I'll say it, the adult gorn, in those space suits look awesome, I'm a sucker for more animalistic races in star trek
The adult gorn was easily my favourite part of the episode!
There's clearly a horror strain in the Gorn arc, with pretty strong echos/homages of Alien ... and I am all here for it. With the scene of Batel warding off the young Gorn, I knew straight away she'd been impregnated because of the clear Alien reference.
I really liked the subtle hints. They arent just savage creatures. They have advanced technology. Communicate in ways humans cant understand at all. Use tech in ways most humans cant handle as well. Etc etc.
Trek would do good to have more species that arent humanoid. It makes for a much more interesting show.
And now is the time to do it, where VFX and CGI are surely up to the task now.
Agree. One of my favorite species was the Xindi in enterprise. But even they fell victim to the trope of the universal translator. A species like the Gorn where normal linguistics just won’t work would be a nice touch (Ala the movie arrival or something)
I’m a sucker for more animalistic races in star trek
Bring back the Xindi insectoids!!!
Adored seeing Scotty show up. I am worried about Batel being infected, as I love seeing a strong woman Star Trek captain and love her relationship with Pike. Lots of hints that the Gorn are not just “monsters”. They are the Borg of pre-TOS era, as someone mentioned.
I hate cliffhangers though. I agree, how long before we see the next episode, especially with the strike.
While a strong woman, they've done shockingly little to tell us anything about her until the last episode when we find out she likes tourism. But we know precious little of her personality and most of the relationship has been seen from Chris' side. I think she's been written to be disposable. But I'd love it if they save her and actually develop her more.
I hope she lives because I like her as a captain. She seems very laid back and I feel like Starfleet being huge and all there would be a few captains that are pretty chill.
We do know she is smart (ad astra episode where she is a lawyer), loyal (she tried to help Una) and doesn’t let Chris lie to her.
The more I think about the Chapel plot, the more I think it was a blunder.
If she survived the initial attack on the Cayuga, it's likely that others did, too - at the very least, it should give Spock a reason to look before hot-dropping the saucer onto the planet.
Gotta agree, it seems like an unforced error. A good chunk of the audience knows she shows up in TOS, which robs the whole idea of any tension it might have, and on top of that it feels plot armor-y to have one person survive and then not check for anyone else.
They could've just contrived to have Spock and Chapel be the best persons for the saucer deorbiting-- Spock as the precise vulcan/science officer to place the thrusters, Chapel as medbay's lead in case they could bring anyone back from the Cayuga.
I'm fine with Chapel being stuck there - I think the tension comes from the overall Spock/Chapel emotional arc, rather than wondering whether she will survive - but the sequence practically demands a second scan with the newfangled tricorders to verify that there are no other life signs on the ship.
HOLY CRAP, I AM SO GLAD I WENT INTO THIS SPOILER FREE!!!1!
Someone posted earlier this week that it looked like Captain Batel was having a really bad day, and yup, she definitely was. My heart sank when she revealed the Gorn egg infestation. My money's on her being the sole "main" character casualty from the events of this episode.
I didn't know Scotty was going to show up so that was a total surprise. Finding out he was Pelia's perfect student who somehow flunked made all the sense in the world, ignoring the obvious small universe complaints.
I LOVED all the effects shots of the Cuyuga's debris field. I initially thought crashing the remains of the saucer section into the Gorn jammer was complete overkill, like throwing a dinner plate at a toothpick, but then realized the jammer must have been absolutely massive and far away from the settlement. It looked like it was relatively nearby upon initial viewing which didn't appear to be the case considering the explosion from when the saucer section hit it.
That cliffhanger, wow. I pray that they have the second half already written and aren't going to do like TNG and wait to write the conclusion. It was mentioned in the TNG Companion that the writers only wrote the first part of their season ending cliffhangers and waited until closer to filming to write and finalize the second part which doesn't seem like the best way to develop a strong resolution.
I love SNW so much. It's going to be an agonizing wait until the new season, probably 2025 at this point? Argh.
EDIT: I swear I didn't read any posts in this thread before posting my thoughts. I'm glad and amused to see we Trek fans had many of the same reactions!
I think we can excuse the fact that apparently everyone and their transporter clone had Pelia as their engineering professor. She's been at the academy for so long, I wouldn't be surprised if she dated Boothby on and off again or at least got him into gardening.
There's a long tradition in star trek where characters talk about one particular professor or class at the Academy and the other character always knows who the professor is.
Ah butts. Until I read your post I forgot that a writers strike is going to make the outcome of this episode up in the air.
Pay your writers big corpos and stop trying to figure out how to reanimate actors corpses with Ai so you can use them forever !
The TNG writers held off on writing BOBW2 at least partially because Patrick Stewart was renegotiating his contract and they needed to know if he was staying on. I doubt that's a concern with SNW. The writers strike could be a problem, though.
