Logline
Uhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source.
Written by Onitra Johnson & David Reed
Directed by Dan Liu
An okay episode.
Finally Una got to do something instead of being completely on the sidelines. The whole ensemble got something to do, except Ortegas who slowly turns into SNW’s Travis Mayweather: that one cast member that is just there physically but doesn’t get anything to do.
My personal highlight was the scene were Spock and Chapel play chess, and he passive-aggressively pushes her to play faster. Very Vulcan.
What irked me: everyone and their mother immediately started calling the First Officer of another Starfleet ship by his first name. That was weird.
Another weird thing was Pike’s promotion to Fleet Captain. We’ve never seen this in Star Trek, particularly not when it’s just two ships on a mission. So I checked the transcript of The Menagerie were Kirk speaks about the one time he met Captain Pike. And there it is:
MENDEZ: You ever met Chris Pike?
KIRK: When he was promoted to Fleet Captain.SNW’s producers were sneaky with that one. I’m both annoyed and impressed.
My personal highlight was the scene were Spock and Chapel play chess, and he passive-aggressively pushes her to play faster. Very Vulcan.
My favourite scene too. I am glad they only got one scene together this episode to avoid it veering too hard into the soapy relationshipy aspects after last week. But damn those are two well-written, well-acted characters with insane chemistry - they gave them one scene together, playing chess no less, and it stole the whole episode.
From the “previously on SNW” showing pretty much Soapy relationship drama of half the crew I had worries for the episode but was not realised
The whole ensemble got something to do, except Ortegas who slowly turns into SNW’s Travis Mayweather: that one cast member that is just there physically but doesn’t get anything to do.
I get the feeling the writers don’t really know what to do with Ortegas beyond that she “flies the ship”.
“I fly the ship”
She also delivers the many one-line commentaries on dire situations. It’s funny at first, but it does get old pretty quickly.
So I checked the transcript of The Menagerie were Kirk speaks about the one time he met Captain Pike.
Well caught!
PIKE: Lieutenant Kirk.
KIRK: That’s right! It’s an honour to meet you, sir. Congratulations on your promotion to Fleet Captain.
I was so focused on Pike’s face since he has met Kirk before. But this is the first time Kirk has met Pike and this is the first thing he says to him. So of course that stands out in his memory in The Menagerie.
Nurse Chapel fiddling with a butt plug while playing with Spock. I will show myself out.
They 100% knew
Ribbed for his pleasure.
Zombie Hemmer was freaky! Nicely done, wardrobe/makeup.
This clearly took a lot from TNG’s Night Terrors right? A bit of Firefly’s Bushwhacked in there too.
I liked it overall, but my favourite Star Trek episodes are when the crew gets to use their extreme competency to overcome a difficult challenge. This episode, the crew was… not so competent.
- Una’s team can’t identify that there’s been sabotage even though it’s just like, phaser blasts from a half-deranged man
- The dude easily escapes from sick bay and blows up a nacelle (had the stun setting not been invented yet? What about locked doors?)
- There’s no way the medical team could keep Uhura around and try to do some tests when she’s having an episode, they can only put on the brain scan screensaver
- They can’t shut down the dang refinery! The lever’s stuck and they’re out of WD-40!
- Pike blows up the quadrillion dollar infrastructure project immediately, not even just targeted laser blasts to the parts that are doing the murder. The whole thing has to blow up.
I guess this is just trek being trek and I shouldn’t take it so seriously. Emotionally, the crew was at the top of their game: intuitive, perceptive, empathetic, trusting. good stuff.
But yeah, I feel like I would have enjoyed this more had the problem been made more difficult instead of the crew less capable.
They can’t shut down the dang refinery! The lever’s stuck and they’re out of WD-40!
I actually had the least problem with that. It’s entirely plausible that huge machines can’t just turned off in an instant. Even real life nuclear reactors need something like +12 hours even for an emergency shutdown. A city-sized space-refinery probably has so much momentum in it’s spinning parts that it is faster to just shoot that thing.
Overall a solid episode, a little different but ultimate felt very core Star Trek TOS with strange alien life and coming to a resolution.
