Review Text
Looking back at the hugely misfired fourth season of Strange New Worlds, I see there was indeed a goal that the writers sought to achieve, which was to try to bring many of the SNW characters forward and give them a spotlight to show their evolution into what they will later become in TOS. (For the non-TOS characters, they got some sort of advancement or resolution as well.)
- Spock reaffirmed his Vulcan logic in the nonetheless irredeemable "Level-Five Transporter Accident."
- Kirk faced tough choices and lessons in leadership in the solid "Orders of Magnitude."
- Scotty embraced his relationship with the Enterprise as its engineer in the middling "Off-Hour."
- Chapel committed to permanently serving aboard the Enterprise in "Off-Hour."
- Pike acknowledged his feelings of loss (and, arguably, another step in accepting his tragic fate) in the otherwise terrible "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass."
- M'Benga torpedoed his career to transition his way out of the role of medical chief in "Orders of Magnitude."
- La'an came to terms with her personal demons in the fantasy dud "Once La'an a Time."
- Una embraced her ability to conceal her true nature to lead a revolution in the serviceable "A Case of Chiaroscuro" — although that was less a character revelation than a standard outing. (I expect she'll get something more definitive next season.)
So there actually was some "there" there, especially when it came to the characters. The problem was that it was so frequently alternating with or buried beneath all kinds of awful storytelling dreck. A shame.
Now Uhura gets her turn in the solidly engaging "Tomorrow's Enterprise," where she becomes the fulcrum upon which a mysterious temporal anomaly pivots. Hanging in the balance — in a refreshing change of pace when it comes to stakes and temporal anomalies — is not the fate of the galaxy or universe, but simply Scotty's life. (Since we know Scotty doesn't die because he must survive into TOS, that's of course never in doubt, but that doesn't matter. I always find it curious when people say there's no suspense in a story because we know a character must survive beyond the prequel. How often do you honestly expect non-prequel regular Trek characters to die in their stories? This isn't 24 or Game of Thrones.)
As temporal tech mysteries go, this one works pretty well, up to a point. It works better as a puzzle than a solution, but that's often how these things go. The Enterprise is observing an extremely rare "white hole" (which is theorized as the flip side of a black hole). An entity accompanied with some sci-fi musical notes (think Close Encounters) emerges from an anomaly, and a shockwave knocks the Enterprise about and hurls Uhura to the floor of the bridge. She experiences strange aftereffects, including an echo of Scotty screaming a mayday. She doesn't have a concussion or any other medical symptoms to explain these experiences. In speaking with La'an (who time traveled in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"), she realizes these are side effects of having experienced a temporal event.
Before long, she has found a transmission that puts her in contact with herself from one year in the future, where the Enterprise, now under Kirk's command, is in this same region of space exploring the black hole on the other side of the white hole. In this future time frame, Uhura, Ortegas, and Scotty take a shuttle to investigate the black hole. A similar event involving entities, musical tones, and a shockwave occurs, and the shuttle is destroyed. Only Uhura survives, but when she beams back to the Enterprise, the timeline has changed: Scotty has already been dead for a year, and Ortegas is a pilot instructor who never returned to the Enterprise for this flight.
Now the two Uhuras must work together (they're able to communicate through an earpiece synced to the time-spanning frequency) across a year of time to figure out what happened and how to restore the timeline so that Scotty doesn't die — which happened a year ago from future Uhura's perspective, and in the very near future (possibly days or hours) of current Uhura's perspective. And what does all of this have to do with the white/black hole and the alien entity that emerged from it at both ends of the time conduit?
Structurally, this resembles a simplified version of "All Good Things," where the past and future must be brought into a specific alignment to solve the central puzzle connecting them. There are some enjoyable details, like the fact that Uhura needs to synthesize a dilithium diamond as part of the technical solution, and that synthesizing one takes a year to complete — and, fortunately, the Uhura from her past can get right on that. I also thought the use of the alien music as a language that Uhura must decipher was a nice idea, although it's so briefly introduced and quickly solved that it feels like an abbreviated footnote that could've been vastly expanded upon.
The true core of this, however, is the focus on Uhura's character. The Uhura of a year from now is much different from her previous version. The earlier Uhura doesn't live "in the now." She turns down having drinks with Scotty because she doesn't want the possible messiness of a relationship, and she's overly focused on her career and what every decision she makes might mean for her future. The Uhura in the future, however, is more relaxed, more sure of herself, more interested in living in the moment. She's in a low-key relationship with Scotty before he vanishes from her timeline, thus raising the personal stakes. (By mentioning this is consistent with canon, I must also mention how the only other time we saw this on screen — in Star Trek V — was truly awful.) Celia Rose Gooding does a good job creating these two different versions of her character, and manages to work in some Nichelle Nichols vibes.
What's disappointing, unfortunately, is the puzzle's solution. The aliens are beings who exist outside linear time (like the wormhole prophets in DS9), and the space-time disturbances here are caused by a distressed birth. The "space baby" trope is a less than imaginative fallback option for what could've been a far more cerebral and interesting concept, and the fact that the baby is in a literal breech that must be physically repositioned strikes me as a far too anthropomorphic take on a spacefaring life form. Why reduce such a potentially grand concept to a troubled human pregnancy?
The technical solution is also ultimately a letdown, with Uhura needing to do a space walk (the visual effects, let it be said, are impressive, as they often are on this show) so she can use space drones to literally turn the breeched baby around, which she does with mimed hand motions that walk the fine line between earnest and hokey. And the aliens' explanation at the end, where they speak to the two Uhuras, offers far too much dumbed-down exposition, where a bit of mystery would've been better. There's also a convenience here that's used in many time travel plots, where a triggering technobabble event can simply reset everything to the way it "should" be, solving a puzzle with technical magic and thereby sidestepping any need to solve it with interesting logic.
I also could've probably done without the plot development where the two Uhuras switch places and end up in the wrong time frames. Yes, there are some nice moments here — like Uhura's conversation with Pike about seeing into the future, or Kirk's distressingly long pause when Uhura mentions La'an's name. (What might this mean? Does the timeline with La'an's ominous future still hold given that it gets changed by saving Scotty?) But there's also the contrived weirdness of how long people take to react significantly to the fact that Uhura's hair and uniform have so obviously changed. The other characters gloss over it as irrelevant until the story catches up to deal with it, instead of them immediately probing an obviously strange thing that has happened.
On the balance, I enjoyed this as a strong outing that tries to be classic Trek, with a passable but notably less than satisfactory resolution. This is possibly the best outing of the year, along with "Orders of Magnitude." They fully utilize a character who was mostly underserved in TOS and manage to tell a nice sci-fi yarn without overselling it as a massive season-ending event.
Hopefully, the six episodes in the final season of this series will be more along these lines, and not the waste that too many outings this season were.
Previous episode: Once La'an a Time
Like this site? Support it by buying Jammer a coffee.
117 comments on this post
Colin Daniel Lindsly
It is Uhura's turn to be explored as a character. We get a story where she re-learns what she has forgotten. Nothing much else happens of note. I may have missed something as I saw only the beginning and the ending and fast forwarded through the rest.
We do get a sample of what Star Trek: First Year might have been.
