uninterest (like the front of the helm being prominently features, even though it has not so much as a ridge or vent on it, turning it into an utter eyesore – even BLAKE’S 7, an utterly cheapo show, dressed up that area of SCORPION with what looked like sunglass racks.)

I thought there was a lot of good work done on engineering, though it still had issues like consoles that jiggled when keypunched — the sort of thing one might have expected on a TV series, not a feature film.

I’m not going to jump all over the trasnporter effects, because the time crunch impacted everything, and 90 percent of them are still glorious.

No. Enterprise was actually pretty good with adhering to the rules that applied to them. It wasn’t perfect but they didn’t compound their few mistakes by continuing to make the same ones. And there was no “reinvention of ‘visual canon'” on TMP. That was simply normal changes in everything due to the passage of time.

We’re clearly not watching the same franchise. Enterprise was four seasons of canon violations all by itself.

We’re clearly not watching the same franchise. Enterprise was four seasons of canon violations all by itself.

Yeah, Enterprise was much worse in terms of violating canon, starting from the first second of TV when they showed the wrong starship design…and the canon retcons spiraled downhill from there. And TMP was one of the biggest canon shocks ever given the changes from TOS.

I’m sorry I don’t agree with this at all. Enterprise had it’s canon issues for sure (Ferengis anyone?), but its nowhere close to the ridiculous canon violations Discovery had. At least Enterprise looked like it fit in the 22nd century and the Star Trek universe. DIS looked like it fit in another universe entirely and closer to the 25th century than the 23rd and exactly why its in the 32nd century today.

And while SNW is better than DIS in that regard, it’s still screwing up canon to a major level. Just in a different way than DIS and ENT did I guess.

SNW screwed up canon so very badly they felt they had to write and entire episode to explain why they think their version is the “prime” version now.

Was it? If it was then it was super duper teeny tiny bits that nearly no one noticed or cared about or that mattered.

As I said earlier, they were pretty good in following the rules. And the few times they made mistakes they didn’t arrogantly double down and keep making that mistake over and over as if they were right and the source material was wrong.

100% agree – Star Trek’s canon is one of the reasons it makes it feel special and real to the fans. Destroying it “just because” aka lazy writers, should not be acceptable to fandom. Like Tolkien fans or any other universe.

Well… They did pretty much eliminate everything TOS with that previous episode. Which puts them in their own KU-like timeline/reboot. Probably because they knew they didn’t have the creativity or talent to write shows that actually conform with TOS.

I actually enjoyed this one the most of the season so far. Loved how the aliens sounded like Siri or Alexa.I just wanted to see a bit more of the actual charades game.

100% agreed. I’d have loved to see a round where Sevet got really into it

Sevet was down for anything that game (or Pike’s kitchen) had to offer. He was such a standout!

His wife must keep his Vulcan gonads somewhere. He sure didn’t have them with him in that episode!

Might be that Vulcans train like sumo wrestlers at an early age to be able to retract and re-deploy their testicles at will (done so they don’t get injured during matches.)

See what you can learn reading Ian Fleming?

Well, yes, I get that the point was that the whole episode was a charade (definitely in the double entendre sense of the word, too), but we never actually saw them play.

At first I thought the aliens sounded like Amy Acker. I was disappointed to discover it was a completely different actress.

I enjoyed this episode very much. It was great seeing Spock’s human half explored a little more and the struggle the character has had to endure with being seen as inferior by other Vulcans and how his mother endured much of it for him so he could be accepted by the other Vulcan children when he was a child.

The cg fx were excellent. In my opinion, they are the best looking out of all the new shows and this episode didn’t disappoint with that.

I was surprised by the ending of the episode and while it doesn’t bother me, it does make me wonder what the writers plan to do with it since there was no indication in TOS that Spock and Chapel ever had an intimate relationship. It was clear she was attracted to him, but that was it. But again, it doesn’t bother me.

A really enjoyable episode and second season.

 It was great seeing Spock’s human half explored a little more

So, his human half involves groping women, taking his rage out on subordinates, and participating in a hen party. Deep exploration, that.

I never said it was a deep exploration of his human side and it was obvious the episode wasn’t meant to be very serious. It was interesting to see what a human Spock could be like.

I will have to give it another watch because I seemed to have missed the part where he groped women.

He’s not responding to you so let’s assume he’s realized he got that wrong Regarding the Spock inappropriate touching charge.

I like the dude but he has a habit of disappearing when you answer one of us posts with information that fully contradicts his point

Good Lord, go take a nap.

You noticed that too, huh?

I enjoyed this episode very much. It was great seeing Spock’s human half explored a little more and the struggle the character has had to endure with being seen as inferior by other Vulcans and how his mother endured much of it for him so he could be accepted by the other Vulcan children when he was a child.

Great point. I loved the exploration of Spock as well. Just a great character ep for Spock!

It’s pretty obvious from all your posts that you love SNW but to say this is great story writing is laughable. The series is ok as a Trek series and a bit cheesy at times ,we have seen so much better episodic Trek than this. I honestly don’t see this as the huge improvement of Discovery that some do here. Feels like the same writers doing a original series fan service show to me.

Dude, that sounds 75% like my review of Picard Season 3 (just substitute TNG for TOS)

To be fair they have already made it clear that nothing in TOS matters anymore. In fact, they KU-ed this show. They showed this is an alternate timeline/reboot. The only thing missing is a showrunner saying so out loud. So they technically are free to do with Spock, Chapel, any of them whatever they want.

That was a good episode… but I’ve had enough of the cute episodes. We know these people can be funny. That’s great. Let’s have some more drama.

I’ve got a feeling the back half of the season will deliver more drama, with the exception of the LD Crossover episode

Don’t forget the musical episode, too; that’s more than a third of what’s remaining.

Well it can be a dramatic musical. ;)

I actually don’t have a problem with going against the grain like that in Trek. The problem I have is the people writing and producing this show have demonstrated they are just not up to the task of making it even mediocre.

It’s been fairly serious the whole season though. Even fish out of water Kirk was servicing a non-comedic storyline. I think they could have balanced this week’s story out better but I wasn’t really opposed to most of the comedy. He wasn’t exactly Jeri Ryan rattling off a dozen personalities or doing a perfect Robert Picardo impression, but I thought Ethan Peck did a very fine job here.

I was think about this earlier. I have yet to see this one, but overall I agree that the show is more serious than last season. But it’s also…I don’t know any other way to characterize it…not as light on its feet. It seems ponderous where it was nimble last year. Maybe that’s due to the longer episodes, who knows? It feels…different.

That may well be a factor.

I feel like everything these days is too long. I am happy for creatives to not be beholden to exact running times now, but hourlong episodes of Ted Lasso? The longest Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones movies? Across the Spider-Verse being nearly two and a half hours long and still ending in a cliffhanger?

Maybe I’m just less patient now, but there’s something to be said for the creative possibilities a shorter running time can impose, as well as budget restraints. Sometimes more is just more, rather than better.

To true. I know this show is supposed to expore all genres. So lets do that and move on to some other stuff now.

Brilliant episode. Loved every moment of it.

Spock as having teenage urges – charming!

Only one small complaint – when Chapel spoke to the aliens, she should have described her relationship with Spock as professional – sort of on the level of the aliens adhering to the tiny print in a Warranty – and let Uhurah and Ortegas out her if that worked comically.

Cinematically, the Enterprise never felt more lived in than in this episode.

Haha. Your “warranty” comment cracked me up. Yellow and Blue had all the trappings of aliens calling to inquire about the human’s exteneded ship warranty, but then that was hilariously turned around with Christine basically visiting to inquire about extending the response period of their friend’s remediation period!

Great review by Anthony, and pretty much encapsulates my feelings on the episode. Kudos to Ethan Peck and the rest of the main case for making what would have been a disaster of a script into an enjoyable episode. The humor was spot on, imo, great acting across the board from all involved. I got some legitimate chuckles out of the first half. I liked last week’s episode a little better, but will likely be revisiting this one just to enjoy Peck’s performance again.

I caught some shades of how Vulcans acted in ENT during this one, which is not a good look. Nice work on the actress who did a great job being unbearable as T’Pril, complete with the stereotypical henpecked husband, as Anthony mentioned. That trope is so tiresome, worn out and not remotely funny, imo, the gutless husband tagging along, being berated at every turn. And our annoying Ortegas line of the week, ‘Hold onto your butts.’ Ugh.

To me, this episode belongs more as a part of the development of Kelvin Spock, to me. Overall though, a fun romp, nothing new or groundbreaking for certain. One of the best of the first 5 of the season for me. So I guess there will be a little Spock/Chapel romance now. That’s fine, as we ‘big swing’ our way through this alt. timeline. Hoping the second half of the season will “Wow” me, but not expecting much. Cheers.

Wow really glad you enjoyed it so much Danpaine. You seem to be enjoying the show a lot more the last few episodes. I really liked this one too. A lot of fun stuff in it. It wasn’t perfect though, there were definitely some cringy stuff in it and they try a little too hard to make the show contemporary but overall those were minor issues for me.

I was surprised how much I liked this one, because the previews had me thinking I wouldn’t. But yes, the last two have been worth watching for me. Of course the show has its troubles, but not to the point where it’s turning me off (until the musical episode shows up – ha). Considering it a different timeline is helping my appreciation of it greatly.

director Jordan Canning, a veteran of TV comedy, as well as co-writer Kathryn Lyn, who has jumped over to  Strange New Worlds  after writing 10 episodes of  Star Trek: Lower Decks

Aha. ‘Splains a lot.

That’s wrong, her previous Star Trek writing credit was ONE episode of Lower Decks, though she served as a story editor for season 2.

I enjoyed this episode more than I probably should have, and in some ways I think I liked it more than most episodes this season. But part of that may be because I’ve just accepted in my mind that this is no longer the TOS-era timeline. Otherwise, I just can’t rectify most of it anymore. That said, I’m still not a fan of how far they are trying to push the Spock/Chapel relationship, regardless of timeline.

All that said, there’s two things that bugged me with this episode, with one of those issues being a season-long issue that is getting very old:

• Why does it suddenly seem like the approach to Spock is that he is 99.9% Vulcan except when he explodes with emotion? It’s been obvious several times – but much more so in this episode – that the writers seem to think that Spock doesn’t experience emotion. In other words, his human side is pretty much dormant except when he lets it out on occasion. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s never how I interpreted Spock in any other incarnation of Star Trek. He’s always been familiar with emotion, and even experienced them deeply at times (I really thought the ST ’09 movie fleshed this out very well when he was a kid, but we also saw this to some extent in Star Trek III and also in Amok Time). But the approach in this particular episode was more like Data from Generations when he suddenly experiences emotion FOR THE FIRST TIME . It just makes no sense to me since it’s extremely obvious with Amanda there that he is HALF HUMAN. Suppression or not, he HAS experienced emotion.
• Secondly, very simply put, why has Spock become the comic relief for nearly the series?? Last season, Spock Amok already made it clear that they were willing to use Spock for a comic storyline, but there’s been multiple times this season where he just been used for simple laughs. This episode really pushed the boundaries, even if it was entertaining. But between, “I want the ship to GO!” and “What the f*&%!”, I just feel like the writing staff has lost respect for the character. Sure, this is an earlier version of him, but going back to my first argument, Spock is not completely new to the world of humans nor having to balance between the two. It just feels like he’s playing the “fish out of water” card too much, and it’s honestly getting very old.

Just for the purpose of reiterating what others have already said, I’m also not liking the consistent portrayal of stuck-up Vulcans. Between T’Pring, her mother, and the jerk Vulcan prosecutor from “As Astra per Aspera”, it’s becoming pretty annoying to see the continual take on the “we’re better than you mentality”. But I think I wouldn’t mind seeing more Sevet (T’Pring’s Dad) in the future.

I think this type of stuck up Vulcan is in keeping with the period. There are probably only a handful in Starfleet and I’m sure a lot of the older ones would have grown up with those ingrained prejudices against humans and other alien races.

Even if that is the case, there have been few examples to the contrary in the show. T’Pring’s Dad and Spock are the only two I can think of at the moment that haven’t come off as stuck-up. I left out the Vulcan who was considering Christine’s application at the Vulcan Science Academy. He may have actually been the worst of them all so far.

These writers have absolutely no idea how to write for Spock. They do not seem to understand or even respect the character at all. Which is yet another reason why I think they decided to make this show an alternate timeline/reboot. So your thinking this is not the TOS timeline is right in line with that previous episode that essentially explained that this show is it’s own KU kind of thing. Again, I just with the producers would flat out admit it.

Trek is Trek….

Or to put it much better:

Nu-Trek will Nu-Trek

That’s putting it better?! Ok, if you say so….no idea as to what you mean.

What a great ep!!! I am still smiling and will watch it again tomorrow.

I’m right there with you! :)

“Despite that text, however, I am so tired of this trope” — Another trope that got overused this episode: the ubiquitous shuttle accident. Whether its surrounding Joran Dax or Airiam or Uhura’s family, it seems the only way a person can die a natural death in the future is by piloting or being a passenger on one of these death-traps.

“Buddy Holly Shuttles”

Bopper-class.

It was an enjoyable hour of television. I’m not sure it was great Star Trek, but I still liked it. I cringed through a few of the Spock “teenage” outbursts but did laugh out loud when T’Pring’s mother said that a Vulcan should have better bladder control! I thought the bacon eating was especially out of character, especially when you remember how ashamed Spock was for eating animal flesh in “All Our Yesterdays.” I’m still adjusting to the revelation that this is a different timeline and uncertain what bits of the TOS prime universe are the same and what is different. But as others have said, I do find it easier to enjoy these episodes if I just assume it is a different universe. Overall, I think this episode was better than last week’s but overall I think this show is having a Sophomore Slump. Now that we are half way through the season, I hope the remaining episodes raise the bar.

Wow this exactly where I’m at too. I agree with pretty much everything you just said. We seen to agree on a lot of things here Captain Danno! :)

Thanks Tiger2. I take that as a complement!

It’s all different. Don’t waste time trying to reconcile this with TOS. This is reboot in every way except the producers haven’t come out to say it yet.

People write here like the TNG DS9 never had stupid silly funny episodes that had no real impact on the bigger picture or direction of the season. Shows are allowed to have episodes like this and so many of you forget, storytelling isn’t the same as the 90s in which you’re stuck in.

Last season’s “Spock Amok” had better Vulcan hijinks. Last season’s “Serene Squall” had better Vulcan-Human culture clash.

Even though I generally liked this episode, one of my main arguments remain: You only have 10 episodes and this is the best you can do?? TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and even TOS had episodes to burn. SNW doesn’t. Not saying this episode is awful, but I could still argue that, with only 10 episodes, it could have been better.

It was slightly better than that awful episode last season when Spock and his annoying fiance swapped bodies. That was so bad so not saying much about this one.

I am saying this episode was awful. I’m still debating with myself if it was the worst of the series. There is a LOT of competition for that.

But yeah. They only have 10 episodes and so far, including the 10 from season one they have had but ONE good episode. One.

Definitely is in my book, and I’ll go a step further and say it’s the worst episode of NuTrek we’ve gotten. It’s insulting.

Dude, one of the reasons I love TNG and DS9 was for their stupid silly funny episodes lol. I always love when Trek does comedy. Yeah it doesn’t always land but for me I think it does 90% of the time. This is exactly why I love Lower Decks. I guess I just don’t take Star Trek that seriously compared to others here. I am here for the deep and issue probing stories like Drumhead, Measure of a Man, Far Beyond the Stars, Terra Prime, Past Tense, A Private Little War, The Maquis and on and on.

But I also love A Fist Full of Datas, House of Quark, Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy, Qpid, Bride of Chaotica, In the Cards, A Night in Sickbay (I know I’m in a big minority with this one lol), Menage a Trois and on and on and on. Why Trek is so good is because you can do a big and thought provoking episode one week and then something totally silly and fun the next week. These shows weren’t all just hyper serious stuff every week.

It’s also a big reason why I never truly like Discovery because they never had a single comedic episode to this day and that show takes itself waaaaaaay too seriously. Sure they have comedic moments and characters like Tilly and Jet Reno but never just one fun off the cuff episode. But I guess that’s hard to do when you’re trying to save the galaxy every season.

