“Lost in Translation”

Fantastic episode top to bottom. Kirk's speech about facing death was iconic. It was glimpse under the hood of what makes the trickster archetype tick. Always fighting. Like Hawkeye Pierce once famously yelled at a dying patient "don't let the bastard win". And Pelia, what a kick in the pants. And Uhura, during Kirk's speech all I could think of was all the harrowing shit those to would face together. And here we see both a lot about her psychology AND the genesis of her trust in him. And Zombie Hemmer...horrifying. Four stars, a classic.

Ok it’s fucking cool that they whip out the Bussard Collectors. I’ll say that. Crew banter is good too. This is just the teaser.

Uhura vs. Kirk is an example of the kind of humor I would like to see more of on Trek. I’m sorry but Uhura punching the shit out of Kirk right after their first meeting in this version of Star Trek, is gold.

Ha! Also, she introduces herself with only her family name, I noticed that too.

I like how paramount+ does not shrink the screen to 10% of its size and move it to the lower left when I pause, anymore.

Also, this episode is 24 mins in and I’m on tenterhooks wondering what is up with Uhura. This has shades of “Night Terrors” so far. Tension in a Star Trek ep! Color me singularly impressed.

Oh my gosh the scene between Chin-Riley and Pelia here is good too

The “Eureka” Moment with Uhura, Sam and Jim Kirk is really pretty sci fi as crap. I’m intrigued by the premise of this ep now that I know what’s going on.

Not a whole lot of Spock in this one, but what is here is pretty good.

In all, a pretty good meal of Trek, i appreciate this ep a lot. This is a four star.

Ps neat surprise at the end

Similar to the previous posters, will say that this is my favourite episode of the season so far, and one of the best from the series: the mystery was entirely compelling, effectively weaved in a new species with a reflection on death, and supplemented existing cannon (I could not help but think, for example, of 'Plato's Stepchildren,' and how the events in this episode inform Uhura's unwavering trust in Kirk). The episode does exceptionally well in taking bits and pieces of stories past and to come and bring them all together to enrich characters and the ongoing narrative of the series.

The episode may not be an all-time great (see, e.g., 'The Measure of a Man,' 'The City on the Edge of Forever'), but it is just about as solid as Star Trek can get.

Two seasons of Strange New Worlds, and two fantastic Uhura-centred episodes. Huge credit to Celia Rose Gooding for what she has brought to the character.

ALIENS! IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME! ! Not to sound greedy or ungrateful but I wish they had explored a little.more abiut their extradimensional nature and made them be made up if partly or based in something different than deuterium since that makes the aliens similar to the Deomn life form from the classic Voyager episode Demon and I prefer this to be as original as possible but the extradimensional part was neat I just wish we had learned more about them to flesh it out more especially after last week's interdimensjonal ALIENS got short shrift which is still messed up..And I hate to say it but the basic story theme/premise of taking fuel from a stellar body thst turns out ot be an unknown life form us similar to a classic Doctor Who episode from Series 3 called 42 which is one of my.fsvorite Who episodes as well as a bit similar to Voyahers The Cloud, bit at least the nature of the aliens here and how they communicate here is pretty imaginative and original I think, unless someone can correct me(original except for the aforementioned Demon deuterium based lifeforms or deuterium containing similarity at least )? And the one down side is this BETTER NOT BE HEMMERS ONLY FORM OF RETURNING DAMMIT! He better come back as a cryogenicslly frozen Gorn mama incubator or something..did anyone else think we would see a real zombie Hemmer incubating Gorn nabies when the episode mentioned they were near Gorn space? That was the oen downside of the episode for ke..other than that good Trek best episode since Ad Astra..the ONLY true trek episode this season other than ad Astra for me..Ok fine and a few bits of Charades from last week

All I really want to comment on is we just got to watch Kirk and Spock meet for the first time. And the manner of that meeting: Kirk stuck out his hand, and Spock shook it. I think that one gesture spoke VOLUMES. Vulcans do not shake hands. Vulcans do not like being touched like that (it's partly cultural; it's partly because they are touch telepaths). Spock chose to take and shake Kirk's proffered hand, almost on a whim, like he wasn't even sure why. And just like that they are friends. Sometimes it's like that in life. You just . . . have a feeling. And in this case, even the logical Spock does. I just think that one, simple, understated scene was an extremely clever way to handle this. I really, really liked it.

. . .

Both Uhura and Una got significant things to do. Hooray.

The brothers Kirk having some scenes together was novel. Uhura decking Kirk was fun. Bet that's a treasured memory she brings to mind at certain times in the future, ha! Also enjoyed Uhura immediately assuming Kirk was hitting on her.

I did want to see more Kirk--La'an.

Pike shows immense trust blowing up that relay station on the word of an ensign and zero supporting scientific evidence. Yet he's clearly weighed the decision and made it based on his judgement of his officer. Very professional, very Starfleet.

. . .

I wonder if SNW, knowing there have been something like a thousand episodes of Star Trek produced already, realizes it cannot compete every week with new "ideas" episodes that feel fresh rather than a rehash and so instead is focusing on character and character development over trying to find a steady supply of novel ideas to base episodes around. If so, I am completely okay with this as long as they continue to do the character work this well. It's a somewhat different kind of approach to a Star Trek show, isn't it? For an episodic Star Trek series to be THIS character focused as it has been this season?

So okay yes there are weird nebula aliens and a mystery to solve, but what really matters in this episode is what it means for Uhura's character journey. Right?

I get that this won't be everybody's thing. I've been getting back into reading more sci fi books lately and there's a marked split between books where "characters are just there to drive plot which is just there to express BIG IDEAS" and books where "character journeys are the point of the story." I mean, ideally you get both, but in practice that's rare. Some readers are just fine with or even prefer the former in their science fiction. Some need the latter much more than the former to be entertained. Me, I guess I'm more interested in the latter and cannot count many of the former amongst my favorites.

I'm digressing. It's late. I have a point in there somewhere. I hope I made it. If not, I'll try again tomorrow to clarify. Anyway! Another highly enjoyable episode.

Okay, who is gonna be the first requisite “worst episode of the show!” comment this week :)

I REALLY liked this one.

Kirk was Kirk, for the first time on SNW.

The actress who plays Uhura did a bang up job.

Even the little scene between La'an and Kirk was very nice.

Still love Pelia.

All in all, a great one.

* * * 1/2 for me

The best episode of the season. I have very few complaints. Great tension, excellent juggling of multiple character threads, solid pacing, and a genuinely wonderful closing moment that ignites the TOS crew.

WORST EPISODE OF THE SHOW!!!!!!!!!!

... I haven't actually seen it yet, I just wanted to be first at something for once.

I liked this episode. It had exploration, strange new aliens, a di­lem­ma and just the right height of stakes. Also, it had Kirk who really acted and felt like Kirk (alt­hough the actor doesn’t look like Shatner by any stretch of the ima­gi­na­tion). Una could shine a little bit, and Pike could de­mon­stra­te his un­fal­ter­ing trust in his team. I like Pelia’s at­titu­de peeled back to see that she just hides pain, like probably everyone else. And they tried to honour canon by hav­ing Pike and Kirk meet when Pike be­came “fleet cap­tain”, even if it was just a joke. Probably all of us have missed Bussard collectors since the be­gin of this third iter­ation of Trek. I found the understated portrayal of the first meeting between Kirk and Spock as simple as effective. Lastly, some of the visuals were quite ima­gi­na­tive.

I don’t mid the episode is derivative — “Night Terrors” was my first asso­cia­ti­on just a few minutes in, and together with the epis­ode’s title I figured out elements of the plot quickly. It also reminded me a lot of “Home Soil”, with a bit of “Equi­nox” and “Night” mixed in. Even if I had to look up the name of he epis­ode, I’ll men­tion the re­use of some minor themes from “Saints of Imperfection”.

However I also strongly dislike the sloppy, con­tem­po­rary writing. Why should these people even know what a “gas sta­tion” is, yet alone com­­pare any­thing to it — have you ever heard some­­one call a motel a “shiny cara­van­sarai”? And no, deu­te­rium can’t be very toxic be­cause ever human has a couple of grams inside their body; in fact, one would have to in­­cor­­por­ate ridi­cu­lous amounts be­fore toxicity kicks in. After all the dis­cus­sion about the strike last week, I am still not sure whether I am team “Hol­ly­wood Writers” or team “A.I.” here.

"And no, deu­te­rium can’t be very toxic be­cause ever human has a couple of grams inside their body; in fact, one would have to in­­cor­­por­ate ridi­cu­lous amounts be­fore toxicity kicks in"

You mean, like a literal NEBULA full of the stuff in high concentration? Are you familiar with the concept of a critical mass? We also have trace amounts of arsenic in our bodies. But it is fatal in greater amounts/concentrations.

That was excellent. Would struggle to fault that one.

@AP

Certainly we have some arsenic in our bodies — several micro­grams, to be precise (details depend on where you live). Of deu­te­­r­i­um, it’s a few grams, or al­most six or­ders of mag­ni­­tude more. This hap­pens naturally because deu­te­ri­um is an iso­tope of hy­dro­gen with an abun­dan­ce of about 0.015%, so out of a kilo­gram of hydrogen, 0.3 g are deu­te­ri­um by de­fault; a typi­cal hu­man contains 5 to 10 kg of hy­dro­gen, or 10% of body mass.

Since regular hydrogen and deuterium have nearly the same che­­mical pro­per­ties, it comes as small sur­prise that deu­te­rium is nearly non-toxic. For sym­ptoms to mani­fest, a sig­ni­fi­cant amount of all hy­dro­gen in the body has to be re­plac­ed by deu­teri­um, about 25%. This would involve in­cor­porat­ing many kilo­grams of deu­te­rium, upwards of 100 liters of D₂O, over weeks. While it has never hap­pen­ed for a human, I don’t think hal­lu­ci­na­ti­ons would ensue. Ani­mals typi­cally die when 50% of their hydro­gen is replace by deuterium.

(What doe you mean by “critical mass”? Deuterium is not fissile, in fact not even radioactive)

I am totally sold on this new Kirk.

I think if you set aside Shatner’s hammy old school acting style, then it’s easier to accept this more nuanced and modern take on the character. This new Kirk is charming and loyal and kind and he marches to his own drummer. It works for me.

PS I also appreciated how quickly Pike arrived at his decision relative to the space station. It was indicative of Star Trek's futuristic utopia. It is easy to see the converse today, how private and public entities alike favour industry and resource extraction over the survival and well-being of sentient or conscious beings. Sunk costs be damned. The Doctor Paul Stubbs of the universe are still out there, but, on this occasion, life took precedence.

@Galadriel IIRC, Doc M'Benga based his diagnosis on Uhura's exposure to *refined* deuterium, which implies something is done to it in the refining process that makes exposure potentially dangerous.

Good to see Hemmer again!

Don’t know if I quite understood how Uhura translated her visions and arrived at the conclusion of the aliens’ dilemma — that scene went by so fast I’ll have to rewatch. But def my fave ep of this season so far.

@Gilligan I agree, this was my one gripe. There is nothing done to verify this idea that it’s aliens trying to communicate with Uhura. It takes all of 30 seconds to basically go from a hypothesis to Pike taking Uhura’s word immediately and BLOWING UP a piece of starfleet property. At least spend a minute running some kind of modified scan to make this seem like something other than a hunch. That bit strained credulity for me. They may as well have had Pike say “you know that tracks with many previous Star Trek episodes, that must be what’s going on here!”

… that being said I echo the sentiments here of this episode being very solid. It also went a long way as far as establishing Wesley as a believable version of Shatners Kirk.

That was lovely. Not an absolutely perfect episode, not an all-time classic, but one which perfectly encapsulated so much of what makes Star Trek work, from exploration of relatable human conditions to cooperative problem-solving.

This was, of course, an "Uhura episode," - and Celia Rose Gooding shows yet again her ability to carry a scene despite being the youngest member of the cast. The decision to weave her unresolved grief involving both her parents' offscreen death and the very onscreen death of her mentor, Hemmer, was inspired, moving me close to tears at one point. However, it was also an effective ensemble piece. For many episodes this season, one or more of the characters were simply missing or effectively absent from the narrative, but here, everyone is given something to do. For the most part, all of these threads work as well, other than the Una/Pelia subplot, which seems out of left field and left me kinda cold with its clearly manufactured drama.

Of course, the episode cannot be discussed without considering the return of Paul Wesley's Kirk, as he's effectively co-lead here, in his third appearance on the show, but first actually playing "real Kirk." With every reappearance, I find myself warming to him. He's a complicated character, walking a fine line between being arrogant and empathetic, in part reflecting his younger age at this point and lack of command experience. While we never saw Uhura and Kirk interact in a significant way in TOS, Wesley and Gooding have good on-screen chemistry, and their dynamic together helps to center the episode. I adored the scene with Kirk, Sam, and Uhura brainstorming a solution within Sam's laboratory. Plus, we get the canonical introduction of Spock and Kirk!

If there's one issue I had with the episode (other than the manufactured Una/Pelia drama for the sake of a B plot), it's that everyone goes along with Uhura too easily in the 11th hour. Pike's a mench and all, but he's destroying a major bit of Starfleet infrastructure on the word of an ensign that it's all been figured out, with no corroborating evidence. No command structure in the world would work like this, and it wouldn't have taken more than a few additional lines to "fix" the issue via some technobabble regarding having the ship detect the aliens.

Other than those two things, almost a perfect episode of Star Trek, highlighting all the strong points of this show.

@Karl Z.

"Pike's a mench and all, but he's destroying a major bit of Starfleet infrastructure on the word of an ensign that it's all been figured out, with no corroborating evidence."

Except that is NOT at all how that scene went. First of all two dead, and one critically affected crewman. Second, Uhura convinced Sam K (the ship's xenoanthropology expert) and Spock (2nd officer, and chief scientist, who Pike trusts implicitly) AND Jim Kirk (visiting 1st officer who Pike knows to be a level headed badass and all around terrific officer), and they ALL supported Uhura's position. He made a quick decision to rely on 3 Lieutenants AND an Ensign. That's a lot of pips.

A fine outing, though the mysterious deuterium aliens felt a bit too familiar to me.

Isn't it a variation of Voyager's infamous "there's coffee in that nebula" episode and The Cloud? Not to mention the whole 'burning up alien lifeforms for fuel' premise of the Equinox two parter?

In fact, you might even say this is the exact reverse of Discovery's entire season 4: this time we were Species C-10 carelessly mining the living space of other sentients.

Still, it makes for a well above average episode thanks to the crew's interactions. I love the exchanges between Pelia and Una that goes beyond catty rivalry. It also looks like our resident immortal *does* remember a lot more than she lets on. We might touch on her encounter with La'an and Kirk in the past yet.

Speaking of rivalries: the brothers Kirk are almost cartoonishly competitive and petty. That might be common among siblings, but is it really behavior you expect from Starfleet officers? Grow up, guys.

Also: with the fuel station destroyed and their own supply of deuterium vented... Shouldn't the Faragut and the Enterprise be dead in space? That's not addressed at all here.

I thought Hemmer was back alive...

@Galadriel

"However I also strongly dislike the sloppy, con­tem­po­rary writing. Why should these people even know what a “gas sta­tion” is, yet alone com­­pare any­thing to it — have you ever heard some­­one call a motel a “shiny cara­van­sarai”?"

Language is full of these euphemisms that everyone understands from colloquial usage that are based on antiquated references that no one contemporary would understand. An easy example from the old font-displaying sentence: "quick as a fox." How many 21st century people have seen a fox run and would know how quick it is or isn't?

How about the expression "in like Flynn?" Who the fuck knows who Flynn is? I don't. I still use it.

"Hang up the phone." I press a button on a touchscreen. No handset goes back on a receiver.

What about the word "okay?" Is "Old Kinderhook" still relevant?

"Let me give [artist's] new single a spin." What is spinning when I open Spotify? Or ask Alexa to do it for me?

Of course people will still say things like "gas up the starship" in the 23rd century, That's how language is. (Plus, you know . . . deuterium is gas! The refinery is literally a gas station.)