Paul Wesley continues to impress me in the role of James T Kirk but his character did not need to be in this episode, they need to be careful with how they use him going forward.
SNW is such a good show with strong cast and characters and storylines. They totally can stand on their own without trying to bring back legacy characters or storylines. I am not sure why the producers seem to be hell bent on trying to weave these characters back in.
Agreed, I didn’t mind Kirk being in A Quality of Mercy or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. However, him being in this episode just felt he was in it for the sake of it.
I was gearing up for a Gorn episode and they faked us all out!
I liked it thy gave most of the cast (sorry Ortegas) screentime and moved a lot of side plots a small amount.
Moderately bummed they retroactively made Thor (George Kirk) seem like a less good father, though.
I was gearing up for a Gorn episode and they faked us all out!
Yeah, totally. I mean building a gas station right next to Gorn space and all you got there is 2 starships, what could go wrong. Turns out its not Gorn.
I didn’t get the impression George was a bad father. Sam certainly struggles with their relationship, but no father is perfect.
This is also the most information we’ve ever gotten on George as a father, so there’s nothing retroactive about it.
Ramon froze pretty quickly out there in space. Wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago this show was trying to convince us people could survive in space without a suit for two whole minutes?
Yeah star trek right now really can’t seem to decide whether “space is cold” or not.
Of course, that’s because the truth has just alittle bit of nuance to it, and nuance is hard for writers.
Space can be cold, depending on where you are, but its also barely even there. No atmosphere means no convection, and that means you’re gonna be losing heat much too slowly for it to be your number one problem if you’ve just been spaced without a suit.Maybe because they’re in the stellar nursery. The deuterium was like having an atmosphere.
Convective heat transfer in a cold dense gaseous nebula would be a lot faster than radiative heat transfer in empty space.
He was extra warm too before getting to empty space. Larger differential in temperature.
I loved this episode. Some really great relationship progress… Chapel/Spock, Uhura/Kirk, Kirk/Kirk, Kirk/La’an, Pelia/Una, even a taste of Kirk/Spock at the end. Pike exhibiting remarkable and badass trust in his bridge crew. And Hemmer lingering over it all in such a bittersweet way. I was so here for all of it. And I actually thought the reveal about the aliens in the deuterium burning out Uhura and Ramon’s “receivers” was a super cool sci-fi concept. Might be my favorite episode of the season so far to be honest!
“Eyes in the dark, one moon circling”
Oh man that episode was about hydrogen (deuterium) too. They couldn’t even change the element for this one.
The Kirk bros. 😅
A Short Trek with them bickering, please.
Didn’t realize I wanted that until you said it. Maybe have them on a shuttle trip back to earth for a holiday. The two of them in a shuttle for a week would be hilarious. Imagine “Shuttlepod One” with those two.
Pike once again demonstrates his faith in the crew without second guessing Uhuras decisions. What a boss.
A little bit of a dip from last week but otherwise an enjoyable episode even if it learned a bit too much on the fan service.
Although kudos to the writers for cleverly weaving around existing continuity and throwing in the Gorn misdirection.
The whole season is very, very good. Really loved this episode and the characters development in it. Mayby the overall story of this episode wasn’t the best, but who cares it is real classic trek 🖖
It’ll be a while before I can watch this one, but I predict that Jim Kirk was an hallucination the whole time.
I look forward to logging in and seeing just how badly I’ve been roasted for being wrong.
One man’s hallucination is another’s parallel dimension.
Literally the only guy that wasn’t. Lol.
Well, dang it.
Hahaha actually very close.
I’m starting to get DS9 vibes among the crew. I’m liking that things are complicated. This season doesn’t feature Pike much, does it? DS9 of course handled politics and religion well and I suspect SNW is steering clear. I knew that (blank) would return but I didn’t expect him to be a decomposing corpse.
Anson Mount had a new baby just as filming this season began, so they worked around his schedule a bit so he could spend more time in Canada with his family.
Anson Mount’s wife had their first child just before the filming of the season, so he was given a few episodes off
Fantastic episode. Great to see Bruce Horak back.
I was a little thrown by the interactions between Sam and Kirk, and Una and Pelia. Their early scenes kind of felt pissy in a way you don’t usually see in star trek.