Pike’s Hair
In the beginning this was looking like another middling episode to me. By the end, I thought it was pretty clearly one of the best episodes of the show. A massive improvement over last years abomination of a season finale.
And so a wildly uneven season of SNW comes to a close. The less than half of the season that remembered it was a Star Trek show was pretty awesome. The other greater half of content however should clearly not have been what dominated this year’s material. Hopefully the last 6 episodes of the show next year understand that.
Andre
... What a waste of pure potential sorry set up with such a let down of a conclusion.
Spoilers but if you haven't watched it why are you reading comments.
A time travel set up. Tomorrow's enterprise. Will you see enterprise B? The refit? The C?
No. 1 year ahead OG enterprise. Ok. Fine. Political intrigue? A war with the Klingons again which must be stopped!? No. Uhura birthing a space baby whose mother ?? deux ex machina things back to normal. How did the shuttle accident which killed Scotty link to the console explosion which killed him ? Did we even need the shuttle death for the story?
I think I understand whats happening. To cut cost, kurtzman went to a community college's arts and media faculty, went into a first year class of 18 year olds with tik tok brain, and offered them an extra credit assignment: write SNW episodes.
It's the only thing that makes sense.
I'm glad this show is ending along with all of kurtzman trek.
Jeffrey's Tube
Best episode of the series. Star Trek to its core.
Only thing that would have made the episode better would have been McCoy instead of Boyce. Not like McCoy to be on board and not sticking his nose in everywhere. But I know why they didn't use him. First, his introduction would have overshadowed everything else and pulled focus from Uhura and the plot, which already was a lot to cram into the runtime of a single episode. Second, they didn't want younger Uhura to meet him ahead of time.
Loved Gooding's portrayal of older Uhura. Felt like Wesley was Kirk for maybe the first time ever. He had the self-assurance and presence, and even used some of Shatner's body language. Same with Peck playing older, more logical Spock--though we've seen him do that before in Quality of Mercy, when he also did it excellently.
Loved the costuming and the hair. Well, Chapel's was a bit silly and unconvincing, but it is what it is, because that's what it was.
We learned some interesting things about the future, including that Ortegas is alive and a special Starfleet Academy flight instructor of some kind. She's also referred to as a captain, though that may be position and not rank.
We learned that M'Benga apparently starts out as CMO under Kirk, though is quickly on his way out, and apparently McCoy wasn't originally CMO when he first came on board, but beats Boyce out for the position when M'Benga steps down. No mention of Piper. Maybe Boyce is dead or no longer on board by the time of Where No Man Has Gone Before, a few short months later, and Piper is the secondary physician.
We learn that Gary Mitchell is Jenna Mitchell's stepbrother and is aboard the Enterprise, though we don't see him. Bummer.
We see what certainly looks like M'Ress in the shuttlebay. The camera wisely keeps its distance so we don't get to see close up the makeup, which is probably not good enough, I mean SNW does not have Marvel money. Though they spent a lot more than usual in this episode with the special effects, costuming, and even on random alien background crew members.
And we learned that things are certainly not looking good for La'an's future, are they.
But I will point out that at the time Kirk has that reaction to younger Uhura mentioning La'an's name, it's in a timeline where Scotty has been dead for a year when he wasn't supposed to be in the correct future timeline. You can't tell me that Scotty's absence wouldn't have affected anything--it's a miracle the Enterprise is in one piece without him--so perhaps, if something happened to La'an, it was the result of something that Scotty was supposed to, and will, prevent. All I'm saying is the writers aren't married to anything regarding her fate.
We don't learn anything about Una. In fact she's barely in this episode, which is kind of a bummer. But it is very overstuffed as-is.
We learn Scotty and Uhura have a romance around the first year of TOS. Could it have continued on the entire time and we just never knew? It could have. We all remember Star Trek V.
. . .
Before everyone gets in a tizzy about "black holes don't work that way," it isn't a black hole. Or a white hole. It only presented as each, at the respective times, initially. Camouflage. (Only while birthing, to hide from predators, maybe? There's a thought.) Once our characters figure this out they cease referring to it/them as such and start calling it "the anomaly."
It's heavily implied these aliens are related to, or at least the same type of lifeform in nature to, the Prophets of the Bajoran wormhole. If not the Prophets themselves? Who knows!
. . .
At the very end of the episode, future Uhura plays cards (the name of the game that begins with "p" is blocked from this site it seems!) with Kirk & co and she flashes some playing cards. They are not regular playing cards. They are some kind of futuristic, holographic playing cards. An effort was made to imagine this very tiny bit of future, and that makes the world feel real and alive. The little things like this make all the difference . . . it showed someone involved with the show truly CARED . . . and I appreciated that one little very, very much.
Jeffrey's Tube
. . . that one little moment very, very much.
Norvo
This didn't so much feel as a season finale as it did a series finale. We began with Uhura as the young, green cadet and now her future TOS version gets to come back and thank Pike for all he's done for her. It had a sense of finality to it.
A fine Trek outing, inventive camera work and cleverly written temporal shenanigans (though I'm really not sure how the Uhuras figured they had EXACTLY one year to prevent Scotty's death, oh well). It's enough to forgive this season's gimmick, the obligatory genre pastiche (this time we're doing Freaky Friday, Trek style!)
I'm glad we get another 6 episodes to wrap up Strange New Worlds, but honestly, I would have been fine if this was it.
Karl Zimmerman
Wow. What an episode. Started thinking it was a good episode with a few flaws, similar to Off Hour and Orders of Magnitude. But it closed very, very strong, both in terms of direction and character, making up for a handful of earlier shortcomings.
Celia Rose Gooding has always been one of the stronger performers on the show, despite being one of the youngest members of the cast. The earlier seasons knew this, by giving her a strong character arc in Season 1 covering her misgivings about Starfleet and growth into the role. Somewhere along the way, the show kind of forgot what to do with her, spinning wheels with the stupid Beto romance in Season 3 and giving her a promotion for generic badassery this season. But this episode remembers her character and her skill as a crewmember, and ties beautifully into both what she was at her introduction and what she'll eventually become. She so perfectly gets across the vibe of Nichelle Nichols with the uptime version of her.
One of the few misfires the episode makes, however, is the choice to have it be only a single year in future. Look, I get it - they hadn't cast McCoy or Sulu yet, and so they wanted this to be the Enterprise we saw in Where No Man has Gone Before. So we get Boyce, and this has to be quite early in Kirk's captaincy. This means that the episode has to sell us that this one additional year of missions has transformed Uhura in a way that the previous four years has not. It does it just barely, but it's on Gooding completely selling it - I'm just not that moved by the script itself telling me that suddenly, Uhura grew up all at once.
The plot that uptime and downtime Uhura hatch to fix everything doesn't really make a lick of sense to me. I don't understand how past Uhura keeps setting up things for future Uhura to discover. I suppose the implication is that uptime Uhura already knew about all of this stuff, though since her own timeline had already changed due to Scotty's death, that implies what? That she had these new memories which were implanted from the new past without Scotty after the accident? I dunno, I'll give the episode a pass here, because it lampshades how awful time travel paradoxes get. It's part and parcel of this kind of episode. Regardless, this section is fun, so I'll let it be.