Season 3 was originally scheduled to start production May 2nd, just before the start of the strike. It’s only the impending strike date that caused them to stand down on that.
This tells us that the script for the season premiere has been locked for some time.
I loved the colony design. It kinda makes sense. There's an endless number of planets out there, so why not found a colony for your weird LARP phantasies? "Hey, you wanna join my colony reminiscent of Victorian England? There'd be bustle skirts, butlers and bat'leths."
I had a feeling right from the urgency of the first minutes that they were setting this episode up as SNW's version of "The Best of Both Worlds". And the elements are certainly there. A superior enemy. A plan to fool them with technobabble. A crewmember held hostage -- just this time it's split up between Captain Batel being infected, and La'an, M'Benga and Kirk (and colonists) captured. And a cliffhanger. I had hoped that they wouldn't do cliffhangers in this show -- especially season-ending cliffhangers when we don't even know when the next season will air. (2025 maybe?) Or if they did it then at least do it DS9 style where it's more like a teaser of things to come instead of an actual cliffhanger.
Oh well, at least they didn't kill off Batel immediately, and I hope they won't do it in season 3. I'd like to see more of her and of her relationship with Pike because I think it's a really interesting relationship dynamic for a Starfleet captain to have a truly equal partner.
I'm not quite keen on the physics in this episode. Would the Gorn really be fooled by the Cayuga's saucer suddenly "naturally" accelerating towards the planet from the orbit of its moon? That already bugged me in Star Trek Into Darkness when the ship suddenly "fell" towards Earth. Yes, this is a Science Fiction show but they could really use a science advisor for this basic stuff.
Finally, I wonder if every season will bring in another TOS cast member, and who will be next. Sulu? (he'd be an astroscientist though, unless they ignore the 2nd TOS pilot episode) Cadet Chekov? Bones? Janice Rand?
This all sounds a bit negative but I actually enjoyed the episode. It wasn't the best episode of the season but still above average. I just hope that season 3 will come rather sooner than later.
Yeah, the colonists in this episode intentionally curating the a small-town experience is pretty subtle worldbuilding, but tees into the crazier variants like the Hysperians from Lower decks.
I agree with most people here. Great episode as long as you kinda ignore the fact that only Chapel survived in the saucer section and neither her nor Spock made any attempt to look for anyone else or even acknowledge it.
Rest of the episode I loved and I’m now just a bit sad we are going have to wait so long for the next series.
That being said, I absolutely support the strikes so I’m not complaining about the wait.
They just had to say something like "Scans show nobody's alive in the saucer section" and everything would be fine I guess.
The whole point was scans were down UNTIL they slammed saucer into planet. They couldn't detect chapel due to the beam the saucer was used to destroy
As I note in my annotations, I got very emotional whenever I heard them refer to Scotty as “Mr Scott”. Not sure why, it just sounded so right. When they said, “Thank you, Mr Scott,” I mentally added: “That’s something he’s going to get used to hearing over the years.”
The moment I heard Pike say he missed Batel and then praise Ortegas I immediately knew they were going to be placed in jeopardy and sure enough…
It was also immediately obvious when the Gorn youngling left Batel alone why it did so, so glad they didn’t string that out as some big mystery.
The colony design meant that filming exteriors was cheaper, I suppose. It’s the equivalent of building a gated community as a Ren Faire, though there’d definitely be a demand for it.
Wish they’d have given some hints to why that Gorn was on the Cayuga saucer, though. Why was it trying to access command level functions? Intel or something else? And how did it get there without Enterprise noticing or was it there before they arrived? Questions, questions…
At least Martin Quinn, who plays Scotty, is a Paisley boy like David Tennant and Steven Moffat, which means using his natural accent will be easier to make out, as the Paisley accent is less harsh than, say, a Glaswegian one. He’s a bit young for Scotty though, at 28. I’d always assumed Scotty was at least five to ten years older than Kirk.
Nice, fast moving action finale - but I echo the frustration at having this be a cliffhanger.
I swear if anything bad happens to Ortegas I will riot. That lady has surpassed Tom Paris as my favorite pilot and with all the banter with Pike I worry for her well-being.
I imagine they left it open on purpose to allow Melissa Navia, who had a pretty rough year during production of season 2, an opportunity to be written out of the story.
I would love for her to continue though, because I like her way more than Tom Paris, too.
I would like to know why the Gorn was there too, but the Gorn didn't notice Spock boarding and so there's no reason to believe Enterprise would have notice a Gorn boarding. It's also possible it was beamed over when the Cayuga was destroyed to find something or to access the ships systems.
Anyone else notice that the 2 people on the shuttle down who didn't have plot armor (Ortegas and La’an) were wearing red shirts?