And it’s why SNW feels like an anti-Discovery show in so many ways because it seems much more comedic and light hearted most of the time than serious or weighty. I do think it can be a little more weightier at times but I do love its light touch more times than not and why its tied with Lower Decks for me.

If only Lower Decks was actually funny, the bleeped swear is so overused. I absolutely love Futurama because it has great comedy writing,unfortunately LD isn’t. I really struggle to watch it, Mariner has to be one of the most annoying characters ever.

All I can say is I laugh nearly every episode. But its obviously not funny for you so I can’t really argue it. Either you laugh or you don’t.

But I also admit I don’t even watch LDS for being a comedy. I just love the stories in general and to see low level crew members doing day to day things and not trying to save the galaxy every season.

I agree. LDX just isn’t funny. It’s far too self aware. The characters act like they themselves are Star Trek fans. And yes, Mariner is just an awful, terrible person. And Boimler is a Trek version of Homer Simpson. The whole thing is just badly done. And that’s really unfortunate because a Trek comedy had so very much potential in the right hands. McMahon seems too scared to poke fun at Trek and thinks references to other shows are the funniest things ever. Opportunity lost. I’m doubting it will ever get tried again.

From my point of view when Trek did comedy it rarely worked. TTWT was a classic. Nothing has ever even come close. Sure, other Treks had comedic moments. But when the episode went light… That was really hard for them to hit. TNG figured it out a little but turning Q into a clown. So his episodes generally were light and he made it fun. And of course there was Worf’s, “Sorry.” Which was hysterical and in a Q episode, too. But that was about it.

I love most of the comedic episodes. The only ones I had trouble with were the Quark ones. But even on my rewatch of the franchise I realize there were more of those I really enjoyed than I remembered.

But yes comedy very subjective, so everyone will feel differently what they is funny or isn’t.

The argument of having fewer episodes is that they are higher quality. With 26 episodes per season there was room for poor quality. With a measly 10 episodes there is no room, and quite frankly this season has been very sub par.

I totally agree, it’s been a hard watch. If this and Starfleet Academy is all the Trek we have in the near future, these are dark times 😔

Well, yes, they did; but they mostly garnered poor reviews (see Tim Lynch or Jammer), and they never make those lists of “essential TNG episodes” today. In other words, they’re quietly put on the back burner, if not outright forgotten.

In the NuTrek era, seasons consist of 10 episodes. “Cost of Living” (in which Lwaxana and Alexander take a mudbath) was one of 26 episodes. Put it, and a few of its ilk, on the back burner, and you still have 20-odd gems to enjoy. In the streaming era, you need a higher hit-to-miss ratio.

To be fair I don’t think TNG had a lot of winners. But also to be fair the vast majority of their episodes weren’t BAD. Like SNW’s are. There were a few really bad ones and also a handful of really really good ones. And a ton of mediocre ones. All were saved by the acting chops of one Patrick Stewart. Who’s charisma made even the bad episodes watchable.

Agreed, but the writers took the characters seriously. If they didnt’ succeed at comedy, they didn’t turn a character into something he wasn’t. In this case, a bumbling, pre-pubescent teen in a 30 year old’s body, who is apparently entirely reliant on alien DNA for his intelligence.

True. The characters stayed within themselves. Even when they were turned into children. When they really had a bit of an excuse to do so. I’m really hoping this writers strike goes on long enough that Secret Hideout gets cut loose from P+. It’s probably a pipe dream but it’s still a hope.

Some do seem to forget that some were also voicing critical opinions about DS9 VOY and ENT at the time. So this is at least a consistent continuation of that pattern. Dont forget the Federation Aggression in the Delta Quadrant that ignited the Dominion War, Janeways Command Style (like killing Tuvix, and other stuff) that earned her a promotion before Picard, Archers Gazelle Speech. Oh man, the Gazelle Speech. But also Archer killing Tuvix, i mean Sim. Also Archer as a pirate.

While there a cringeworthy Eps in VOY that i cant stand to watch today, like the doctor hiding in 7s Implants, I consider Enterprise the most serious and professional depiction of early human Warp-spacefaring in the Star Trek sense. and in the end, it is actually just TV. As Phlox implied, they had something similar but left it behind as their lifes were more interesting. … I miss Phlox. I was entertained with this SNW, so was my wife, and she is not into trek. This show has an appeal outside of the purist fan base and that is the key, i think. and that makes it work.

When you only have 10 episodes I think fans have a right to expect better than what we’ve been getting.

One Hundred Percent.

The constant complaints levied against Strange New Worlds show that Discovery did nothing wrong. The problem has always been with an audience that cannot be pleased.

It was the audience that essentially willed this series into existence, but because it’s not chapter and verse what they think a prequel to The Original Series should be they dismiss it as “wrong”, just like they did Discovery.

Consider that a preview of what will likely happen if Paramount+ similarly greenlights Legacy.

Unless that show is chapter and verse what people that will it into existence want it to be, they will dismiss it just like they are Strange New Worlds. The moment it does something they disagree with it, whatever that might be, they’ll do just that.

I for one have been enjoying SNW, just like I did the first season of Discovery before they backtracked to please the people that hated it.

Ironic to think that one point people said that SNW is what DIS should have been all along, only for them to now disparage it for not being what they think it should be.

Agreed. All fans are awful.

Yes, all fans are awful, terribly awful; in fact, terribly, horribly awful — most especially those of us who found fault in Discovery. We should be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.

You have summed it up PERFECTLY.

Everyone has an opinion, and opinions on SNW vary greatly. Some people love it, some people hate it, but I see a lot of in-between. Accusing the entire fanbase of being against the show because they “didn’t get what they want” is looking at this from a very skewed point of view.

That said, I will still make the argument that, with only 10 episodes, they should be some of the best episodes of Star Trek we can expect. I personally liked this one, but by no means do I feel like season two as a whole is hitting on all-cylinders. Sure, that’s my opinion, but I do think the general consensus is that not all five of the episodes so far are the best Trek can offer.

Can’t really argue with this point. Between P+’s financial troubles, the WGA strike, and now SAG hitting the picket lines, this may be what pulls the plug on Streaming Trek. The irony being that for those who were screaming that current Trek is an abomination and needs to go away, now that it may be gone, they’ll be demanding more Trek.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with SNW, now that: a) SAG/AFTRA is on strike and, b) the AMPTP is reportedly willing to let the WGA strike go on as long as it takes to “break” the union. If production starts again, it will be no early than fall if that reporting is accurate. And given Paramount Global’s money woes, I can certainly see them canceling it and scrubbing it from the site. Don’t think that’s a distinct possibility, but it is a possibility.

Star Trek will live on in the animated shows. Heck, I think they’re more popular than the live action ones anyway.

The actors are on strike now, so that shuts down the animated work.

Thank you. I should’ve been clearer: “If the strike kills Strange New Worlds, I suspect Star Trek will live on in animated form. AFTER the strike, Star Trek will still have value as a brand and as Lower Decks has shown, there’s a young, voracious, almost Disney-level obsessive fandom for animated Trek that should allow the IP to continue to be profitable for the studio (or whatever entity winds up buying Paramount or its parts) and a cartoon studio licensee.”

Trek has been a profitable IP for Paramount for decades now. Someone, somewhere will pick it up and run with it it Paramount finds itself needing to sell it.

I think voice actors are a different union. But I’m not positive of that.

Also, Prodigy was the only half way decent Trek out there. And it’s gone. So….

Paramount+ didn’t find one of them more popular. 😢 (sadface)

Bob Iger was commenting on Hollywood’s labor woes this morning, a few things he said struck me that he was saying the silent part out loud. If management now has union busting as a primary goal, that will be a disaster for the industry. Entertainment will be looking a helluva lot different a couple years from now. A lot of small companies are going to get crushed in all this.

I won’t be. At least not if the only Trek we get will be made by SH.

The fans saw Mount’s portrayal of Pike and felt that would be far more interesting than anything done on Star Trek Discovery. Can’t blame the fans for that. But what the fans didn’t seem to consider was the Pike centered show would be produced by the same production company that made Star Trek Discovery to begin with. So essentially they wanted a Pike show but NOT one made by people who consistently make awful Trek. If Legacy get’s green lighted if it, too, is made by Secret Hideout fans will likely react the same way. So essentially what we need is for Secret Hideout to stop making Trek. Get a different person/production company in and let them run with it. It certainly can’t be worse….

But, dude, the same issue will keep coming up until they hire someone that makes Trek the way these people that cannot be satisfied want it to be made. That’s not happening, ever. That old style Trek is gone.

It’s like if someone watched the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons of The Next Generation and denounced it as “awful Trek” because they weren’t like The Original Series.

To please that person, TNG would need to be made like the first two seasons, which were considerably derivative in style and tone to TOS.

The same is happening now, with people demanding that current Trek be made in the style of ’90s Trek. That’s not happening.

I saw every season of TNG to be a derivative of TOS style. That never changed until DS9 came along. Which was very different and a show that worked very well.

I don’t think we have enough of a sample size to make that determination considering the only nu-Trek we’ve been getting has been made by people who have produced mediocre Trek at best and mostly garbage Trek. I think if Trek were made by more competent writers more fans would be happy with the results.

Nah, Trek stopped being derivative of TOS half-way through the third season of TNG.

And “nu-Trek” hasn’t been mediocre in the least. It just hasn’t been a rehash of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, or ENT.

I will give you that it wasn’t exact. They quite often went with A & B stories. That’s about it. Everything else could have been a TOS episode.

Any no. Nu-Trek has been mediocre at best. It hasn’t been a rehash classic or Berman Trek but that doesn’t mean it must be good. In fact, it’s been far far worse.

Not really. It’s actually been quite good. Discovery was just not an ensemble show like TNG, DS9, and VOY, or focused on a trinity like TOS and ENT. Instead, it was focused on a singular lead. That doesn’t mean it was mediocre.

And before you say that what made it mediocre were the stories, that is not what people complained about. What they complained about WAS the focus on a solo lead, the tone, and the lack of censorship, the latter of which allowed Tilly to curse (something that didn’t bother anyone when Bones did it in Trek III, Kirk did it in Trek IV, and Data did it in Generations).

It wasn’t until it was done on a “TV” series that people got in a huff over it. “STAR TREK WOULD NEVER DO THAT!”

Fact is that Star Trek HAS done that.

The most mediocre Star Trek ever made were the first two season of TNG.

Star Trek Discovery wasn’t bad because they focused on one character. It was bad because not only was that one character badly conceived and written the entire show was. The entire concept just didn’t work. Ultimately they knew it which was why they went with the time change. But that didn’t solve the underlying problems. The cursing complaint really wasn’t about the cursing. It was a symptom of the terrible writing. As you said, there has been lighter cursing in Trek before and it didn’t generate that kind of response.

The most mediocre Trek was pretty much the bulk of all 7 seasons of TNG. The worst Trek has has pretty much come from Secret Hideout nearly exclusively.

People hate Discovery starting with the first episode, so you cannot say that they dismissed it based on the quality of the show as a whole.

There was nothing ill-conceived about it in the least. Conceptually, it took a lot of ideas from Singer’s Federation pitch, such as making it about a member of the crew that wasn’t the captain and tracking their ascendancy to the rank (in that series it would have been Kirk’s descendant, whereas here it was Spock’s adopted sister).

At its worst, Secret Hideout’s Trek is still better than the first two seasons of TNG. As for the latter five, there were not mediocre in the least. They’re what made Trek the franchise it became.

The only thing gleaned from the first episode was the look and feel of the show. Which didn’t go over well. People didn’t make up their minds on the writing for sure until a few episodes in when it was made painfully clear it was gawdawful.

And again, the problem wasn’t a character’s rise in Star Fleet. The problem was HOW it was done. This is symptomatic of all of Secret Hideout Trek. The general concepts are sound. A character’s rise in Star Fleet. Different shows feature different genres. Etc. Even Short Treks were a good idea. The problem is the people they hire to make them are, to put it simply, bad writers. They don’t seem to have a clue how to write good drama, let alone good Sci-fi or good Trek.

There is no way Secret Hideout Trek could be seen as better than any of TNG’s seasons. And yes, while TNG did have their share of crap episodes they did counter that with a number of excellent ones. But the bulk of them were indeed rather pedestrian. Made watchable due to the charismatic acting chops of one Patrick Stewart. Which is also something nu-Trek never had. A high quality actor to make weak episodes watchable.

And it was TOS that made Trek what it is.

TOS was cancelled after three seasons. TNG created the Star Trek franchise.

True, it was canceled after 3. But it was EXTREMELY popular in reruns. Actually it was popular when it aired it’s just that the demographics weren’t what executives were shooting for at the time. There were conventions. Books. Even an animated series. TOS was the genesis for everything.

I think the PIke on this show is nowhere near as interesting or as plausible of being a great Captain. he has moments, but the writers treated him entirely differently on Disco. I think about the dressing down he did of Saru as the best example of how he was a great Captain. From and unyielding, but fair. Here, he’s just everyone’s buddy.

Interesting observation. I honestly don’t recall much from S1 at this point it was so long ago but this season he has been so very absent that I’m unsure about that. But it does feel like a legitimate criticism.

I liked the episode, especially Spock/Chapel. But the aliens were underdeveloped. My theory is that they are time traveling Vulcans on a mission to their own planet’s past, who were stuck in an ancient period and over the ages evolved into incorporeal beings.

But why in a sci-fi show should you be left having to guess the backstory of an alien species who plays a primary role in the plot? Better yet, why does the exploration of the new species along with the efforts to help out an injured (in a sense) crew member stop simply because the alien species says that no further communication is necessary? It’s like Pike decides that “welp, I guess that’s that” even though they stay in orbit and have plenty of time to try and gather more info. Instead, we get a crazy, last-minute, mostly unplanned mission to attempt to contact the aliens again after how long sitting there doing nothing?

Now, now, Pike wasn’t doing nothing. He had a banquet to prepare.

My mistake. That’s very true! And, on some level, I honestly think that SNW Pike would NEVER turn down a chance to practice his culinary skills.

First use of the exact term (and possibly copyrighted?) “Ancient Aliens” in Trek’s history? Here’s hoping we get a walk-on from Giorgio Tsoukalos at some point.

I had a great time watching this episode. I was surprised how many moments were laugh out loud too. My opinion, loved it.

It doesn’t get any better than this!

“ Spock is such a Miranda.”

Valaris might have something to say about that. HAHAHAHAH. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Carry on.

For me It DID pay off and it WAS satisfying. I liked a lot about this episode. So much that I didn’t care about the nitpicks mentioned in this analysis. They might be valid points, but that was not this episode.

After the last 2 episodes, that I really didn’t care for, this one was a relief. I loved the humor, especially from Anson Mount (his side-eye is amazing!), and I loved the fact the episode was both lighthearted and heavy.

What I also really liked was that it involved the entire cast, and that everybody felt essential. A thing that always solidifies SNW as an ensemble show. Something I was missing from Discovery.

The guest stars were a treat as well. Great to see Amanda again, as well as T’Pring and her family (poor dad). The episode was pretty long again, but this time it worked. The story was involved enough to warrent it (minus maybe a minute or 2).

Score: 7.8/10

PS: I’m finding I gradually care less and less about what TOS parts of canon they do and don’t break. Maybe because I didn’t grow up with it, but it’s been ages really since they made it.

It doesn’t matter anymore. Gotta keep reminding people of that episode 2 weeks ago that made this show a KU-like new timeline/reboot. So no worries about it ever lining up with TOS Trek ever again. They can keep Pike alive. Kill Chapel, add a Horta crew member…. None of it matters anymore.

Anson Mount’s reaction shots had me laughing out loud- what a great foil for a room of serious people.

I was expecting Sevet to be our second asylum-seeker this season. Poor guy just wants noms and to be friends with Sarek. Too bad he married a potential Tal Shiar spy.

I also enjoyed Uhura and Ortegas groaning at Chapel for being so pent up about her feelings towards Spock.

And as for the Customer Service Dimension, as McCoy said “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.” Now that law applies to other universes!

I don’t know why, but I LOL when he snapped his fingers to Sevet to bring out more food.