Then we get to the section where the two have their bodies swap to the opposite time periods. How ridiculously slow on the uptake everyone seems on the respective bridges to not notice the different hairstyles/uniforms really stretches credulity, though it's saved because both captains ultimately are playing dumb in the moment, but make it clear they knew what was going on almost immediately. I had a sinking moment when it seemed like Kirk was going to be the only one to figure it out, but thankfully Pike was also given a scene with uptime Uhura, allowing him to come across as a plausible authority figure for one of the first times this season. After this, we pretty much stop seeing Pike's Enterprise, because this is really "our Uhrura's" character journey.
Then the episode has it's second flaw - the whole "space baby" thing coming out of left field. Really, this just comes down to some awkward exposition. I didn't have an issue with the concept, but it felt like the discussion jumped forward through a bunch of suppositions like "breech birth" with absolutely no warning. They really needed like one more pass in the writer's room to smooth this thing out more.
Pretty quickly, this was forgiven, though, because the end of the episode was so incredible. For all that modern Trek tries to be cinematic, the closing sequences around the black/white hole were the first time that I was really sold that yes, this could be a movie. The scene on the empty bridge with both Uhuras and the lights was the perfect mix of TOS vibes with a modern VFX budget. Arguably the dialogue from the black hole aliens should've been a bit more cryptic, but enjoyed it. I liked that while there were some analogues to The Prophets, they didn't make an explicit canon link, as it's a big universe and multiple types of alien can exist outside of linear time. Something about this whole section even moved me to be a bit misty-eyed, even though it wasn't outright sad or even bittersweet. Maybe because the episode was groping towards pretty universal themes about how time changes us, makes us wiser? I dunno, but it seemed profound in the moment.
So yeah, an episode with two relatively minor flaws, but one of the most perfectly done final acts in all of Star Trek. If the writers are capable of this level of greatness, why did they waste our time on all that other stuff?
Mike A
Good episode. Best of the season though with Season 4 not really a high bar to cross.
Great showcase for Uhura! Absolutely loved how they portrayed time intersecting & how the two Uhura’s, from one year apart, worked together to arrive at a solution to save Scotty. The contact & communication by the two Uhura’s with the time entity was a very nice touch indeed.
Interesting to get a glimpse into one year into the future to see what I assume was the proposed Star Trek: Year One. Kirk is more confident with a swagger, Chapel has a terrible hairstyle (didn’t anybody have the sense to speak up and tell she looked terrible in it?), Spock suddenly changed forever because he spent a few months on Vulcan (when did he have time to do this?), and Ortega is alive & well off on another assignment. La’an apparently doesn’t make it. A lot of this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me since they kind of abandoned character development this season. My first reaction was I was kind of glad Star Trek: Year One didn’t get approved.
All in all a highly enjoyable, good episode though I wouldn’t rate it as highly as some here are. it’s Star Trek & that’s a good thing! Why did we get so little of you this season?
Joseph B
Ok ... *THAT* was Star Trek!
Very enjoyable ... and a good use of the Doctor Who "wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey" effect!
Notes:
* "Future" Uhura looks *uncannily* like Nichelle Nichols.
* "Future" Scotty trying to sound like Captain Kirk sounded more like Shatner than Paul Wesley ever has!
* It doesn't sound good for La'an in that "Future" year.
Sincere Question: Why the heck haven't we been getting episodes like this all season??
Mike A
Just to add some description to what I previously wr The two Uhura's contact with the time entity was stunning. absolutely beautiful. Also the wisdom she learned from her experience in time travel. To appreciate the here and now & the connection to th people that matter to her.
My problems with the episode rest in the radical transformations of everyone in the course of just a year. Since the series has invested little time in character development, it just didn't make a whole l of sense to me. The only realistic one was Kirk, the new swagger, but they've invested time in showing Kirk's learning curve despite the fact that in reality his learning curve should have been around USS Farragut & not the Enterprise.
karatasiospa
Finally, a great and true trek episode
Mike A
Doesn’t seem any way to make any corrections so please excuse the typos above
theBgt
WELL THAT WAS BETTER!
This episode managed to make me pleased and angry at the same time.
Pleased, cause even with its flaws, that was a proper good sci-fi episode.
Angry, cause if they can write like this WHY they torture us with all these BS episodes? Cause they enjoy it. Torturing us, that is.
I agree with the ones who believe the 1year gap was too short.
I believe it should be at least 2 years. But oh well, at least we finally got some Star Trek in our screens.
Gosh, I dislike these writers and showrunners so much!
voxymandias
Now, this is a big swing I can get behind. I thought this was such a bold, ambitious episode, and despite some minor quibbles, I think it really delivered.
We finally got a Star Trek episode this season. And it makes me feel its absence this season all the more.
Bok R'Mor
This is the kind of episode that happens when NuTrek tries to be profound. It’s neither convincing nor particularly interesting, and falls off a cliff in the final third when the writers start patting themselves on the back again and again for slipping the term ‘space baby’ into the script.
It’s a boring, flabby episode straight out of the Memory Alpha and AI script blender (‘All Good Things…’, ‘Galaxy’s Child’, ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’, among many others), and Celia Gooding is a terrible, wooden actress who’s only got worse as this series has progressed.
And of course they couldn’t resist the petty compulsion to turn Pike into the ship’s cook at the very end, yet again. This show is a mockery of itself, and I really can't be bothered to try and take it seriously anymore.
episodenull
Another mess of an episode, though I can give it points for at least trying to be Star Trek again. Unfortunately it's cribbing some of the dumber prior plot points, including the pregnant nebula "contractions" nonsense from Picard S3. It's also lifting from "Timescape," now that I think of it, in that we have aliens nesting in a black hole causing time shenanigans. But it's a fresh enough spin on that idea that I don't mind so much.
Unfortunately the writing is all over the place. Two episodes ago Uhura is such an accomplished bluffer that she tricked Andorian gang members for an entire subplot, but now she's so bad at lying everyone can see through her. This would honestly have made a lot more sense if the "future" Uhura were from this season and the "past" Uhura from season 1 or something.
It's also nonsense thematically. The dialog keeps hammering us with "LIVE IN THE MOMENT, CARPE DIEM" but the story doesn't support that at all: she literally has to coordinate with her future self, including planning a year ahead with the dilithum diamonds, to save the day. I think we're supposed to take at face value Chapel's admonition re Scotty that sometimes living in the moment is enough, but like...the heck are you talking about. Uhura worrying about the future LITERALLY SAVES SCOTTY'S LIFE.
And they didn't even refit the future Enterpise's exterior. I wanted straight pylons, dammit.
2.5/5 stars, okay but hampered by the standard writing issues that have plagued the past two seasons of this show.
SC
I thought that was bloody brilliant! I love that we got to see future Uhura (on the Enterprise) and that she was given something significant to do. I love that she was in an actual loving relationship and that they (her and Scotty) could share a real kiss. It almost brought a tear to my eye when she was telling Pike how much he meant to her. Scenes like that always get to me because Pike would never have known that in the OG series.
