Strange New Worlds

[Khaldun]

Red alert for me at least:

1) Akiva Goldsman, famous hack destroyer of franchises as showrunner
2) "Khan's relative is a major cast member and Khan might appear in later seasons"

[HaemishM]

Both of those things would be a big ol' NOPE from me even if it wasn't Star Wars. Goldsman is the twat that took whatever potential Titans might have had and just let it turn to utter shit.

[Typhon]

Isn't this Star Trek?

[HaemishM]

Sorry yes, Star Trek. Is there a difference? 

[Khaldun]

First episode is surprisingly good. Feels like TOS but also more interesting at the same time. Even the Khan's-relative character is pretty interesting actually.

[Tale]

Hearing nothing but rave reviews. Going to give this a look.

[Khaldun]

I was very prepared to dislike it; I haven't liked most of this season of Picard and Discovery is just a fucking mess. But this felt really assured, really confident, and genuinely interesting.

[Ruvaldt]

I deeply dislike Discovery, and had to read a little primer on season 2 to get a better handle on what was going on with Pike. After that though, this feels like really good Star Trek. I'll definitely watch this week-to-week. I'd prefer season 3 of The Orville...but that's coming soon, too.

[Ragnoros]

Show looked fantastic. Like on par with the JJ movies for production values. Yet, I don't understand how you can get A grade professionals in every role, vfx artists, set designers, cinematography, actors, etc., and then hire writers where all the dialogue and story beats feel off.

For Noonien-Singh's character we got what felt like an entire season of character development messily crammed into one episode. Meanwhile every motivation and story beat was punctuated with some weird proverb or folksy saying.

I'm annoyed that they seem to be 95% of the way there, and then tripped at the finish line on a great show. I get that everything can't be on par with The Wire, or True Detective for narrative excellence. However it seems like the writing should be the easy part to nail down on a multi-million dollar production. So I'm left wondering why that keeps not being the case for so many projects.

Fingers crossed it slows the hell down and finds its footing in future episodes.

[Velorath]

Looking forward to 3/4 of the way through the season when they all of a sudden do some time travel bullshit or something.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, that's what I'm dreading: this group of showrunners have some kind of collective ADHD.

[Riggswolfe]

I'm still on the fence about signing up for Paramount+ to try this out. Having a character that is a descendent of Khan just feels like a really bad sign to me on top of my other previously mentioned concerns.

[Surlyboi]

We’re not sure if she’s a descendant yet. She could be a relative.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, listening to her story I was thinking they have room to make her relationship to Khan be more direct--it's not clear that the "colony ship" she described was either 23rd Century or something like the Botany Bay. But as with other things in the post-JJ TV versions of Trek that are supposedly back in the old show timeline, there's a few things that don't quite match up to TOS/TNG continuity. Some of them are expected/necessary: it's clear that they're making a big move to relocate the Eugenics Wars to the mid or late 21st Century along with WWIII (and using Vulcan first contact + Europa expedition to explain how Earth was able to bounce back ecologically and economically). But Kirk's Enterprise acted as if the Botany Bay was the first sleeper ship the Federation had ever heard of and yet here's Pike's crewmember talking very unguardedly about being the sole survivor of what might be a similar kind of ship. It's possible that's a conscious misdirect--that she's chosen not to disclose that she is a Eugenics War survivor from a sleeper ship. (Also, Kirk says in "Arena" that the Gorn attack on Cestus III was the first contact between the Federation and the Gorn, but nobody questioned her about who these "Gorn" people in her story are. Maybe the Feds have heard of them but never met them.

[Riggswolfe]

I watched the pilot episode on Youtube. I enjoyed it for the most part though that Gorn story did stand out to me as a potential warning sign that they're not being careful with continuity. I do like the character but think she'd be just fine without the surname that has a lot of loaded meaning to some viewers and could result in shenanigans with the timeline.

I also enjoyed that Fox news whined about the scene that showed January 6th as the start of World War 3 essentially.

[Tale]

I'm still on the fence about signing up for Paramount+ to try this out.