I feel sorry for Sevet as well married to that wrench. We also know why T’Pring turned down Spock in Amok Time. Her mom was probably in her night and day to pick Stonn. ;)

Great Point!

“I was expecting Sevet to be our second asylum-seeker this season. Poor guy just wants noms and to be friends with Sarek. Too bad he married a potential Tal Shiar spy.”

This comment made me laugh! Love it! :)

LET’S GOOOOO!!!

That episode was SO enjoyable! Funny, touching, emotional, entertaining, well written, directed and acted.

To the cast and crew of SNW: *THANK YOU* for the gifts of all you do.

Keep up the great work!!!!

This is the worst episode of Trek, post 2005, and maybe since TOS. Spock should not be a joke, and that’s exactly what this writing staff is doing with him. It’s sad. Bottom tier Fan Fiction is better than this.

I watched Into Darkness the other day, man, Quinto’s Spock is so good and miles better than SNW Spock, shame.

The thing was, this entire cast auditioned in DISCO season 2 as a serious cast — that’s what sold people on the idea of a Pike series.

Now that they’re intent on turning much of it into light comedy, it’s a completely different proposition. I liked Ethan Peck on Discovery. Has he even gotten a serious character development episode, on that doesn’t involve T’Pring and Chapel, on SNW?

Agree the actor is not the problem. It’s how he’s written. I just cannot believe that Alonso-Meyer’s and Goldsman are Star Trek fans from the early days, because they have no understanding of Spock as a character. Canonical issues aside, I don’t believe this is the same character. I watched the after show and listened to the two show runners talk about their love of Trek, and espousing about what they have done. I’ve been annoyed by their take on classic Trek before.. this was downright insulting to anyone that’s a fan of the original.

Dude how many times do I have to tell you to go back and watch The Cage so that you will understand Spock’s lack of maturity and emotional state at this period of his life.

The showrunners understand this — it’s you who have not done your homework.

I don’t recall you telling me anything, but to that I would just ask… so a single smile before the creatives even decided that Spock was to be emotionless suddenly means that he should become this series’ laughing stock? Losing his Vulcan DNA means he lost his memory of what it is to be Vulcan and intelligence? Did his development from Disco and SNW S1 also get thrown out the window?

He laughs and behaves emotionally throughout that ep. And with The Menagerie, the TOS more mature Spock actually watches his younger immature version at the Court Martial — with Kirk and his crew members also watching — so The Menagerie ep doubles-down that the Pike-era Spock was much less mature and more emotional. He was not the “final product” Spock that we saw in TOS.

It’s all fully consistent, and they are getting it right in SNW. As for DSC, he was freakishly violent in some of that, so that’s part of it too.

PS: I was mistaken, and it was not you who I have repeated this to several times. Sorry!

With all the canonical liberties taken by this series, that would have been an easy one to overlook. I just don’t buy into that a single smile from the first Trek episode ever means they have to slow build to him becoming the Spock we know from TOS. I don’t buy that Spock is this far into his adulthood and unable to control himself.

Yes. Exactly. No one knew what Spock was in The Cage. To base their entire thinking of the character based on one moment from before he was ever fully formed is just downright ridiculous.

And I was thinking the same thing. He still had his memories. He still knew what it was like to BE Vulcan. At worst he would have a little more difficulty keeping the emotions buried. He certainly wouldn’t go full on rebellious teen on us.

To see him subtly struggle would have been much more effective and in line with the character. I just don’t believe Spock is this reliant on his DNA for his intelligence.

Agreed. I do not understand how the people you mention can claim to be such big fans but to not understand the Spock character in any way.

At least they have at least made a full episode telling us this show is an alternate timeline/reboot. But even rebooted Spock is being treated badly.

Yeah. Even as a rebooted character they are really treating him badly. I’m not liking it at all.

Truth. To me, the issues here have nothing to do with Canon, and everything to do with a gross and awful misunderstanding of the character. It’s embarrassingly bad to watch Goldsman and Alonso-Meyer’s drone on about how much they love the character on the Ready Room, and give us a complete reinterpretation of that character.

I’ve only ever seen one episode of the Ready Room. The gushing over every episode and mutual back slapping made me nauseous. Never tuned in again. If that is really what they are saying then either these people are the most out of touch producers ever or they are among the biggest liars in the industry. I honestly do not see how it is possible to claim one loves and understands TOS and then make THIS as your prequel series. There is nothing but disrespect for TOS here. To me this show’s message is “TOS is old, outdated, looks bad and has terrible characters. Our show ‘fixes’ all that.”

I really liked this one! Not perfect and definitely had a few issues but really fun overall. I didn’t like it on the level of Spock Amok but this is probably my second favorite episode of the season. I liked all the Vulcan stuff happening while Spock came off as one of the most emotional humans ever lol. And it was great to have Amanda back and hope we see her again. I always liked her on Discovery as well.

But it’s clearly a divisive episode and not hard to understand why. And I’m not really interested in the CW love triangle they have going on with Spock, T’Pring and Chapel but we knew it was coming. Now that it’s here, it’s like kid Khan to me, whatever I’ll roll with it, but I think they need to just make it clear the show is operating in a different timeline. It obviously is now since Spock and Christine never had a romance among many many other things SNW is tossing in. But this development seems really popular for others who probably never watched or cared about TOS, so YMMV.

But overall it was fun, nothing amazing but good. This season feels a lot more up and down as a whole and not nearly as good as Picard season 3 for me so far, but it’s light and fun and I think for many that’s enough.

Once again, thanks Tiger2! All I needed to read was your first sentence, now I am all set to watch…. in about 60 mins time! Btw, while waiting I was just watching an old Voyager episode and Neelix describes Tom Paris as ” our ship’s pilot”! That is the first time I remember Berman Trek using that term…. just like SNW!

No worries DeanH, can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it.

And actually the word pilot was used quite a bit on Voyager. Paris called himself that all the time. Dude the first scene of the show, the FIRST scene when Janeway is recruiting Paris out of prison, he says the word pilot.

Paris: “Observer? Oh hell, I’m the best pilot you can have.”

And one of my favorite reverse lines is also used by Paris: “I’m a pilot Harry, not a doctor.”

There are plenty more examples.

I mean, so what’s the problem?? Now you know I’m always fair, maybe some fans hated when VOY did it too, I have no idea or memory about it though. But stuff like this is a big shrug to me like everyone getting on Pike’s case for calling Ortegas Erica although its been done by a Captain in every freaking show.

You know I’m not an apologist for any of these shows. When I think they suck, I say so loudly. But one guy here keeps saying know your Star Trek and in this case he’s right. So stuff like this are either people not remembering the classic shows enough or just being hypocrites about it.

Yup, more than a little embarrassed to admit that Voyager is my least watched live-action legacy Trek series, so that is why I missed or forgot all the Paris pilot references.

Will post my overall thoughts RE E5 below, but agree that last night’s episode was good bordering on very good. My third favorite of the season so far. Have to agree RE Spock Chapel relationship. That last scene was not needed, in fact it would have been a much better episode without it.

Here is one reason – I actually liked the Spock T’Pring dynamic from last season and through much of last night’s episode. I thought that Peck and Sandhu really did a great job, so much so I was actually pulling for them to be a couple, even though it would have completely blown up cannon.

Of course the writers decided to stick with the TOS storyline on this one so the Spock T’Pring relationship never had a chance to succeed. As they say – it was fate.

So happy you watched and liked it. We seem to agree on most and that’s it’s good but not amazing. And yeah I could’ve done without the last scene, but ironically this entire episode was probably made just for the final scene alone. I suspect every episode going forward this season will involve their relationship in some way now.

And I really like T’Pring as well but we knew that was going to have major conflict to eventually set up Amok Time; but I don’t think Chapel had to be part of that since she ironically wasn’t even close to a factor in TOS. Oh well.

As for Voyager, it was very common to say pilot although they said helm or helmsman as well, they just went back and forth on it. And I admit, I never noticed or cared until this was pointed out in SNW. Sure I am stickler for things like others, but mostly when it comes to story continuity and not tiny stuff like this which, as proven, has been done on other shows with little to no issue for some reason. But I guess with SNW, it’s a bigger issue at hand for some and think the show is too relaxed on protocols and command structure compared to the other shows.

Haha, I watched Endgame this morning… Dr “Joe” introduced his wife to “Voyager’s pilot” Tom Paris. So much for the naysayers not liking the word pilot.

Btw, now I know what you mean about the problem with prequels. Even though I liked the T’Pring Spock chemistry , it was never written so their relationship was always doomed to fail. Too bad because this would have been another cannon violation I would have gladly accepted. But I guess that was a bridge too far!

Being hung up on pilot was always silly even if there was no proof others did it. But now it makes even less sense. Some people just want to nit pick everything.

And I would’ve had no issue if they change things up either, especially since they already are. But they will probably keep with the broad strokes I imagine and that they will still end up a doomed couple.

What a WONDERFUL and heartwarming episode: funny, touching, witty. And what a likeable cast!!! Just yesterday I watched a Discovery episode. And while I certainly like Discovery, the direct comparison made me realize once again how extremely hyper-neurotic Discovery’s crew is. And Strange New Worlds shows that there is another way.

I genuinely can’t believe how bad the Discovery crew are.

I’m sorry. Not the crew. Or the actors. It was all the writers and the creative team.

I disagree. I mean yes obviously the writers are bad, but the casting on that show is somehow even worse.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I understand that it’s a comedy episode, so things are intentionally silly and overdone, and I understand that an episode that’s played for laughs often makes the characters behave in ways that they wouldn’t actually behave. That’s all par for the course in a comedy episode.

So although I think if Spock’s Vulcan DNA were  actually  removed, he’d behave the way he always does, because his  memory  wasn’t removed. He’s been practicing his control all of his life, and removing his Vulcan genes wouldn’t remove it. But I’m willing to go with the absurd premise for the sake of comedy.

I thought the episode did some wonderful things with the absurd setup. Star Trek often shows us how evil prejudice is, but it’s a message I never tire of, because it’s so very important. It was heart-warming to see Spock claim his humanity and extol his mother’s virtues. Amanda was clearly a better person than either of T’Pring’s parents, and it was wonderful to see him realize that and to celebrate her to her face.

I’m unhappy, though, that BOTH this season’s Spock focus episode AND last season’s Spock focus episode were comedies. It’s fine of have one of them be a comedy — Ethan Peck does comedy very well — but can’t we have a serious Spock focus episode? One that delves into his character a little more than is possible during an absurd episode? I don’t want to see this character become SNW’s Neelix. Spock is important to a great many of us; please write him a serious focus episode for Season 3.

I agree. I think they are taking advantage of the fact that during this time, during The Cage, Spock was all smiles. After TOS, this window will be pretty much closed or limited.

I have no doubt serious Spock episodes will come, at some point, hopefully soon.

So far, I really like all SNW episodes, all episodes since episode 1.

But he WASN’T all smiles; he smiled ONCE! Agreed that it was a memorable smile, but really, they’re running awfully far with that one smile…

Like I said, they are talking advantage of the one big smile! :D

That’s not completely true. He smiled a few more times after The Cage as well. His first scene in WNMHGB the guy smiled.

It was fine-tuning a new character. We might as well have a whole series about why Worf was a tenor in “Encounter at Farpoint” and a deep baritone everafter. Like Klingon ridges, it’s just not something that needed explanation.

Exactly! Spock smiled in the beginning because the production team hadn’t figured out Vulcans yet, not because he was supposed to have been different then.

I don’t disagree with your points, but regardless it’s still canon, correct? So there isn’t much people can say other than they wish they didn’t do it. And clearly they disagree.

If you saw Goldsman on the latest Ready Room episode, he points out the Cage specifically that says helped influence this episode.

That’s the problem. They’re relying on one hour of a failed pilot as something that is completely fixed, and yet they take such extreme liberties with the more developed episodes. I cannot fathom, why they are treating this as such an absolute for the character.

Again, I don’t disagree with this and why I would just avoid prequels altogether and you would have none of this. But AGAIN, we already saw this with Discovery, so people can’t be shocked they would just continue it from there although ironically Spock came off more like Spock on Discovery to me, so go figure?

We never saw such Spock portrayed in such a way on Discovery. It’s not shocking to see this, but it’s maddening and sad. This is not Spock.

I’m not talking about this specific episode which is obviously an extenuating circumstance, just Spock showing more emotions in general on the show like when he laughed in Children of the Comet or became angry in the Gorn episode.

But if you didn’t like those examples too, OK, but those were the type of stuff we saw him in do in Discovery as well.

I get that, he STILL SMILED regardless. So that gives them the room to do what they want.

And I was the guy who pointed out this issue back in Discovery season 2 that they don’t have to follow the Cage because it was a different character at the time and all off that. Well they did it anyway and this was four years ago already. You can’t be shocked about it now right?

It’s just a little too late to be upset about it now.

Not too late when they continue to reference and talk about it. It’s a continued, fundamental misunderstanding of the character.

Well it’s too late in terms of the season being shot. That’s what I mean, the damage has been done. But they can pull back on it later obviously and they probably will. Oh who am I kidding, they will probably just ramp it up more lol.

You weren’t the only one; I pointed out, too. As soon as Roddenberry decided in the second pilot to give Spock the “suppresses emotion” characteristic that Number One had in the first pilot, that became who Spock’s character had always been.

It’s weird that the showrunners insist that Spock has this emotional development based on “The Cage,” but they DON’T insist that NUMBER ONE suppress her emotions, just because SHE did so in “The Cage.” They shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways!

I think they just want to add their own stamp on things. That’s always been the problem with writers when they adapt someone else’s work, they want to add something to the conversation or go a different direction that the book, movie or show they are working with never went in and Spock is a prime candidate being so iconic and known. He’s really the only truly KNOWN character on that show right now when you think about it because all the others, including TOS characters like Uhura and Chapel had very little development on the original show.

But with Spock we already know everything there is to know and I guess for them they have to prove there is in fact more there that we don’t know and why he’s now in a love triangle with Chapel and treat him like he’s in the fifth grade or something.

And it is ironic that Una has one of the biggest personalities on the show when in the Cage she came off like a robot. But again, this is probably about doing something very different with the character like with Pike himself. In the Cage, neither of these people had much of a personality and now they both are very social and basically the life of the party…or Pike’s big dinners.

They did give Una the nickname where fun goes to die but the irony is she actually is a lot of fun lol.

Well… They fixed that a couple of weeks ago when they decided to KU this show to be it’s own unique timeline/reboot. So they are now free to do whatever they want. They can even kill Kirk and it wouldn’t matter one teeny tiny bit anymore. I just wish someone highly placed at the show would just come out and say so blatantly.

I agree obviously. But you know how these things go. Until someone just comes out and says the show is acting in its own separate timeline, this will be debated about ad nauseam regardless.

The KU is literally the perfect example since they in fact said it in the open it’s a completely separate timeline and yet you still had people on this very board arguing that it wasn’t and that it had overwritten the prime timeline even though Discovery made it absolutely clear that wasn’t the case. Of course I would like to think everyone finally understands it didn’t with all the new shows on now and that prime timeline canon is still very much what we saw by the time Voyager ended, but you never know lol.

I never understood why some were so upset with the KU situation. It’s really just a different way to create a reboot. In the end, those films were just Trek reboots. And that is what SNW is. And to me, by extension, all the SH produced shows are. All their shows are in their own plane of existence. That’s been pretty obvious for a while now. All the remains is for some SH official to confirm it. But I don’t think they ever will. Mainly because of their own “sheer effing hubris”.

This. The Cage really wasn’t canonical, either. Parts of it were used in the Menagerie, and those parts are, but the rest of it wasn’t. Yeah, Spock smiled. But the notion that his one time reaction has to be extrapolated upon as a slow burn towards him in TOS a few years later… it’s assinine.

And that smile came before anyone knew what Spock was all about. Even Nimoy didn’t know. He even said the reason he smiled was only because the director told him to. It’s pure lunacy to use that moment as your basic Spock blueprint for the character at that point in time.

Amanda was clearly a better person than either of T’Pring’s parents, and it was wonderful to see him realize that and to celebrate her to her face.