@Karl Zimmerman

"Pike's a mench and all, but he's destroying a major bit of Starfleet infrastructure on the word of an ensign that it's all been figured out, with no corroborating evidence. No command structure in the world would work like this, and it wouldn't have taken more than a few additional lines to "fix" the issue via some technobabble regarding having the ship detect the aliens."

Picard would have done it.


@Norvo

"Also: with the fuel station destroyed and their own supply of deuterium vented... Shouldn't the Farragut and the Enterprise be dead in space? That's not addressed at all here."

I am not 100% sure on the Trek-science, but I think the impulse engines would still work. As long as those work, the ships can open the Bussard collectors and pick up enough non-nebula free floating interstellar deuterium to warp out of the system to someplace they can properly refuel (a gas giant in a nearby system, perhaps). Yes, this is probably going to be slow and take a few days. But no, they're not stranded.

That last scene with Uhura, Spock and Kirk... wow

An okay episode.

Finally Una got to do something instead of being completely on the sidelines. The whole ensemble got something to do, except Ortegas who slowly turns into SNW's Travis Mayweather: that one cast member that is just there physically but doesn't get anything to do.

My personal highlight was the scene were Spock and Chapel play chess, and he passive-aggressively pushes her to play faster. Very Vulcan.

What irked me: everyone and their mother immediately started calling the First Officer of another Starfleet ship by his first name. That was weird.

Another weird thing was Pike's promotion to Fleet Captain. We've never seen this in Star Trek, particularly not when it's just two ships on a mission. So I checked the transcript of The Menagerie were Kirk speaks about the one time he met Captain Pike. And there it is:

> MENDEZ: You ever met Chris Pike?
> KIRK: When he was promoted to Fleet Captain.

SNW's producers were sneaky with that one. I'm both annoyed and impressed.

I just wanted to jump on here and say I AM IN TOTAL AWE OF THIS SERIES RIGHT NOW!!!

Even my wife (a very casual Star Trek fan) has been totally on board with this series since “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”; and she, obviously, *LOVED* this ep!

I’m speechless …

@UESPA Sputnik

Ortegas isn't quite in Mayweather territory, she still has one personality trait (smart-ass), which is one more than he got.

Chapel's a civilian and she works for M'Benga, so I think Spock is actually OK with not contacting Starfleet HR immediately. The crew members we see have probably figured it out anyway, or will soon enough.

As for what would be antiquated jargon in the 23rd century, Pike has been shown to love using it. Everyone would have read up on the subject just to make sure they didn't look too befuddled in front of him.

Very much a filler episode. Forgettable. We learn kirk’s brother is jealous of him and Uhura saves the dust aliens who are being hurt bc of the ship’s [ *enter space flight jargon*]. This wasn’t a bad episode just as much as it wasn’t a good episode. Meh

@jeffrey’s tube

The saying In like Flynn comes from the actor errol Flynn always being a ladies man in his roles. Being in like flynn means you’re on the right track with a woman. Some people incorrectly say in like flint because that was the name of a popular James Bond ripoff movie in the 1970s. Not sure why I know this but share your useless knowledge when you can I suppose.

I hope M'Benga is ok. That was quick. Not the greatest episode I ever saw. Uhura's epiphany was way too easy/convenient. Una still poorly written except for S2E1. They just shouldn't have killed off Hemmer. 2.5 *'s imo

@ Cody B

Other examples:

"Hit the hay." No one sleeps on hay anymore.

"Stay tuned." Don't need to explain that one, do I?

"In the limelight." No one burns lime for light anymore.

"Turn it down a notch." No one uses knobs for volume anymore.

When's the last time you got on a soapbox when you got on your soapbox? Where does one get a soapbox these days?

"Close but no cigar." No one gives out cigars as prizes anymore.

It's endless, really.

I mean I hate to "sound like a broken record." Maybe we should start over with a "clean slate."

@Norvo see my comment above yours you echoed me in similar to The Cloud and the aliens mature similar to Demon Voyager season 4 though hopefully the aliens here were somewhat original in hiw they communicate? And were they made of deuterium or just lived in extradimensional hydrogen connected deuterium..not sure thus point was clear
. Because the life fork in Demon contained but wasn't made of deuterium solely..it had dichromates and what not

A good Uhura episode. But the story was a little too reminiscent of TNG’s Night Terrors. I still don’t care for Paul Wesley as Kirk and the subplot with Una and Pelia could’ve been left out entirely. It’s as if the writers don’t know what to do with Una. Also, I found hard to believe Pike would destroy the collector on Uhura’s word alone. Couldn’t they have added a scene where Spock confirms what she’s been saying?

> @Gilligan
> Don’t know if I quite understood how Uhura translated her visions and arrived at the conclusion of the aliens’ dilemma

I'm guessing this was like her mental pipes getting unclogged, and stuff that was just outside her awareness finally becoming sharp and making sense. (e.g. "A whole bunch of shit just started making sense.")

That's how I ended up interpreting her sudden extreme certainty. Just not easy to portray that on-screen, but it would have been nice to see _some_ kind of signal everyone could understand.

Still, good stuff.

Incredible episode. 4/4 stars as one of the episodes in the overall cannon that must be watched to understand the ethos of Star Trek.

However, why are her quarters so much bigger this year. In the light virus episode she shared it with a bunch of other people.

There’s gotta be some explanation

@ThatERguy

"However, why are her quarters so much bigger this year. In the light virus episode she shared it with a bunch of other people.

There’s gotta be some explanation"

She's an ensign now and full-time assigned to the Enterprise. Last year she was a cadet and on a rotation.

@ Cody B.

"...filler...Forgettable."

Project much?

@Sputnik

"What irked me: everyone and their mother immediately started calling the First Officer of another Starfleet ship by his first name. That was weird."

1. He's not quite the Farragut's XO yet. 2. Uhura is the only non-Lieutenant who interacts with JK in the episode, everyone else (Sam, Spock, L'an, Pike, Una, M'Benga) either equal his rank or outrank him. 3. JK has never been big on formality, Bones and Spock call him "Jim" through his entire career on the Enterprise. 4. Starfleet is not a military organization. 5. Starfleet officers have NEVER been depicted as overly formal, how many seasons of DS9 did we get with O'Brien calling Bashir "lieutenant" and not "Julian?"

Another solid episode.

Does anyone know what music the band was playing in the bar in the last scene? Felt a bit like I was back in Vic's lounge, but I dug it. Curious as to if it's a new composition or an old classic.

There are mostly good elements here but some things continue to drag down SNW for me. Firstly, this is a pretty routine story akin to body possession with weird aliens trying to communicate with humans -- seen this kind of thing numerous times in classic Trek. As a vehicle for Uhura it's good, though Gooding is nowhere near as good an actress as Bush or Chong.

I also feel that James T. Kirk is being shoe-horned or forced into these episodes when I don't think it makes much sense for him to be here. Yes, it's nice at the end when he's introduced to Spock and obviously this has longer-term implications for the series but couldn't Pike play the role Kirk played here as some kind of mentor to Uhura? And I don't like Paul Wesley as Kirk -- just find it hard to see the character played so differently compared to how Shatner did it. Also, this SNW S2 I feel Pike has been neglected as the primary character.

It's good that this episode takes the opportunity to update some "relationships" like Chapel/Spock but also La'an/Kirk and we get some interaction between Una and Carol Kane's character. But the issue I have is how SNW is forcing character development -- like Una and the engineer are so unprofessional toward each other - basically a pissing match to show character weaknesses for each one. And then in the end, they all make up perfectly. It's just too pat and simplistic. Instead of "telling" and treating the viewer like an idiot, how about some more nuance or "showing".

I had to do a double take when Pike just orders the refining station blown up based on Uhura's deductions -- Uhura who was highly mentally compromised the whole episode. That's quite a leap of faith for Pike, considering how important the station is.

But I did like the mystery in the early going -- just wished it had turned out to be more original in some way. It is an improvement from the first half of SNW S2, which was largely mediocre and way worse than the 1st half of SNW S1 (just an arbitrary comparison there).

2.5 stars for "Lost in Translation" -- I still feel SNW has to be better than just relying on well-trodden roads. Gooding doesn't exactly knock it out of the park in her time to shine but she's not bad -- the writing could have been better like in her first interaction with Jim Kirk etc. The Uhura character examination via Kirk was also not very subtle -- the whole not willing to face death and death winning etc. Kirk does all the work for the viewer. But there are aspects here that are clear improvements from the 1st half of SNW S2, but this episode still has a lot of flaws.

@AP

If you liked the episode that’s great but you don’t need to get insulting. People are going to disagree with you about things in life. Yes I think this episode is filler and forgettable. We just saw a similar plot last season of Discovery with the old “how do we communicate with invisible/microscopic life forms” plot that’s been done much better on just about every series that has ever had the Star Trek name on it. Besides that tired plot we learned the Kirk brothers have a competitive relationship. There is nothing else to be said about the episode. Filler, forgettable.

@Cody B

Disagreement is fine. De gustibus.... But trolling is another matter.

@AP

It’s all good no hard feelings. In text it might seem like I’m harsher on this episode than what I really feel. This to me in general seems like the consensus is the reverse of “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” where I was in the camp of thinking that was among the best episodes to come out of the Paramount+ era but a lot of people didn’t care for it much. I just didn’t find anything in this episode at all where I thought “oh my god, GREAT writing! So original!”. The last scene was cool but it could also be argued that was low hanging fruit and an easy way to get some fan points. Throw Spock, Kirk, and Uhura together. “Remember these three? They are in TOS together!!!”. I just highly disagree this is a four star episode is all. Just my opinion though I am certainly not the gatekeeper of what anyone enjoys nor would I want to be.

Not the worst episode of the season, but was just okayish. It feels like a premise that has been done many times before but the piecing together of the mystery following through to the resolution was just so hastily and poorly executed compared to every other similar Trekkian example I can think of. They completely forgot about the science in the science-fiction and went straight from a mere hunch to WE GOTTA BLOW UP THE STATION NOW. The evidence was circumstantial at best and situated only in a person suffering hallucinations. I look forward to hearing Pike's explanation to the Admiral in charge...maybe he can charm his way out of not losing his captaincy. And Sam Kirk even plans to write a science paper on it too. Maybe it would go something like this:

"A couple members of the crew suffered from hallucinations and psychosis, leading to violent behaviour. One of them tried to sabotage both the station and the ship, resulting in his death. The other crew-member psychoanalyzed herself and deduced that invisible aliens were trying to communicate with her based on the nature of her hallucinations. These aliens were trying to tell her that they were in danger and only way to help them was to destroy the station. After we destroyed the station, the hallucinations and psychosis ceased...therefore proving that these invisible aliens really exist. I'll take that medal now plz."

We saw this kind of crazy logic on ST:Picard but it was mostly there as a way to quickly move to characters from point A to point B in the plot. This is worse because it's largely the point of the entire episode.

Is anyone digging the Carol Kane character yet? Because now that they're trying to include her more and give her things to do other than provide snarky one-liners and just be kooky, she's really starting to grate on me. Maybe she would be better as ship's counsellor if she has all this inexplicable insight into what everyone is thinking. Is her species supposed to have some sort of psychic powers? I doubt it, as she keeps chalking her insights up to her "experience" and long memory, but just as with the invisible aliens, characters are once again just spit-balling with far-fetched hypotheses and consistently being proven right on their first try because the writers demand it. As a rule, what the writers say always goes but when the storytelling is competent and persuasive enough, you forget that you are watching actors follow the dictates of a script but rather that everything that happens could have conceivably happened in this world in a fairly logical and organic way. I didn't really get that sense here.

Did anyone else jump when the buzz came the first time? My brain just said "Breen!" and I was so on the edge of my seat for a few seconds.

Poor judgement by Pike to pooh-pooh the very sensible suggestion to confine Uhura to her quarters.

"I don't need a cookie."

"Okay, NOW you sound crazy."

🤣

What did Sam take from the table?

That bearded extra at the end was really hamming it up! I guess the director liked it; otherwise I'd think they would yell "CUT!" and ask him to tone it down on the next take.

Wow, I see the first few commenters absolutely LOVED this one. I was a bit more mixed on it. I agree with the comment made in an earlier episode's comment section that I miss the days of TOS when we didn't constantly dig into every character's "tragic backstory". And the whole "invisible aliens only Uhura can see, just trust her on this and blow up the giant, strategically crucial refinery, it'll be fine" plot was hard for me to swallow.

So it's impossible for me to get as high as three stars. I'll go two and a half because there were a number of individual scenes I did like, and this Kirk is growing on me even if he still seems like a pleasant new character rather than the old one we have known and loved since TOS.

@Jeffrey's Tube: "I did want to see more Kirk--La'an."

Cosigned.

"Pike shows immense trust blowing up that relay station on the word of an ensign and zero supporting scientific evidence. Yet he's clearly weighed the decision and made it based on his judgement of his officer. Very professional, very Starfleet."

I certainly agree with the first sentence there. The last one? Not so much. [@Rahul, @Karl Zimmerman, and I seem to be of like minds on this.]

I think you express a bit of a false binary (and something of a strawman) in your bifurcation of sci-fi where "characters are just there to drive plot which is just there to express BIG IDEAS" or that in which "character journeys are the point of the story." I would assume you might class me as more a fan of the former, given that in my first comment in this thread I bemoaned the constant use of "tragic backstories". But like many other Trekkies, I consider "Inner Light" a masterpiece (even though I don't love TNG overall). And in that episode the sci-fi itself is risible for many reasons. It's the character arc that makes it great. But that's not because of a standard-issue Tragic Backstory (TM) like we get from Uhura in this episode. It's the WAY the character arc is played out in a more subtle manner, like the way the regional administrator is a bit of a bureaucratic annoyance but isn't fundamentally a bad guy.

So I love character-based fiction, sci-fi or not, if it's done on a truly sophisticated, intelligent way. This is hardly ever the case on TV in general, and is even rarer in science fiction. (One of the only other counterexamples that comes to mind on TV is the excellent and far too little-seen Amazon limited series "Tales From the Loop"; if we broaden it to movies I can think of a few other examples like "Her" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".) La'an's tears at the end of the time travel episode represent one of the only scenes in nuTrek that I found effective in that regard; most of the frequent attempts these creators make in that regard qualify as overwrought, cliche-ridden melodrama. Bathos, if you will, rather than pathos (Leif, a couple more fancypants vocab words for ya).

(BTW, JT: I hope you still go back to the previous episode thread to see my responses to you there about whether Starfleet is "the military".)

@Galadriel: "However I also strongly dislike the sloppy, con­tem­po­rary writing. Why should these people even know what a 'gas sta­tion' is, yet alone com­­pare any­thing to it — have you ever heard some­­one call a motel a 'shiny cara­van­sarai'?"

I will, once again, defend the "contemporary writing". We have no freaking idea what contemporary 23rd century argot will sound like, and I think it would be exhausting for an ongoing series to go all "Clockwork Orange" and attempt to make some up. They want us to get the vibe of what the characters are saying, so we get a kind of "universal translator" version of their future speech. Just as we got Sixties bouffants and miniskirts on TOS, and their representation of the future tech was just the best, albeit still crude, approximation they could provide at that time.

It's like when you see a play. You don't (or shouldn't) expect a scene where people are driving somewhere to look ultra-realistic. They give us enough to know they are in a car, and seeing scenery go by as they talk, and expect us to fill in the rest. Maybe some of you don't like plays, or even black-and-white movies, because you insist on extreme fidelity to verisimilitude (hi Leif) in everything you watch, but that's way too picky for my taste.

@Norvo: "It also looks like our resident immortal *does* remember a lot more than she lets on."

Based on what?

@AP: "Starfleet is not a military organization."

Hard disagree. Please see my comments at the end of the last episode's comments section where I take apart this claim.

@castlerook: I'm a jazz fan myself, and although I didn't specifically recognize that music, I really liked it too.

@Cody B: "If you liked the episode that’s great but you don’t need to get insulting. People are going to disagree with you about things in life."

Cosigned.