Yes, the space baby stuff is technobabble with no real explanation (unless I'm missing something, haven't seen the OG series much) but the character work throughout this episode was truly great.
This is maybe our only glimpse of Year One as apparently the sets have been torn down and the cast have taken other jobs. But it was a fantastic glimpse.
Easily the best episode of series 4, one of the best of SNW's and Celia Rose Gooding was superb (as Uhura.) You could clearly tell the present version and the future version of her apart.
When they can deliver stellar episodes like this, it makes you a little sad that they wasted so many of them.
Atoz
Thought as I watch:
"Nerds!"
"Feels like a Tuesday"
"Crushing need to pee"
"Time...stuff?"
Wonderful dialogue.
Don't bother telling the Captain you are experiencing some time travel shit. 45 seconds worth of "girl talk" with your bestie is really all the attention such an unimportant event deserves.
Uhura talking about exploring the inside of a black hole = "If Chad's promotion comes through we MAY be going to Gatlinburg this fall! squee!"
This show sucks. Skipping ahead.
Bad wigs.
Skipping ahead.
Hey, it's yet another episode featuring a Kirk impersonator. Hopefully, they find time for Pike to cook for everyone.
"It's a space baby"
Skipping ahead.
"Hey, kid, one last thing. You're doing great" Awww...don't that just tug at your heartstrings? All this time Uhura was doubting whether she truly was as awesome as everyone keeps telling her she is, but now she's finally gotten the only person awesome enough to truly give her validation - herself.
And Pike is wearing his dress uniform - an apron.
THE END
Another great episode, guys! I can see why you all like it so much. Trek is back, baby!
SC
Atoz wrote: "Hey, kid, one last thing. You're doing great" Awww...don't that just tug at your heartstrings? "
Actually, yes, it did. People often wish they could go back in time and talk to their younger selves and tell them everything is gonna be all right. And Uhura got to do that.
Maybe you just don't like Star Trek any more?
And that's fine, we all change. I don't like many shows that I used to like.
I just hope you're not hating on Nu Trek because it's Nu Trek. People like Nerdrotiic on YouTube do that, they hate on everything new, for clicks and views, it's rage-bait to make money. If he says anything good about Trek, or Star Wars or Harry Potter (the series) etc., then he loses his audience. They are miserable and live for the hate he provides. Even if it's good.
If something is good they won't admit it. If you didn't like - at least - parts of that episode, then maybe Trek isn't for you any more? Just MO.
Tim Buckley
It seems that the writers actually know how to make a good Star Trek episode. Sometimes, they get so enamored of a high-concept that they forget to make a good story. There are gimmicks and time-travel shenanigans here, but they are in service to a good story and good characterizations. It was a smart idea to make Uhura the focus here. Notwithstanding the “timey-wimey” approach, the split between our present and +1 year works well – parallel events connected by Uhura. I like the fact that Uhura is smart enough to figure it out, and Pike and Kirk each figure out what is going on from the context clues. That is what has been missing most of the season – the characters drive the plot, not the plot driving the characters. Also, nice touches closing the gap between SNW and TOS.
It is perfect? No. We’ve seen the space baby and non-linear alien tropes before. And I’m not convinced it adds a lot here. There’s a lot of moving chess pieces from B to A to B and a lot of talk about how to move them there. Characters stop to talk about feelings for a bit too long. But considering the long slog this season has been, it is still a vast improvement.
Way back in Star Trek V, there is an awkward scene suggesting that Uhura and Scotty had been an item, and she never quite let go of those feelings for him. SNW doesn’t mind referencing those events, even though a lot of people would rather forget them. If you are going that way, I suppose this is where you could put those events.
As for the timeline, the events of “The Cage” occurred 13 years prior to the events of “The Menagerie.” The events of “A Quality of Mercy” occurred 6 years prior to the canon events of “Balance of Terror.” Given the significant refit and change in personnel, the events of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” took place in the first year of Kirk’s captaincy of the Enterprise, and perhaps a year before the events of “The Man Trap.” The official chronology has “The Cage” taking place in 2254, “The Menagerie” taking place in 2267, and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in 2265. “Balance of Terror” takes place after “The Menagerie,” and would also place in 2267. That would place the events of “A Quality of Mercy” around 2260, (with Discovery Season 2 taking place somewhere around 2258-59.) Placing SNW Season 2 in 2261 and Season 3 in 2262, it is not a big leap to say that the events shown in “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” occur in late 2263 and late 2264, respectively. So the one year gap actually works out.
Atoz
"People often wish they could go back in time and talk to their younger selves"
She went back in time a year! What kind of advice is she going to give? "Get the EXTENDED warranty"? " Don't bother dvr'ing this season of The Desperate Housewives of Risa"?
"I just hope you're not hating on Nu Trek because it's Nu Trek."
I think Prodigy is very good for what it is. I'm not the target demographic, and I think they made some mistakes with the show, but I think it's a quality program. It's written much better than SNW and Picard, and the writers/showrunners seem to actually know and like the franchise.
Even though I'm as old as dirt and Prodigy is aimed at 10 year olds, I think it's good Trek.
SC
"She went back in time a year! What kind of advice is she going to give? "Get the EXTENDED warranty"? " Don't bother dvr'ing this season of The Desperate Housewives of Risa"?"
Ha ha, I get what you're saying, and a year flies by so fast now! But for Uhura many things have changed. She's been promoted, she's transferred to the Enterprise, working under Kirk and no longer Pike, many of her friends have left, and she's in a proper relationship. She's happy on the Enterprise and she's telling her younger self, good job.
dave
Can someone really change and mature that much in only one year? I think that was "off" the most about this..... her older self should have been a decade older, not one.
Other wise it was fine.
I guess they were also trying to give us some time with the prophets? Assuming they could reside anywhere and Sisko in the future taught them about linear time so they were able to understand this Uhura in the past.
dave
Also reminds me how frustrating it is that they burn so many episodes on filler and junk and comedy. They only have 10 and they don't treat that as respectfully as they should. They should max it out at 2, and the rest be actual Star Trek and building towards TOS.
Hopefully the final season does more TOS building and less "har har " throw away episodes that most will never watch a 2nd time.
Scott
This was a good episode. I think the issue is so many people are just trying to act like they're smarter than they are, (or think they can write better scripts than professional writers in the industry), and the constant snarky comments on this site have gotten out of hand. I know most people here are probably 50+ year old boomers given the age of this site and the franchise in general, but this really feels like, "Old men yelling at clouds" territory. (For the record I'm 40, so I'm not that young either but not as old as the oldest Trekkies)
This was a great episode, is about as "Trek" as you can get, but also had some stellar performances from the actors as well. While I understand the complaints about the gimmick eps this season, the fact that some can't even appreciate a good outing is very strange to me.
It says a lot that a lot of reviews on other forums, social media like the Trek subreddits or other places are always a lot different than here.
Atoz
"think they can write better scripts than professional writers in the industry"
I don't know the first thing about piloting a ship, but I'm fairly confident in saying the captain of the Exxon Valdez screwed up. A lot of people are in important positions who aren't qualified to be there. Even truly talented people don't always hit home runs. It's ok to criticize. Do you need to a former president to criticize a president? Do you need to attend a culinary school to say something tastes bad?