1883 is a damn good western, one of the best shows of the year for me so far. Had me in tears twice. Worth the sign-up for that alone (8.8 average on IMDB, 87% Rotten Tomatoes). I'm signing back up for Strange New Worlds.

(I'm not a Yellowstone fan - they're not alike despite 1883 being a prequel about ancestors.)

[Riggswolfe]

I'm still on the fence about signing up for Paramount+ to try this out.

1883 is a damn good western, one of the best shows of the year for me so far. Had me in tears twice. Worth the sign-up for that alone (8.8 average on IMDB, 87% Rotten Tomatoes). I'm signing back up for Strange New Worlds.

(I'm not a Yellowstone fan - they're not alike despite 1883 being a prequel about ancestors.)

I poked around a bit to see if it had other good stuff to raise the value.

So far it seems like Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are worth it. Discovery, I guess it depends on if I can get over the Klingon changes they made (I find it almost impossible to call them Klingons.) Picard I hear lots of mixed things about and I've heard nothing but bad about Halo.

[MahrinSkel]

Paramount is mandatory in my house for Paw Patrol, but the sci-fi (Halo, Lower Decks, and now Strange New Worlds) is a nice bonus. I just can't be arsed to finish Discovery or Picard, the previous seasons just seemed...overwrought.

--Dave

[Ruvaldt]

The second episode (Children of the Comet) is probably the most recognizably Star Trek thing I've seen since they started making this new run of shows in 2017.

And I've started watching Lower Decks since I resubbed a few weeks ago. It's a lot of fun. Paramount+ seems like something I'll sub to for a few months and come back to every year when there's another run of good shows.

[Khaldun]

Lower Decks is good fun.

[Surlyboi]

I watch Halo in anticipation of various fanboys' head exploding.

[Riggswolfe]

So I broke down. It helps that I had a deal for a free month of Paramount+. Strange New Worlds is my favorite Star Trek since DS9 though I haven't seen Discovery or Picard. I have no intention of ever seeing Picard to be honest, I'm terrified it'll retroactively tarnish TNG to be honest.

They seem to be doing really well with the show and have surprised me by not utterly chucking away canon yet. I thought for sure in the last episode they'd show off the Gorn a decade before Kirk and his crew were the first ones to actually see one in the flesh but nope, they didn't do it. This last episode was also one of my favorite types of Trek action episodes. "We're doing a submarine movie in space."

So far it's a great show and I don't regret watching it. I've checked out the first episode of Lower Decks as well but nothing else yet.

[Ruvaldt]

Yeah, the gorn episode reminded me a lot of Balance of Terror from TOS. They're getting this right.

[Khaldun]

It's almost too much a remake of Balance of Terror (which is a remake of The Enemy Below) but it was a good remake. Lot of familiar tropes given some fresh feeling.

I like all the characters a lot. Including Chapel even though she is most definitely not the Chapel of TOS.

[Riggswolfe]

It's almost too much a remake of Balance of Terror (which is a remake of The Enemy Below) but it was a good remake. Lot of familiar tropes given some fresh feeling.

I like all the characters a lot. Including Chapel even though she is most definitely not the Chapel of TOS.

In fairness the defining trait of Chapel in TOS is *gazes longingly at Spock*. I think most fans would be hard pressed to remember anything else about her.

[Khaldun]

She didn't really get much else, yeah, except for the episode where she's in touch with her fiancee and he turns out to have become a creepy android. (Also her former professor who started sleeping with her while she was a medical student, which is I guess didn't seem such a big deal in the late 1960s...)

[Khaldun]

I've generally been enjoying this a lot even when I know full well what they're swiping (sometimes TOS, sometimes other SF that is adaptable to old-school Trek, like the LeGuin story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"). But this last one crossed a line for me with the rip-off of Alien and Aliens. It was just too slavish a steal which in turn made it all too predictable. Plus it makes the Gorn kind of boring, to be honest. (The one twist on Aliens is the whole "they have to battle each other to be the Alpha", I guess.)  Having Newt-Trek be such a direct copy of Newt visually and then having La'an be Ripley was just, come on guys. Plus having the acid spew also be sperm (from baby Gorn, notably) is just kind of "do we really have to go through the 'oh noes the tricorder can't read the Gorn because something something' bad plotting.

