Star Trek

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.

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?

Enjoyed pretty much everything in this episode except the magic super steroids. The sequence went on for so long.. I assumed that I had forgotten something from last series because there’s no way they would have had this to hand the whole time and never thought to use it during any one of the many life and death emergencies?

That aside. Loved the rest of the episode and looking forward to where things go from here (plus really really happy to have weekly Trek again!)

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.

Is this post tagged NSFW for spoilers?

Can we talk about that weird camera roll during the M’Benga / Chapel fight scene? Usually thats done when gravity is changing, but here the camera flipped, they went through a hatch to a lower level, then the camera rolled over again. What was that all about?

So good to have SNW back!

Loved the episode in general, but there are some interesting decisions with this episode I'd like to get into, like the green power-up juice.

That seemed odd to me. Usually on a Star Trek show the ship's doctor and a trainee nurse would easily be able to kick the crap out of a dozen or so Klingons to save the day. And I'm not even joking, the crew of Deep Space 9 were absolute murder machines when they got going.

Thing is I sort of liked it, I liked that for once on a Trek show "We can't just beat up all of these people on our own" was presented as a plot point, because it usually isn't. I expect that there will be consequences.

As to whether it could or should be a thing, I mean this is a show where people can be teleported, so the idea that they might have some kind of super bull-shark testosterone quad damage power up in their med-kits seems perfectly reasonable.

It does however beg questions about why it isn't used more. And that I think is likely going to be a question we get an answer to this season. I also think it might be connected to why Mbenga will ultimately end up being replaced by McCoy*.

*Slight tangent, but McCoy's bigoted attitude towards Spock in TOS is going to hit so differently if they keep it for SNW, assuming he ever were to appear on the show.