Something I've noticed is that when people make a criticism, there's usually no effort to answer that criticism. Most often it's just ignored, or you get the "well, that old episode sucked too" or "you're old - this isn't for you" but rarely do you see an actual defense.
Person 1: Wow, I can't believe the butler strangled all those people! Great movie!
Person 2: But the butler had his hands ripped off in a freak silver polishing accident in act one...how could he ha-
Person 1: AWESOME MOVIE!
Yes, my criticism of this episode is snarky. The thing is there have been 40 episodes so far and it's all the same shit. There are plenty of posts here detailing the numerous problems with various episodes. Prove 'em wrong.
Jeffrey's Tube
One year is a much bigger deal between 25-26 than it is between 55-56. Some of us, it's been so long that I think we forget.
And also it wasn't exactly a year to the day. There was a line that indicated this, though I don't remember exactly what it was. They were just using "a year" and "last year" as shorthand because there wasn't a need to be precise. So it was actually a year and some months, but by the calendar, just the next calendar year.
thebuescherman
They swung for the fences on this one. That was a lot to fit into an hour. They didn’t pull it off completely, but they got most of the way there. Some poorly explained details (like how we went from the shuttle crash killing Scotty to this new timeline where he dies in a panel overload) and a shitty Una joke (who otherwise did nothing all episode) about Tuesdays were weak points, but they didn’t sink the episode for me. I think the highlight for me was Pike putting the pieces together and their conversation in his quarters. It’s a good continuation of their professional relationship, starting all the way back in Children of the Comet, and more recently in Chronitons Through the Hourglass. 3* for me.
I also have to call out the effects team doing extended, continuous scenes outside the ship. The space walk on the rotating Enterprise in front of the black hole (with a cool synth take on the ST main theme) looked great. Reminded me of Spock’s spacewalk in Off Hour.
Valles Marineris, The Griffin Incident, Off-Hour, Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass, Order of Magnitude, and Tomorrow’s Enterprise all worked for me. I did not hate the puppet episode. Burn the Hangover, Chiaroscuro, and fantasy episodes with fire. Not up to the standard set in S1 and S2, but an improvement over S3.
theBgt
@Scott
You are in your 40s and you haven't learned to respect people having different opinions than yours?
"There are boomers that yell at clouds"?
Really now?
And also what Atoz wrote.
In other forums do also insult those they disagree with?
Karl Zimmerman
A new Trek YouTuber (Mr. Knowitall) pointed out today that this was SNW's attempt to do All Good Things. And you know what, I can see it.
Like the TNG finale, this plot involved time travel, with more than one version of POV character having to work together. Like that episode as well, it touched on both the beginning of the series (thematically, at least, since Uhura regresses to her Season 1 insecurities) and where the characters will end up upon its conclusion. Oh, and both have a game of cards near the end.
Of course, this is not the finale of SNW. But maybe it was intended as a finale before they realized they could get an order for six more episodes. It works pretty well as a finale to the show.
TOY
"... ALSO, OLDER YOU WILL DO SOMETHING LIKE A DANCE WITH FANS IN YOUR FUTURE. DON'T. IT GETS WEIRD." - The Midwives
- TOY
Jeffrey's Tube
It was definitely a "just in case" finale. One that could have reasonably served if season 5 didn't happen.
episodenull
>In other forums do also insult those they disagree with?
Yeah.
Pike’s Hair
“I don't know the first thing about piloting a ship, but I'm fairly confident in saying the captain of the Exxon Valdez screwed up. A lot of people are in important positions who aren't qualified to be there. Even truly talented people don't always hit home runs. It's ok to criticize. Do you need to a former president to criticize a president? Do you need to attend a culinary school to say something tastes bad?”
A lot of people are armchair complainers that don’t know a clue about all of these things as well, this fallacy of a take doesn’t hold up to the tiniest modicum of scrutiny. Half the criticisms of Strange New Worlds I see are answered simply by paying attention to the episodes. This was particularly true with the first two seasons, which were excellent overall. I mean you have people flat out admitting that they only watch the first five minutes of an episode and last five minutes then skipping the rest, and pretending their opinion is of any merit when that’s objectively not the case.
Pike’s Hair
Also I don’t mean to say this show or season was perfect. It wasn’t at all. Last week was one one of the worst episodes of all NuTrek which is a very high bar of trash to compete against imo. This week was good. Really wish they had spent more than 40% of the season doing actual Star Trek episodes.
Klanky
This episode was…fine. I’m happy they tried to write a Star Trek episode for the finale. Like others, I think the time jump should have been bigger but I can deal with it.
What I don’t love is when recent Star Trek tries to have a profound monologue at the end of the episode. It gives me big ‘I’m 13 and this is deep’ vibes, which I suppose fits for the character who is discovering this, but for at least this audience member it doesn’t really hit…it’s mindfulness 101.
Again, at least it felt like a Star Trek episode and there were definitely some interesting moments sprinkled in there.
The Queen
Up to the birthing scene I was solidly in favor of this episode. Gooding's transformation into TOS Uhura was spectacular and her acting was very good. I loved the writing in the scene where Pike confronted TOS Uhura. And despite some quibbles like the one-year difference and how Uhura even knew that, I was impressed by the ambition, relative freshness, and execution of the plot.
The birthing scene spoiled all that for me. It just looked silly, especially with the slowmo - even sillier than the whole idea of a "space baby" having a breech birth. But the final straws for me were the amnesia (overused to the point of triteness now) and the unnecessary rerunning the clock sequence.
So I'm ending up with a mild "Okay" for this one. I would rewatch it, but mainly for technical reasons like identifying the TAS characters (which I did like). It's a metaphor for the whole series, starting out very strong and then fizzling out .
Dimitris
"3 crewmen & a baby". Well this could certainly be much better. Felt like the plot at some point lost itself within itself. If it was supposed to be a series finale it should have focused more on the whole crew taking action than a single crewmember.
It's a testament to the showrunners that after getting a season full of gimmick episodes (some of which I liked more than this) we reached a point were getting an episode with some convoluted *Star Trek plot* is enough for most of us to go "Wow!"
Not a Merry Man
Sure Scott. You attack people here based on ageism, the theory that caustic language automatically invalidates an opinion, and the baseless conjecture that every other site is heralding SNW as the second coming of television drama.
News flash bud - low ratings and viewership killed the series. That means the OVERALL audience doesn't want it. And your silly, ad hominem attacks only bolster the position that certain people would rather trash honest opinions than face the fact that the series' show runners tanked the show.
SlackerInc
Ortegas's wig is terrible.
There's too much shuffling around of various romantic pairings among the main cast on this show. I prefer the days when there was very little of that sort of thing. I don't think I would mind if they just had one or two couples pair up and maintained it. But instead they go for these myriad different combinations, I guess to keep it fresh and exciting but it begins to seem incestuous and boring.
Not sure how I feel about the idea that black holes no longer have event horizons and you can have signals come from inside them.
Did Lieutenant Uhura ever call Captain Kirk "Jim" on the original series?
"Because it's not just a white hole or a black hole, it's both." Ebony and ivory, live together in perfect harmony...
