Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

[DrNewGod]

Holy Moly, punching in the feels below the belt like that is not Marquis of Queensbury Rules.

Doc did let his daughter go a bit easier than I'd have thought, but then he'd maybe been walking the stages of grief for some time.

Pike morphed into a cowardly, yet opportunistic weasle was a delight surpassed only by Uhura as a ruthless queen conqueror.

Still, I'm struggling a bit with the quick, convenient resolution of M'Benga's story. It has the merit of being totally unexpected. Still, seems like a cheap out.

Nonetheless, enjoyable ep.

[Anthony W]

This week’s episode of The Orville was better than this week’s episode.

Shots fired!

[Gray Lensman]

Holy Moly, punching in the feels below the belt like that is not Marquis of Queensbury Rules.

Doc did let his daughter go a bit easier than I'd have thought, but then he'd maybe been walking the stages of grief for some time.

Pike morphed into a cowardly, yet opportunistic weasle was a delight surpassed only by Uhura as a ruthless queen conqueror.

Still, I'm struggling a bit with the quick, convenient resolution of M'Benga's story. It has the merit of being totally unexpected. Still, seems like a cheap out.

Nonetheless, enjoyable ep.

It's never a bad thing when what could be the worst episode so far (per some online critics who still say they enjoyed it) ranks as "enjoyable". I've seen too many series where even the middle of the road episodes can be described as "painful to watch.".

[ChrisIII]

Looks like next week's going to be a "crew discovers damaged starship with a nasty threat onboard" one. Wonder how it'll compare to "Context is for Kings" which was the Discovery episode that introduced most of the ship & crew but had a similar plot.

[ChrisIII]

Also apart from the one ship seen in the first episode it seems like they're kind of doing the TOS stuff of having most of the rest of the fleet the Enterprise encounters being comprised of Constitution-class. Saves money I guess. "Discovery's" starfleet mostly seemed like takes on the NX-01 design to an extent IMO, especially the Shenzhou which like the NX-01 had the deflector in front of the saucer.

One thing I did wonder about the last episode, what about the other 200+ crew members? Were they incorporated into the fantasy world too or just stuck in their quarters? Also I would've thought Spock would have shown some signs of resistance like Hemmer since he has telepathic skills as well (Then again, he did manage to go nuts in Discovery and had a botched mind-swap recently so maybe he's not quite as well honed as TOS)..


Also thought some of the emotional impact of the daughter leaving was hurt by her coming back instantly as an adult for one last goodbye. Maybe they'll undo that like the X-men did with Magik in INFERNO (and of course she did eventually come back as her older self). The idea of a "Nebula friend" was also in an episode of TNG (Imaginery friend), although this particular one seemed more benign than Isabella (Who attacked people and nearly destroyed the Enterprise) apart from her effect on the crew of course.

[Beantownbrown]

S2 Will Bring Back Major Villains

[thwhtGuardian]

S2 Will Bring Back Major Villains

I'm pretty glad to hear we'll be seeing more of Captain Angel, she was such a great character and it was awesome to see a trans-actor on screen.

[Thezmage]

Still, I'm struggling a bit with the quick, convenient resolution of M'Benga's story. It has the merit of being totally unexpected. Still, seems like a cheap out.

I do think that they needed to let this story breathe a little bit more before this resolution, especially as the last episode implied that a cure was imminent. Like at least give us one episode between them

[DrNewGod]

S2 Will Bring Back Major Villains

Sighhhhhhh...
spoilers:

I wish they would keep JTK far, far away from this series. Let the space between "The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" have its own room to breathe.

end of spoilers

Still, so far, so good. I'll trust the team.

[Jared]

I completely forgot Castor and Pollux were from Greek myth. My first throught was "oh, a reference to Face/Off, nice!"

I'm not sure which actor was having more fun, Anson Mount or Christina Chong (La'an).

Similar to how the daughter story was introduced late in the Gorn ep, here I think the resolution scene was too quick. M'Benga should have had longer to wrestler with the prospect of sending his daughter off into a nebula with an unseen comic entity, perhaps never to be seen again.

However, I did like that she returned immediately and we got a mostly happy ending, which fits the spirt of the rest of the episode. But it needed more time.


At first I thought they should have held this story for at least a season, but then I realized why they can't: thr girl playing Rukia will visibly age and thst defeats the whole point. Still, I would have put more distance between this ep and last week's.

A consciousness spontaneously sprung from nothing made be think of Nagilium. I wonder if "Deborah" is a more benevolent expression of the same form of life.

I totally missed it while watching, but the of the fantasy book Benny Russell!

S2 Will Bring Back Major Villains

What's this about Pikecand M'Benga having history with thr Klingons? The Enteprise missed the entire war.

[ChrisIII]

Yeah, and it seems to be mentioned in the early Discovery episodes that the Klingons pretty much haven't done much since the ENTERPRISE era, perhaps not wanting to make any enemy out of the new Federation right away until T'kumva motivated them.


Maybe Pike and M' Benga encountered them in an isolated inciddent?

[Captain Craig]

S2 Will Bring Back Major Villains

I'm not interested in "Glow Up" Klingons which I take to mean, Bumpy Foreheads.
This show needs the OG Klingons and if the show wants to elaborate on how the foreheads changed, alluded to in DS9 but not spoken of, then fine. First, start with standard flat Klingon foreheads.

[thwhtGuardian]

I'm not interested in "Glow Up" Klingons which I take to mean, Bumpy Foreheads.
This show needs the OG Klingons and if the show wants to elaborate on how the foreheads changed, alluded to in DS9 but not spoken of, then fine. First, start with standard flat Klingon foreheads.

While it could be fun to build on the "explanation" from Enterprise about the augment DNA, perhaps showing that group of Klingons gaining dominance over the empire for a while after T'Kuvma's sect lost prominance I'd also be fine with just ignoring the old look too. The real life reasoning of they didn't have the budget to make them suitably alien looking in the original series but redesined them the first chance they got when that budget did get bigger with the Motion Picture and that they continued to tinker with the design every chance they got after that works far better than any convuluted in universe explanation.

[Sutekh]

I'm not sure which actor was having more fun, Anson Mount or Christina Chong (La'an).

I did not love this episode, but I very much enjoyed how much Pike, Hemmer, Uhura and Ortegas were eating up their roles. Uhura, for instance, made a much more fun 'evil queen' than Hoshi as Empress, back in Enterprise (hamming it up more like Intendent Kira, from Mirror Universe DS9). Pike as the shifty aide-de-camp, and Hemmer enthusing about the magic of SCIENCE! was hilarious.

It's fun to see actors get to stretch their range a bit out of the familiar roles they traditionally play on a show.

[James Cameron]

I thought it was enjoyable but like with a lot of episodes this season, I thought it was unearned. We're 8 episodes in and still don't know a whole lot about the characters, and an episode like this should come around later in a series. If you're going to do a mass hallucination type of deal where every character is supposed to be acting different than normal, we should at least have a better idea of what their normal is. I still have no clue who Ortegas, Singh, and Hemmer even are. They've appeared in some scenes, we've had some glimpses of backstory, but they are barely characters because there haven't been nearly enough episodes that have built up the team and their repoire with one another. So far the bridge crew dynamic has felt really forced and awkward, and even though this episode was fun, it didn't do much to alleviate that problem, and the quick resolution of the stuff with M'Benga's daughter, something I expected to last a long time, was certainly powerful but very underwhelming. Like I said, totally unearned for a show only 8 episodes into the first season.