Well, yes, but that’s because both of T’Pring’s parents, especially her mother, were set up a straw men (er, straw Vulcans).

Lwaxana had some “evil mother in law vibes” here and there, particularly in her debut episode, but at least she had some redeeming, endearing qualities. She wasn’t a harridan.

“SNW’s Neelix” is a great way of putting it.

Agreed. They’ve turned him into an idiot, and it’s insulting to the character, and to the audience.

It’s bad to do that to any Star Trek character, but to do that to SPOCK is unconscionable.

Absolutely!

Spock was half human to begin with. He would have had a far better grasp on controlling his emotions than this episode showed.

And I wouldn’t expect any kind of deep dive into any of the characters. The writers on this show just aren’t capable of it.

Exactly! Spock’s DNA has nothing to do with his abilities. Those were built over time. To me, Spock would struggle silently, but he would have been able to get through it. I also think he would have been up front about what happened from the get go, but then they don’t have an episode. This episode is like the most banal kind of fan fiction, and feels like it was written by a 13 year old.

Yes. My understanding of the Spock character is that he might struggle a little more. He would certainly have informed T’Pring. Would not have tried to fool is mother. And there would have been a really good opportunity for his loyalty to Pike to come out in some scene with the two. But no… The writers would rather see Spock made the clown because it’s easier than emotional depth to them.

Have to disagree, for the tone of the episode, this one will probably stand the test of time. This season continues to be a winner for me, and improves on last one.

Hey, and no big fight scene, though the irritating potential PITA Vulcan MIL seemed up for one….

I am very surprised for all the negative criticism. It was a great episode. I truly enjoyed the humor. It is light, refreshing to watch these dynamics between the main cast and special guests.

I agree. If you check the imdb score, it’s rated pretty high (8.4 as this writing). I don’t think this thread represents the true consensus for this episode

Especially after watching several seasons of trauma, tension, stress (Discovery and Picard.) It is nice to watch these type of dynamics.

Some nice moments, a great performance by Ethan Peck who doesn’t receive enough praise for his portrayal of the younger version of the Spock we grew up on, but definitely one of the lesser episodes of SNW. I don’t think I could have tolerated Carol Kane in this episode. Pelia is over the top on her own and this episode was badly in need of a bit of grounding. With the Lower Decks episode still to come I hope that’s it for comedic episodes. I give this episode a C.

Really seemed like a pastiche of a warmed-over Data story, Deja Q, and Horny Teenage Spock from Star Trek III. And I don’t see how they get Spock and Chapel to where they are at the beginning of TOS without Spock being a huge jerk. Also, this show has some of the worst Vulcan characters in Trek. They simply don’t understand Vulcans. Just because something worked in Lower Decks that doesn’t mean it works in another context.

I will agree the horny teen stuff seemed a little too much, I could’ve done without that too. And I also agree they go a too bit overboard with the Vulcans. They shouldn’t all be assholes.

As far as Spock and Chapel, it doesn’t even remotely align with TOS lol. Not even a little bit. In TOS Chapel had feelings for Spock but never other way around. And Spock was still engaged to T’Pring which Chapel knew nothing about. Add to that Chapel was already in a relationship with Korby before she joined the Enterprise. On this show, she hasn’t even met the guy yet.

This show is obviously working in a different timeline because none of it remotely makes sense.

I view it as an alternate timeline created by the Temporal Cold War. I enjoy the series a lot more because in my head, it won’t change the characters I love from TOS or its history.

I loved the episode. I’m hoping the writers will get the Spock-Chapel relationship out of their system and conclude it quickly so we can get back to the final frontier. I also hope in the last half of the season we can move back to the tone of S1.

That’s not head canon anymore. They flat out said so two weeks ago. The only thing missing is for someone involved in the production to come out and admit it.

This is a KU like reboot.

I’ve considered the show a reboot from the very start and even having that in mind going into each episode, seldom does the plot of a given episode remotely make sense. But the uncritical love for this show has compelled me to get my brain checked, because I’m clearly watching or perceiving the show wrong.

No, I think you are seeing it correctly. Even if the producers flat out admitted this was the reboot it is and it lives independently from TOS and the others just on it’s own merits its awful.

All I gotta say is that my non-Trekkie wife liked it.😊😊

I’m actually enjoying this season better than the first . And so is my GF. I personally have liked the writing this season. The actors also seem more comfortable with their roles. This particular episode I thought was strong. Some will disagreeand and thats fine. Imdb score is also pretty high for this episodes so obviously I’m not alone

Spock ringing Chapel’s bell (get it? Cuz she’s a chapel)? Okay. I didn’t see that coming given that TOS Chapel always seemed so thirsty over Spock, who behaved like he could have care less. Perfect example of this was during “Amok Time,” when she brought him some soup and he went apesh*t on her. Also Kirk and McCoy would take perverse pleasure in seeing her pine over Spock.

Overall, the episode was an improvement over last week’s horrible episode. It was also nice seeing Mia Kirshner back as Amanda.

This was the best episode. The scenes between Spock and Amanda were amazing as Spock finally learned just how hard his mom worked for her family. Several off the early books tell pieces of Amanda’s story, and it’s nice to her onscreen as a woman who you do not mess with.I like how Pike stepped in as the father figure, making sure the dinner was a success. Ethan did a great job playing both human and Vulcan. But the best part was badass Christine Chapel. This lady was the heroine of the hour, not only accepting Spock but fighting for him to exist. And having Uhura and Ortega as her team was fun to watch. Some people like the reviewer may want to write this off as rom-com because there was kissing and cranky in-laws. But this was a show about family and how we support each other, even when we are troubled. It’s about embracing differences. I love T’Pring but I never forget she will become the woman who almost forces Spock to kill Kirk to end an engagement – an engagement that we now know her family didn’t want in the first place. T’Pring can take care of herself.

I’m guessing that at some point in this season or next season, Spock is going to choose to ditch Chapel and go back to T’Pring to fulfill his Vulcan obligations. Chapel will be sad and will go off to study archeological medicine where she will become engaged to Korby.

She doesn’t need to. This is all a brand new universe.

Well I liked it, even though it’s very early to be retreading similar ground as Spock Amok. I like the lighthearted episodes of Trek and we need them for balance. Disco is very serious and Lower Decks is a flat out comedy, so SNW weaving between the two feels right.

The cast is very charming, Peck did very well modulating being a human acting trying to act like a Vulcan. I’m rusty on my Nurse Chapel in TOS but I don’t recall seeing anything that quite jibes with where this episode takes them. But honestly my bigger concern is down to how Trek’s track record with romance is fairly dire. While the shows occasionally managed some stellar one-off love affairs, the majority of long-term pairings haven’t rung true at all.

Apparently 40 Eridani B is a white dwarf, so an extremely old star that no longer performs nuclear fusion. Not surprising that the intelligent inhabitants of that system decided to go elsewhere.

I’m enough of a geek to know that this episode borrows from the fan fiction stories “Ni Var” and “The Procrustean Petard,” both published in short story collection in the mid-1970’s.

Great episode! Loved learning more about Vulcan culture 🖖

I don’t know. Why are they wasting time making episodes like this? And soon the musical one and then the cartoony one. It’s not the Star Trek I wanted from this and a disappointment after season 1. Am I the only one who watches it more out of obligation than pleasure now?

No, you’re not the only one. I really wish it was ‘must see’ tv for me, but it isn’t.

Not to the point of obligation, but I honestly don’t even anticipate it each week. Sometime on Wednesday night or Thursday morning I remember with the thought, “that’s right, I’ll have something to watch tomorrow”.

I’ve never watched Star Trek with the expectation that every episode must be made with the lofty intentions and highest standards of an Inner Light, The Visitor or The City on the Edge of Forever. Star Trek has always been about telling eclectic stories, so I appreciate the attempt to do variety here even with a reduced episode count. Taking the season in as a whole, I think such stories provide balance. We have subsisted well enough for years on a diet of baseline anomalies and trite allegories of the week and the lighter fare, supplemented by the occasional stone cold classics (most of which are pretty serious affairs).

You may not be doing this, but I’ve noticed a number of fans have treated overtly comedic episodes with some derision over the years. Sometimes it’s felt like if there’s not a Tribble or Q involved, any Trek episode that’s light-hearted is in danger of being dismissed as lesser than. I think that’s a real disservice to the people who work to make it – good comedy is incredibly hard to pull off and even more subjective than good drama. It’s never rewarded on the same level as serious narrative and yet making someone laugh is as meaningful a reaction as making someone sad, while being much more difficult to achieve.

When people ask me what the best episode of Voyager is, I will always champion Someone to Watch Over Me. Making romantic comedy work is a huge challenge, but Voyager of all shows did it with flying colors.

I’ll say this in case you’re misreading Imdb credits going forward. Lyn’s previous Trek writing credit was for ONE episode of Lower Decks, wej Duj. The ten writing credits listed on Imdb are for serving as a story editor on the ten episodes of season 2. She says she also served as Lower Decks “canon consultant.”

I really enjoyed the broad comedy in the episode and Ethan was magnetic as ever. But this episode really does no favours for Spock. He doesn’t trust his fiancée to the point where she decides they need a break- and he responds by immediately kissing/sleeping with somebody else. It’s totally at odds with the Spock that we know and love.

More broadly, speaking on SNW as a whole, I really don’t like that we only get to see Chapel in the context of her relationship to Spock. Even her arc in the “The Broken Circle” was in service to the idea that Spock has feelings for her. It’s 2023 and it’s about time she becomes a fully rounded character and not just defined by her attraction to a man! We *hear* about her experiences in The Klingon War and we see *brief* glimpses of her being a physician- but it’s enough. There is more to Christine Chapel but the writers and producers seem to be content with making her a tragic romantic heroine who is just going to end up pining for Spock.

Overall a fun and entertaining episode, probably the third best of the five. I would give this one a 7.5 or higher, mostly because of Ethan Peck’s stellar performance. Both as the usual Spock in the first part of the show, then switching to being human in the rest of the episode. Laughing at jokes and eating and enjoying the smell and taste of bacon were just some of the classic scenes. I laughed out loud when M’Benga, Pike and Spock are in sickbay and after being told to get back his sea legs, Spock responds with a wry smile, “Aye Aye Captain!” and M’Benga sadly shakes his head in dismay.

That said, for whatever reason I am not a huge fan of the Chapel Spock overt relationship, even though it does (at least for me) explain why Chapel is “in love” with Spock in TOS. The episode would have been great if the editors had cut the last scene completely. Chapel clearly doing whatever it takes to help save Spock and return him to normal – with her feelings being unrequited. Oh well, that is today’s Hollywood.

Perhaps the main reason why I feel this way (and I know this sounds a little ridiculous and it flies directly in the face of cannon), I actually really like the Spock/T’Pring relationship. Sandhu and Peck do an excellent job making the audience believe in their relationship, especially last season and it is hard not to cheer for them.

That is the problem with prequels, it was never written so their relationship was always doomed to fail. Too bad because this would have been a cannon violation I would have gladly accepted. But I guess that was a bridge too far.

Okay, bring on next week! Too bad we are halfway through the season. With the two strikes, who know when S3 production will resume so after this year it looks like we may have a long wait for more SNW.

My only nitpick was it seemed weird to me if this planet was close to Vulcan why the Vulcan’s hadn’t surveyed it sooner and noticed the interdimensional gateway thing? We know they continue to maintain their science fleet even after the forming of the Federation/Starfleet. Perhaps it can be explained as they didn’t think it worth their time.

Anyway, that really is just a nitpick, I really like this episode. Peck is great, the whole cast is great. Really enjoying this show.

This episode so highlights the difference between classic and Kurtzman Trek.

I am all for Trek having comedic episodes and comedic moments. I loved Trouble with Tribbles, I Mudd, A Piece of the Action, etc. What do all those comedic episodes have in common? They set up a silly scenario and have our characters act against it. Never do our Trek heroes come out of their “characters” and act like bumbling fools.

So what happens differently in Kurtzman Trek? The writers think that our characters need to act like idiots. Look at the Tribble Short Trek! Look at this episode… They tried to derive comedy by making Spock an idiot, and don’t get me started on the cliche mother-in-law and henpecked husband (a Vulcan male emasculated too in Trek).

I was not against showing a human Spock, hey, Voyager did it with B’Elanna, but her character never acted out of character and just plain rediculous.

If you take all the cannon issues out of Strange New Worlds, season one was pretty good. Season two so far has drastically fallen short.

There are *plenty* of 90s Trek episodes where the cast act like complete buffoons. Have you not seen “Move Along Home” or “Fascination” or “Up The Long Ladder” or “Singularity” or “The Naked Now”?

Let’s not pretend this is a new era exclusive issue.

The only redeeming bit in this episode was Spock getting violent at the crumbs on the table.

This was Spock’s Brain bad. Spock’s Genome?

I doubt very much that the Enterprise has farm animals and a butcher that kills them for Pike to use in his dishes. Likewise, I doubt that a Starship which mission is to travel farther than any other vessel in Starfleet has been receives regular shipments of perishables such as bacon.

If the bacon is replicated, can it really be said that it came from an animal?

Can a Vulcan really be considered to have eaten meat if the meat in question comes was created digitally cobbled together using a protein sequencer, or however it is that a replicator works?

Lab grown meat is a thing and there was a big article about it this week. My guess is that if the technology is a few steps above the ground-floor now, it’s highly possible that it could be in use by the 23rd century. It does use animal products, but it helps avoid the slaughter process. And it can be grown and regrown using the base elements. It could be possible to do out in space that way.

I’m certain the bacon in SNW is as fake as the burger Una had in DIS.

• The Inventory

Star Trek: Discovery Would Really Like You to Know What It's About

Discovery 's final quest continues in "jinaal," giving it an opportunity to yell loudly what the show has always been about, for those in the back.

Star Trek: Discovery has always been about one thing: at the end of it all, the only thing that matters, the only thing that will bring light in dark times, and save the day, is a connection and understanding forged between people, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done. Sometimes, it’s more subtle about reminding us of this than others. This week was definitely one of the others.

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“Jinaal” is quick to get going after last week’s explosive two-episode premiere gave Michael and the crew a TNG -throwback mission to stop the mysterious Moll and L’ok getting their hands on Progenitor tech—and use their leg up on the duo wisely to get on to the Trill homeworld as soon as they can, in the search of the next clue to the Progenitor puzzle. It turns out, they’re actually looking for a person, so much as they are the clue—the titular Jinaal, a host of the Bix symbiont, who worked with the Romulan science team that discovered the technology’s existence eight centuries prior, at the height of the Dominion War .

Bad news: Trill don’t live for 800 years, and Jinaal is very, very dead. Good news: symbionts are much more lasting, and it turns out the Bix symbiont is still around with its host, Kalzara. Better(?) news: after answering a very simple riddle, Kalzara agrees to undergo a Trill ritual known as the Zhian’tara—a process seen in DS9 and Discovery that allows the consciousness of a past joined Trill to be put in another body for a period of time. After Dr. Culber eagerly accepts to be Jinaal’s organic AirBnB, the transfer is done, and Michael and Book are off on Culber-Jinaal’s tail to go find the clue.

If all this sounds like it’s going at an alarming pace, it is and it isn’t. While “Jinaal” certainly gets going very quickly, there is both not much else to the episode and also a big breath and pause, because Discovery gets ready to lay its forever thesis on thick . All of this—all of it, not just the main thrust of the episode but its parallel stories aboard the Discovery with new first officer Commander Rayner, and back at Federation HQ with now-Ambassador Saru—is in service of people facing something, momentarily struggling, and then realizing “oh, this is much more solvable when everyone talks to each other and connects. Hooray!” And like we said, not only does the episode slow itself down to make this point clear, it makes this point plainly and repeatedly for the rest of the episode.

Look, this is not necessarily a bad thing—it’s actually been for the most part very beneficial for Discovery for it to embrace that this idea, an intrinsic aspect of Star Trek ’s hope for the future, is the core of its identity. Star Trek ’s ideal is people from across different species, backgrounds, gender identities, linguistic barriers, adversarial pasts, even across lines of understanding of radically different forms of sentient life, coming together in the face of evil and standing against it as one. Coalescing itself around that idea has given Discovery both a certainty and a confidence in recent seasons that at its most frustrating points, it deeply lacked. But god, sometimes you just gotta chill on it having every character in every storyline of an episode saying that idea to each other back and forth.