@AP: "Disagreement is fine. De gustibus.... But trolling is another matter."

Eye of the beholder. I have been accused of trolling many, MANY times for forthrightly expressing my (often contrarian) opinion. But I have never ever been less than completely sincere. Most of the time IME people use "trolling" as an ad hominem attack against those who express opinions they don't like and want to shout down. Just let other people express their opinions, and you can civilly express your disagreement. Leave the ad hominem attacks out of it, please.

Yknow another thing I like about this ep now that I've had time to reflect on it and read you lovely people's comments a bit, is that it moves, it goes, they're talking about fixing the Refinery, then they're doing it, they show Uhura having hallucinations, then you find out more...the pacing is very good, and it has a lot of different good parts of the episode that are juggled well.

I like Spock and Chapel playing 3D chess. I like Uhura punching Kirk the day they first met. I really like that Spock decides to take a cue from his recent experiences and shake Kirk's hand. So much about this story feels right. I'm afraid I can't explain it very well. It was...satisfying.

There's something almost euphoric in watching a nice, solidly plotted, well-paced episode of Star Trek, with a good mystery that is slowly revealed in steady intervals, and has a solution that (although you might have seen it coming) gets paid off well in the execution (with good acting, good camera work, and a big finale that doesn't feel paltry or tacked-on).

It's Streamlined NuTrek with a taste for the classics. This ep really is a 4 star for me.

Man I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with everyone liking this episode.

First of all, Jim Kirk has none of James T Kirk’s actual personality traits. He’s acting more like the kid from That 70s Show. He should just be his own character. Chris Pine was way more like a real Kirk than this guy. And why is he the main character in two episodes already? He’s not even part of the crew and he’s had more screen time than Pike.

What’s going on here?

Pike…the captain, is like a background character. Weird.

I’m sure I wasnt the only one who figured out there were aliens trying to communicate living in the nebula. Also…how did Sam automatically jump to the correct conclusion about extra dimensional beings?

They didn’t explain that at all. There was no interesting reveal or discussion or discovery about how they figured it out. They just figured it out in like 5 seconds.

I feel like people just enjoy these episodes becomes is semi-competent Trek. It has all the “beats” of a TNG episode on paper but without any originality or intrigue. But the writing really isn’t that good.

We’ve just lowered our standards.

I think it's important to note the Out of Universe reason for why Kirk is in so many episodes instead of Pike. Anson Mount has a new baby and they needed to write out their leading man for most of the season. This is why Paul W. keeps showing up as he's basically being the substitute while the guy takes some time off.

@C.T. Phipps
"I think it's important to note the Out of Universe reason for why Kirk is in so many episodes instead of Pike."
I would assume that they are planning to reboot TOS. Kirk 3.0 has to be heated up for that.

Absolute banger

"There are also too many examples of poor communication among the characters — especially, ironically, by the communications officer. "
remember when this was clearly spelled out as the thematic premise of the episode

I'm gonna say it. It might have been said before after others how but I've not seen it.

If they wanted to do a Star Trek remake or retell using the current crop. Kirk, Spock, Chapel and Uhuru. Find some actors for Scotty and Chekov.
I'd be interested in watching that.
This, SNW is good, but I wouldn't be enraged if they followed that with this.

Have to vehemently disagree with Jammer on this one. I thought it may have started slightly slowly but by the end it was far and away a superior work of trek television.

4/4 stars.

Critical cannon of Star Trek and should be required watching for any lists of key episodes of Star Trek.

Uhura meets Kirk.
Spock meets Kirk.

This was done equidistant without being too sentimental or overdone.

The ensemble in its entirety gets featured proving once again this show is excelling where other shows have struggled. This will v continue to be the strength of this show.

Una/Pelia: Una and Pelia have their drama together which I think was very realistic tension between two strong women. Adds dimensions to both.

Spockel: The schroedingers cat relationship analogy with Chapel and Spock was brilliant. Early stages of a relationship can very much be that way, even in the future apparently.

Uhura/Kirk: The chemistry between Uhura and Kirk was electric and built over the episode. Uhura’s acting is excellent. I would say with the caveat that’s she’s much better when not on the bridge. On the bridge she always comes off as childish and out of place. Everywhere else she shines. I’m not sure if this is intentional. On the bridge I feel when she’s at the communications center in many episodes she’s been very cringey. Other settings she’s phenomenal.

NuKirk: Paul Wesley has earned his chops to be Kirk. It’s been clear since the beginning he’s been playing alt-Kirks until now. Still hope he doesn’t get too much airtime and overshadow the rest.

We clearly need more Sam Kirk.

Ortegas: She had a minor role again but at least nothing to wince at. I can’t remember any quippy comment this time. Let’s hope they’re moving away form that. I’m starting to think she may be SNW’s Bashir. Where she starts out much worse than where she ends up. Bashir also was super cringe in DS9 season 1, especially towards Jadzia.

This episode is absolutely key viewing for SNW and key to cannon for the entire franchise. It will age well with time.

4/4 stars.

Almost forgot:

HEMMER: how dearly he is missed in this show. I hope they can find a way to bring him back or an alt Hemmer. We haven’t actually seen his death. They can hand wave it away. Zombie Hemmer was terrifying and poignant.

Pike: this show shines when the cast is so strong that the show doesn’t have to revolve around the captain. Like doesn’t have to save the universe. In fact him sliding into the background or mid-ground is exactly what makes this show so powerful as TV. Maybe it’s because real life he had a baby. But the show would do well to keep in mind how successful it’s been when he’s a player but not always the MVP.

@ Slackerinc

Not only did Pelia remember never having talked to Uhura before, she was able to recall grades she gave to both Una and Hemmer, two of possibly thousands of students she teached in her decades at the Academy. That's evidence of a pretty keen memory, even though she likes to pretend she's a bit of a wacky ditz.

I can’t fault Jammer for the middle of the pack score for the episode, his opinion after all, but I gotta back up @Andrew here because the entire point of the episode was that Uhura was seeing terrifying visions, hearing a loud creepy sound no one else could hear, and was not sleeping which easily explains why she couldn’t communicate more directly with everyone what was going on. Hence the title of the episode, the ships best communicator having a hard time communicating.

Unrelated it’s worth noting how lame a lot of the hate reviews for this show have become in other circles. All week leading up to this on YouTube and various other places people were whining that the structure they were in for the preview of this episode was “way too big to be on the Enterprise, and is a massive violation of canon.” Turns out it clearly wasn’t the Enterprise Pelia and Una were standing in, and I doubt any of them will own up to their poor quick judgment. I personally don’t care if you don’t like the show, but just make better criticisms please. Others have noted here that the Una vs. Pelia moments in this episode were a completely irrelevant B plot to this episodes story, and I agree. It remains to be seen if it’s something they develop later.

^forgot to conclude that the Una Pelia point is a better example of constructive criticism than being willfully obtuse about ship interiors.

Another decent Star Trek-y episode that balanced a clever sci-fi mystery with more of that sweet, sweet character work. One thing Disco learned too late (if they learned at all) is that if you don't care about the cast, you won't care about their adventures.

Doggone it, this new Kirk is growing on me!

I like how this was a subtle callback to the classic "Darmok", one of my favorites as I watched it when it first aired. Also "Night Terrors" with the simple message being conveyed by the alien.

As for the sound of the aliens' "voice" in the hallucinations, why that just made me think of the *Breen*! GRHYXTHPTFYTHRTXGH

@Norvo

"Also: with the fuel station destroyed and their own supply of deuterium vented... Shouldn't the Farragut and the Enterprise be dead in space? That's not addressed at all here."

They just vented the deuterium they had collected. Not the stuff they brought with them.

@ThatERguy

"However, why are her quarters so much bigger this year. In the light virus episode she shared it with a bunch of other people."

My guess is that she is an Ensign, not a cadet, so she has her own quarters now.

@SlackerInc

"What did Sam take from the table?"

I'll have to watch and pay closer attention. I seem to remember it being some sort of food?

"I agree with the comment made in an earlier episode's comment section that I miss the days of TOS when we didn't constantly dig into every character's "tragic backstory"."

Isn't that the truth. I saw it coming a mile away... she had to have inter turmoil from losing her family... they just can't help themselves. It's really getting old. But I certain Chapel will have one too.

"And the whole "invisible aliens only Uhura can see, just trust her on this and blow up the giant, strategically crucial refinery, it'll be fine" plot was hard for me to swallow.""

I think they should have linked Uhura and Ramon somehow. Why is it just these two people that are affected? Was Ramon possibly a communication officer with talents similar to Uhura? They could have made some connection and came to a conclusion.

"La'an's tears at the end of the time travel episode represent one of the only scenes in nuTrek that I found effective in that regard"

I agree. That scene truly moved me... one of the few in nuTrek. Again, hat's off to Chong for her acting chops.

@AP: "Starfleet is not a military organization."

True, but it's structure and conduct of it's bridge officers (until nu Trek) has always reflected that. I don't like when people throw that out there like it's supposed to mean something. Everything Star Fleet is based on military hierarchy. Staff, Admirals, Commodores, Captains, 1st officers... the list goes on and on. SNW is the absolute worst at it.

@Joe

"First of all, Jim Kirk has none of James T Kirk’s actual personality traits. He’s acting more like the kid from That 70s Show. He should just be his own character. Chris Pine was way more like a real Kirk than this guy. And why is he the main character in two episodes already? He’s not even part of the crew and he’s had more screen time than Pike."

I don't agree with this at all. He hasn't displayed any "Shatnerisms" but he is projecting confidence, brilliance, intuition, etc. His conversation with Uhura about coping with death is probably one of the best Kirk moments so far in nuTrek. Peter Wesley is killing it. Chris Pine did a fine job too.

"Also…how did Sam automatically jump to the correct conclusion about extra dimensional beings?"

"SAM: Well, there's a theory... it's a little bit fringe, but hear me out...
that extra-dimensional life-forms could actually poke into our space and attach themselves to atoms from our dimension."

That was enough for Uhura to start to put 2 and 2 together.

@ThatERguy

Nice review... I pretty much in lock step with your points although I don't think this is a 4-star episode.

"HEMMER: how dearly he is missed in this show. I hope they can find a way to bring him back or an alt Hemmer. We haven’t actually seen his death. They can hand wave it away. Zombie Hemmer was terrifying and poignant."

They had the PERFECT opportunity to not kill him. He's an Aenar... they LIVE in the ice of Andor... the Gorn babies die in the cold. This was a more than plausible way to retain Hemmer as a character. It still chaps my ass to this day. I really enjoyed him and his budding relationship with Uhura.

"Pike: this show shines when the cast is so strong that the show doesn’t have to revolve around the captain. Like doesn’t have to save the universe. In fact him sliding into the background or mid-ground is exactly what makes this show so powerful as TV. Maybe it’s because real life he had a baby. But the show would do well to keep in mind how successful it’s been when he’s a player but not always the MVP."

Agree with "not always", but the Captain is there to be in charge and the junior officers need to acknowledge his presence, defer to his judgement, etc. WAY too many ENS's making command decisions here.

This is another SNW episode that liked just fine but I think they squandered an opportunity to land it. Gooding's acting was good (no pun intended) but not great IMO. This was her opportunity to shine and I found her performance to be a little lacking. Again, not bad but...

Can someone on the bridge please locate our intruder? ... good lord, it was like kids playing hide and seek... and were foiled by the old pop into the Jeffery’s tube trick. Where is everyone else on the Enterprise? Why didn't Uhura just stun him when she found him instead of trying to reason with someone who she more than anyone should understand is mentally incapable of reasoning... good lord.

That said, Kirk popping in with the emergency transport was pretty cool.

I understand Pike having to make the tough call on some pretty shake grounds, but why did we have to blow up the station? So Una pushes a button and the TV doesn't shut off so that's it? Pelia states that the saboteur did more damage than we thought? Roman was trying to keep the station from powering up! ... are you saying he was so bad be made it so it wouldn't shut off? Shoot the damn panel and shut the thing down ... pull the plug for god’s sake... oh wait, we MUST give ENSIGN Uhura an opportunity to SCREAM "fire torpedoes!" I'm sorry, that's not her place when she is of sound mind, and she isn't here... Shouldn't generating a HUGE plasma based fireball inside the nebula be a discussion point here? That wouldn't kill a gazzillion interdimensional deuterium hitchhikers? At times I think this is turning into Discovery. (Burnham's blatant lack of regard for life)

Oh, Pelia... I'm guessing that Pike accepted her request to be Chief Engineer on the Flagship of the Federation? Can't we show Pike making that decision? As of right now she just showed up and help steal the Enterprise... or did that even happen? I haven't heard Pike or Una talk about it.

... and I love Carol Kane, but take a tablespoon of honey or something and clear your dam throat... she's as bad as Stewart in Picard. Her accent makes it hard enough to understand her.

Rant over I guess...

Some really good stuff in this episode.

Kirk/Uhura
Kirk/La'an
Chapel/Spock
Una/Pelia

All meaningful and sometimes charming exchanges.

Hairs stood up on my arms when Kirk and Spock shook hands... no kidding, a powerful trekkie moment for me. Love the pan out with Kirk, Spock and Uhura all sitting together.

But there is too many WTF's to go any higher than 3 stars. Kirk meeting Spock for the first time is worth one star all by itself.

Oh, and in case anyone wasn't aware...

Mellisa Navia lost her partner three days after he was diagnosed with leukemia.

I read this awhile back. I really felt for her.

https://www.talkhouse.com/an-actor-a-helmsman-and-my-brian-boldly-going-where-no-widow-has-gone-before/

His name was Brian Bannon.

They named the nebula after him in this episode.

Pretty cool gesture I thought.

> ...oh wait, we MUST give ENSIGN Uhura an opportunity to SCREAM "fire torpedoes!" I'm sorry, that's not her place when she is of sound mind...

I'm surprised so many reviews have glossed over that moment. I cackled when she did that -- for me it signaled that she was REALLY invested at that point. The clouds had basically parted on the whole 'mystery' and she was desperate to act on it...

Thing is, those torpedoes were happening anyway. I didn't _really_ think she was giving the order, she was just excited. Little excited yapping ensign acting above her pay grade. ;)

I hope that giant explosion in the nebula didn’t kill
Millions of transdimentional aliens in an instant giant genocide.

This story was done far better on TOS as Devil in the Dark. Watching SNW and Enterprise in parallel I can't get over how overly emotional and unprofessional everyone in new Trek acts. No one acts this way even in a contemporary blue collar office setting, let alone people who are supposed to be in a hierarchical pseudo-military organization.

A much weaker episode than the previous two, unfortunately - rather predictable from the start and all over the place in terms of constantly stuffing questionable interpersonal melodrama into the mix.

Very happy to see Hemmer and Una again, though. Hemmer should never ever have been killed off and while Una gets a little more time in this episode she's sadly paired - or, rather, mismatched - with the intensely irritating Pelia here. The scene in which Uhura and NuKirk discussed coming to terms with death, with reference to Hemmer, was probably the best Uhura moment in what was meant to be her focus episode.

Pike is getting far too deferential towards his crew now, to the point that Uhura actually gives the command to launch torpedoes! Pike is starting to come across as something of a drip rather than just a well-meaning let's-all-get-along motivational speaker.

Chong once again demonstrated a masterclass in acting in the few scenes she was in, even though I don't care for the La'an-NuKirk 'nomance'. Likewise the rivalry between NuKirk and Sam Kirk and their whole family history is both uninteresting and forced.

The 'gas station' references were very silly.

Quite disappointed by this episode, I'm afraid, but it was not without its moments (Una, La'an, Hemmer).

@ThatERguy
'Ortegas: She had a minor role again but at least nothing to wince at. I can’t remember any quippy comment this time.'

She had a winceworthy quip about 'pulling doughnuts in the cloud' as part of the 'gas station' exchange at the start, alas.

She's only really been toned down properly in the two episodes preceding this one.

While I liked the little La'an/Kirk follow-up I wish they could have gotten that drink.

My friend with whom I watch Trek still thought it was far-fetched that she would fall so head-over-heels in love in just a single episode, but I reminded her "this is Star Trek, people *been* falling in love in one episode, since the beginning!"