Was Chapel previously shown to be bisexual?
I was wavering between 2 1/2 and three stars until we got to midwives and a "space baby". Oof. From that point, the last 15 minutes or so of the episode seemed to drag on forever as I desperately wished for the episode and season to mercifully end.
Two stars. No lower, because there was some stuff earlier in the episode I liked.
Episodes one, four, and six were good. Episode eight was great. Episodes five and seven were OK. The other three? Oof.
Bok R'Mor
Agree with pretty much everything @Atoz has written in this thread. I'm grateful someone has the energy to say it, because after this season, I don't.
Bok R'Mor
@SlackerInc:
'There's too much shuffling around of various romantic pairings among the main cast on this show. I prefer the days when there was very little of that sort of thing.'
SNW is primarily a show 'about' the superficiality of human relationships and the ephemeral strange new feelings (for the writers) of such feelings.
And no, Chapel being portrayed as bisexual is new. It's like the Una/Ortega's kiss from the last episode. There to be there.
Kyle
Slackerinc: Well said, it's like Melrose Trek or Trek 90210 now. Trek was never about will they or won't they or everyone's messy relationships. You can ge that from lots of other shows. Again, shows Kurtzman and the writers don't really know what to do with or care about the franchise they have been put in charge of. And yes, Chapel being bi and Ortegas and Una being a couople last week came totally out of nowhere and seems like shameless titilating pandering.
Jeffrey's Tube
@ Not a Merry Man
"low ratings and viewership killed the series."
No, nothing killed the series. It just reached the end of the lifecycle of a streaming series. In the past, in discussions of other episodes, I've gone over all the reasons why this is the business model now, and I don't have it in me to go too in depth doing that again right now. But the tl;dr is a much greater focus on driving new signups rather than retention of existing subscribers leads to short lifespans for streaming series. The reasons for this focus is, again, complicated.
If SNW had been a monster runaway hit it might have achieved one additional season at best. And probably not.
. . .
No, Chapel being bisexual isn't new, but it has only been spoken about in dialogue. Way back in season one she discussed having previously dated a girl with Ortegas.
Asmadi
I thought this was very fun, very moving, and ohmygosh an actual sci-fi star trek episode! It was a ROUGH season, and I wish the rest of it had been more like this! Interviews and such imply that season 5 will be more on track, fingers crossed.
I do wonder if this episode was written as a series finale and reconfigured. I wonder if it was written to be 3-5 years in the future instead of 1 and rewritten. Neither of these things really detracts, but I'm curious if we'll learn more about this script in the future (especially when its time for the series postmortem when we'll have none new trek to watch for a while)
The addition of some of the more obscure races on the Enterprise+1 was a nice touch, even if they were quick out-of-focus glimpses. It's clear some of the people working on this show care a lot about lore, continuity, cool things - it baffles me how the rest of this season happened, given that!
artymiss
dave
"Can someone really change and mature that much in only one year? I think that was "off" the most about this..... her older self should have been a decade older, not one."
No they can't, and I really struggled to get past that aspect of this episode.
Kuebel
I do keep asking myself (and more so after this episode) why they wanted to remake TOS. It would have been exactly the same show as SNW, just with another lead actor.
(And the increased baggage of always people comparing it to the original)
The Queen
Where is this bit about Chapel being bisexual coming from? I said I wouldn't mind rewatching this, but it turns out I'm not ready for that yet.
@Asmadi - The fact that the TAS characters were in the background and not commented upon or pushed right into our faces was one of the things I liked about this episode. IMHO that's the way it should be done. I did wonder about the dinosaur, though, don't remember that from any other series. Or was it supposed to be one of the Voyager species?
Karl Zimmerman
@ Kuebel,
I'm not sure they had the stones for it, but given their love of homages to other media, I'm 100% certain that if they were given a Year One show, they'd work their way into remaking classic TOS episodes, giving the stories we already know a new spin.
To be clear, I think remakes and reinterpretations include some of the best stories across media. However, given how the fandom is a stickler for continuity and canon, an updated version of a classic episode (even if it just improved the VFX and took out the sexism) would be raked over the coals.
Atoz
Chapel has been bi since Spock Amok, right?
Maybe she should give up on Spock and give T'Pring a shot. That would be the first good reason that this p.o.s. show has ever given us to tune in.
Hot lesbian action...er...I mean DIVERSITY!. Yeah "diversity."
Atoz
"Half the criticisms of Strange New Worlds I see are answered simply by paying attention to the episodes."
Lol. Roflmao even.
"I think remakes and reinterpretations include some of the best stories across media."
This statement can cover a lot of territory. Are we talking about modern Hollywood's regurgitation of of every known "ip" in existence? Or are we talking about genuinely artistic and creative efforts to do something new with an old story? Updating the Wizard of Oz from an ill conceived silent era comedy to a Technicolor musical is one thing. The 20th reboot of a superhero franchise is another.
Remakes aren't inherently bad. The problem is that 90%, or more, of them are just made to cash in on a "name".
Karl Zimmerman
I'm not talking about an IP cash grab here. Let's be honest, Trek is already an IP cash grab as it is.
That said, I think it's worth noting that some of the most popular stories across all of modern TV and movies are adaptations. Harry Potter - based on books. The Lord of the Rings movies - based on books. The Expanse - based on books. Game of Thrones - the good half based on the books. The MCU cribbed on comic book stories all the time.
If we want to go to more classic things, think of how many adaptations have been made of Jane Austin novels at this point. Think of how The Maltese Falcon (based on a book) was adapted three times as a movie in the span of 10 years before they "got it right." Think about how many movies have been loose interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, Greek mythology, classic fairy tales, etc. We love readapting old stories. Indeed, I'd argue that's historically been the most common form of storytelling across human culture. We learn a story from those older than us, and put a new spin on it.
And from a standpoint of a modern writer, I hate to say it, but adaptation is just easier than doing something original. There's already a plot framework, characters, etc. You can diverge from the source material as much or as little as you need to make the story work. But the "big issues" are figured out for you, and it's just down to execution.
TOS famously was hit or miss when it came to episodes. Lots of them were conceptually decent, but poor in execution. With 60 years of critical analysis behind us, it wouldn't be hard to improve on some of them, not just in terms of presentation, but in terms of narrative.
Bok R'Mor
Was writing in haste on my way into work earlier, and my post got a bit garbled.
It should have read:
'SNW is primarily a show 'about' the superficiality of human relationships and the ephemeral strange new feelings (for the writers) of such RELATIONSHIPS.'
The saddest thing about SNW is that I've simply grown increasingly indifferent to it. This season was a colossal waste of time and I'm just left shrugging my shoulders about the whole thing. I'm not even invested enough to nitpick anymore.
Atoz
"I did wonder about the dinosaur, though, don't remember that from any other series."
The modern Trek shows pull from the Trek novels occasionally, and I would guess that the dinosaur crewman is a nod towards a character on the Titan series of books named Dr. Ree. That's purely a guess on my part. Maybe someone on staff just likes dinos?
p.s. If SNW ends up with Lt. Rex sabotaging Pike's training vessel as payback for what he did in Valles Marineris I'll take back everything I said about this series. "Revenge is a dish best served cold...blooded.'