We see it on Trill, when it turns out Jinaal is leading Michael and Book into a nest of invisible, barb-shooting giant creatures—a test to see if, when faced with unintentional aggression, they reply in turn or seek to find a peaceful solution so every party gets what they want (hazard a wild guess which one Michael does, and therefore proves herself worthy of inheriting the next clue to the Progenitor tech). We see it back on Discovery , when the irascible Rayner, ordered by Michael to do one-on-one social introductions with the senior crew, treats everyone so brusquely that even Tilly has to snap at him and tell him to stop being a jerk trying to prove himself and actually get to know the people he’s now working with (Rayner’s “this meeting will last with you saying 20 words about yourself, max” attitude does at least let us give some of Discovery ’s awkwardly barely known crewmembers pockets of personality though, that’s nice). And we even see it back at Federation HQ, when Saru’s first day as an ambassador sees him forced to reckon with the political worries of whether or not his engagement to T’Rina will upset her career, after he learns of potential pushback to her husband-to-be from Vulcan purists.

In the end, all of these storylines end the same way: our heroes embrace understanding and seeking connection over aggression and division, and realize their problems are best solved when everyone talks to each other. Michael and Book get the clue (although we learn at the every end of the episode that Trill’s famously tight security of guys in red robes going “I dunno man, I’m just here to ask you a riddle” is in fact not so tight, after Mol sneaks in Guardian disguise to plant some kind of tracking device on Adira), having convinced the creatures and Jinaal alike that their intentions are peaceful. Rayner eventually realizes, after a drink and Tilly’s further prodding, that the only way he’ll get the respect of the Discovery crew that he had with his former one on the Antares will come when he offers himself openly in respect to them. And of course, Saru and T’Rina’s brief disagreement over their protectiveness of each other is quickly resolved when they actually talk to each other and make their feelings clear, instead of making assumptions and debating over it internally.

“Jinaal” then is not a bad episode. It’s breezy, it’s got some fun moments, Wilson Cruz gets to loosen up a little playing host to Jinaal’s consciousness for a while, and while the action here isn’t quite as on the scale of the premiere’s shootouts and chases, it’s still really fun (one of the best things about Discovery ’s jump to the 32nd century has been about how it plays with near-instantaneous, localized beaming, and it’s used greatly here). It just happens to be a distinctly unsubtle one in ways the show has only rarely dipped into being in the past. Nothing particularly advances here beyond the team getting the next bit of the Progenitor puzzle and moving on, there’s no real character work beyond little kernels setting things up to come, nor are Discovery ’s oft-hammered-home themes particularly challenged here: they are just repeated, very, very clearly, across multiple fronts.

Hopefully now that it’s sure everyone’s paying attention, it can hammer home those themes a little more gracefully as the adventure continues.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel , Star Wars , and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV , and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who .

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Episode 3 Recap

Episode 3 of Star Trek: Discovery, sees Captain Burnham and her crew visiting Trill to search for more clues.

Star Trek: Discovery

Quick links, what happened in star trek: discovery episode 3, how does star trek: discovery episode 3 end.

Episode 3 of Star Trek: Discovery continues on Paramount Plus , after airing with the first two episodes last week. The sci-fi spin-off series will consist of ten episodes, and will continue to air once a week for the rest of the fifth and final season. The show began in 2017, and Season 5 will bring the successful series to an end. Star Trek: Discovery stars Sonequa Martin-Green, Callum Keith Rennie, Doug Jones and Anthony Rapp.

The third episode of Star Trek: Discovery 's final season sees the team arrive on Trill, and Captain Burnham, Book, and Culber must pass a dangerous test to prove themselves worthy of discovering the next clue. Elsewhere, Adira reconnects with Gray and Saru's first day as ambassador is complicated by his engagement to T'Rina.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Episode 2 Recap

In Star Trek: Discovery episode 3, the crew prepare to travel to Trill to seek out the next quest clue. Culber and Book brief Captain Michael Burnham on the potential threats, with some new background details on Moll courtesy of Book. Burnham’s criminal ex is trying hard to get his life back, and he wants in on the Trill landing party even though he isn’t a Starfleet member.

Adira and Tilly identify a Trill spot pattern on the map puzzle piece, and it leads them to a 24th-century Trill named Jinaal. (the name of this episode) Captain Rayner comes aboard, and Burnham orders her new first officer to get to know the rest of the crew. Stamets is focusing on trying to unlock the secrets of Dr. Vellek’s old tricorder, and he ignores Adira’s clear stress after seeing Gray again. Things are running relatively smoothly until the crew arrive on Trill, and Burnham solves the riddle quickly and heads down to the Caves of Mak’ala with Adira, Culber, and Book, and they meet an old Trill.

Jinaal reveals that the next clue is close by, and takes Burnham and Book with him. Upon their arrival at the canyon, Jinaal tells the group about how he, Dr. Vellek and four other scientists found the Progenitor technology, but they decided it was too dangerous to hand over to the Federation in the middle of the Dominion War.

Burnham and the team end up being hunted by giant “Intronok” predators, and once they arrive at the location of the clue, a monster gets in their way.

Back at Starfleet, Ambassador Saru is settling into his new office with the help of his fiancé, T'Rina. They plan to make their wedding announcement before heading into a resource meeting, where Saru argues for more allocations to the small worlds he represents, which successfully ends in a compromise with others who are concerned.

T’Rina’s aide, Duvin tells Saru that he is concerned about how the wedding announcement will affect the Ni’Var politics, but when Saru raises the issue with T'Rina, she doesn’t react well.

Back on Trill, Book attempts to use his glowing forehead empathy connection, but all he gets from the monster is that it’s rather annoyed. Book then tries some distracting techniques, while Burnham heads to the rock with the clue symbol on it to retrieve the big prize. However, things do not go as planned, and they get hit. They are subsequently pinned down as a second monster shows up to cause havoc.

Burnham holsters her phaser, showing the utmost respect to the Intronoks, who are now calming down somewhat. Book does the same and communicates that they just want to leave as they slowly back off. Sonn after, they find Dr. Hugh Jinaal on a rock, quipping, “I see you survived.”

Turns out, Jinaal drew them to the nest after suggesting they arm their phasers. By connecting them instead of shooting, they have passed another test. Jinaal was willing to let them die just to see if there was “goodness” in them. However, they did survive, which results in them winning the prize: the clue and the second map piece, which was hidden under a different rock.

After Culber gets swapped back, he heads back to the ship to recover from being possessed. When Burnham catches up with him in the lounge, they contemplate the spiritual implications of the journey they are on, and they seek the technology of the gods.

Back at HQ, Saru apologizes to T’Rina for all the politics that were getting in the way, and they make up with one another.

The episode ends in the Trill caves with Bix returning to the symbiont pool and Adira and Gray saying farewell. Turns out, Moll is disguised as a Trill, and she puts something onto Adira’s sleeve before the ensign beams back to the Disco.

Star Trek 4: Paramount Needs To Let This Sequel Die

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 2 Recap

Warning: The following recap of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 2, contains spoilers.

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery continues with its second episode on Paramount+, with the series embarking on an epic hunt across the galaxy for a valuable artifact. However, a new villainous pair is one step of the USS Discovery as its crew faces major personal crossroads. 

Previously on Star Trek: Discovery , Starfleet Command’s black ops official Doctor Kovich assigned Captain Michael Burnham and the USS Discovery to recover a Romulan diary with confidential information. Accompanied by the USS Antares and its commanding officer Captain Rayner, Burnham reunited with her former paramour Cleveland “Book” Booker, but the ensemble was unable to stop criminals Moll and L’ak from making off with the diary. Kovich revealed the diary contained information about the Progenitors, including clues about their technology’s whereabouts. Here is a recap of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5’s second episode, “Under the Twin Moons.”

The Repercussions of the Season Premiere

For ordering the Antares to fire at Moll and L’ak’s vessel, inadvertently causing an avalanche that not only allowed the culprits to escape but endangered a nearby city, Rayner faces a tribunal at the highest levels of the United Federation. During the tribunal, Burnham admits on the record that she believed Rayner made a grave mistake that needlessly put thousands of lives at risk and created the diplomatic fallout the Federation is currently facing. After learning more about the diary and its writer, along with information provided by Sylvia Tilly, Burnham pinpoints where she and the Discovery need to go to intercept Moll and L’ak.

For his continued support on the matter, Admiral Charles Vance clears Book to be assigned to the Discovery, rather than sending him back to his penal rehabilitation facility for his own brash actions in Star Trek: Discovery Season 4. Book agrees to this arrangement and continues his discussion with Burnham about their relationship before researching more about Moll and L’ak. As he awaits his determination from the tribunal, Rayner is assigned to the Discovery for further notice and quietly removed from his command of the Antares in the interim.

The Return of Action Saru

Joining Burnham on the planet’s surface is Saru, with the two old friends finding the environment seemingly pleasant but, after encountering the skeletons of previous grave robbers, deadlier than they anticipated. As the two proceed together cautiously, Saru reflects on Burnham transitioning from mutineer to redeemed Starfleet officer to the inspirational captain of a starship. Burnham reveals she knows that Saru will resign from his Starfleet commission after completing this mission in order to accept the diplomatic job and be closer to his partner T’Rina.

Approaching an ancient temple, Burnham and Saru trigger its advanced defense systems, with dangerous robots activating. Rayner helps Tilly and Adira Tal decipher clues on text engraved on nearby stone structures, with Saru successfully destroying the robots with his Kelpien physiology. Through his own research, Book is able to contact Moll and L’ak, who mock him, revealing they know how important the Romulan diary and its contents are before ending the transmission.

Changing of the Guard

Burnham and Saru discover Moll and L’ak already beat the Discovery to this location, defacing a stone obelisk to prevent anyone following them from reading the clues it contained. Burnham is able to bring back a small piece from the site, revealing it to be one piece of a five-piece puzzle that will create a map leading to whatever the Progenitors have left behind. As they go over the clues with their puzzle piece, Adira realizes that it points to their own home planet of Trill, with the Discovery moving to obtain the next piece of the map.

The tribunal finds Rayner guilty and not only maintains his removal from the Antares, but seek to force him into an early retirement from Starfleet altogether. With Saru officially stepping down from his position as the Discovery’s First Officer, Burnham offers the vacant role to Rayner, giving his place in Starfleet a second chance, just as she had received years ago. Reviewing his recorded conversation with Moll and L’ak, Book determines that Moll is from Kwejian and related to his mentor, making them the last two known survivors from their planet and fueling his desire to find her.

'Star Trek: Discovery' opens its 5th and final season in unremarkable fashion (Red Directive recap)

Warning: Spoilers ahead for "Star Trek: Discovery" season 5, episode 1

Well, here we are. Again. It's the fifth and final time around for "Star Trek: Discovery" and the single biggest question every sci-fan will be asking themselves is, will this season actually be any good. The tragic thing is, no one can really remember what happened in season 4 and that speaks directly to the fact that "Discovery" is not exactly a high-scoring show when it comes to rewatchability.

It's been two years and two weeks, give or take a day, since we last saw the crew of the USS Discovery risk everything to save all life in the universe, again. During that time, we've seen a lot of sci-fi, both awesome and awful, including two seasons of " Picard " and " Strange New Worlds ," the third and final season of " The Orville ," season 1 of " Andor ," "The Book of Boba Fett," "Ahsoka" and the less said about "Obi-Wan Kenobi," the better. If you're wondering where to see all that Trek, check out our Star Trek streaming guide for Paramount Plus and more.

Not to mention, the vastly underrated second season of "Invasion" and "Halo" seasons 1 and 2, plus, the first mind-blowing season of "Silo" the second and sadly last season of " Avenue 5 " and two seasons of " For All Mankind ." The point is that the standard has, for the most part, been refreshingly high. And frankly before we even get into season 5 of "Discovery," it's worth remembering that what executive producers and showrunners Alex Kurtzman  and Michelle Paradise have given us up until now, has not exactly been a consistently high quality of sci-fi writing. In fact, it's been rather disappointing.

Related: 5 things Star Trek: Discovery season 5 needs to fix

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Are we in-store for another cookie-cutter season of what's-in-the-box plot threads that deliver misdirected build ups with unsatisfying pay offs...you know like we have for the past two seasons plus all three seasons of "Picard"..? Even "Andor," despite its peak and trough-style of repetitive set-piece storytelling, was impressive and that was down to how well those set pieces had been fleshed out along with well written character development and dialogue. Less can very easily be so much more. 

Moreover, now we're in the 32nd century and we've seen that transporter technology can be used to replace stairs and even change outfits, so to be perfectly honest, there really isn't a single story idea that cannot be solved by a simple combination of transporter and replicator technology. Not to mention smartmatter. Ah, hello smartmatter, my old friend. Because this is what happens when you throw three seasons of a "Star Trek" series 1,164 years into the future.

Regardless, it would seem that within the story, between four and six months have passed since the events of last season , where you may remember, the United Federation of Planets was desperately trying to save all life as we know from being accidentally exterminated by species 10-C, all while Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle) was still hell bent on using the illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator to destroy the dark matter anomaly. Book (David Ajala) gets killed when his ship explodes then bought back to life before he faces repercussions for siding with Tarka. General Ndoye (Phumzile Sitole) seems to get away scot-free despite sabotaging the Discovery's warp drive and everyone lives happily ever after. 

Coming in at nearly 60 minutes long, the premiere episode is titled "Red Directive" and drops at the same time as the second episode, entitled "Under The Twin Moons." Michelle Paradise wrote the former, which could explain why it's so dull, and Olatunde Osunsanmi directed. The latter was written by Alan B. McElroy and directed by Douglas Aarniokoski, so fingers the second installment might be a bit better. Aarniokoski directed the season 3 premiere episode of "Picard" and while the rest of that was a disappointing, drawn out, nostalgia-fueled, 10-episode long epilogue to another series that ended three decades ago, the premiere installment was actually okay. 

The gang seems mostly all here, including Lt. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and Adira (Blu del Barrio) and there are some characters who don't seem to have made it back, some of whom will be very much missed, like Grudge, while others won't be. No sign of Zora yet either. It's also entirely likely that the amazing talents of Callum Keith Rennie, who plays a Starfleet Captain named Rayner, will be spectacularly underused, much like Todd Stashwick was in season 3 of "Picard."

Credit to the production team though, as they're are really making the most of their Volume-esque video wall soundstage. There are a couple of interesting choices in terms of editing, much like there were in the second season premiere where Alex Kurtzman showed us what he'd learned in the Vince Gilligan School of Cinematography. It's doubtful we'll ever see them again, just like we didn't before. 

To conclude then, the opening episode of the final season "Star Trek: Discovery" is a far, far cry from strong openings that this show has demonstrated it's capable of in the past. And that's a sentence we've had to write far too many times. The TNG throwback right at the end is...well, disappointing, mostly because of the extent that nostalgic fan service has been dialed up since the first episode of Nu-Trek aired in September 2017. However, it could still provide an interesting story thread — we will just have to wait and see.

The fifth and final season of "Star Trek: Discovery" and every episode of every "Star Trek" show — with the exception of "Star Trek: Prodigy" — currently streams exclusively on Paramount Plus in the US while "Prodigy" has found a new home o n Netflix.  

Internationally, the shows are available on Paramount Plus in Australia, Latin America, the UK and South Korea, as well as on Pluto TV in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland on the Pluto TV Sci-Fi channel. They also stream on Paramount Plus in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In Canada, they air on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and stream on Crave.

Screen Rant

Sugar episode 3 recap: 6 biggest theories, clues & reveals.

Sugar episode 3 not only makes new revelations about the overarching murder mystery but also hints at what the show's big twist will be all about.

Warning! This post contains spoilers for Sugar episode 3.

• Sugar episode 3 uncovers Olivia's disappearance and Clifford's death, hinting at Sugar's origins and who he works for.
• The show continues its compelling murder mystery formula, with eerie developments setting the stage for an unexpected twist.
• Melanie reveals the truth about Clifford's death, hinting at Olivia's involvement while exploring the complexities of her relationship with Sugar.