@SlackerInc
'That bearded extra at the end was really hamming it up! I guess the director liked it; otherwise I'd think they would yell "CUT!" and ask him to tone it down on the next take.'

Haha, I thought the same thing. I think he was meant to be a Tellarite, so 'hammy' definitely fits. If he was a Tellarite perhaps the extra thought he'd try to portray 'argumentative' body language.

I liked it too though. It was a wonderfully bizarre sight to pan back from.

Did anyone else assume, given the reference to the Gorn at the beginning of the episode, that this was some kind of Gorn telepathic weapon to get Starfleet out of the nebula?

@SlackerInc

"(BTW, JT: I hope you still go back to the previous episode thread to see my responses to you there about whether Starfleet is "the military".)"

Thanks! I would not have gone back to last week's discussion without the reminder.

Cool, JT.

Spot on review, Jammer.

@ThatERguy: "Spockel: The schroedingers cat relationship analogy with Chapel and Spock was brilliant. Early stages of a relationship can very much be that way, even in the future apparently."

I agree about that part. Don't agree that Una/Pelia worked.

BTW, it's "canon", not "cannon", in this context. They are homophones but different words.

@Norvo: I thought you meant we saw signs she remembers the time travel visit, which I wasn't sure if she would be able to.

@Yanks: "oh wait, we MUST give ENSIGN Uhura an opportunity to SCREAM 'fire torpedoes!' I'm sorry, that's not her place when she is of sound mind, and she isn't here"

Agreed.

@Bok R'Mor: I dig it.

Interesting episode, but I can swear I've seen this storyline before, don't remeber where.
Good suspense at the outset but the episode lost steam as it went along.
First episode where Carol Cane's character didn't annoy me.
Uhura's first meeting with Kirk is a fun idea. Don't know if I buy it but it was fun to see. Paul Wesley doesn't feel like original TOS Kirk at all but I guess that's fine. We can just imagine him as Star Trek 2009's Kirk.

Botrhered me a bit when Pike let Uhura take charge and issue a torpedo volley on the bridge, but I guess his command style is really loosey goosey. The denounement felt too quick and easy. I was hard-pressed to beleive that they would decide to destory the refinery five minutes after Uhura updated them on the situation.

Overall an ok episode with a central fine performance by Celia Rose Gooding.

@philadlj

“My friend with whom I watch Trek still thought it was far-fetched that she would fall so head-over-heels in love in just a single episode, but I reminded her "this is Star Trek, people *been* falling in love in one episode, since the beginning!"”

She didn’t fall in love, it was the first time she connected with anyone before. It’s more like a crush that can’t go anywhere.

“questionable interpersonal melodrama into the mix.”

This is massive hyperbole in my opinion. The crew on this show pretty much unanimously gets along with each other like every episode, simply having emotions beyond being happy and determined 24/7 isn’t melodrama. Melodrama is The Whale starring Brendan Fraser or insert Discovery episode here.

Very reminiscent of “Night Terrors”. Good episode but the mystery wasn’t that mysterious.

Great character work, though.

@Slackerinc I know the words bathes and verisimilitude lol did you reslly think I didn't? Another reason isn't coming more rare..apparently mainly used in legal.contexts so I feel like it's a less well known word..anyway whatever..I wish we had learned more about the aliens aliens they had been a little less reminiscent of The Cloud or Demon..I don't see how it's at all like. Night Terrors though as someone above mentioned..since those aliens were telepathic and not extradmiensional and not lovong in deuterium and not being hurt by humans so...what similarity?? Other than a vague horror motif/tone/element..but that's very basic..

@Yanks said "I think they should have linked Uhura and Ramon somehow. Why is it just these two people that are affected? Was Ramon possibly a communication officer with talents similar to Uhura? They could have made some connection and came to a conclusion."

I thought it was clear, though not stated outright, that the connection was recent loss and/or fear of death... When Kirk and Uhura played back Ramon's logs, he said he'd hallucinated a dead loved one. Right then, I figured it was people like that who were susceptible to the aliens' "transmissions." I assumed at some point that connection would be stated out loud but no one said it.

I liked this episode a lot (and Pelia is awesome for me; "I get it," that not everyone agrees). I feel like Jammer is overly negative on this one, but he isn't wrong about length/pacing. I mean, really, what exactly was gained by Ramon's escape from sickbay and the subsequent chase? Security personnel fire at him on the way out of sickbay, hit the door with a shower of sparks like Imperial stormtroopers do... A nacelle is damn near **blown up** according to VFX but just needs repairs per Pelia. Jammer is right: Cut this crap out. Instead: Ramon fights his restraints in sickbay, blows a gasket and dies. Just as tragic, with no less or no more known about the issue at hand than what we saw.

Blowing a gasket is on a car(I think 🤣) not a human

Complaining about longer episodes is lame bc we only get 10 episodes. I’ll take every minute I can get. More development even if it becomes extra.

Still middle of the road, but definitely a step up from last week. I appreciated that they at least made the attempt to keep the stupidity to a minimum. That part about "refined deuterium" made my eyes roll up in to the back of my head, though. You wouldn't usually refine deuterium in this circumstance. It's not a radioactive ore that you want to purify. For the term "refine" to even make sense it would have to be a part of some compound that you wanted to break down in to pure deuterium, like refining water into heavy water and extracting the deuterium on earth. But that doesn't fly here because they're literally scooping up deuterium gas into the Bussard collectors. Somebody just failed physics and chemistry in that writer's room.

Shout out to Robert W. Bussard. That brought a smile to my lips when they mentioned the Bussard Collectors. Fantastic physicist. His legacy lives on. Rest in peace.

According to Wikipedia, hydrogen is collected and converted into both deuterium and anti-deuterium in Star Trek. I suppose you could loosely refer to that process as "refining," but seems like an extra step. At this point, I'm going to assume that the nebula was mostly hydrogen with a certain critical concentration of deuterium. The refinery/collectors scoop up the mixed gases and filter out the hydrogen from the deuterium. Why the pure deuterium should be highly toxic is anybody's guess. How they would assume Uhura would get exposed to deuterium when nobody else working for much longer periods in engineering did is also anybody's guess.

The Una B plot fell mostly flat for me, although towards to the end in the shuttle they made an attempt to recover. That whole B plot should've been rewritten to include Una in the discovery of the aliens, shoring up that part of the A plot, which was played too loosely at the end. I wanted more of an investigation as to what was going on. I was troubled that there weren't more people hearing the signal. It seemed that they were targeting people who'd experienced loss of loved ones as someone pointed out above. There should have been more people targeted. Hemmer had more friends on the ship, Una for instance, and there were other people who lost loved ones. I wanted a scene similar to the one in TNG's Schisms were a number of affected persons came together to connect the pieces of the puzzle. Instead it was just a sudden onset revelation by Uhura with flimsy corroborating evidence. That was rather weak to start the climax of the story.

I'm really hoping they don't try to do some love triangle with Uhura, Kirk, and La'an down the road. But with the same writing crew that sat Nurse Chapel's tastebuds directly on Spock's tonsils it's a real possibility. I'll keep my fingers crossed that smarter screenplay editors will prevail.

Another annoying part is the Kirk is better than Spock at 3D chess nonsense. Considering their stated mental capabilities, this was absurd in TOS and also just as ridiculous here. Stop it. Just stop it.

Lastly, at this point, Pike is just a soft, moist, warm, buttered biscuit fresh out the oven rather than a captain of a ship. You can see the aromatic steam rising off him when he sits in the captain's chair. Anybody can give orders on his bridge, especially in emergencies. You just have to have the correct body parts and be in an elevated state of agitation over something SERIOUS. I shouldn't expect anything different considering how the writers literally depicted in season one that getting him OUT of the captain's chair in favor of the far more proactive Kirk is crucial to the future of the Federation. He should be somewhere christening his girlfriend's palate rather than sitting anywhere near a captain's chair on a star ship.

Does anybody know what the song was the jazz group was playing at the end? I kept feeling like I ought to know it. Someone suggested "Till There Was You," but I don't think that's what it was.

Really enjoy Jammer’s reviews as they are well written, informative, thoughtful, and detailed. Not a regular poster but have gone over just about all the reviews, in all the series. When doing rewatches use Jammer’s reviews as a general guide. However, they are only a subjective point of view. Not meant to be something that is blindly followed. This post is my subjective point of view.

We all have bias. From following Jammer’s history he seems to have become obsessed with Deep Space Nine at an early age with staggering detail that none of the other series match. From DS9 his website blossomed. It stands to reason that DS9 would probably be considered his Star Trek gold standard with perhaps a little bias in favor of DS9. As for myself, I’m one of the dwindling number of people who was fortunate enough to have seen the TOS when it originally aired in 1966 (I was my teens in 1966). In order to have seen or remember seeing (someone 5 or younger is not going to remember regardless of what they say)the TOS when it originally aired you would have to be at least over 60 years of age. In addition you would have to have been between the ages of 6 to 36 in the year 1966. At least six to remember. Anyone over the age of 36, given the reality of the actuary tables, is no longer with us so the the number who actually saw TOS is becoming small and getting smaller with each passing year. As you can guess, my bias would tend to be towards the TOS.

Looking over Jammers Trek reviews in total. My view is that he tends to over value DS9 episodes when is comes to the number of 4 stars ratings. He appears have done the TNG retrospectively with my view being there were definitely some episodes under valued. Absolute classics not given 4 stars. Again this is just my opinion. As TOS, he seems to have taken issue with a lot of the dated production value and largely discounts the innovation for the times. Obviously the production cost can’t really be compared to the 1960’s to the 1990’s. It’s not a fair comparison. The birth of Star Trek starts with TOS. Everything that followed comes from TOS. There are a number of episodes which, again in my opinion, are under valued. Maybe this is my bias. A note: I love DS9, TNG, and TOS in equal measure. The other two series Voyager and Enterprise were only average from my perspective and somewhat of a disappointment compared to what came before. Judging from his reviews of the episodes, it appears Jammer may have come to a similar conclusion.

This brings us to the new Star Trek series. Judging strictly from his actual reviews, it clear he’s not really much of a fan of any of the series if one compares it to his two favorite Star Trek Series (DS9, TNG). One can at best surmise they may rise to an entertaining level but, as a whole (my understanding based on the actual reviews) all the series are in Jammer’s opinion very much average. The best reviews seem to have been reserved for Discovery and Picard 3.

SNW has now gotten enough episodes and reviews that one can clearly see a trend. The reviews outside of a few first season episodes is decidedly middling. Basically average to below average especially when compared to DS9, TNG. When it comes to SNW, I strongly disagree. The series reminds me a lot of TOS. My view is these episodes are continually getting under valued. Again my opinion. One of the common complaints is lack of execution. This screams cast chemistry. As a cast with chemistry can make average scripts come alive and entertaining. One of the great strengths of TOS, DS9, TNG was the chemistry in the cast, the characters. SNW has great, entertaining episodes with great chemistry in my opinion. The stories are interesting, the characters fascinating. SNW is now becoming my 4th much loved Star Trek series joining TOS, TNG, DS9.

I've been following Jammer's reviews for over 15 years now. Started out with Voyager and DS9 reviews and read every single one of them (there was no comment section back then if I remember correctly). Since then I went through every single Trek review section except for Prodigy and TAS. I also follow his Star Wars reviews and followed this Orville reviews as well.

In general I find 90% of his reviews spot on, or else I wouldn't hang around here. He GETS Trek and unlike some vehements online, he was always prepared to give the so-called NuTrek a fair shot and his review are mostly unbiased by nostalgia. Do I always agree with him? Of course not. Only kust now in Picard S3 I thought the coveted 4 start rating for "No Win Scenario" was a little too generous. But for the most part, like I said, I find his reviews insightful and fair and I also like to look part the rating and see what he's got to say. So for me, his take on SNW his accurate. It's a good show, but not great, with most episodes being not terrible and not stellar.

@ThatERguy
I'm pretty sure "blowing a gasket" can be attribuated to a human. :-)

@Quincy
"Lastly, at this point, Pike is just a soft, moist, warm, buttered biscuit fresh out the oven rather than a captain of a ship. You can see the aromatic steam rising off him when he sits in the captain's chair. Anybody can give orders on his bridge, especially in emergencies. You just have to have the correct body parts and be in an elevated state of agitation over something SERIOUS. I shouldn't expect anything different considering how the writers literally depicted in season one that getting him OUT of the captain's chair in favor of the far more proactive Kirk is crucial to the future of the Federation. He should be somewhere christening his girlfriend's palate rather than sitting anywhere near a captain's chair on a star ship."

I find this is becoming a real problem with the show. Someone made a decision - the showrunners, the producers, Anson Mount himself - to make Pike more of a buddy than a starship captain. It's everywhere. He spends more time cooking than running the ship. Most of the time he's clueless as to what's going on and seems to be the last one to be updated. His confidence in his crew is beyond admirable, it's ridiculous. AP above me wrote that starfleet isn't a military organization. I tend to disagree. While it's not "military" per se, starfleet is still a fleet, with chains of command and hierarchy and it functions only because people follow orders. In order for people to follow orders, they need to feel their superiors have that edge that makes them earn that distinction of giving orders. Heck, orders that might get you killed more than once.

SNW's Captain Pike is not such a man. His command style is so soft and amiable that if I was his subordinate and he would send me into a dangerous situation I would think "that clown with his cookings and apron and "hi"'s and "bye"s everywhere? He's like like my roomate in starfleet academy. Why would I risk my life just because he says so?"

There has to be a certain distance between the captain and his crew, and the captain needs to exhude confidence and authority. How can you do that when you invite your bridge crew for pasta night every week? It erodes that quality in you.

Come on guys, this episode was not very good. Here’s a few things that would make it better (1) more Pike - why does he let Uhura say ‘fire torpedos’? Like a major emotional point should be his love of exploration clashing with his support for his crew. Him wrestling with the set back destroying the equipment would cause could be played up (2) eliminate James Kirk entirely and make this about Uhura and Sam Kirk: he’s the xenobiologist!! Maybe he figures out that there are actually aliens - in fact maybe he even sciences out a way to move them to a different nebula and we get a win-win ending. Seriously you guys, why has SNW completely abandoned Pike and just made this show about TOS again. I wanted 5 seasons of Anson Mount and an episodic fun show with a NEW cast. How many shows does Kurtzman need to ruin before they fire him.

@ThatERguy
‘Complaining about longer episodes is lame bc we only get 10 episodes. I’ll take every minute I can get. More development even if it becomes extra.’

There are two points here: the first is how efficient SNW is or isn’t in what it does with its screen time. The second is how efficient SNW is or isn’t with its ten-episode bloc.

SNW varies wildly in how efficient (and effective) it is in using its running time to actually tell a story. The chase and fight sequences in this episode, as others have pointed out, were unnecessary, just like the car chase in ‘Tomorrow is Tomorrow is Tomorrow’ and the ‘do do drugs’ run the gauntlet slow-mo fight sequence with ‘Chapel’ and M’Benga in ‘Broken Circle’ were pointless as well. How do these add to ‘development’, whether of plot or character? They don’t at all. They simply squander running time. So running time is definitely not an issue here, stretching content thin is.

It is often stated here that SNW can’t highlight everything or everyone because it ‘only has 10 episodes’. I don’t understand this at all. There are eight cast members (Pike, Una, Spock, La’an, M’Benga, ‘Chapel’, Uhura and Ortegas) and that’s enough to give each character a focus episode each and still have two episodes left over for anyone else (Pelia) or to give two of the big three (Pike, Spock and Una) an episode extra. Plus Anson Mount has had reduced time on-screen for the first three episodes due to his personal life. So mathematically SNW is absolutely not encumbered by a lack of episodes, of running time or of space to pursue whatever it wants.

@Quincy
‘Lastly, at this point, Pike is just a soft, moist, warm, buttered biscuit fresh out the oven rather than a captain of a ship. You can see the aromatic steam rising off him when he sits in the captain's chair. Anybody can give orders on his bridge, especially in emergencies.’’