Mike A
Now that Season 4 is finished thought I would give some thoughts about the season as a whole.The first thought that comes to my mind is, taken as a whole, this was a hugely disappointing season. A steep decline in overall quality with just a few nice episodes. Here are some reasons why I thought the season, as a whole, was a failure.
(1) Showrunner- just didn’t care for the artistic direction, vision that Goldman & Myers took the show to. Writers come up with ideas for scripts. It’s the showrunners responsibility to say no if the ideas for scripts just happen to be bad ones. Make no mistake from my perspective, there were definitely many bad ideas that were allowed to move forward. The centerpiece of the whole season were the big swings. The gimmicks & comedy. Unfortunately, this meant for me, too many strikeouts. Too many misses, stinkers. Actual Star Trek episodes were too few in numbers. The evidence points with stronger showrunners a very solid season would have been possible as the limited Star Trek episodes allowed to be made were decent to very good. Instead they went full bore into the gimmick of the week concept to the detriment of the season & the series as a whole.
(2) Storytelling- this has never really been a strong element of the show outside a few exceptions here or there. The outstanding cast can turn average even somewhat subpar material into entertainment. There’s really nothing they can do if the material is this weak. I thought the writing overall for the season was weak & subpar. Enough said.
(3) The Kirk Problem- it’s obvious the showrunners like Paul Wesley as Kirk. They picture him as their lead in the proposed series Star Trek: Year One. I know many don’t see him as Kirk but I personally never had a problem with him. In fact may as go as far to say I like him as Kirk. The showrunners liked him so much they turned Wesley into a regular in the series. Big Prolem. He doesn’t belong on the Enterprise during this time period. He belongs on the Farragut. He’s got a new born son. He’s an ambitious, busy man. He simply doesn’t have all this free time to be wandering off to the Enterprise all the time. It makes no sense.
In seasons one and two, when he was more a guest on the show and not a regular, the times he did appear could be explained so you could at least entertain the possibility he could actually be there. Not anymore. Now that he’s a regular, it just doesn’t work. It really can’t be explained. It’s simply not plausible he could be just coincidentally on the Enterprise this many times. It’s become laughable. The show itself at times doesn’t even bother. He’s just there.
(4) Character Development- Quite simply it’s been abandoned. Most notably in Season 4. The show was so focused on its gimmick of the week concept that it just didn’t bother. Chapel, supposedly one of the core characters of the show, barely showed up this season outside of one episode “Off-Hour". She was very much in the background. Spock? Ethan Peck is great as Spock. Where at the end of season 2 thought it would be interesting to see how he transformed into the Spock of TOS that’s just not happening. There is no realistic transformation. Apparently he’s just going to visit Vulcan & suddenly be the TOS Leonard Nimoy Spock. The strong Pike of the beginning of the series has, at times, faded away. . The rest of the characters are just sort of there. La’an’s augmented DNA crisis introduced in the first episode ,where she fears her violent impulses, is resolved in a fairy tale sword fight between her two selves.
Ultimately, as a season overall and not breaking down individual episodes, Season 4 just didn’t work for me. Didn’t like the artistic direction of this gimmick of the week concept.
Sen-Sors
Good god, a full-on-remake of TOS? A prequel series wasn't enough? Please don't give them any ideas. Trek has always had certain archetypes for stories that have been iterated on in subsequent series, I don't think there's any need to go back and rehash TOS in its entirety. Yes there are aspects of those episodes that are dated, but the core of those stories, the writing, was solid. And the writing being solid is exactly what is missing from NuTrek, so what could the goons at Paramount possibly have to add to those stories? More hugging and crying and therapy-speak? More will-they-won't-they among the crew?
I don't think this is a "The Thing From Another World" or "The Blob" scenario, where a talented film-maker updates an old story with more fleshed-out writing and updated special effects. The special effects would be better, sure, but we'd have Captain Kirk constantly deferring to his young attractive subordinates and giving weekly monologues about how "we are a family". No thank you.
Mike A
@Sen-Sors “Good god, a full-on-remake of TOS?”
Yes this was a series proposal Akiva Goldsman pitched with a presentation to Paramount. It’s called Star Trek: Year One covering Kirk’s first couple of years in charge of the Enterprise. Technically not a full on remake as it’s covering the first few years of Kirk’s command not covered in TOS. You were given a glimpse into this proposed series in this episode.
Kyle
Please let Year One be just an internet rumor that hopefully will never be made, like Star Trek Legacy was. The franchise can't survive more hack writing and nonsensical plots and shallow characterization.
Karl Zimmerman
I want to be clear I'm not necessarily saying they should do a TOS remake. I'm just saying if Paramount agreed to their Year One idea, and gave them open-ended renewals, eventually we'd get to TOS, and they'd just start looking for ways to get the rights to classic TOS scripts so they could do their own edits on them, rather than write new adventures "between" the ones we'd previously seen on camera.
Changing tacks, the showrunners admitted in an interview this episode was intended as a series finale when they got the initial cancelation order, then went through a rewrite once they won the truncated Season 5, with some elements of the planned episode pulled out to the final episode of that season. Originally the Uhura here was supposed to be from three years in the future, which would've made the scenario of the "older/wiser" Uhura not seem quite as ridiculous. Presumably they were originally going to unveil McCoy and Sulu here as well, among other things. Maybe say what happened to La'an.
Next season is supposed to be entirely focused on "aligning canon" which means all of the stories are focused on ensuring the legacy characters become who they are in TOS, and putting the ones who either are absent or unimportant on a bus.
I dunno why Hollywood thinks we want this kind of prequel writing, but I guess we'll see.
Torvik
Just because it’s the only episode of the season that attempted a Trek story, by copying old ones essentially, doesn't mean it succeeded. Everything about it is heavy-handed and the lessons on maturity that Uhura receives from her alter ego - who is just a few months older - are ridiculous. It's not a season finale, it's another ad for Year One thrown in Paramount's face that confirms that this show never existed in its own right after its first batch of episodes. Being less disastrous than Discovery, Picard and Academy is nice but it's a too thin reason for being.
Lynos
There was a lot happening here so I need to sit with it some more, but first impressions: some of this was really good, some of this was really clunky, and the episode kind of lost me towards the end. I just went with it but I really wasn't sure what was going on.
The whole romance thing between Scotty and Uhura. I'm not sure why everyone needs to date everyone on this show. This could've worked as well if Uhura wanted to save Scotty as a colleague and a friend instead of a love interest. Was there anything between Uhura and Scotty in TOS? I don't remember there was.
But as a character piece for Uhura, it works. I liked how the two captains weren't stupid and felt that something was going on with the Uhuras.
Ortegas future hairdo is funny. Was it supposed to be? Chappel looking much similar to her TOS look was kind of weird but amusing. The show is teasing us with La'An's fate.
The script keeps saying that "space baby" is silly so we won't have to, but despite bringing it up multiple times, nope, it still sounds hugely silly.
Not perfect but definitely one of the better episodes of the season, so at least it does not end on a sour note, even though this was the weakest SNW season we had so far, I don't think there's any doubt about that.