Sugar episode 3 reveals the truth about Olivia's disappearance and Clifford's death while also hinting at the titular character's origins and who he works for. Starring Collin Farrell , Apple TV+'s Sugar presents itself as a crime thriller that hooks audiences with a compelling murder mystery in its opening episodes and keeps them guessing till its final moments. Even in its third episode, the show continues using the same formula, but some eerie developments in its overarching story seemingly set the stage for an unexpected twist.

In its opening moments, the show's episode 3 features conversations between Sugar and Melanie, where Melanie finally blurts out everything she knows about Olivia. Things, however, take a strange turn when Sugar attends a gathering of other spies like him and gets a psychological evaluation from Ruby. Although the episode does not provide any affirmative details about the main character, it drops enough clues to leave room for speculation.

Genius Sugar Twist Theory Completely Changes Colin Farrell's Show (& Apple Hinted At It 2 Years Ago)

6 sugar helps melanie & teresa evade stallings and his men, sugar wins melanie's trust.

In Sugar episode 3's opening moments, Carmen's sister, Teresa, calls Melanie and tricks her into visiting her home by saying that some men came looking for Clifford Carter. Melanie falls into the trap and visits her, only to realize that the men are still there. Melanie attempts to handle the situation by claiming that she would have reported Clifford's murder to law enforcement if she knew about it, but Stallings refuses to believe her. He threatens her to reveal the truth, claiming that he will harm Teresa if she does not tell him about Olivia's location.

Fortunately for Melanie, Sugar smells danger after his partner, Charlie, tells him about Melanie's visit to an unknown apartment. With what follows, Sugar tricks the men into leaving Teresa's apartment and gets Teresa and her kids out of harm's way by making them leave the site. He then leaves the location with Melanie to ensure Stallings and his men do not question her again.

Sugar Cast & Character Guide

5 melanie reveals the truth about clifford carter's death, melanie finally discloses what she knows about olivia's disappearance.

Melanie previously denied knowing much about Olivia's disappearance and kept insisting she would eventually return. However, several details in Sugar episode 2 suggest she knew way more than she was letting on. After shrouding the truth, Melanie finally starts trusting Sugar and tells him everything she knows about Olivia. She says that she and her organization helped several women like Teresa and Carmen who were involved in toxic, abusive relationships. Olivia, too, was working with her and had even become close friends with Carmen.

Considering how Melanie was the first person to arrive at the crime scene after Clifford's death, she likely helped Olivia escape and hide.

Owing to this, when Olivia found out that Carmen's husband, Carter, had killed her, she could not help but avenge her death by shooting Carter in the head . For obvious reasons, Olivia asked Melanie for help after the incident. They would have reported the incident to the police, but Olivia was too worried about how it would impact her family's reputation. Therefore, instead of reporting the crime, they put Clifford's body inside a body bag and hid it in Olivia's car's trunk.

Melanie's confession seems to confirm that Olivia was responsible for Clifford's death. However, it does not reveal Olivia's whereabouts and whether she is still alive. Considering how Melanie was the first person to arrive at the crime scene after Clifford's death, she likely helped Olivia escape and hide. But despite helping her cover up the crime, Melanie may still not know where Olivia is. The episode also does not reveal who moved Clifford Carter's body from Olivia's car.

4 Sugar Reluctantly Attends A Gathering That Includes Others Like Him

The polyglots at the party seem to have a lot in common with sugar.

Throughout the first two episodes of the Apple TV+ show, Sugar primarily focuses on his job and helping those in need. However, in episode 3, he forces himself to attend a polyglot convention despite not being in the mood to socialize. He gets a warm welcome at the get-together, which includes people from different backgrounds and ethnicities. Ruby is also a part of the party, but the episode later reveals that her reasons for attending the gathering are far different from others.

Although the invitation for the gathering suggests that it involves people who can speak multiple languages, like Sugar, it seems like there is more to it than meets the eye. As soon as Sugar shows up at the venue, the other members of the community just freeze for a few brief moments before Sugar acknowledges them. This scene alone establishes that everyone at the gathering is as strange as Sugar, hinting that something more is at play.

3 Sugar Gets Vulnerable With An Old Friend

Sugar and henry talk about their most "human" experiences.

At the polyglot convention, Sugar does not seem to be interested in interacting with most other attendees. However, one of them, named Henry, turns out to be his old friend, whom Sugar feels comfortable with. The two get down to talk about what they have been up to before Sugar tells him about his experience at Japan's Shibuya Crossing. He recalls how incredible he felt when he saw hundreds of people at the Shibuya Crossing. The way he describes his feelings almost suggests that he is not human and is learning to become one .

While it may be too soon to draw any conclusions about what Sugar is, this scene seemingly implies that he may either be an alien or an angel . How he ended up on the planet and what he intends to achieve will likely be explored in future episodes. However, the implied supernatural connotations in this scene explain why Sugar seems too altruistic to be human. It also highlights why he questions his own feelings in the show's earlier episodes and cannot get drunk no matter how much he consumes alcohol.

New Sugar episodes release every Friday on Apple TV+.

2 Kenny Uncovers New Information About Sugar's Past For David

David and kenny track down sugar's mother.

Worried that Sugar would unearth some of their own secrets, David and his partner, Kenny, continue their own investigation by digging into Sugar's past. To progress their investigation, Kenny seduces a man from the National Security Agency and asks him to get information on Sugar. After learning that Sugar has always been an overperformer, Kenny also finds Sugar's mother's whereabouts. In the next episode, the two will likely set out to meet her to find out what he does and who he works for.

David later arranges a meeting with his father to tell him about everything he has uncovered. He tries to discuss his suspicion of Sugar's involvement in a polyglot society, but his father does not take him too seriously. His father, Bernie, also seems deadset on getting him involved in another movie, even though Sugar episode 2 confirmed that many women have accused David of harassment.

1 Ruby Conducts An Evaluation Test At The Party

Sugar's notes deeply concern ruby.

One of the most intriguing bits of Sugar episode 3 is when Ruby conducts an evaluation test on all the attendees of the party. The fact that all the people of the polyglot club report to her suggests she holds a higher rank than all of them in whatever organization they work for. Sugar's evaluation begins with Ruby going through the notes in his journal. She seems immensely bothered by the fact that Sugar is working on Olivia's case when she keeps warning him not to. Meanwhile, Sugar attempts to keep his guard up by claiming that he only uses the journal to note down his observations.

While it is possible that Sugar and the others polyglots are merely a part of a secretive government organization and have gone through vigorous training to solve crimes and find missing people, it seems strange that they are not even expected to be human.

However, after going through his notes, Ruby discovers that he has written more about his feelings and less about the case . She also remarks how he has only taken up the case because Olivia reminds him of his sister, Djen. Concerned about Sugar's well-being, Ruby reminds him that their job is to observe and report instead of getting attached to the people they are working with. Her warnings and reminders in Sugar episode 3 further reinstate that something supernatural is at play.

While Sugar and the other polyglots may be merely a part of a secretive government organization and have gone through vigorous training to solve crimes and find missing people, it seems strange that they are not even expected to be human. Ruby also keeps addressing an enigmatic higher power, Dr. Vickers, whom Sugar has been hesitant about visiting. Hopefully, Sugar 's upcoming episodes will reveal more about the titular character's true identity, purpose, and motivations.

Sugar (2024)

“Sugar” is a contemporary, unique take on one of the most popular and significant genres in literary, motion picture and television history: the private detective story. Academy Award nominee Colin Farrell stars as John Sugar, an American private investigator on the heels of the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Siegel, the beloved granddaughter of legendary Hollywood producer Jonathan Siegel. As Sugar tries to determine what happened to Olivia, he will also unearth Siegel family secrets; some very recent, others long-buried.

'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Season 1 Recap: What to Remember Before Season 2

Everything you need to know ahead of warping into Season 2 later this week!

Over the years, the Star Trek universe has expanded and given audiences fantastic T.V. shows. Early ones like The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine , and Voyager paved the way for new platforms for the Star Trek Universe to play with. And Star Trek is no stranger to having episodes that seemed far out but were indeed ahead of their time. Audiences are on the edge of their seats as the newer shows debut. The Discovery spin-off Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is one of the many brilliant series audiences can't get enough of. We follow Captain Christopher Pike ( Anson Mount ) and his crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise as they explore the galaxies and discover strange new worlds. We see many classic characters from The Original Series , like Spock ( Ethan Peck ), Uhura ( Celia Rose Gooding ), and Nurse Chapel ( Jess Bush ), plus some new ones you won't want to miss. Before warping into Season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , here's everything you need to know about Season 1.

Before we jump into Strange New Worlds , a reminder of something significant that happened on Discovery : Christopher Pike touches a time crystal and sees his future, where saves the lives of other Starfleet personnel but ends up trapped in a room of radiation poisoning after a baffle plate rupture on a training vessel. Then time jumps to Pike being what we saw in the original series: disfigured and in a brain-wave operating wheelchair. This, of course, causes severe trauma for Pike.

RELATED: You Can Watch All of 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Season 1 for Free

Maximum Impulse as the Crew Soars Through Space

In the first episode of Strange New Worlds , Pike is still at odds with his fate and trying to escape his responsibilities by hiding on his ranch in Montana, making one of his signature breakfasts for Captain Batel ( Melanie Scrofano ), and ditching calls from Starfleet. But finally, someone comes; Admiral Robert April ( Adrian Holmes ) comes to see Pike in a shuttle and delivers the news that his number one, Una Chin-Riley ( Rebecca Romijn ), has gone missing with a couple of Starfleet Officers. So, of course, Pike doesn't hesitate and heads for the Enterprise.

But Pike can't go alone. He'll need his science officer Spock to accompany him. For Spock's shore leave, he's decided to spend time with his partner T'Pring ( Gia Sandhu ), who had just proposed, and the two were about to engage in a mating ritual before Pike called. Nevertheless, Spock answers the call and starts for the Enterprise. This is where we see the Enterprise in all her beauty for the first time in this T.V. series. Bright colors and a shiny finish make it perfect. Plus, this is where some of the new characters are introduced, like the new Chief of Security, La'an Noonien-Singh ( Christina Chong ), pilot Erica Ortegas ( Melissa Navia ), and the prodigy Cadet Uhura.

The Enterprise crew finds Una on a planet where she was trying to make first contact. Little did they know that society hadn't built a warp drive yet. But they somehow have some technology and have created a warp bomb. Another thing about this planet is that they've been at war for a long time and refuse to talk to one another. But does Pike decide not to break General Order One, not to interfere with the natural order, and leave their people behind? Of course not. That's when an away team is put into place. But the mission wouldn't be complete without disguises—and excruciating ones, especially with Spock's Vulcan genetics. Nurse Chapel and Doctor M'Benga ( Babs Olusanmokun ) work on altering their faces before the away team beams down to the surface. Once they get down there, they find Una and the officers. They go back to the ship while Spock and Pike stay down to meet the people of this planet. They meet the leaders and make them negotiate with each other, or they could end up like Earth if they continue on this path. They give them a choice: to either go to war or join the Federation and reach for the stars. Fortunately for the planet, they chose the latter. And with that mission complete, it's on to the next.

The next time we see this crew, they're studying a comet. This comet is heading right for Persephone III, so its mission is to destroy or move it out of the way. But once they fire at the comet, they find out it's got a force field around it and are promptly contacted by the Shepherds. The Sheppards explain that that is no comet but actually the M'hanit, the ancient arbiter of life. So, naturally, an away team beams down onto the comet, which is Uhura's first away mission. A giant egg in the M'hanit's center has all kinds of markings. After much deliberation and Sam Kirks's ( Dan Jeannotte ) heart-stopping after approaching the egg, Uhura can deduce that the egg communicates by harmonics. But The Shepherds don't like that they have disturbed the egg and start blasting the Enterprise. After the away team beams off the M'hanit, Spock uses a shuttles heat shield to nudge the M'hanit to change course. It does and also douses Persephone III in water, changing its entirety of societal development, plant growth, and agriculture. And since the M'hanit wasn't hurt, they and the crew don't part as enemies. But it turns out the M'hanit was all-knowing, as it sent the Enterprise an image of the chunk of rock that got broken when Spock was heating it before the event occurred.

In Episode 3, we learn about the Illiryans who genetically modify themselves to become better without sickness . Many officers beam down to explore this old colony with no survivors. But they can't do anything with a fast-approaching ion storm blocking their transporters. That is until Chief Engineer Hemmer ( Bruce Horak ) saves the day. He gets them back to the Enterprise in one piece. But Spock and Pike are trapped on the planet. At least Spock found some journals to keep him busy. However, on the ship, one of the officers picked up an illness that caused a severe drop in vitamin D, causing him to be drawn to heat sources. Everyone on the ship starts to contract this virus. Una gets it second but starts glowing and is suddenly alright. It's later discovered that she is an Illyrian, and they're not allowed in the Federation because of their genetic modifications. And it's her blood that ends up saving everyone after she keeps La'an from deactivating the warp core containment field. As the Doctor says: "Prejudice has kept people from helping each other for centuries with no scientific reason." And as Spock and Pike found out from the journals, the colonists on the planet were trying to fix their modifications to join Starfleet. Then as the ion storm hits full blast, plasma creatures come to save them, and Spock theorizes they were the colonists. By the end of the episode, Una tells the Captain that she is Illyrian and is ready to resign, but Pike won't allow it. She's part of the crew, and he intends her to stay that way.

Things take a turn for the scary in Episode 4 when the Enterprise is on the way to deliver an atmospheric upgrade to Finibus III and run into the Gorn, La'an's worst nightmare, after being captured and escaping from them when she was a child . The Gorn attacked Finibus III and massacred everything in sight. They then start attacking the Enterprise, and as La'an knows, they won't back down. Meanwhile, the Matrix in engineering has blown and needs repairs. Uhura is working with Hemmer for this rotation. He breaks his hand and cannot fix it without help, which means he has to quickly become a team player. The Enterprise is on the verge of critical condition by this point, but all hope is not lost. La'an goes on a mission to outmaneuver the ruthless Gorn, who will stop at nothing to win , but La'an gets the best of them while Pike figures out a way for the crew to slingshot off a black hole using the explosion of the Matrix. After they escape that debacle, killing the remaining Gorn in the process, they head back into the depths of space.

Halfway Through, The Adventure Continues

In the next adventure, the crew is docked at Star Base One for repairs—time for relaxation and shore leave. But Spock is troubled by a dream where T'Pring doesn't want to be married to him because he's fully human, and she challenges him to a duel where it turns out he has to fight his Vulcan self. This rattles Spock deeply, especially since T'Pring is coming for a visit. After a chat with Nurse Chapel, Spock comes up with the idea that he and T'Pring should do a Vulcan Soul Sharing Ritual where they could hear each other's inner thoughts. This goes awry and almost ends up in a hijinx when they switch bodies entirely and must act as each other . This enlightens them about the sacrifices and duties each has to perform, and with some help from the Doctor, they return to their bodies. While everyone else is off enjoying shore leave, La'an and Una (where fun goes to die) stumble upon Starfleet Bingo. In an attempt to prove to themselves that they aren't where fun goes to die, they complete the tasks and figure out that it's simply about blowing off steam and doing something risky just because you can. Meanwhile, on a more serious note, Captain Pike is trying to negotiate with the Rangouions for a space route; after some deliberation, Pike figures out that the Rangouions are radical empaths and want people to try and see things from their perspective.

In Episode 6, we're transported to the planet of Majalis , where we learn about the First Servant, a holy figure chosen at birth to be their maximum. In a few days, he will ascend and save the planet from destruction. And after a kidnapping attempt, Pike decides to help. It doesn't help that the woman asking for help is the love of Pike's life. Her name is Alora. But it turns out the intention is different from what you would think. The child is sacrificed to the planet. Pikes try to stop it but are ultimately taken out until he wakes up in Alora's bedroom. The First Servant's father figures this out and wants to go to the colony that tries to stop this from happening, hoping he can help save the next child.