@Lynos
‘I find this is becoming a real problem with the show. Someone made a decision - the showrunners, the producers, Anson Mount himself - to make Pike more of a buddy than a starship captain. It's everywhere. ‘

I generally don’t have a problem with giving Pike a warmer and more approachable personality who consults painstakingly with his senior staff (Anson Mount is in my opinion probably the best casting decision in all of NuTrek). I would prefer it if he consulted with them in a ready room rather than over him whipping up gourmet food though.

However, when Uhura gives the order to fire torpedoes, I half-expected Pike to snap his fingers and point understandingly and say ‘On it!’ like he did when Sevek asked for more food in ‘Charades’. That is not character development – it means that Pike is on the verge of no longer being taken seriously as a figure of authority within the series. That sense isn’t because of one single scene on the bridge in this episode, it’s because of a progression over time that has made Pike seem less captain-like. (I say this just two episodes after a fascinating scene in which an amnesiac Pike nearly beat someone to death, which I expected the writers and producers would delve deeper into.)

If (for whatever reason) the writers and producers don’t feel comfortable with portraying Pike as an actual captain who does things captains do and actually leads his crew instead of simply deferring to them, they should leave him as the de facto ship’s counsellor cook for the rest of the series and have Una take over any scenes on the bridge where direct command authority is required. It would also solve the problem of Una being sidelined*, which actually irritates me far more than the portrayal of Pike as motivational speaker.

*Admittedly Una was not really sidelined in this episode, although again she was separated from the rest of the main crew and relegated to a largely pointless B plot.

@Bok R' Mor
" That is not character development – it means that Pike is on the verge of no longer being taken seriously as a figure of authority within the series."
At the end of the show we are going to find out that Pike's accident wasn't one. That's why so many of this crew are no longer around when Kirk takes over.

@Booming
'At the end of the show we are going to find out that Pike's accident wasn't one. That's why so many of this crew are no longer around when Kirk takes over.'

Ha. Nice.

I actually wouldn't mind that much if the writers and producers showed that Pike slowly receding from a command role to spend more and more time cooking and handing advice out was Pike struggling to cope with his knowledge of his own fate. Pike was famously jaded in 'The Cage' so it would make sense. But I doubt such an arc is what is motivating the writers and producers regarding Pike at the moment.

Can someone do a count of how many shots/scenes we have of Pike in the captain chair? I love to know! :-)

It seems to me he hardly ever uses it. Even with the few bridge scenes he's on, he's usually standing or walking around. It's subtle, but it's a visual language that communicates to us that "Pike is not in the captain chair most of the time", whether it's done deliberatley or not.

Gotta admit, I got some chills from the Kirk-Spock introduction.

I would love to have seen Jonathan Frakes make a cameo playing trombone in that last scene.

I think the idea is that Pike is so secure in his authority that he can casually discard it and it makes no difference.

@Jammer great review. I hope this year's summer vacation was significantly better than last year's.
...

Initially I had an extremely positive reaction to this episode. I even checked the time at the 40 minute mark because I thought at least an hour had passed and we were looking at an amazing two-parter. Unfortunately that's when it began to go off the rails for me. As I've previously mentioned, I am a really big fan of Celia Rose Gooding. Sadly, in this episode I wasn't convinced that she was up to the job. I always felt like her embodiment of Uhura did justice to the Uhura I grew up watching and admiring, but I didn't feel that way this time. I missed the explanation for why she was able to tune in to the frequency. I guess fear of death and recent loss just seems like part of being human.

How many people do you think are on the Enterprise ship in SNW? (This isn't a rhetorical question.) I don't think I've ever seen more than a dozen at most on screen at the same time, which is fine but the other shows have made an effort to give the illusion of a pretty packed ship. Nothing on SNW gives me the impression that there are 400+ people serving on Enterprise. (One consequence of this is that it feels like a Hollywood set. The ballroom-sized crew quarters don't help.)

One episode or one scene can interrupt the narrative tension significantly. When Pike asked his Ensign, "what's the play?" That was the scene for me. Enough. I don't mind how Pike is portrayed as 'the husband of a successful female executive who reads self-help books so he has something to talk about at parties.' I don't mind that at all. Generally I really like him. But there are no ships anywhere with captains who ask ensigns what their next decision should be. If it were a film, I would have walked out.

This is also another huge let down for Una, and I hope Rebecca leaves SNW for not developing her character or giving her much to even do. (Also, has she EVER sat in the Captain's chair?) As others have observed, the script would have been better if some of the science officers had analyzed what was going on.

I am actually pretty pleased with Paul Wesley's portrayal of Kirk. I just don't understand why he needed to be in this episode, especially when Spock or Una could/should have been doing what he did in the show.

@Yanks
"They had the PERFECT opportunity to not kill him. He's an Aenar... they LIVE in the ice of Andor."

Yes, 100%. Pisses me off too. It seemed like the most logical and expected conclusion to that episode was that Hemmer would survive in the ice. I wonder how much the writers know about Star Trek? Hemmer was my favorite character, and I felt like 'zombie Hemmer' was a slap in the face to fans, on top of a contrived explanation.

@Peter Howie
"Did anyone else assume, given the reference to the Gorn at the beginning of the episode, that this was some kind of Gorn telepathic weapon to get Starfleet out of the nebula?"

Nope. But that would have been a story worth telling.

@Quincy: "Somebody just failed physics and chemistry in that writer's room."

As long as we're on that topic, it seemed pretty clear to me that they once again went with the trope of that guy instantly freezing when he was exposed to the vacuum of space. Which is just not what happens, at all. If you had a good pressure helmet on your head, I think you could do fine for a good little while in space--even if the rest of you was not in a space suit.

"I wanted a scene similar to the one in TNG's Schisms were a number of affected persons came together to connect the pieces of the puzzle. Instead it was just a sudden onset revelation by Uhura with flimsy corroborating evidence. That was rather weak to start the climax of the story."

Great point.

"Lastly, at this point, Pike is just a soft, moist, warm, buttered biscuit fresh out the oven rather than a captain of a ship. You can see the aromatic steam rising off him when he sits in the captain's chair. Anybody can give orders on his bridge, especially in emergencies. You just have to have the correct body parts and be in an elevated state of agitation over something SERIOUS."

LOL!

@Mike: "The birth of Star Trek starts with TOS. Everything that followed comes from TOS. There are a number of episodes which, again in my opinion, are under valued. Maybe this is my bias."

I was not yet even a gleam in my father's eye when he, a big sci-fi fan, was watching new episodes of TOS when they came out. But I got hooked on the repeats as a kid, before TNG ever existed, as well as the movies featuring that original cast. And I totally share your bias.

However, with SNW I actually tend to line up fairly well with Jammer. I did like some episodes a bit more than he did:

--"Strange New Worlds" (the pilot)
--"Spock Amok"
--"Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach"
--"The Serene Squall"
--"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"
--"Among the Lotus Eaters"

But Jammer liked a few others more than I did:

--"Ghosts of Illyria"
--"All Those Who Wander"
--"The Broken Circle"

We rated the remaining seven episodes basically the same. So I guess I do like the show more than Jammer does, but only marginally.

@Midge: "Pike - why does he let Uhura say ‘fire torpedos’?"

She was basically having a psychological breakdown at the time. The real question is why the person whose finger sits on the torpedo button followed her order!

@Bok R'Mor: "There are eight cast members (Pike, Una, Spock, La’an, M’Benga, ‘Chapel’, Uhura and Ortegas) and that’s enough to give each character a focus episode each and still have two episodes left over for anyone else (Pelia) or to give two of the big three (Pike, Spock and Una) an episode extra."

I take issue with your implicit premise here. I would like to see a lot more episodes that are not focused on ANY one character.

@Dirk: "@Jammer great review. I hope this year's summer vacation was significantly better than last year's."

Oh, that's right! What a nightmare that one was. So, yeah: seconded.

@SlackerInc
'I take issue with your implicit premise here. I would like to see a lot more episodes that are not focused on ANY one character.'

Oh, I agree, believe me. I was merely pointing out that there are more than enough episodes in a ten episode run to give every single cast member their own focus episode (if that's what the writers and producers want to do) and still have two episodes left over to do something different or give specific characters even more attention.

Trek has always done episodes focusing on a single character, as well as ensemble pieces. I don't have a preference for or a problem with either approach.

My point was that it is wrong to claim that SNW doesn't have sufficient episodes or running time available to do whatever it wants.

I thought this episode was fine, but could have been so much better with a few changes. First, SNW's Kirk just doesn't work. The actor doesn't have the charisma and his appearances feel like poorly executed fan service. Nothing in TOS suggested to me that Kirk and Uhura had such a close friendship. Pretty much everything Kirk did in this episode could have been done by one of SNW's core cast, all much more interesting characters.

The other drag is the show still seems afraid to take its time and replicate the success of 90s era Trek. As Jammer noted in his review, there's still a need to cram in action/horror scenes.

SNW is much, much better than Disco or Picard, and I've found most of the episodes entertaining, but a few self-inflicted wounds prevent it from being great.

I’m honestly baffled by the generally positive reaction to this episode. SNW has usually excellent writing and this episode includes just the most ridiculous choices. Why is Uhura allowed to do anything freely after Ramon blows up a fuel pod? Why is she ever left alone? Why is the crew so weirdly skeptical? They’re literally flying around space meeting weird aliens all the time. Why in the world did Pike ask Uhura “what’s the play” instead of just executing the very obvious next step of evac and destroy? Why is Una doubting her chief engineer when she suggests root cause analysis?

The story was interesting but absolutely the most sloppy execution I’ve seen from this group. Felt like there was a guest writer who’d never written anything before.

This had a lot of elements that reminded me of Discovery, which is not good. Commanding officers making irrational decisions("Hey Uhura, we know you're going crazy like this other guy who is trying to destroy the station. Take this phaser and go hunt him down"). Subordinates completely ignoring orders multiple times without so much as a sideways glance from their CO's.

Further, the solution would require a massive leap of faith, and you could remove 10 seconds of this episode and leave it open ended as to whether she actually solved the mystery or just set the Federation back years over a false hunch she got while watching a video.

I liked the theme of the story, though. I like Uhura, and getting to know the new engineer, but the story itself felt like a half baked STTNG "Evolution" or "Night Terrors". That seems to be commonplace in this season: story is a bit weak, but the character work is terrific.

@Dom

"I thought this episode was fine, but could have been so much better with a few changes. First, SNW's Kirk just doesn't work. The actor doesn't have the charisma and his appearances feel like poorly executed fan service. Nothing in TOS suggested to me that Kirk and Uhura had such a close friendship. Pretty much everything Kirk did in this episode could have been done by one of SNW's core cast, all much more interesting characters."

1. I was not to convinced of the young Kirk first episodes either but here Wesly catches part of the older Kirks charm. I agree that Kirk was not neccessary but why not?

2. Tos was not to much about charaters. SNW is very much about charaters and relations. SNW could not do this without TOS because we, well I, have a relation to the vert in best cas two demensional charaters in TOS. The sceen where Mbenga draped the dead crewman and Pike standing was not TOS like. But it's done now. It picks up the "zeitgeist" time of TOS and makes in a more modern way. There where no relations in TOS. People came clear with each other they where 2 dimensnal buddies.

The scene between Peila and Una would not have been possible for trek 40 years ago.

By the way, a fair / good episode but not excellent. But there where some goodies. If I am not mistaken there is a sceene in TOS (perhaps) from the crew mess. Compare it with the scene from thise episode. It is just fantastic.

FYI: Hey ya’ll — ep 7 crossover with Lower Decks just dropped at 4pm today

I’m unable to finish this episode. I keep falling asleep.

SlackerInc: "What did Sam take from the table?"

Celia Rose Gooding said in her Ready Room interview that Sam took Uhura's cookie.

That's the kind of thing that keeps you behind Jim in rising through the ranks, Sam. You're just a bad boy.

@Gilligan's Starship

My man. You made my weekend. Thanks!

Sam stole Nyota’s cookie, did he? Bet he got crumbs everywhere.

Agree with Jammer that it should have been a bit more tense than it ended up being, but still a good episode overall.

SNW might have the highest floor for any Trek show. TNG, Voyager, and DS9 were all littered with true garbage episodes amongst the great. SNW never goes to those depths. Only 1 or 2 episodes have really been 4* classics - but 16 episodes in and my lowest score might be a lone 2* (Serene Squall), with almost every other episode being a 3* or higher. That’s really solid.

3* again for me with this one.

So, I’m little behind in my Trek Tech: I thought their ships were powered by dilithium crystals. What do they use deuterium for?

In all fairness, rewatching the scene when the torpedoes are launched, Pike gives a nod to La'an before she actually launches the torpedoes, something I didn't catch previously. So I guess what Uhura said could be taken as her urgent guidance to Pike, and not an order to fire weapons. Still insane to do that based on her seemingly unhinged say-so, though.

At the risk of digging up a can of worms, I heard something on the "Baldly Go" Bald Move podcast that I just can't resist sharing. The two seemingly straight dudes who host it had the following exchange, talking about how Jim Kirk seemed surprisingly warm and kind to Uhura:

https://youtu.be/ilpn5FCJTxM

At 24:52, "But also, Uhura is an attractive woman, so maybe that's, uh--"
"That helps! [laughing]"

They also weighed in on the question of whether Starfleet is a military organization, and noted that Jim's contemptuous attitude about Sam's job, and who gets promoted faster, is a point in favor of its being military.

And they posed the fair question of why Ramon wasn't transported directly to the brig, or force fields erected to contain him.

@RobSoLF: Yeah, I kept thinking they should definitely not let Uhura have that phaser.

@TheQueen: Ah, Uhura's cookie! Thanks.

@thebuescherman: "SNW might have the highest floor for any Trek show. TNG, Voyager, and DS9 were all littered with true garbage episodes amongst the great. SNW never goes to those depths."

[ahem] "The Elysian Kingdom" is the worst of the literally hundreds of Trek episodes I have seen. It's actually probably the worst episode of any TV series (including just those intended for an adult audience) I have watched all the way through.

@Gilligan's Starship: I was wondering the same thing. Actually, I think I took them to be talking about dilithium until I saw the discussion here.

@SlackerInc

"[ahem] "The Elysian Kingdom" is the worst of the literally hundreds of Trek episodes I have seen. It's actually probably the worst episode of any TV series (including just those intended for an adult audience) I have watched all the way through."

You keep beating this drum, but you'll have to accept at some point that you're pretty much beating it alone, heh.

A lot of us liked it well enough, but even among those who didn't I haven't seen anyone else express that they think it's nearly as bad as you do.

@The Queen
'Celia Rose Gooding said in her Ready Room interview that Sam took Uhura's cookie.'

It makes me feel queasy that cast members are being asked questions that lead to these kinds of replies and/or giving replies like this. By and on an ostensibly 'official' Trek outlet to boot.

How the mighty have fallen.

What next?

Oh dear.

That'll teach me to read posts properly and to not reply before I've had my morning coffee.

As you were.

Cynic

"I thought it was clear, though not stated outright, that the connection was recent loss and/or fear of death... When Kirk and Uhura played back Ramon's logs, he said he'd hallucinated a dead loved one. Right then, I figured it was people like that who were susceptible to the aliens' "transmissions." I assumed at some point that connection would be stated out loud but no one said it."

Thanks, but I find it hard to believe that these two are the only ones that have lost someone.

@Quincy

"Lastly, at this point, Pike is just a soft, moist, warm, buttered biscuit fresh out the oven rather than a captain of a ship. You can see the aromatic steam rising off him when he sits in the captain's chair. Anybody can give orders on his bridge, especially in emergencies. You just have to have the correct body parts and be in an elevated state of agitation over something SERIOUS. I shouldn't expect anything different considering how the writers literally depicted in season one that getting him OUT of the captain's chair in favor of the far more proactive Kirk is crucial to the future of the Federation. He should be somewhere christening his girlfriend's palate rather than sitting anywhere near a captain's chair on a star ship."