Nice to see Bruce Horak back, but very much want more. More Hemmer, more Aenar, even more Bruce Horak as a completely different alien or character.
I like the episode a lot, and it hit so very many wonderful notes and gave us so many coup d’oeil moments….but…it’s also getting me to the point where wanting just to settle into something just focused on the entire main cast together. That won’t be next week’s crossover with Lower Decks or the musical episode. And we’re promised a ‘Moretegas’ episode too. Would be sad if the finale is the only episode that features the whole cast coalescing as a team.
We got more from Una in this one, but still not enough. They had her in an oppositional situation with Pelia, somewhat as she was with Hemmer in season one. Even though I liked the resolution, and it’s great to see this kind of friction between two female officers with very different temperaments, somehow it’s not quite hitting the mark in making us see why Una is such a great officer. I feel like other than in the focus episodes for her each season, the writers just don’t know who she is as well as Chabon did when he wrote Q&A.
I’m also having very mixed feelings about how Kirk is overshadowing main characters in the episodes in which he appears. This Kirk is growing on me, but do we really need so much Kirk so early in the multi season run of this show? Especially when it’s getting Paramount+ ratings enough to make the case for many seasons to come.
All to say, as much as I really am sold on the ensemble, with so few episodes, I’m feeling that adding in so much Kirk is taking away from the opportunities to have other ensemble characters be featured teaming up with each other. I’m still not feeling that hankering for Pike’s Enterprise, that I’ve had since I first saw the reconstruction of The Cage, is quite getting satisfied.
Their early scenes kind of felt pissy in a way you don’t usually see in star trek.
I liked them, personally. I often think about what conflict would look like in a post-scarcity people… and sibling resentment, minor grudges (re: Una) feel like the sort of thing that stand the test of time.
We saw some of that pissy-ness in season one of Discovery, and the frictions between McCoy and others in TOS were far more extreme.
We shouldn’t expect 23rd Century crews to behave like mid 24th century crews in TNG. Human society has had another century of evolution and peace by then.
Enjoyable episode, down a bit from the last few but at least we’re staying well ahead of ep1 in terms of quality. I am getting a bit of Kirk fatigue though, they have him technically meeting people for the first time in this episode but it feels like there’s no impact because we’ve seen them together in alternate timelines already.
Also, did I miss something or did they gather no proof whatsoever of the nebula aliens? I’m fine with Pike taking Uhura’s word for it in the climax but it just felt like there was a bit missing in between “taking the hallucinating person’s word for it” and “we now all accept that this was definitely happening and are writing scientific papers on it”.
Anyway now for my truly controversial opinion: I don’t like Pelia. The character is a great idea, but the execution is terrible.
I was excited at first, Carol Kane is great, but she just doesn’t work here imo. She’s hard to understand, every line seems to be delivered exactly the same, I don’t know she just seems like a joke character but without many jokes. It’s a little uncomfortable to watch.
Fully accept I am the only one who thinks this, though!
@TeaHands @ValueSubtracted you’re not the only one, the way Pelia delivers her lines irks me quite a bit.
Plus, I was shocked at Pike giving Uhura so much liberty with something that he said was so important for the federation, especially since she didn’t have any proof. 🤷♀️I was 100% braced for a deluge of downvotes so thank you for standing with me on this one 😅
I agree with you on multiple accounts. Seems like the writing was lacking. In addition to not securing the hallucinating guy, they also made no formal announcement to security or to warn others about his dangerous presence. You would think with such a huge crew complement that there would be more people walking the halls in the scenes when they were trying to apprehend him. Or at least folks trying to figure out why it is dark, etc.
Also agree with the lack of direction on Carol Kane’s character. In fact, the way they included Hemmer as a hallucination, in the pre-recorded video, as well as in commentary by Una and Pelia, it almost seemed as if they were apologizing to the audience for getting rid of the Hemmer character. I am unsure of the reasoning behind it, but I thought he was a great character and wish they hadn’t killed him off.
So far this is the first episode that kind of disappointed me in the new series. It almost felt like it was filler to create the establishment of relationships between Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew.