I guess I appreciate the homage of having the obvious redshirts be obvious at the beginning of the episode without being redshirts exactly, only I'd actually like this show to be "everything you liked about TOS without being everything that we kind of make fun of because it was cheesy".  I'm enjoying the complex prequel version of Spock's love life, I love Mount's version of Pike, etc. I even liked Hemmer and La'an; I suppose La'an may reappear. I'd rather this enrich and complicate rather than slide into being cheesy re-enactment of the cheesiest elements of TOS. But I'd also appreciate if they'd at least try to do something slightly original when it comes to plots.

[Reg]

I want the Salt Monster prerelease version.

[Riggswolfe]

So, this has been really good. I'd give season 1 a 9 or 10 out of 10. It might objectively deserve slightly lower but I'm giving it bonus points for feeling like good old school Star Trek and the really great acting across the board IMO.

I liked the season finale a lot as well. I even really liked Pike's thoughts about why those events happened.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, not as charismatic, but then early Kirk was a more serious character in demeanor than we remember now because later on Shatner really Shatted it up a big notch. I think the general take is that imitating Shatner will come off as high camp, so you have to do something different.

I liked this episode fine. Pike moves between being a very empathetic, social captain and being brooding and introspective, and I love that range. It's clear that the visit from the bad future is also going to change that bad future in a more subtle way in that he's going to find a way to get Una out of prison.

(The additions of the Ilyrians is one of the really great bits of building up the Trek universe in all of the newer range of shows.)

re:additions to the continuity, not sure how I feel about Sybok being in continuity--I was hoping they'd just plain decide that Star Trek V never happened.

[Riggswolfe]

re:additions to the continuity, not sure how I feel about Sybok being in continuity--I was hoping they'd just plain decide that Star Trek V never happened.

It was a bad movie but they wouldn't just write it off as never existing though I will admit I figured it'd never ever get mentioned ever again. I suppose it's a bit of hair splitting really. Perhaps they figure Sybok is a character with potential if used right? It'd be interesting if they somehow redeemed the character in viewer's eyes. There is literally nowhere to go but up.

[Khaldun]

Spock certainly has a complicated family life.

[Riggswolfe]

Spock certainly has a complicated family life.

I've never watched Discovery but I do remember rolling my eyes when I found out the main character was his sister. I guess though that with Sybok out there it shouldn't be a surprise though I had forgotten about Sybok until SNW if I'm honest. I saw Star Trek V once, late at night on cable and still felt ripped off.

[Khaldun]

The interesting thing is that Sarek is very nearly as explored a character as Spock and yet there's a ton we don't know that arguably this series could explore via Sybok, since it doesn't have to change what we do know.

Sarek's grandfather was the Vulcan Ambassador to Earth. Presumably that's where Sarek's interest in/fetish for humans developed. He married a priestess and then divorced her and the child of that marriage became deeply opposed to Vulcan ethics. We now know that child (Sybok) was treated for his emotionality by T'Pring, which raises all sorts of interesting questions. Why did Sarek leave his first wife? Or did she leave him because he had some kind of weird fixation on humans that she only discovered after marriage? Did he already know Amanda Grayson at that point? Was he already involved with her? I mean, if Star Trek V is in continuity, I guess Enterprise is too, at which point we know that Sarek isn't the only Vulcan who has gotten sexually involved with a human. Sarek always tries to claim later that marrying Amanda was pure logic, etc. but if instead it was emotional/sexual in some fashion, it would explain why Sarek is so intensely focused on Spock being a good Vulcan--because he knows that he himself has not been. This might also end up explaining why T'Pring cools so much on Spock--if she finds out in the course of treating Sybok that there's something kind of squicky in Spock's family history and that most of Sarek's respected peers know about it, she might not especially want to get involved in it all.

[Reg]

Episode 7 of season 2 just aired a couple of days ago and so far every season 2 episode has been fantastic. Episode 7 was the crossover with Lower Decks. I had no idea that Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome looked so much like their animated characters.

Anyway, just reviving this dead thread to remind people the show is still out there going strong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=molkZhrxqqc&ab_channel=TVLine