Agree 100%

I agree with Jammer, 2 1/2 stars. This feels like a Hoshi episode with Enterprise crossed with a fake back from the dead episode ala the return of Kes in Voyager, all wrapped up in a big bow of pedestrian writing. It’s an obligatory “character episode” highlighting Uhura in the tradition of post-TOS Trek. In short, blah.

The pre credits “previously on Star Trek” seems to be an attempt to remind us of Hemmer’s existence last season but to hide it in a lot of random material (the alternate Kirk and Chapel stuff were not necessary to set up this story) from this season that is irrelevant to this episode. Pardon me, but what is this supposed to accomplish? If it’s to tease Hemmer’s return in this episode, then cut out all the other material, as it doesn’t really situate this episodic series within any kind of season arc. It just eats up air time in an already overlong and bloated episode; I kind of miss traditional television’s ability to keep TV episodes under 50 minutes due to commercials. Anyhow, I immediately took it as a sign that Hemmer was returning in some form, and his Zombified form is a cheap letdown. I liked Hemmer and would have preferred some kind of resurrection ala Dr. Culber in Disco, but there we have it.

Finally, am I the only one who thinks wimpy Kirk in this series looks and sounds like Jim Carey from the 1990s? Even the way he raises his eyebrows is distracting. Voice is also way too high pitched, like a phony and insecure salesman. Chris Pine was much better. I only liked this Kirk in the time travel episode.

I also miss Nichelle Nichols and even Zoe Saldana. Paramount, please stop recasting and reheating TOS in new packaging. Move on, create a new show, and leave TOS alone.

@Bok R'Mor: "It makes me feel queasy that cast members are being asked questions that lead to these kinds of replies and/or giving replies like this. By and on an ostensibly 'official' Trek outlet to boot."

Why? I was really curious about it, and I'm glad the question was asked and answered. What's the problem?

Oh, now I see by the next comment that you must have misunderstood the question. Did you think it was some kind of sexual thing or something? LOL

I really enjoyed this episode!

3.5 stars.

I do have 2 things that I thought was a little weird about the episode.

1. Why was Kirk spending so much time on the Enterprise? (it might have been explained but I missed it)

2. With the Ramon hunt, why the hell was Uhura helping?, She should have been confined to sick bay or something. (I also wasn’t 100 percent sure that was real until after the fact)

Also, not a gripe with this episode overall, but out of the 6 episodes so far, only 1 has been Pike focused, and one other having him in a major role. The other 4 he has either been in a minor role or barely there at all. I expect that at least 2 of the next 4 episodes to be wholly Pike focused as a response. The character is too good to be sitting in the background. (Probably means we need more episodes next season :)!)

I would have liked (not sure how to do this with a non speaking life form that we can't see); a reverse of the 10C situation. Have this species have a debate about whether to destroy the beings that are killing them or reach out because they may not be aware they are causing damage. And there being some rogue element that almost destroys the operation while the rest of the species are trying to communicate and resolve it peacefully. This really was a mirror episode to what Discovery did the other way.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the episode very much . The plot hole of Pike letting Uhura running around in her state with a phaser notwithstanding.

Ok. I get it. We want to portray Uhura, i.e. a black woman, as a protagonist. That's fine, that's fair, that's earned. But jesus christ I don't care how much empowered you are, the Captain simply doesn't ask you "so, what's the play?" and then let you command the torpedo firing hahahaha

This episode is in the right direction, and I've mostly liked it. Very cool how they started with obvious not-real hallucinations scenes and then left us thinking also the real ones as may being not-real too. Nicely done. I haven't watched as much trek as you guys, so I can tell the idea of Aliens communicating through Uhura was not very obvious. And I liked her part being decoding the message, although the execution was not that solid (the crew flying off the windshield as a "wanting to be free" message???)

So yeah, cool stuff.
But how about dialing down the shitting on the white male characters, eh? I mean, Kirk hears Uhura and was there for her in difficult moments and she is like "forget the stupid cookie!"? Ouch. Instead of showing a future better society, SNW's writing of women characters is making me think of a Paulo Freire's quote:

"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor"

From a writing point of view, I get the tough corner in where they were.

They wanted Uhura do protagonize a high stakes matter. But being high stakes it meant it should pass through the captain. But that would become only "...and so the white man listened to her and stepped up and saved the day". Not the message to end up with. So they chose to make the captain step back and let she command the destroying of the oppressive machinery. Are we so stingy that we will not let even this one pass? No, I think we shouldn't be. If they exaggerated, they did it towards the right side. But still, instead of refreshing, progressive, it sounded naive, childish.

A more mature way of solving it could've being focusing more on communicating something back to the aliens as the solution —maybe the officers are having difficulty conveying a good message and she manages to deliver it with true empathy and connection, for example— and so we would've seen Uhura as a competent officer saving the day by doing her actual job.

Yeah, these nuTrek shows do lean toward being "Black Women Empowerment Hour" to an often eyerolling extent. Certainly SNW not to the same extent as DSC by any means, but they slip it in there when they can, as you note.

Anyone else feel bad for George Kirk? Guy seems to have no friends in the crew, seems to not be respected, and his brother literally makes more friends and connections in five minutes than poor old George.

He seems pretty excluded.

Sam Kirk and the way he is characterized and treated represents the vestigial remains of the Nu-Trekian tendency to demonize or humiliate its Straight White Male characters...at least the ones that aren't beloved legacy characters like James Kirk, Spock or Pike because the fans would never forgive that. But I want give SNW some credit for fleshing him out as more than just a one-dimensional effigy that exists only to be burned to spite the archetype that it stands for, as has often been the case on Discovery. Although Sam typically played the fool (especially in season 1), he is occasionally able to be semi-useful like he was in this episode. Also, while it seems to be his raison d'être to play the chump when juxtaposed to his brother so as to prop up James, I believe the scenes they share together conveys just a shred of genuine sympathy...on top of the overriding sense that he is still a big loser nonetheless.

So I agree that we're meant to feel just a tiny bit bad for him, but we're also meant to take some perverse pleasure in his loserdom, especially those who enjoy seeing white dudes knocked down a peg.

Orrrrrrrrrrr maybe it's just funny that Sam Kirk is a bit of a frustrated underachieving boor. I mean, what do we know about Sam Kirk going into this series from TOS?

1) He washes out of Starfleet eventually to be killed ignominiously on a backwater planet.
2) He has a ridiculous mustache.
3) His younger brother is the Starfleet wunderkind who not only becomes the youngest captain in the history of Starfleet but the captain of the flagship simultaneously.

Give me those facts and ask me to design a character around them, and I would come up with SNW's Sam Kirk. I mean what else do you DO with a character like that, really?

A Starfleet officer portrayed to the audience as being consistently competent, or portrayed more "Kirk-like," would never die like that to those aliens the way we know he does.

Only he would think that mustache is cool, so that trait has to fit into his personality.

Anyone would feel overshadowed by having Jim Kirk as a younger brother no matter what you yourself did successfully accomplish.

So . . . yeah. Not much room for much else.

@JT

But to take for granted the conditions at hand and argue backwards from that really begs of the question of why have such short-lived and thinly sketched TOS character feature at all in SNW, and whats more -- to feature as prominently as he does, even before the brothers ever have the chance of meeting face to face. Since it seems like it's not even til halfway through season two that they even have a conversation. So even though you can certainly argue that the point of TOS Sam is to be James' foil and little more than that, the SNW showrunners have clearly presented him for other purposes that stand independent from just his juxtaposition to James. And in addition to that, the writers have deliberately leaned in to accentuating how ridiculous and pathetic he is, when this sort of framing is quite foreign to most classic Trek with its more humanistic and merciful bend.

Had TNG existed in the era of Nu-Trek, you can sure that Barclay wouldn't have been accepted into the fold as much as was possible, and he would have instead been almost exclusively the butt of jokes, as the quirky differences and fragile character that differentiate him from the team would've been used as a pretext for his further ostracism rather than spur on their more compassionate impulses where they thought, "Hey, this guy seems to be struggling to fit in -- maybe we should make an extra effort to help him feel more included as a part of the crew, and give him more chances where it is due." He would basically become an even more jokey and unsympathetic character, like SNW Sam here.

But I guess since Sam has an unfashionable moustache you have him pegged and imagining any alternatives to that is no easy feat.

Sam is portrayed as fitting into the crew just fine. A few jokes about him leaving crumbs behind delivered by an overly emotional Spock are no worse than any of the humor at Barclay's expense. Pike for one is a big fan of his. Step back and look again and get some perspective on what's actually been shown on screen.

What I said was meant more as a general comparison in how old and new Trek chooses to frame its odd ducks or black sheep with Barclay given as an example. It wasn't a side-by-side comparison of the those two characters in particular. I wasn't saying that SNW goes to any great length to portray Sam's rejection or not fitting in, but as that other commentor observes, there's a more subtle sense that he stands apart and doesn't have any true friends, unlike the rest of the crew who are pretty close-knit and buddy-buddy with each other. His existence as a black sheep is more readily apparent in what is NOT shown, as juxtaposed to every other member of the crew, rather that what is explicitly shown.

And besides, the framing of Sam as someone who is audience is meant to look down upon or perceive as an object of amused ridicule doesn't depend solely on how the rest of the crew treats him. It's obvious enough how we're supposed to regard him by the way he's acted, written and directed in isolation. I didn't really get this same sense of narrative framing when it came to Barclay. You could say there are important character differences between Sam and Barclay that deserve our laughs with Sam but earn our sympathy with Barclay and you'd be right. But then it goes back to my earlier point that asks why have an unsympathetic member of the ensemble cast in the show at all? IMO, it is better to fill that spot with a different sort of character that feels more humanistically Trekkian or leave that spot empty altogether rather than encourage this sort of "punching down" that feels so antithetical to Trekkian principles.

Oof. I'll give this a (barely) passing grade. Heavy handed and It took way too long for the crew to catch on about the alien communication. To quote Pelia, "sloppy."

Sloppy writing.

At the end, Spock just shows up at the table for no reason - other than to get an meeting scene devoid of meaningfulness. Wow.

There’s no evidence of the aliens except Urhura’s word. No-one ruled out a Romulan attack or any other number of possible explanations.

But they just blow up the important “gas station” on that basis. What!?

Why is Kirk aboard again? He’s just inserted because… it’s something that the writers think that we want?

La’an is a virtual stranger to Kirk, yet he immediately gets personal and teary-eyed with her after she says “hello”.

This kind of half-arsed writing doesn’t draw me into the story at all.

Also: props to Mike (Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 11:08pm) for reviewing the reviewer.

>which sound like Transformers transforming
THANK YOU, I'm glad I'm not the only person who immediately thought that upon hearing it.

I’d give this 2 stars. I really enjoyed Uhura’s parts, and found them very convincing, but I hate it when the writers make the character act dumb or out of the ordinary just to advance the plot. The ending was also a little head-scratchy, like “Pike is gonna have to write a very interesting report to sell this to Starfleet.” But it was a very TOS/TNG type episode which is great.

"Where are you?"
"Eyes in the dark… one moon circles."

This episode had a lot to like, but I took off one star for how ridiculously quickly Pike decides to blow up the refinery, which took me out of the story.

** 1/2. I mostly agree with Jammer, though I was more on board with the whole episode until the final act where it derailed, so I'll focus on that.

Uhura just assuming everything and putting together all the hallucinations was way too quick. What happens next. She, the Ensign who has been hallucinating, calls the Captain to shut down the reactor / station.

Pike "Uh ok."

Like WTF. What captain in his right mind would just agree to their hallucinating ENSIGN's demand. It only gets worse. Uhura runs on the bridge, still hallucinating, and yells "FIRE TORPEDOS"

At this point, along with prior evidence, I'm getting completely fed up with Pike's lack of shall we say, Balls. Pike, you have a hallucinating officer yelling orders at you, followed by demanding to fire weapons that destroys valuable property and your response is a tepid "mmm...ok."? How did you ever get the Enterprise?

I honestly think Kirk (Wesley) is stealing his diminishing thunder. He's pragmatic, calm, reasonable, but also not a pushover.

The earlier parts of the episode were reasonable. My other big gripe, was I'm so tired of shall we call it "Therapy" scenes, where two characters are alone, one shares their capital T "Trauma" and the other gives the pep talk. The problem I have with it is not the concept, but the predictability. It's always character A - crying, and character B - there there, you are strong. There needs to be something more in these scenes to make them worthwhile. And whenever it's about an unseen event, it doesn't have weight or gravity to pull us in. I've never met Uhura's parents. They have not been on the show in any significant way, so I have no empathy.

Also, please give Una something good to chew on. The actress is being completely wasted, and I find her character boring now. I'm still not really sold on the new engineer either. She's sort of quirky for quirkyness sake.

I liked the general premise, and yes Paul Wesley is taking a slow and steady approach to his portrayel of Kirk. He hasn't had any outstanding scenes yet, but they have all been consistently reasonable, and in that consistency, his character and presence is developing solidly. Despite my Uhura gripes, I do think she is delivering good performances overall. My main issue continues to be the writing on this show, which had good concepts, but has forgotten some of the foundational elements of trek: Proper chains of command, professionalism, and protocol being the foremost.

As a post script - Though Uhura delivered a good performance, the best one came from an unexpected person: Hemmer.

I'm still not sure killing him off so soon was in the best interest of the series. His presence was absolutely missed this season, and that quirky new engineer has not filled that at all. I can't even remember her name.

Yaaay. Psych-horror in space. Yawn.

Ok, fair is fair, the zombie-fied Hammer did make me jump slightly, that first scene in the turbolift. Half a star for that semi-effective jumpscare.

Some nice suspense-sountrack too. Another half a star there. The plot is about as banal as possible. Dilithium-dwelling creatures? Really? And the best solution Pike can come up vith is to blow up the whole expensive station, and seriusly impact Federation supply lines. Not - idk... convince the things to move out of the nebula? Offer them another nebula to live in?

One star.

"So, I’m little behind in my Trek Tech: I thought their ships were powered by dilithium crystals. What do they use deuterium for?"

The ships are powered by a matter/antimatter reaction (presumably the protons for these reactions are collected from the deuterium). The dilithium crystals are used to moderate the reaction, or channel the energy released somehow (waves hands).

Anyway, as for the episode. I don't care for jump scares in Trek, too easy.

And as a whole I didn't really care for the episode either; far too much unprofessional behaviour amongst the crew. SNW is turning into a disappointment for me. Looks great, excellent production (although the CGI is not to my taste; too much like a Playstation cutscene), but poor writing and I find myself not really caring about the crew and rapidly losing interest. All very forgettable.

I've been rewatching Enterprise recently (my least favourite incarnation of 'classic' Trek) and found it a much better show than I remembered, and miles ahead of any of the NuTrek.

"The ships are powered by a matter/antimatter reaction (presumably the protons for these reactions are collected from the deuterium). The dilithium crystals are used to moderate the reaction, or channel the energy released somehow (waves hands)."

Sort of. They definitely use antimatter to generate enormous bursts of energy for the warp engines and other applications but because there is no naturally occurring source of large quantities of antimatter in the universe (and we have never heard of any being referenced in the shows) they must be breeding the antimatter on the ship, presumably using their fusion reactors. So nuclear fusion, not antimatter, is the underlying source of a starship's power, which is then used to breed antimatter which is then used for giant bursts of power and dilithium crystals regulate the matter antimatter reaction so they don't blow up the ship. Deuterium presumably is fuel for both the fusion reactors and for the warp core (as matter to react with antimatter)

Using crystals to channel particals isn't very strange. Dilithium is just some futuristic thing that does it in some special way and apparently doesn't involve the antimatter colliding with it. The Ramscoop collectors do collect deuterium, plus they probably have a standing supply they begin with. Afaik this is used to fuel the fusion reactors, which are the propulsion system of the impulse drive. They don't ever specify what type of matter is used to collide with the antimatter, or at least if they mention it this detail eludes me. The antimatter is likely stored in advance and refueled at intervals. Although in theory Jason R is right that maybe in the crazy sci-fi future it can be created on the fly, based on our current knowledge that would take some pretty fancy systems. So maybe you could argue that a Galaxy Class has a particle accelerator or something onboard, but certainly not the old Constitution class, or smaller ships like the Oberth. Heck, even Runabouts and some later shuttles have warp drive. How could they ever create and store the antimatter with the few systems they have onboard?