In Episode 7, we get a different start . Rather than on the Enterprise, we see where T'Pring works: the Ankeshtan K'til Vulcan Criminal Rehabilitation Centre. She calls Spock and tells him she wants to explore his human side and spice things up. This freaks Spock out because T'Pring seems more eager to explore his human side than he is. Switching back to the Enterprise, we meet Dr. Aspen, AKA Captain Angel, who plays a wicked mind twist with the crew in an attempt to free Xaverius from the facility T'Pring works at by using Spock as leverage. That only works as logic prevails. Captain Pike and the rest of the crew perform some mind tricks when the Serene Squall Pirates capture them and have to get them to perform a mutiny if they want any chance of surviving. Luckily the crew knows what they're doing, and they save the day again.

During a routine survey of the Genesion Nebula in Episode 8, the crew stumbles upon a Boltzmann Brain. This is a theoretically spontaneously generated consciousness, an intelligent mind without a physical body. It changes everything on the ship to the story of the book the Doctor reads to his daughter Rukiya ( Sage Arrindell ) called The Kingdom of Elysian . Everyone transforms into the magical people of this story, and the Doctor thinks he's going insane as only he and Hemmer remain aware. He thinks this is due to the explosion in his lab while working on a cure for Rukiya's illness, but it was the entity playing with Rukiya. It felt her loneliness and sickness and wanted to take it away. Speaking through Hemmer, the entity conveys that it can improve Rukiya and that she'll never know death; her body is sick, not her mind. Of course, this kills the Doctor on the inside, but he knows it's the right decision. After mere seconds of leaving, she returns fully grown and tells her father to thank him and don't worry; they'll see each other again.

Uhura is done with her Enterprise assignment after they deliver vidium cells to the Deep Space 7 Station, so the landing party goes down to the icy planet (which Hemmer loves, as it reminds him of home), where they find everyone massacred. Their enemy, the Gorn, is there, however, hatching out of one of the life signs still left on the ship. The other is a girl who has just barely escaped from the Gorn. Using the temperature regulators, the crew can maneuver the Gorn (because they hate the cold), where they can set a trap for them. If the baby Gorn doesn't kill each other first. They manage to outmaneuver the Gorn, but not before one spits their slime on Hemmer, which we later learn is how they lay their eggs. Hemmer sacrifices himself by going out into the cold and throwing himself off the side of the mountain . This was especially tough for Uhura, as they had become quite close. Hemmer had fulfilled his purpose: to fix what was broken.

In the season finale, things get interesting . Pike has been trying to deal with his fate the entire season, but it, naturally, still has a hold on him. But in this episode, he meets one of the kids who dies on the training ship. It sends him on a downward spiral, which causes him to start writing letters to all the kids who are supposed to be on the ship that day, telling them not to show up. That's when the Klingons send the Future Pike to show him what will happen if he tries to dodge his fate. Future Pike takes the current Pike to the future, where we discover that if Pike changes things, he could start a war with the Romulans, which should never happen. These guys also see Romulans for the first time and are surprised when they look similar to Vulcans. We get Spock's signature eyebrow raise as his reaction to the situation. Spock almost dies in this timeline, and James Kirk ( Paul Wesley ) dies as a sacrifice. Pike can't live with this, so he returns to the present and starts to come to terms. One thing that stays the same in the future, however, is Una's situation. The Federation finds out that she's Illyrian and comes to arrest her. They take her away. Will Pike be able to get her back?

Season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres June 15 on Paramount+.

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Star Trek: Picard Series-Finale Recap: Captain’s Log, Final Entry

Star trek: picard.

Star Trek: Picard  began as a series partly dedicated to giving Jean-Luc Picard, the aged but unbowed former captain of the  Enterprise , a late-in-life shot at returning to the stars and partly as a torch-passing exercise that surrounded Picard with new characters (a kind of next generation, you could say). Across three seasons, that mission didn’t so much drift as grow in scale. This third and final season has extended the autumnal adventures to almost all of the original cast of  Star Trek: The Next Generation  (while keeping Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd around from the preceding  Picard  seasons) and making the torch-passing theme even more explicit by bringing in Picard’s previously unknown son, Jack Crusher, and a pair of Geordi LaForge daughters to boot.

That’s a lot to ask of any series, much less one that has to give the beloved  TNG  characters the proper send-off (maybe?) they were denied by the less-than-beloved  Star Trek: Nemesis.  And, by and large, the season has shouldered that burden well. The  TNG  characters have all had their moments in the spotlight as the show reassembled the team, Ryan’s Seven of Nine and Hurd’s Raffi have had plenty to do (as did Todd Stashwick’s Captain Shaw, RIP), and Jack has proven to be a charismatic addition when he could have felt like an interloper shoehorned in to bring down the cast’s median age.

But does this final episode stick the landing? Pretty much, yeah. “The Last Generation” both brings the season-long story — which began as a confrontation with the Dominion before that dread foe essentially handed over villain duties to the Borg — to an exciting conclusion and gives the original cast a nostalgic valedictory moment while also leaving the door open for future adventures.

As it opens, however, any possibility of a happy ending seems unlikely. Federation President Chekov (not that one but his son) issues a dire warning that the Federation’s younger generation has been assimilated, and there’s little to be done about it, but in the words of his father, “There are always possibilities.” Picard and the crew are not an easily dissuaded bunch, and recognizing, as Data puts it, they “are the cavalry,” they come up with a plan.

Sure, it’s a desperate plan, but a plan nonetheless: Head to Jupiter, board the Borg vessel, and shut down the beacon that allows the Borg to do what they do. (And hopefully rescue Jack in the process.) For Picard, it’s personal. The Borg have his son (whom he’s come to like quite a bit despite a messy start), and he’s been plagued by their threat for over 35 years. For everyone else, it’s, well, also pretty personal. If this is truly a last stand, it’s a last stand against an enemy with whom they have a long, nasty history. The newly emotional Data sums it up as they approach: “I hate them.”

No one knows that better than Seven, of course, who leads a party to reclaim the  Titan.  She and Raffi will play a crucial role in the confrontation that follows, but it’s the newly reunited  TNG  crew that drives the action. And, in classic  Trek  faction, that means breaking into smaller groups. Picard, Will, and Worf head into the cube. (“And I will make it a threesome,” Worf says, by way of announcing his intentions.) Their farewell is one of the episode’s first heart-tugging moments. Could this be the last time these characters see each other? The look on Deanna’s face as Will walks away says it all.

On the cube, they find a lot of rotting Borg drones but little action. Then it’s time to split up after another wrenching farewell scene in which Picard can’t bring himself to tell Will how much he means to him. “You know that I know. Always,” Will says, letting him off the hook while making the scene that much more intense, with Worf’s own final words about Klingon’s not knowing the words “defeat” and “farewell” providing poignant punctuation.

When Picard reaches Jack, it’s worse than he feared. His son appears fully Borgified and the Borg Queen (voiced by Alice Krige and looking more like a nightmarish H.R. Giger creation than ever) looms over him. She’s mostly interested in mocking “Locutus,” calling his arrival a homecoming. The Borg Queen also announces that assimilation is old news. The new Borg goal is evolution. And it looks like that plan is working out for them. Thanks, unwittingly, to Jack, Starfleet is now filled with unwitting hybrids walking around with Borg DNA just waiting to be told what to do.

But despite the odds stacked against them, our heroes prevail via a series of pretty good fight scenes that mix aerial combat, a hand-to-hand battle with Borg drones, some fancy flying from Data, and a battle for Jack’s soul. The latter involves Picard plugging himself into the Borg network and selling Jack on the pleasures of life outside the Borg cube, despite the possibility of loneliness and fear. Picard’s pitch includes freely expressing his emotions (never an easy thing for the captain), including his feelings for his son. “You are the part of me that I never knew was missing,” he says. Later, they hug. (This episode just does not let up on big emotional moments. Will’s farewell to Deanna, if anything, hits even harder: “I’ll be waiting. Me and our boy.”)

Star Trek  is a franchise dedicated to following intriguing science fiction concepts wherever they lead, but it’s also one in which occasionally love saves the day, and the Borg Queen’s dying shout of “No!!!” shortly before her cube explodes signals that this is one of those  Star Trek  installments. (Even Seven’s in a hugging mood when the Borg control lifts from the  Titan  crew.) It’s a happy ending for all, and the tableau of everyone posing on the  Enterprise  bridge (an image that includes Will and Deanna embracing and Worf asleep) could be a fitting end to the series.

But there’s more to be done. That includes giving the  TNG  crew some more time together and setting up future adventures. Will’s log reveals that Beverly has developed a method to eliminate Borg DNA and scan for Dominion holdouts. Tuvok, the real Tuvok, is still alive, it’s revealed. Seven learns that Captain Shaw actually liked and respected her, even recommending she be promoted to the rank of captain. Data is still sorting through his new emotions with a lot of help from Deanna, who’s a little distracted planning a vacation during the latest of their marathon sessions. But, essentially, all is well.

One year later, the long good-bye continues as Will, Picard, and Geordi put the  Enterprise  D to bed. A bit later, Picard and Beverly escort their son to his first Starfleet assignment aboard … the  Enterprise ? Rechristened in honor of Starfleet’s fabled flagship, the  Enterprise  is now under Seven’s command, with Raffi and Jack by her side. That looks like a setup for a whole new series featuring this crew. (I would watch.)

We’re not done: Over drinks and a stirring recitation of one of Brutus’s speeches in  Julius Caesar  from Picard (“There is a tide in the affairs of men”), the  TNG  crew spends the evening in each other’s company, reflecting on their time together before, in a nod to “All Good Things …,” the original  TNG  finale, a game of poker breaks out with Picard enthusiastically participating. It’s an indulgent moment that calls on decades of accumulated affection for these characters, and boy does it work. It feels like a fitting farewell, albeit one that suggests all good things, or at least all good shows, don’t always come to an end. They just kind of lay around waiting for someone to pick them up again.

Captain’s Log

• Hello! No, I am not your regular  Picard  recapper (though I did cover the first season). I’m just filling in for the excellent Swapna Krishna, who was unexpectedly unable to cover this episode.

• This episode pretty clearly sets up a Seven/Raffi/Jack–focused series and that’s a pretty exciting prospect. Ryan is, of course, already a  Trek  legend and her reprise of Seven has broadened the character and confirmed she has a range we never saw on  Voyager . Hurd was always a  Picard  highlight and Ed Speleers has fit right in when Jack could easily have been the series’ Poochie.

• If there is a series, please, please find room for the “Ma’am, I’m just a cook!” guy. He’s great.

• Over the end credits, there’s one last surprise: Q is back and ready to put Jack to the test. Nothing really ends or dies with this franchise, does it? (Okay, except for Ro Laren, Capt. Shaw, etc., etc.) After a first season partly dedicated to putting Data down, he’s back and the Data who wanted to die got hand-waved away. Now Q’s mortality, a big part of the second season, is out the window. It’s inconsistent, but is any going to complain, particularly after a season this strong?

• That said, the sudden transition to a mostly different supporting cast hasn’t been without some awkwardness. Whither Laris?

• Is this the last time we’ll see the  TNG  characters all in one place together again? Another reunion seems unlikely, but then  this  reunion seemed pretty unlikely. If it is the end, it’s a warm, affectionate send-off. If not, let’s hope the next reunion strikes as deft a balance between nostalgia and adventure.

• star trek: picard

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Published Apr 12, 2024

RECAP | Star Trek: Discovery 503 - 'Jinaal'

Not everything has to have an answer; can they be okay with that?

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains story details and plot points for Star Trek: Discovery.

StarTrek.com

Previously, in " Under the Twin Moons ," following the dangerous events on Q'Mau in " Red Directive ," Saru decides to accept President Rillak's offer to serve as a Federation ambassador. When Captain Rayner's decisions that day forces him into an early retirement from Starfleet, Captain Burnham offers him a second chance — to be her Number One aboard the U.S.S. Discovery .

While antagonists Moll and L'ak don't have a crucial part of the Progenitors' clue, Burnham takes advantage of their lead and heads to Trill in search for another piece to the map that will lead them to the Progenitors' life-building technology. However, Book uncovers another relevant clue to the mystery — Moll is actually Malinne, the daughter of his mentor, Cleveland Booker IV, making her the closest thing to family he's got.

In Episode 3 of Star Trek: Discovery , " Jinaal ," on Trill, Captain Burnham, Book, and Culber must pass a dangerous test to prove themselves worthy of the next clue. Adira reconnects with Gray, while Saru's first day as ambassador is complicated by his engagement to T'Rina.

• Michael Burnham
• Dr. Hugh Culber
• Cleveland "Book" Booker
• Sylvia Tilly
• William Christopher
• Paul Stamets
• Guardian Xi
• T'Rina
• Kalzara Bix
• "Jinaal Bix"
• Dr. Tracy Pollard
• Moll (Malinne)

• U.S.S. Discovery -A
• Federation Headquarters
• Caves of Mak'ala, Trill
• Trill canyons

With the U.S.S. Discovery -A docked alongside the U.S.S. Locherer and other Starfleet vessels at Federation Headquarters, Cleveland "Book" Booker briefs Captain Michael Burnham and Dr. Hugh Culber about Moll as they stroll through the starship's corridors. Moll was born on Callor V, and her father Cleveland Booker IV left when she was only eight years old. She lost her mother at 14, joined a courier guild at 17, and did at least two stints in an Emerald Chain lockup. Book warns the captain about the potential to encounter Moll and L’ak on Trill, but the planet's status as a Federation world means she must bring a uniformed away team.

Book believes he would be an asset to the mission, but Burnham asks him to convince her why his connection to Moll shouldn't make her nervous. The ex-courier confesses that he is learning from his choices, and serving the Federation will help him get his life back. Burnham agrees to consider it, and Book nods before departing. Culber and Burnham discuss the restlessness the Progenitors' puzzle has caused them, and the doctor wonders if the Vulcan meditation she utilized as a kid might be beneficial for her — remembering every little detail is part of his job.

The two move on and join Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly, Ensign Adira Tal, and Book in Engineering, where the Starfleet Academy instructor notes that Trill's surface area of 500 million square kilometers will make finding their next clue difficult. Commander Paul Stamets has been working on the tricorder recovered from the Romulan, while she and Adira have been analyzing the poem from Lyrek. A decryption algorithm uncovered a cryptex key on the metal relic the captain obtained on Lyrek, and the pattern is consistent with Trill facial spots. As unique as fingerprints in humans or dorsal ridges in Saurians, the spots are matched to a Trill named Jinaal Bix, who lived 800 years ago — during the same era as Dr. Vellek.

Adira digs deeper, learning that Jinaal was a symbiont host. Though unusual, it is possible that the symbiont still lives, and its current host would retain Jinaal's memories. Captain Burnham takes charge of the room, assigning Culber and Adira to the landing party and deciding to bring Book along, as well. The Bridge notifies her that Discovery 's latest crew member has arrived, so the captain heads off to her Ready Room.

"Jinaal"

Rayner awaits, now holding the rank of commander. The former captain attempts to "break the ice" by joking that he is used to having larger quarters and Burnham's job, but she is more impressed that Rayner has familiarized himself with Earth idioms. While Burnham continues her quest on Trill, Rayner is to do one-on-one interviews with the crew. He brushes past the idea, but Burnham insists he connect with his subordinates in person. Itching to have a hand in catching Moll and L'ak, Rayner nevertheless accepts the task. The two officers walk to the Bridge, and Burnham introduces the senior staff — Lieutenant Naya, Lieutenant Arav, Commander Rhys, Commander Asha, and Lieutenants Gallo, Linus, and Christopher — to their new first officer, Commander Rayner. The captain shifts her focus to the mission, bringing Discovery to Black Alert and ordering the jump to Trill.

Down in Engineering, Adira speaks with Commander Jett Reno about the pending reunion with Gray, sharing that the couple has pretended that everything is normal in their holo-chats over the last six months. Reno tells Adira that they look great, but is curious as to how many raktajinos they have had. The ensign nervously acknowledges they’ve had two… okay, three — well, might be four. Adira beams to the Bridge, leaving Reno to chastise Stamets — "space dad" — for not recognizing that there is clearly trouble in paradise for Adira and Gray. Reno shocks Stamets by comparing Adira to a "lamb off to the slaughterhouse," though her introspective view on life's journey causes her to turn the criticism inward and refer to comments as something a "woo-woo asshole" might say.