Martin Quinn (Montgomery Scott) was reportedly born in Paisley, Scotland.
Dropping in to note that I’m feeling very smuggly self-satisfied that I decided not to completely abandon my alias when we migrated from the other place.
I guess that I must now become an unrepentant SNW Scotty stan. I look forward to seeing the character grow.
THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS AS I WATCH:
NOOO, I DON'T WANT THIS TO END!
Previously: The various stuff happened.
Oh, hey, Cayuga captains log.
Nice of them to have a colony modeled after an Earth town. Saves on budget.
"SIGNAL LOST." In space, a dropped call can mean only one thing: Invasion.
Oh, we're doing the Independence Day thing?
Telling a Starfleet captain to just do reconnaissance is basically telling them to go weapons free.
Nice little tinge of one of the TOS scores at the end of the cold open. Someone more geekier than I can probably place it.
If you ever feel like you are useless in life, just remember that there is a "skip intro" button during a "Space, the Final Frontier" monologue.
Is the "Gorn Protocol" a hand-cannon with with a diamond?
She flies the ship!
I'd like to imagine there is a deleted scene where they glue every piece of junk they have onto the shuttle.
If they're going to do a "is someone still alive in the wreckage" storyline, they probably should have flip-flopped Batel and Chapel's spots, given that we obviously know she's going to live.
They keep giving Jenna Mitchell lines! FREE MITCHELL! Give that actreess a cast credit, cowards!
Ah, a good old fashioned beam into the sky.
Oh, look, a Gornzooky!
And... vaporized.
More Gornzookies!
Oh my god, it's young Scotty. Hopefully this means Keenser is there. I always loved Keenser and his ability to sit on things he isn't supposed to.
Doesn't seem like Keenser is there :(
Of course Scotty would engineer a way to save people. He truly is a miracle worker.
Smashing a piece of space debris is a very... brilliant idea.
Pelia continuing to harass Una for her poor academics in engineering.
Why do I get the feeling that whatever plan Spock has to put the rockets on the hull will also allow him to check for survivors?
Wow, imagine that, Chapel is alive! Imagine that! Whoever would have thought! (Seriously they should have flip-flopped her and Batel if they were going to do this)
USE THE MORSE, CHRISTINE!
Oh, now she grabs the spacesuit. Although I guess she didn't need it yet.
WARNING: GORNZOOKY
COMMAND CODE INVALID'
That looks like a bigger Gorn. An adult? Or at least like a teenager.
So incredibly Alien.
"GET YOUR HANDS OFF HIM, YOU BITCH!"
Oh shit, she's been impregnated with gornzookies. A very zombie movie trope.
"There'll be time later." Before or after you get engaged to Dr. Korby?
"We need to abort some Gornzookies."
Yeah, Scotty would be a shitty student despite being brilliant.
OH FUCK THE GORN KIDNAPPED THEM
TO BE CONTINUED?!?!!?! Okay, who wants to drive to Hollywood and personally beat up some billionaires? I want this strike over NOW and I want a conclusion WITHIN A YEAR, A YEAR AND A HALF MAX!
A cliffhanger... I was hoping they wouldn't introduce those. I expect Sam and M'Benga will be the only one who makes it out alive... expecting to see Sulu and Chekov introduced soon.
Edit: Also the "They've been beamed up... by the gorn" and Pike standing there has the potential to be one of the most horrifying cliffhangers in Star Trek.
2nd Edit: Not Chekov....
Chapel: [restores life support on the saucer]
Spock: [straps rockets to the saucer and yeets it into a planet]
Chapel: surprisedpikachu.gif
Uggggh, not a cliffhanger!!! Damn them! Ok, how long till season 03?
With the strikes and every production on halt and needing to restart? Maybe early 2025 if we're lucky. Earlier is possible I guess if the parts settle in the not too distant future and CBS put prio on SNW once things resume.
It may be a while, depending on when they settle the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strike.
The location they filmed the town at is the same one used in the Wednesday TV series, which was a bit distracting for me, although I suppose if anyone wants to do a crossover Wednesday/Star Trek fanfic, it'll be super-easy, lol.
On the whole a solid episode and the Scott appearance was very surprising and well done.
However why the hell is Christine the only survivor on the cayuga, it makes no sense at all.
Also the fucking cliffhanger is ridiculous
They did it again TOS purists
spoiler
you wanted a rubber suit, so they gave you a rubber suit.
My biggest gripe with this episode is
spoiler
that it could been easily a double episode THIS SEASON with more breath, I hate those cliffhangers but the plot armor was too strong here, we already know who will survive and who don't even before the start of the episode xD
I expect we’ll see Sulu, McCoy and more Scotty next season
"Man sure hope no one else was alive on the saucer section before I viking funeral'd it" ~ Nurse Chapel
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