@Jason R.

That's a good point about generating the antimatter using fusion reactors. Lithium deuteride is one of the components of hydrogen bombs iirc.

". Heck, even Runabouts and some later shuttles have warp drive. How could they ever create and store the antimatter with the few systems they have onboard?"

I am heading canoning this heavily but I surmise that an antimatter reaction is not a necessary precondition for warp drive nor is dilithium by extension. They use antimatter reactors for starships because you need a gigantic burst of power to propel an enormous starship at high warp speeds. But there is zero chance that Zephrim Cochrane had dilithium crystals and an anti matter reactor on the Phoenix which was just a rust bucket repurposed ICBM. For all we know propelling a runabout sized vessel to Warp Factor 1 can be done with a small nuclear reactor or heck a lithium ion battery from a Tesla. The same would be true of an Enterprise Shuttle which probably only needs a big battery to get to Warp speeds. You charge it before your trip and it's good enough for a couple days trip to Riza at warp 2.

@ Jason R,

The Trek canon seems to say that the warp core is necessary for warp drive. For whatever reason, going back to TOS, the crystals and matter/antimatter are necessary to go above light speed. Impulse drive can apparently get to a decent rate toward C, but obviously cannot reach it. Looking at Enterprise-D for example, the saucer section has no warp capability, even though it contains the nuclear reactors, and the drive section is capable of warp, even though it lacks the nuclear power source.

"The Trek canon seems to say that the warp core is necessary for warp drive. For whatever reason, going back to TOS, the crystals and matter/antimatter are necessary to go above light speed. Impulse drive can apparently get to a decent rate toward C, but obviously cannot reach it. Looking at Enterprise-D for example, the saucer section has no warp capability, even though it contains the nuclear reactors, and the drive section is capable of warp, even though it lacks the nuclear power source."

Complete nonsense - the saucer section is clearly capable of warp - this is established in the pilot when it escapes at the Q encounter and clearly must be travelling at warp to reach Farpoint.

In addition I believe there is specific reference in First Contact to Lily being poisoned by radiation leaking from the Phoenix's nuclear reactor - so it's powered by a nuclear reactor *and* an antimatter reactor with dilithium crystals? Ridiculous.

@ Jason R,

"Complete nonsense - the saucer section is clearly capable of warp - this is established in the pilot when it escapes at the Q encounter and clearly must be travelling at warp to reach Farpoint."

All sources I can find online, including Memory Alpha, say otherwise, and I think you'll find the same is true if you can get yourself a copy of Okuda's TNG technical manual (I'll abstain from trying to track it down). Take a look at Encounter at Farpoint again: after separation, the drive section clearly arrives at Farpoint station alone, without the saucer. In a later scene when Riker has been ordered to connect both parts manually, the saucer is indeed present at Farpoint by then. (a) we don't really know how far away they were when Q interception them, and (b) we don't exactly know how much time has elapsed in between. Bottom line I think taking this to mean the saucer warped there is a technical nitpick that I think is more reasonable to chalk up to production concerns (i.e. not having wasted scenes showing the drive section leaving, picking it up, and returning), and just maybe an omission by the continuity team. I don't think they ever intended to portay the saucer as having warp capability, and in no other episode I can think of is it ever presented as if it can do that.

On the other hand, we have definitely been shown times the Enterprise supposedly can't go to warp if a nacelle takes a direct hit. In Descent part 2, for instance, the port nacelle takes a hit and Barnaby says they've lost warp engines. Why not just switch to the saucer's warp engines? I must surmise it's because it doesn't have any. In both The Chase and Gambit the Enterprise's nacelles are targeted, with the expectation that this will prevent them pursuing. Although in both cases, through a deception, the nacelles were ok, I think we're clearly meant to assume that if the nacelles are damaged the Enterprise won't be able to go to warp.

Regarding dilithium crystals and their requirement for warp drive to work, this came up in several TOS episodes, such as Elaan of Troyius among others. TNG seemed to eschew using that particular plot device again, perhaps because it had already been employed multiple times and for dramatic purposes would become boring if used again.

@everyone

"...if you can get yourself a copy of Okuda's TNG technical manual "

I just happen to own a copy!

pp. 27-28: "As the Saucer Module is equipped only with impulse propulsion, computational modeling has verified that special cautions must be observed when attempting separation at high warp factors. Prior to leaving the protection of the Battle Section's warp field, the Saucer Module SIF, IDF, and shield grid are run at high output, and its four forward deflectors take over to sweep away debris in the absence of the dish on the Battle Section. Decaying warp field energy surrounding the Saucer Module is managed by the driver coil segments of the impulse engines. This energy will take, on average, two minutes to dissipate and bring the vehicle to its original sublight velocity."

Henson, you've just earned yourself a promotion.

While I'm at it, I may as well confirm that deuterium is the matter used in the matter/antimatter reaction to power the warp drive. The antimatter is antihydrogen, which is stored in pods on Deck 42, and kept contained through magnetic fields. The antimatter is created at fueling stations and then transferred to starships during refuelling.

But does a starship technically go faster than the speed of light or does it effectively go faster than the speed of light via slowing down time? Not sure what Okuda has to say about that but this idea of warp field / warp bubble I think has to do with time.

That's the 2nd part of the equation (after anti-matter powered propulsion to "enable" a starship to go close to the speed of light) for it to efectively go several hundred times faster than the speed of light. There's a VOY episode where Paris mentions a warp speed equivalent of a few billion (4?) miles per second.

Just trying to put together the fantasy logic of warp speed travel.

@Rahul

Unfortunately, the technical manual does not go into great detail regarding the basics of warp field theory. It mentions that the basic mechanism is Continuum Distortion Propulsion, which...distorts the space/time continuum. As I've understood it, this means that the ship itself is not moving faster than light, but the warp bubble it creates warps spacetime to carry a ship along. This also explains why there are no relativistic time dilation effects when using warp, unlike when using impulse drive.

Also as a correction, antimatter is only used in powering the warp drive. Impulse engines are fusion devices powered by deuterium. Because of time dilation effects, impulse usually doesn't exceed 1/4 the speed of light.

@Henson

I dug up my Star Trek reference book -- it says the controlled matter / antimatter fusion reaction generates the warp fields that form the subspace bubble surrounding a starship. And that bubble distorts the local space-time continuum. The warp coils within the ship's nacelles create that subspace displacement which propels the ship.

The book also gives a table for warp speeds in km/h:
- full impulse is 1/4 the speed of light or 270M km/h
- warp 8 is 1.10 trillion km/h
- warp 9.9 is 3.27 trillion km/h

@Rahul

Yeah, that all sounds correct.

@ Rahul,

"Just trying to put together the fantasy logic of warp speed travel."

We actually see a schematic in one TNG episode (I forget which) showing what a ship in the warp field looks like, and it's basically doing what we'd expect using controlled gravity fields: it literally warps space in front and in back of the ship, causing space in front to contract and to re-expand behind the ship. This effect generates a field of compressed space within the 'warp bubble' that the ship traverses. So in fact fact the ship crosses space quickly because space becomes smaller, which doesn't contradict relativity. Now this gets mixed up with terminology like "subspace" which is often treated as another dimension of some sort (such as in Schisms, for instance). This perhaps speaks to the basic question you'd ask if spacetime was a "substance" that could be compressed and expanded: compressed from what, and into what? Is it a fluid of some sort contained in some deeper medium? Trek seems to imply that space such as we know it has a structure behind it, called subspace, and that space itself can be manipulated and even damaged in various ways.

Another example of warp drive's principle can be found in Deja Q, when Q suggests that the simple way to move a moon is to change the gravitational constant of the universe. Geordi seizes upon this in a practical fashion when he realizes that creating a warp field does something similar, and can effectively reduce the mass of the moon. How precisely this works isn't important for the episode, but I take it that the [tech] writers were working on the principle that the ship's ability to use gravitons to various effects would allow for both gravity and anti-gravity effects (we know they had anti-grav technology, such as for moving barrels around the cargo bays). So I think they were working on an equivalence here between warping space and the ability to expand and reduce mass as well.

@everyone

Oh, I missed one thing. The Enterprise D does have an antimatter generator onboard, but it is generally not used because of the prohibitively high power and fuel requirements. As such, it's pretty much only for emergency purposes.

Ok I guess I stand corrected on the saucer section having warp drive. Although it doesn't really change my initial hypothesis that: 1) Antimatter is not a necessary precondition for war speed; and 2) Nuclear fusion and not antimatter, must be the underlying power source of a starship.

The saucer section is huge so it stands to reason it is too big to go to warp without antimatter power (i.e. a warp core) but the same is not true of a tiny shuttle or the Phoenix. Runabouts have a warp core (antimatter) as I noted in DS9's "Our Man Bashir" which I just watched, but Runabouts are clearly meant to be akin to mini starships and are shown to have way more capabilities and range than shuttles anyway, so that tracks.

And there is no way in hell Zephram Cochrane powered the Phoenix with some kind of antimatter reactor. While we can accept the premise that he somehow built a "warp engine" using whatever weird scientific knowledge that can, for all we know, be implemented in somebody's garage or a cave a la Tony Stark, we know full well there is zero chance of somebody producing or storing freaking antimatter let alone building an antimatter reactor in some ratty refugee camp / former missile base.

@Peter G.

I think I know the schematic you're talking about -- maybe it's from "Where No One Has Gone Before" with Wesley and the traveler theorizing. And I take your point about the sloppy use of subspace. (I think "Schisms" should just be referring to a parallel dimension instead.)

But as to the creation of the warp bubble or field (where time is slowed down tremendously so that the ship can effectively travel way faster than the speed of light), does the fantasy logic extend to compressing and re-expanding space (or subspace) necessarily? What that sounds like is space-folding technology (which I think was mentioned in a VOY episode that I can't put my finger on). So I think that space-folding tech is something different altogether. But then again, it would "make sense" to me that for the warp bubble to slow down time, it must be affecting space or subspace. But I don't think warp travel means travelling via another dimension.

Anyhow, I think it's cool how some "logic" has been concocted to "justify" warp speed travel on Trek. And we know other sci-fi shows have their own ways of doing it whether it be jump gates, inter-dimensional travel etc.

@Jason R

So this is what I've been able to find regarding power generation on the Enterprise-D:

pp. 57: "Energy produced within the core is shared between its primary application, the propulsion of the starship, and the raw power requirements of other major ship systems. The M/ARA [matter/antimatter reaction assembly] is the principal power-generating system because of the 10^6 times greater energy output of the matter/antimatter reaction over that of standard fusion, as found in the impulse propulsion system."

pp. 61: "There are two distinct reaction modes. The first involves the generation of high levels of energy channeled to the electro plasma system, much like a standard fusion reaction, to provide raw energy for ship function while at sublight. ... The second mode makes full use of dilithium's ability to cause a partial suspension of the reaction, creating the critical pulse frequency to be sent to the warp engine nacelles."

This would imply that, while the ship is in warp speed, the warp drive cannot be utilized for general use power generation. It's not clear to me whether the power generated in the first mode can be either cycled or stored in the ship, on standby until it is ready to be used, but that seems to make the most sense. There would probably be limits as to how long you can cycle energy, much like there are limits on how far you can transmit electricity on a power line before it completely dissipates, so fusion reactors would make sense as a secondary shipwide power system.

As to your first claim that antimatter is not required for warp drive, I would say this is almost certainly true based solely on the fact that Romulan craft power their warp drive with an artificial quantum singularity. Energy is energy, and the only question is whether you can generate enough.

The Enterprise-D actually has a few shuttles with warp capability (Types 6, 7, and 9A), but there are strict limits: the Type 9A, for example, can make standard travel at Warp 2 for 36 hours. I can't find any information regarding whether they use a matter/antimatter reaction, but given the extremely low warp limits, it seems plausible to me that this could be achieved under fusion power. (on the D, Warp 2 runs at between 10^3 and 10^4 megajoules per cochrane; Warp 9 runs at roughly 10^9 megajoules per cochrane. Given that matter/antimatter generation is 10^6 times more powerful than fusion generation, the math seems like it could fit.) But maybe I'm overlooking something!

Jealous I missed the nerd out tech chat over the weekend.

@ Jason R. "they must be breeding the antimatter on the ship, presumably using their fusion reactors"

The tech manual says the Federation produces it at "major Starfleet fueling facilities by combined solar-fusion charge reversal devices" and "even with the added solar dynamo input, there is a net energy loss of 24% using this process, but this loss is deemed acceptable by Starfleet to conduct distant interstellar operators."

Too long, didn't read, they make it with solar power. I always envisioned fuel production facilities in close orbit around Sol and other stars.

@ Peter G. "Regarding dilithium crystals and their requirement for warp drive to work, this came up in several TOS episodes, such as Elaan of Troyius among others. TNG seemed to eschew using that particular plot device again, perhaps because it had already been employed multiple times and for dramatic purposes would become boring if used again."

The TNG series bible specifically said they would no longer be using the scarcity of dilithium as a plot point. They tied this into The Voyage Home where Scotty and Spock figure out how to recrystallize it. Too bad Discovery threw this concept in the trash. :(

It's interesting to see the list of things they proscribed:

1. Stories which do not materially involve our own crew.

2. We do not do stories about psi-forces or mysterious psychic powers.

3. We are not buying stories which case our people and our vessel in the role of "galaxy policemen."

4. We are not buying stories about the original Star Trek characters.

5. Writing Fantasy instead of Science Fiction.

6. Writing "Swords and Sorcery"

7. Treating deep space as a local neighborhood.

8. Star Trek is not melodrama.

9. No stories about warfare with Klingons or Romans and no stories with Vulcans.

10. Stay true to the Prime Directive.

11. Plots involving a whole civilization rarely work.

12. Mad scientists, or stories in which technology is considered the villain.

13. Stories in which our characters must do something stupid or dangerous, or in which our technology breaks down in order to create a jeopardy.

TNG broke most of these over the course of its run, some with great success (nobody was unhappy with Relics, which broke Rule #4), and others to their own detriment (almost every time they broke #13)

@ Jason R. "And there is no way in hell Zephram Cochrane powered the Phoenix with some kind of antimatter reactor."

Are you sure about that? Riker specifically says, "Okay, let's bring the warp core online."

I don't think there's enough in First Contact to conclude one way or the other and I would disagree with this characterization:

"we know full well there is zero chance of somebody producing or storing freaking antimatter let alone building an antimatter reactor in some ratty refugee camp / former missile base."

I didn't take anything in First Contact as a "ratty refugee camp", more like a camp in the wilderness, which might seem silly but a lot of the Manhattan Project occurred in the middle of proverbial nowhere.

Of course, the real reason is they didn't have the production budget to show 2063 New York City. :-)

"In addition I believe there is specific reference in First Contact to Lily being poisoned by radiation leaking from the Phoenix's nuclear reactor"

The line is Data's, "Radiation is coming from the damaged throttle assembly."

The word "reactor" does not appear in the entire script.

Amazing stuff from Hanson and Tim. On the whole issue of antimatter production I'd accept the premise of it being produced at centralized facilities for starship refueling with TNG. However with Voyager it gets problematic if you assume they had no independent ability to create antimatter on the ship because where the hell would they "refuel"? It seems to imply that deuterium was the main fuel they used, which I know could be as matter for the warp core, but what about the antimatter? My explanation, that fusion produces energy which is used to replenish the antimatter stores makes so much sense!

@Tim yes I take your point about the radiation leak not referencing a nuclear reactor and the mention of a "warp core". But I stand by my point that it makes zero sense that Cochrane, in addition to building a "warp engine" (whatever the hell that is) also happened to invent a method of breeding anti matter in large quantities and also a reactor core to store and harness it, all in a vessel the size of a Chevy Silverado.

I'm not sure if Voyager ever got a tech manual as well thought out as TNG's.

TNG's addresses the notion a few times, of what a Starship short on fuel would do, including the ability to make small quantities of antimatter on an emergency basis, using an antimatter generator carried onboard.