Back on the Bridge, Trill denies the captain's request to beam down. Confused, Burnham watches as Guardian Xi's hologram materializes in front of the conn and ops stations. Xi appears solemn, explaining that the information Discovery seeks has been protected for centuries. Before they assist the captain, she must answer a question — “Where does the fourth point?” Burnham understands that the query is a riddle that refers to the poem from Lyrek, whose fourth stanza pointed to Betazed. Xi's expression softens, stating that "Betazed" is correct and the symbiont Burnham seeks is still alive. Its current host — Kalzara Bix — will only speak to an outsider who has provided the right answer. From here forward, all will be up to the captain.

Burnham, Culber, Adira, and Book beam down to the dimly lit Caves of Mak'ala, where Xi, Kalzara, and Gray stand ready to greet them. An elderly Trill who has been waiting nearly her entire life for this moment, Kalzara Bix admits that only Jinaal can truly help Burnham. Jinaal joined with a symbiont so that it could carry his secrets across the ages until a worthy seeker arrived. A zhian’tara ritual will allow Jinaal's consciousness to transfer to another body for a limited time.* Xi warns that it can be an emotionally overwhelming experience, prompting Culber to volunteer himself for the process. Gray exchanges a brief smile with Adira before retreating to assist Xi prepare.

Ni'Var's President T’Rina enters Saru's office at Federation HQ, holding a decorative gift — a favinit plant. Saru graciously accepts and sets the lovely plant on a table. The Kelpien acknowledges that, while he misses his friends on Discovery , he is excited for this new challenge. Asked to speak on behalf of the planets he represents at today's Resource Committee meeting, Saru is acutely aware that the position he plans to advocate for is a controversial one. T'Rina maintains confidence in Saru's, and she gestures towards the door.

As they traverse HQ's hallways, the conversation shifts to their engagement announcement. Having browsed the draft, Saru wonders if they should rethink the section which describes him as "handsome and erudite." T'Rina is open to the change but emphasizes that the words are accurate. Saru welcomes the compliment, and T'Rina promises to have the document sent out within a day. The couple is interrupted by T'Rina’s aide Duvin, who seems unsettled by the notion of the announcement's imminent release. T'Rina straightens Ambassador Saru's tunic, and the Kelpien readies — and steadies — himself for the meeting.

Meanwhile, in Discovery 's Science Lab, Lieutenant Tilly informs Commander Rayner that she is to facilitate his introductions to the crew. Rayner views her as a chaperone and prefers to continue combing through sensor data to locate Moll and L'ak's ship. Tilly persists, citing the importance of crew cohesion and the fact that these are the captain's orders. Rayner says he can walk and chew gum — another Earth expression, sternly commanding that the lieutenant schedule five minutes with each crew member and have them report to him in the lab. Tilly is taken aback, but she grins politely and sets off to carry out the directive.

In Trill’s venerated Caves of Mak'ala, Gray lights a torch and takes a moment away from his duties to embrace Adira. The Trill trainee grasps Adira's hand, carefully mentioning that perhaps they have some things they need to talk about. Adira struggles for a response, but Guardian Xi interjects to announce that they are ready to begin. The group gathers around Kalzara and Culber, who sit opposite each other in the flow of the serene waters. Placing his hands on their heads, Xi recites the zhian’tara ritual. A nebulous fog overcomes Culber, and he opens his eyes — as Jinaal Bix, his consciousness existing in the doctor's body.

An eccentric individual, "Jinaal" is pleased to learn that the year is 3191. "Jinaal" adjusts to Culber's form, his gravelly voice proclaiming that he loves what Starfleet has done to its uniforms. Unzipping his collar, "Jinaal" meets Book — an unaffiliated, professional associate — and tells Captain Burnham that he can take her to the next clue. "Jinaal" concealed it in a nearby canyon, but he prefers walking there over taking a personal transporter — he doesn’t remember the coordinates, he just remembers the path. As Burnham and Book follow him to the exit, "Jinaal" admires Culber's physique, remarking, "Wow. This guy really works out."

At Federation Headquarters, Saru listens to several delegates debate their constituents' needs. Warring factions vying for control have made the Breen increasingly dangerous, but Saru assuages a delegate's request for the security of a new starbase with a promise to increase starship patrols in that sector. The revision is adopted, and Duvin pulls Saru to the side for a private conference. The aide worries that Saru's compromise — and T'Rina's support of it — will become political fodder in the conflict between T'Rina's coalition and Vulcan purists. Since appearances matter in politics, Duvin believes T'Rina's logic is clouded by her love for Saru. Announcing that Ni'Var's leader is betrothed to someone from another world could negatively impact T'Rina's career, an opinion which paints a perturbed look on the Kelpien's face.

As he guides Book and Burnham through the canyon on Trill, Jinaal-Culber delights at an itronok 's call. The carnivorous quadruped stands about three times a humanoid's height and is extremely vicious, and the species use these canyons as their hunting ground. People typically avoid the area, making it the perfect place to hide the clue. Captain Burnham confirms that she's ready to risk her life for her mission, so Jinaal-Culber provides some history; eight centuries ago, the Federation President secretly brought six scientists — including Jinaal and Vellek — together to research the Progenitors and the message found by Captain Picard.

After several years, the trail brought the scientists to a sector of deep space that contained a technology beyond anything they had ever seen. One of their group was killed trying to activate it, the horrible turn convincing the others to make a pact — they told the President that they'd hit a dead end, destroyed all of their research, removed their names from databases, and hid the location of what they found. Witnessing the mistrust and violence surrounding the Dominion War, the scientists knew the Progenitors' tech could be used for great destruction. As Jinaal-Culber states that they made protecting it the focus of their lives, the screech of the itronok grows closer.

Monitoring the sensors left behind by Discovery , Commander Rayner gruffly notifies Tilly, who just entered the Science Lab with Gen Rhys, that Moll and L'ak have returned to Lyrek. Having already been alerted by Zora, the lieutenant politely — Rayner cuts to the chase, asking Rhys to tell him something that can't be read in his file in 20 words or less. Rhys pauses, then offers a smirk as he declares himself a "real shiphead." The tactical officer loves the Crossfield -class, but he is particularly enamored by the curves of a 23rd Century Constitution -class vessel.

Unimpressed, Rayner dismisses Rhys and repeats the same question to several other officers — Dr. Tracy Pollard remembers seeing a bore worm eating a Bynar's synaptic processor, Asha brags about being unbeatable at tongo, Linus shares that Saurians reproduce asexually and raise their progeny collectively, Christopher excitedly outlines the pet Tribble he received from Commander Nilsson when she transferred to U.S.S. Voyager , Jett Reno laments the lack of snacks, and Gallo makes an awkward exit. Tilly is bothered by the brevity of each chat, but Rayner insists that meetings are as long as they need to be. Deflated, the lieutenant heads off to arrange the next appointment.

Alone in the Caves of Mak'ala, Adira and Gray have an intimate heart-to-heart. Gray reveals that he's been doing surprisingly well, and he acknowledges that things have not been the same between them. He points out that they used to be connected by the Tal symbiont, but they are now following divergent paths — one on Trill, the other on Discovery . Neither wishes for their partner to give up their pursuits, so Gray proposes they try a different kind of relationship. Holding back tears, Adira confirms that it might be best for them to break up, though they both vow to always be there for each other.

Evening shadows have descended upon the canyon, and — objecting to Burnham's urgency — Jinaal-Culber professes that his fellow scientists created the clues so that a person must complete the entire journey in order to reach the end. They wanted the power to be found, but only by a worthy seeker in a time of peace. Has that time come in 3191? Book claims it is a time of peace, but Burnham confesses that she cannot promise the tranquility will last. However, she knows the Federation is driven by a will to do good, noting that the scientists must have also had faith in sentient species — especially since they left clues to begin with. The trio rounds a corner and comes across a fresh ina bird carcass, signaling that the itronok is closer than Jinaal-Culber had thought. He recommends they draw their phasers.

Darkness covers their surroundings, and Jinaal gestures to a stone positioned a short distance away. He asserts that the next clue resides in a compartment under a carving on its surface. Burnham's tricorder shows that the symbol matches the one from Vellek's diary, but an enormous edgernawk [SP?] lands before them. The winged, translucent creature’s scales control the way light refracts, allowing it to cloak. It starts spewing fiery projectiles at the travelers, and Jinaal insists they retreat, bolting away in the process.

Unable to connect with the predator through his Kwejian senses — at least, other than to determine that it’s “pissed off,” Book races out to distract the animal. The itronok gives chase, relentlessly vomiting orange stingers at Book. Burnham examines the stone carving, but a second creature flies down to take a shot. Book dives out, pulling Burnham away from danger, only to have a barb puncture his leg. With the captain's assistance, he scrambles for cover amid additional blasts.

Back on Discovery , Stamets bursts into the Science Lab and apologizes for being late to his meeting with Rayner. He gives off an air of exhilaration, believing he has figured out the data from the Romulan tricorder. Intrigued, Rayner grants him permission to explain — and to use as many words as he'd like. The Progenitors' technology is several billion years old, so it is necessary to factor in the half-life of numerous isotopes, but Stamets concludes that the tech could have incredible applications. Designing new lifeforms, accelerating evolution, modifying ecosystems, and — in theory — reanimating dead organisms could all be on the table.

Rayner stifles the astromycologist's enthusiasm, citing the dangerous nature of such power and dismissing him. Tilly's incredulity reaches a tipping point, and the lieutenant gives herself permission to speak freely. She critiques Rayner, emphatically theorizing that he is masking the fact that he's been demoted and transferred to a new ship by being a giant— she realizes she’s used up her 20 words. Her thoughts finally off her mind, she withdraws to let Rayner consider her commentary.

While sipping tea with T'Rina at Federation HQ, Saru raises the issue of their engagement announcement. He searches for an excuse to postpone the declaration, going so far as to quote a wise Vulcan who once said, "To rush a sehlat is to risk a goring." T'Rina sets her cup down, immediately cognizant that Duvin is the cause of the Kelpien's concern. Although T'Rina employs Duvin as a shrewd political operator, she defiantly conveys that she has no need for a caretaker. A call from President Rillak cuts their conversation short, and T'Rina strides out of the room with confidence.

In the canyon on Trill, Captain Burnham pulls the barb out of Book’s leg and treats the wound with a dermal regenerator. Book notices that several eggs are resting among a pile of rocks, a fact that gives them context — the itronok is simply being a good parent and protecting its young. Book and Burnham reach a consensus, deciding that there's no reason to agitate the creatures and intending to return another day. Unfortunately, the minerals nearby are blocking their transporter signals, so Burnham draws upon her background in xenoanthropology — show respect to the one you’re studying.

The captain slowly emerges from cover, walking into the open and retracting her phaser. Book follows suit, and — with the visitors no longer presenting a threat with their phasers — the animals permit Book to employ his empathy powers to communicate. His forehead aglow, the ex-courier extends their apologies, and he is stunned when the itronok signal their willingness to let them go mere moments later.

Book and Burnham catch up with Jinaal-Culber under the glimmer of moonlight, the Trill-in-human-form acknowledging that he knew of the nesting ground and baited the visitors into arming themselves. Would they see an enemy when encountering a lifeform vastly different than their own, or would they try to connect? With the pair passing his test, Jinaal-Culber removes another relic from its rocky confines and hands it to the captain. However, had they not been worthy, he would have stood by and let the creatures kill them in order to protect the Progenitors' power. Burnham solemnly accepts this admission, suddenly recognizing that the coordinates to the next clue are carved into the new relic.

Saru discovers T'Rina in the hallways of HQ and offers a heartfelt apology for overstepping his partner's wishes. Ni'Var's leader quickly accepts, though the ease with which she puts the discord in the past catches Saru by surprise. He has never endured conflict with someone he loves in this way, but T'Rina counters that conflict is a natural part of any relationship — as well as political life itself. The Vulcan purists will be inflamed by the engagement announcement, but her constituents finding out through other means would erode the trust they have given her. T'Rina is clear that they have nothing to hide, converting Saru's worry into eagerness. She shows her appreciation by tenderly resting her finger on the Kelpien's chin.

Guardian Xi ends the zhian’tara in the Caves of Mak’ala, and Kalzara relays Jinaal’s gratitude to Culber, who has been moved and rendered speechless by the ritual. Burnham warns Xi that Moll and L’ak are likely on their way to Trill, but the Guardian is adamant that Trill Security is capable of handling them. Book and Culber beam back to Discovery, leaving Kalzara to thank the captain for giving her the opportunity to rest before Burnham also returns to the ship.

In Discovery 's lounge, Rayner takes a spot at the bar as the Ferengi proprietor pours Tilly a drink that the commander describes as "radioactive." Unamused, Tilly hears Rayner out. The commander contends that leadership and friendship are two different beasts; professional distance keeps the distinction clear, and his crew on the Antares understood that.

Rayner startles Tilly with some key insights — Rhys' knowledge of starships shows he could have a bright future in the command division, Pollard is unafraid of the horrors she faces, and Linus cares deeply for tradition and stability — that he gained from his fleeting interactions with Discovery 's personnel. Still skeptical, Tilly does not equate analyzing the crew with showing them respect or connecting with them. The ice is broken nonetheless, and the lieutenant saunters over to join her friends at a table, leaving Rayner to flash a rare smile.

Culber sips a drink elsewhere in the lounge and offers a seat to Captain Burnham. Preparations are being made to jump to the coordinates from the clue, but — given to the locale's place in Tzenkethi space — Discovery can't go until the diplomats clear the way. The two officers broach the day's events, with the doctor grappling with how to describe the process of having another consciousness inside his body. His abuela was also a doctor, and she filled her home with religious icons from a variety of faiths as a reminder that not everything has to have an answer. Culber is uncertain if he's okay with that notion, leading Burnham to confirm that she is also searching — the Progenitors' technology is the closest they’ll ever get to the beings who designed life as they know it. Perhaps this voyage will provide both of them with the answers they need.

Surrounded by candlelight in the Caves of Mak’ala, Gray speaks to Adira, Xi, and other red-robed Trill — a symbiont's centuries-long life is a journey. Gray relays that a symbiont is changed by every host, and each host is changed by the symbiont. This teaches us that life is a series of changes and we must work to understand those we encounter — Book gazes at Moll's holographic record aboard Discovery , while Saru and T'Rina tend to their plants at Headquarters.

Gray continues, urging that we must choose to connect with others and ourselves — Hugh stares out Discovery 's viewports, Rayner looks over at Tilly in the lounge, and Stamets adds the latest relic to the map in Engineering. Gray argues that we must keep trying, even in the face of failure, because we are all searching for meaning in our lives — Captain Burnham meditates in her quarters aboard her ship. Gray concludes that the connections we make will guide us to those answers and joins hands with Adira. The Bix symbiont swims into the watery depths, and those gathered begin greeting one another by clutching forearms. A red-robed Trill deposits a tiny device onto Adira that melts into their uniform undetected. As the figure turns away, her hood pulls back slightly, revealing that she is not a Trill trainee — she is actually Moll in disguise!

* " Facets " — On Deep Space 9 , Jadzia Dax went through the Trill ritual, zhian'tara . In order to meet the previous hosts of her Dax symbiont, several of her colleagues served as hosts bodies for them. Another iteration of zhian'tara is seen in Discovery 's " Choose to Live " when Guardian Xi modified the ritual to unjoin Gray from the Tal symbiont in order for his consciousness to incorporate with a golem body.

• Written by Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Wilkinson
• Directed by Andi Armaganian

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a freelance writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to StarTrek.com, Star Trek Explorer, and Star Trek Magazine, as well as to Star Wars Insider and StarWars.com. Learn more about Jay by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are streaming exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Seasons 2 and 3 also are available on the Pluto TV “Star Trek” channel in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The series streams on Super Drama in Japan, TVNZ in New Zealand, and SkyShowtime in Spain, Portugal, Poland, The Nordics, The Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe and also airs on Cosmote TV in Greece. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.