Star Trek

I think this episode was fine. Glad to have it back, and hoping we don't have too many more breaks between shows again. :D

So we're not going to talk about the drugs that supposedly give you the strength to beat teams of Klingons and have no side effects?

So, bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed Spock smashing bloodwine, and the general idea of the plot, decent Klingons etc. I did not enjoy unexplained spacewar drugs, feels like a very non-Star Trek thing.

That being said, I really wish they would stop harping the "do the thing do the thing" angle every time anyone sits in the Captain's chair. It's been in every show now and it's just such a tired and stale joke that it's moved over time from being funny, to tiring, to outright annoying.

I think this got things off to a reasonable start, but it doesn't feel like the strongest episode out of the gate. Maybe it's because the show deliberately chooses not take on the cliffhanger of the last season in the first episode. Starting the season with only part of the cast undertaking the mission I think also makes the episode feel a bit slight.

It's also a bit of a darker episode than the last season, but I'm not sure if engaging with the Klingon civil war aftermath is actually necessary in this episode. In fact, leaving out the Klingon stuff here would make it a bit less stodgy to me. I guess there is some curiosity as to what SNW characters were doing during the war, but it really feels like here, the only reason they framed this entire episode around the war was so that M'Benga and Chapel could juice themselves up with a substance that they never quite introduce before using it and Die Hard Klingons for a chunk of the episode. There's maybe some M'Benga trauma, but giving the character another trauma moment where some (particularly Ortegas) remain comparatively lightly characterized feels...meh.

It's probably all the Discovery elements, both in plot and in set design on screen, that make me feel this way, but I was hoping that Discovery would learn the best lessons from Strange New Worlds. This episode has me slightly worried that instead of that, Strange New Worlds may be learning some bad lessons from Discovery. That said I'm hoping things get better across the season. I thought this was good but just not quite what I wanted from the season opener.

If my memory is correct, this episode contained more than half of the scenes from the trailers, most of which were theorized to be from different episodes.

That leaves two possibilities:

• this episode is the most interesting episode, which would be unfortunate but not unheardof for Paramount

• the best is yet to come, and we have no idea what's coming.

I choose to believe the second, for now, and I'm excited.

I didn't really love this episode. I agree with other users that it feels a bit more DIS than SNW s1. I think maybe because of the pacing &/or the action, or maybe just how OTT the plot is, like stealing the Enterprise should be a bigger deal than it is here imo, it just feels a bit ... almost routine? Also I feel like I am the only person on the internet with this opinion, but I really like Spock's relationship with his fiancée and I don't particularly care for the whole Spock/Chapel sub-plot, soooo I am sad to see that continuing. I also didn't enjoy the overtly -> overly emotive Spock, it reminded me of the films, and the Chapel nearly dying bit again felt more DIS than SNW s1. Also, I counted like four different occasions of somebody remarking on Spock being a very un-Vulcan Vulcan, which really felt like a bit much...?

It was very nice to see more of M'Benga, though. He is a great character and I felt like we didn't see enough of him in s1. It felt weird having very little Pike or Number One, though. I hope this is not going to be the standard going forward, it feels like going backwards after SNW seemed to spend a whole season trying to reassure us that they understood what people hadn't liked about DIS?

Oh also -- the new chief engineer seems cool.

Upon further reflection, I feel like this episode undermines the plot of "The Galileo Seven". Spock is a very able commander in 2x01 when years later he struggles on an away mission…

That space jump sequence was the best part of the episode. I felt that.