Star Trek

Fun episode, but bits and pieces always felt a little off. Pelia was fantastic - love seeing competent non-main-characters in any sort of fiction.

Chapel/Spock... ugh. Not so much.

Whats with the wierd "Crossfield" class?

For me that was surprisingly good, by the end I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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.

Overall, a pretty good episode! I am slightly conflicted - I really like the character development of this Spock, but it's also less and less feeling like the Spock we'll eventually see in TOS. As the Klingon captain said, 'the least Vulcan like Vulcan ever' - whereas Spock in TOS is trying to suppress his human side and it takes him till like Star Trek VI to actually act on a hunch. But I am also conflicted as I really like this character too.

The stealing the Enterprise scene, I think Search for Spock is laughing... The CGI of the Enterprise manuvering away from space dock and escaping to warp was amazing though - one of the best uses of 3D space in Star Trek ever but pausing for like 5 minutes whilst stealing a ship to decide what his 'line' is going to be... I wish the new series would stop their pre-ocupation with this, it's kind of famous because Picard uses Engage and Make It So enough to be memeable, but most of the time people from Kirk to Janeway to Sisko also use Engage. (Kirk also frequently uses warp speed Mr sulu, and ahead warp factor 1, take her out, first star to the left and straight on till morning.) And so every captain doesn't have their thing. Pike's 'hit it' is ok, but 'Let's Fly' is kinda dumb and 'I want to go, now' is out of character and just a really unnecessary part of the story. It's also not going to be memeable when it's forced.

I really didn't like the scene where M'Benga and Chapel use some kind of drug to give them super strength to fight off a whole ship of Klingons and then the torture scene? Star Trek should be cleverer than that and made me lose respect for both of the characters. At least the Klingons look like Klingons again.

I like the new chief engineer a lot more than I thought I was going too though!

Star Trek has always been kind of lax when officers disobeying orders save the day, but I thought the admiral should have been angrier and I really hope there's a scene in episode 2 where Pike and Spock talk about it.

Well here we go. Let’s try this out

I liked it, but it didn’t have enough Pike.

If they had super-soldier drugs the whole time why didn't they use them against the gorn or any other combat that occurred in season 1?

Perhaps M’Benga has a stash of the serum Bones will later give Kirk so he can survive his fight with Spock in TOS Amok Time.