There are several pages on this subject. I won't paste them all, the "too long, didn't read" part: "One disadvantage imposed by the process is that it requires ten units of deuterium to power the generator, and the generator will produce only one unit of antimatter."

I would imagine that Voyager found some rich source of deuterium (gas giant planet, nebula, etc.) and parked herself there for days/weeks producing the antimatter necessary to continue on her journey. The Enterprise-D had a three year fuel reserve at Warp 6. No clue what Voyager had, probably not as large as Enterprise did, but for the sake of the argument we can imagine she did this every 1 to 5 years.

We didn't see it, because it'd make for boring television.

They COULD have done it, e.g., a bottle episode where the refueling operation is going on in the background while we tell a character story, but the producers kind of forgot about the whole "scarce resources" bit, just like they forgot about the Maquis/Starfleet conflict that was supposed to drive the show. :(

Also (clicked submit too fast) you have to think of the Phoenix as the Wright Flyer compared to a 747-8. All the concepts are the same. It's just a matter of scale, materials, and significantly more advanced (to put it mildly) engineering.

Also, Wesley briefly powered a much larger ship with a minute amount of anti-matter borrowed from a high school science project. I doubt Cochran would need a lot for the brief (60 seconds tops) test flight he undertook. We can, strictly speaking, produce anti-matter today. We just can't do it at scale. Presumably, we'll get a little bit better at it between now and 2063. :-)

"We can, strictly speaking, produce anti-matter today. We just can't do it at scale. Presumably, we'll get a little bit better at it between now and 2063. :-)"

Errrr this is seriously understating the technical issue. Yes we can produce minute quantities of antimatter which is even useful in technologies like PET scanners but that is a faarrrr cry from producing it in quantities useful as an energy source.

Someone better versed in this can provide some math but my understanding is to produce enough antimatter to provide even the equivalent power to, say, a lithium ion battery, would be basically science fiction and might even be flat out impossible, even with gargantuan investment of energy and infrastructure. And it begs the question, why not just use a lithium ion battery then?

My point being that Cochrane producing 1) A means of generating large quantities of antimatter useful as a fuel source, 2) Inventing a way to store it safely; and 3) Building a reactor to harness it in a tiny ship would be a feat arguably on par with inventing warp drive.

And in the case of the latter at least we can say a warp drive, based on completely unknown principles, might be something that anybody can build in a garage, whereas we already know enough about antimatter to say that it's laughable to imagine Cochrane doing all that with the infrastructure we see in First Contact (basically a refugee camp built around an old missile silo)

@ Jason R et al,

I don't mean this to bash Voyager exactly, but I would say that series wasn't a good showcase for taking the technical aspects of the ship very seriously. The infinite shuttles issue has been beaten to death, and issues like refueling and repairs tended to be left out of the equation. So I wouldn't feel solid taking any indirect evidence about antimatter from that show.

About ST: First Contact, I actually agree with you Jason, but frankly the issue of coming up with a warp drive and antimatter system out of the blue as the movie portrays is a problem with Moore's screenplay. I personally never imagined the Zephram Cochrane as portrayed in Metamorphosis would have been working out of his garage, and I was incredulous at the portrayal in FC when I first saw it in the cinema. Nothing about him struck me as being believable as an engineer or physicist, and the neither the setting nor the story indicated to me anything to do with the future of Earth's technology. It ended up being this weird 20th century vs 24th century culture war thing which I didn't dig at all. So yeah, I too don't buy a 20th century-looking facility being the birthplace of the warp drive. But what can you do, those were the design choices they made. I don't think it's that fair to draw anything too technical from the setting about which technologies Cochrane was or wasn't using. I really don't think the tech writing was nearly as tight in that film as in your average TNG episode. Not even close, really.

Right Peter but what I'm saying is given the reality of what we know to be true about antimatter and the plausibility of Cochrane using it to power his rust bucket warp ship, unless given direct evidence to the contrary we must assume logically that he didn't need antimatter to propel his tiny ship to Warp 1 for a couple seconds. In fact I always put 2+2 together with the Lily radiation scene and assumed the Phoenix used a small nuclear reactor, which is faaaar more consistent with the setting (a former nuclear missile silo base) and basic logic.

Even supposing you could generate larger quantities of antimatter at the gram scale, capturing and storing it for later is basically a non-starter. A gram of antimatter has more potential energy than the Little Boy nuclear device dropped on Japan, so the stakes are quite high. Even a microgram being exposed to any matter at all for a split second would be roughly equivalent to 15 kg of TNT. The odds that a ragtag garage tinkerer can do that without blowing up the whole neighborhood are nil.

Antimatter can be trapped and stored by elaborate magnetic and electric fields, assuming you have the specificity to produce only anti-protons or some such charged particle. Any non charged particles generated such as antihelium are much more difficult to control and store, and would tend to escape containment rather quickly. So you'd need to guarantee SOLELY charged particle production in order to produce and capture antimatter at any scale and be relatively "safe" about it.

The other half of the containment problem is keeping regular matter OUT. Air, for example, would pass right through the magnetic field and react with the contained antimatter and wipe out your work. So you need to be operating constantly inside a nearly complete vacuum, which is another technical difficulty layered on top of all this, not to mention maintaining that environment inside a shaky/rattling rocket.

For reference, humans have never created even close to a gram in its entire history combined. I'm not sure anyone is keeping a close tally, but it is probably in the microgram or less realm for cumulative human production ever. So we are talking about a very dramatic leap in technology here.



It's hard to say what we don't know, so I'll grant some way of generating antimatter could be done easier than current knowledge allows. Maybe it's possible some guy in Montana can generate it a milligram at a time using relatively unsophisticated methods and we just haven't figured that out yet (although not immediately blowing yourself up with that discovery would be something). But generating and storing any amount of antimatter safely is a basic physics problem that makes it among the most impractical of potential fuel sources.

@Jason R.-

I think in Enterprise that they even refer to the "fusion reaction" a few times, so it makes sense if the earlier warp ships are somehow nuclear fission/ or fusion powered. But they also had an episode where Archer was trying to give away a bunch of antimatter, so.. *shrug*.

There was also an episode of Voyager where they were suddenly out of tritium, and it's hard to see why the heck you'd need tritium around to sustain an antimatter/matter reaction. Any old matter would work. Something as specific as Tritium would only reasonably be needed for fusion reactions.

Trek's been a bit inconsistent with this, often referencing things consistent with antimatter and fusion reactions both in less than clear ways about what powers the ship.

But no way Cochrane had easy access to antimatter.

We're also stuck in one other regard: like many shows and media in the 60's, the expectations in regard to tech advancement were obviously way overboard in some cases (space travel, civil engineering) and actually undershot the mark in others (computer technology, digital displays). The timeline given in TOS places the eugenics wars in the 1990's, and the development of antimatter generation and warp drive at a probably very unrealistic time in the near-future. ST: FC sort of had to make use of that timeline, and yet this resulted in a modern film portraying a 1960's vision of when certain tech would reasonably be available to a lone inventor. I think all we can do about this is shrug.

@ Jason R. "it's laughable to imagine Cochrane doing all that with the infrastructure we see in First Contact (basically a refugee camp built around an old missile silo)"

@ Chris L. "The odds that a ragtag garage tinkerer can do that without blowing up the whole neighborhood are nil."

I think both of you are seriously dimishing the character of Cochrane to dismiss him as a tinkerer working in a refugee camp. There's nothing in the movie to suggest this.

Just because they don't show us Stark, err, Cochrane Industries, it doesn't follow that he's just a tinkerer working out of the proverbial garage.

The resources and technical know-how you would need to convert an ICBM into a manned orbital spacecraft are non-trivial and could not be achieved by a garage tinkerer. Just fueling the missile (we moved away from liquid fueled ICBMs precisely because they're an expensive maintenance nightmare) would be beyond the abilities of a tinkerer in a refugee camp.

That's before we talk about the warp drive.

I'm not sure why you can suspend disbelief enough to imagine he can build a warp drive but not enough to believe he figured out a way to produce a small amount of anti-matter.

I went back and re-read some of the dialogue in the film. Geordi has a line, "I've tried to reconstruct the intermix chamber from what I remember at school. Tell me if I got it right."

The 'intermix chamber' in every other usage in Trek refers to the matter/anti-matter reaction chamber.

Combine that line with Riker saying, "Let's bring the warp core online."

It's all right there in the dialogue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Since we're nerd'ing out here, I looked up the technical specs for the Titan II missile, which is the one they used in the film (it was shot at the Titan Missile Museum). It can put 3.6 metric tons into low Earth orbit. If we accept Cochrane used a Titan II, that's the upper limit on the mass of the Phoenix, contrasted to the 4.96 million tons of the Enterprise-D, a ratio of 1.37 million to one.

The Wright Flyer had a takeoff weight of 338 kilos vs. 447,696 for the 747-8, a ratio of 1,325 to one, so I guess my Wright Flyer vs. 748-8 analogy was just a wee bit off. ;-)

I can't find a canon or canon-adjacent source for the mass of Archer's Enterprise. That might be a fairer comparison.

@ Peter G. "Nothing about him struck me as being believable as an engineer or physicist"

I'll take functional alcoholic mega-genius over rage tweeting mega-genius any day of the week and twice on Sunday. ;-)

Maybe that's why World War III has to happen before we get warp drive. It's the only cataclysm large enough to get rid of the modern day Internet.

Sadly, I'm only half-joking. Imagine Galileo, Newton, Eienstein, or Socrates if they had the time suck of the endless doom scroll to distract them from more productive endeavors.

I guess what I mean is he didn't even come across as smart...

He who shall not be named hardly comes across as smart in his Twitter feed yet still managed to accomplish things many thought impossible only a decade or two ago.

I always viewed First Contact Cochrane as the hopelessly damaged mega-genius we've seen in countless other films, many about real world personalities. It's not a reach to imagine in this instance. Dude survived a global thermonuclear war that left human civilization in ruins.

FWIW, I concur with you that the tech writing in First Contact wasn't as good as the average TNG episode. I don't think it had to be though. The theme of the movie came through for non-Trekkies and Trekkies alike.

"The resources and technical know-how you would need to convert an ICBM into a manned orbital spacecraft are non-trivial and could not be achieved by a garage tinkerer. Just fueling the missile (we moved away from liquid fueled ICBMs precisely because they're an expensive maintenance nightmare) would be beyond the abilities of a tinkerer in a refugee camp.

That's before we talk about the warp drive."

Ok agreed.

But at least we are told that the guy is operating out of a former missile silo and heck ICBM tech was later used in the space program so that at least has a ring of truth (at least enough for a Hollywood popcorn flick) and warp drive is basically unknowable and could involve rubbing stone knives on bearskins for all we know so sure, maybe the drunken scientist really did invent it in his garage.

I echo Peter's assessment and would refute your suggestion that maybe there was a Cochrane mega corporation off screen - this is in direct contradiction to what we are expressly told about the setting and the Borg's reason for being there in the first place (mankind is in shambles, no resistance) as well as what we see with our own eyes (refugees huddled over campfires)

Anyway, unlike warp drive, we know antimatter is orders of magnitude greater a challenge (as Chris L. described aptly) than anything like launching a rocket into space. Using antimatter to power a warp engine is far from an incidental detail we should be inferring off screen.

All I'm saying is we shouldn't break logic and common sense unless the script forces us to.

@Tim

The concept of a game changing technology coming out of some guys garage is well baked into the American culture. Jeff Bezos started by using his garage as storage and deciding to test out this new online environment for selling books out of his garage. Steve Jobs/Wozniak building computers and starting Apple in their garages. The Wright brothers basically using their bike workshop to build the first flying machines. Etc.

It's pretty clear to me that Cochrane was portrayed in this kind of way.

But the basic fact remains that he had to be producing antimatter at millions of times the rate that CERN does, and storing it safely, and there is nothing to suggest that he had that kind of a breakthrough, or that the world had previously had such a breakthrough. His breakthrough was in the warp drive itself, which I take to mean he relied on existing technology for most other things.

The Titan II was just sitting there. Sure, it'd have to be fueled and maintained, but as long as he put a payload on it that was consistent with the design, he didn't design and build a rocket.

It was an ICBM presumably carrying a nuclear payload, and if for some reason that one did not launch, then he may have also had access to things that could sustain a nuclear fission or fusion reaction. No, it also didn't seem like he had the capability to create a nuclear reactor from scratch, but there's an obvious path forward for him to have access to the most difficult to obtain components: refined nuclear materials.

So it is easier to imagine him as a guy that built one new thing: a warp drive. And he was just lucky and/or smart enough to have a missile capable of launching him to LEO, and some nuclear material he could use as fuel laying around.

To clarify, I don't think there was a Cochrane Mega Corp off screen, but I still take issue with the characterization of him as a garage tinkerer. It's simply not believable if we contemplate the challenge of fueling the ICBM, never mind building the warp ship.

Did Cochrane have all those other people at his camp just to have drinks with him at the bar? It's obvious he has a TEAM supporting him. You see a bunch of desperate refugees huddling over campfires. I see development, engineering, and production teams. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Regarding anti-matter, the script uses the same technobabble phrases Star Trek used from the 1960s (TOS) to 2005 (end of ENT), "warp core", "intermix chamber", and "theta radiation," to name a few. There's more than enough in the script to infer it and absolutely nothing to suggest an alternate power source.

Side note: I was curious on "theta radiation," because I don't recall it in TOS/TNG, and it's not a real world thing. According to Memory Alpha, it's a byproduct of anti-matter waste and was featured extensively in several Voyager episodes.

There goes the theory that the radiation which poisoned Lily involves some form of radioactive decay, fusion, or fission reaction as we currently understand them.

If you're going to cling to real world examples, e.g., CERN/anti-matter production, I invite you to explain the revolution in nuclear reactor design that allows the creation of a reactor AND shielding (I assume we want to keep our heroes alive) small/light enough to fit within the mass/space limits of the Titan II.

The smallest MANNED platform (the USSR had unmanned satellites with fission reactors) with a nuclear reactor I can think of was the US Navy's NR-1 submersible, which at ~360 metric tons is about 100 times too heavy for the Titan II to lift.... :-)

I'll close by repeating my reference to TNG's "Peak Performance"

"It's pretty clear to me that Cochrane was portrayed in this kind of way."

Exactly right. Portraying him as some kind of conventionally eccentric genius would also contradict the message of the film (don't be a great man, just be a man) and the kind of ethos that was still popular in the 1990s (celebrating the working, rather than professional classes). His love of alcohol, "naked women" and rock music was not coincidental.

Yeah he was essentially souping up his Jeep with warp engines.

I'd add that if the movie were made today Cochrane would be portrayed as a black woman maybe. We have shifted from a class based consciousness to a race based one.

Naw, they would just play up how flawed he is as a straight white male, and not just cuz he's a boozer. And he would have concealed having "borrowed" his breakthrough ideas from a black woman, a la Hidden Figures.

I hated the way Cochrane was written. Just a comic relief clown. An unbelievable and very annoying character. Oh, and a waste of a talented actor. Why do Trek movies have to be popcorn flicks aimed at the lowest common denominator?

@ Jason R. "Portraying him as some kind of conventionally eccentric genius would also contradict the message of the film (don't be a great man, just be a man) and the kind of ethos that was still popular in the 1990s (celebrating the working, rather than professional classes)."

Being an eccentric genius and a member of the working class are not mutually exclusive.

I invite you to consider the mathematical and engineering skills necessary to reach orbit, never mind build a functional warp drive.

Dude was clearly more than a garage tinkerer. I feel like that phrasing reduces him to some parody of Wily E. Coyote strapping a warp drive onto an ACME Rocket. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@ Black Oatmeal "I hated the way Cochrane was written. Just a comic relief clown. An unbelievable and very annoying character."

I didn't view him that way at all. He comes across as a damaged human being thrust into a near impossible situation, surrounded by hero worship that most people would find annoying at the bare minimum. There's very little I'd change in First Contact's Earthside story.

IMHO, the character reduced to comic relief clown who deserved better was Deanna Troi.