Mike A
I think either love or hate NuTrek there is a general consensus that ii’s time to close the page on the Kurtzman Star Trek chapter. Say night night. It’s over. From what I can gather, Paramount is moving on. Kurtznan push for more Trek, more money failed. The sets have been put away, the lights have been turned off. It’s finito, finished. The curtains have been drawn and closed. Paramount is gong in a different direction.
As far as Stsr Trek: Year One, from what I can gather, the pitch for Star Trek: Year One was rejected. Think I read somewhere where Kurtzman has something in his contract that allows him to have some degree of control for anything started during his reign. I believe things like Lagacy and Year One would have such a clause. Non starter for Paramount. The Kurtzman era is coming to a close. It’s finito, kaput. It’s toast.
Rahul
Enjoyed this one — nice to see SNW (for a change) producing actual Trek instead of a stupid gimmick. There’s a good Trekkian story here, emotional engagement and even reasonable science fiction. What drags the show down is what is endemic to SNW — SNW’s versions of the TOS characters are nothing at all like what they were on TOS. And that’s very evident with how Quinn portrays Scotty here.
On SNW these characters have the same names as the TOS ones we all know and love but they’re just different characters on SNW. Was shaking my head at the unprofessional conduct with Uhura / Ortegas / Scotty on the shuttle mission — they’re going to check out a fucking black hole but here they’re yapping about relationships… That would not be the case on TOS.
Have to wonder if the Uhuras were actually talking to the Prophets in the end, who then reset the timelines and Scotty doesn’t die. The whole turning the baby stuff was arbitrary. But the idea of the white hole was pretty cool — so I looked it up and “learned” that they’re theoretical. OK that’s fine and good enough for TV sci-fi.
Uhura is a good vehicle for this story but again I would have liked this season finale to focus more on Pike. And there’s even less focus on Pike since Kirk gets about the same screen time as he does here. SNW always finds a way to insert Wesley, who is just not Kirk. Far too much Kirk at the expense of Pike.
Found it jarring when all of a sudden the 2 Uhuras are talking and they suddenly realize they are a year apart — how did that come about? And how does La’an know about these temporal incidents etc. Perhaps I’m forgetting some SNW canon re. La'an. Anyhow, that part where La’an warns Uhura seems superfluous. Also, the Uhura / Scotty romance does not feel right — it’s likely thrown in for younger viewers who aren't long-term Trek fans.
But I thought the episode took a clever turn with the pulse swapping the 2 Uhuras, though the humor of the resulting situation could have been better.
The title would seem to indicate this episode goes a ways towards building toward the crew of Kirk’s Enterprise at the start of TOS. It could also indicate SNW’s take on “Yesterday’s Enterprise” as it once did a take for a season finale on “Balance of Terror”. But ultimately I think there’s enough originality here though some (as usual) gets cobbled together from episodes like “Visionary”, “All Good Things…” etc.
3 stars for “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” — a disaster of a season for SNW and Trek wraps up on a positive note. SNW is capable of making engaging episodes but wasted far too much time on gimmicks, which have been total failures this season. This episode gets the usual epilogue of sermonizing, but here it wasn’t too over-the-top. We do get to see the beginnings of Kirk’s command of the Enterprise with Dr. Boyce, so maybe that’s where we end up at the end of SNW S5.
Colin Daniel Lindsly
Though not mentioned in the discussion, this episode does change the timeline.
In Classic Trek, Jame Kirk was captain of the Enterprise from 2365 to 2370 (as mentioned in the episode with Q's son in Voyager). With the latest information, James Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise in 2263. It's not a big deal to most; however, for those who like a consistent timeline it does present a challenge.
Pike’s Hair
“Lol. Roflmao even.“
This is exactly how anyone that doesn’t eat paint chips for a living feels when reading any of your comments.
Not a Merry Man
Jeffrey, they had to beg for a fifth season with a paltry 6 episodes. The Year One show is dead in the water. The Kurtzman era is dead. And it's unclear if any new shows will be greenlit. This is not some graceful exit by a beloved show. It's the final death knell of an intellectually bankrupt era in Trek. Let me break it down very simply:
Paramount is on the record indicating that Trek is a valuable property they intend to leverage in the future. Yet, Paramount is cleaning house. A new vision with new personnel is promised, Restoring investor confidence means ridding themselves of Kurtzman and his ilk. That is what's happening in the real world. Yes, there are some vocal supporters of this era. But they just don't move the needle. Enough of us have looked at the IP for this era and said hell no. Others are just indifferent, viewing Trek as a fallen commodity, an insipid version of a once great show that now pales in comparison to shows like The Expanse, Severance, FAM, and a host of other products. So, for the time being, find a new hobby.
Soupytwist
The Cat: So, what is it?
Kryten: I've never seen one before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a white hole.
Rimmer: A *white* hole?
Kryten: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole sucks time and matter out of the Universe; a white hole returns it.
Lister: So, that thing's spewing time...
Lister: [donning his fur-lined hat] ... back into the Universe?
Kryten: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time phenomena on board.
The Cat: So, what is it?
Kryten: I've never seen one before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a white hole.
Rimmer: A *white* hole?
Kryten: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole sucks time and matter out of the Universe; a white hole returns it.
Lister: [minus the hat] So, that thing's spewing time...
Lister: [donning his fur-lined hat, again] ... back into the Universe?
Kryten: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time phenomena on board.
Lister: What time phenomena?
Kryten: Like just then, when time repeated itself.
The Cat: So, what is it?
[Kryten, Rimmer, and Lister stare at Cat]
The Cat: Only joking.
jamesD
I am very disapointed that the defenders can only provide adjectives to support this show.
We get 'character development'. She is a 'great' actress. So what?
I think Jammer has it correct when he says:
"As temporal tech mysteries go, this one works pretty well, up to a point. It works better as a puzzle than a solution,"
Because that is it, isn't it? So what is the point of making a puzzle and solving it? Is that even enough for a Star Trek episode? Or at least a good one?
Lynos
Guys, I just realized that none of what was happening on Kirk's ship in this episode really happened because the Uhuras changed the timeline. That includes all the conversations and character moments (including the bit about La'An - will her fate be different now that Scotty isn't dead?). Basically it means that Future Uhura would be coming back to a radically different ship, even with different crew people, different history... Scotty is a very important figure on the ship and his inclusion or omission should be, by all accounts, impactful.
On further scrutiny, I didn't understand the bit with Ortegas. She died on that shuttle crash, but then she didn't, and when the timeline was restored, she's alive again. What was she even doing there in the first place?
I find it very funny that half the characters on the show radically changed their hairstyles in only one year. ;-))))
Chapel being bi... no, I didn't remember that from all the way back in Amok time, and that line did make me do a double take. I really, really, dislike the virtue signaling in NuTrek, like every show needs a token non-straight character or relationship for diversity's sake. I mean, it's so obvious. Why is Chapel made bisexual? There is absolutely no reason whatsoever. And Chapel is a weird choice. When I first started watching SNW I was sure Ortegas will be the gay character (because I was sure there would be one) - she's new to the canon, and she has a butchy look. But no, other than the weird fantasy sequence last episode, Ortegas sexuality was never really explored. Instead they chose Chapel to be the token non-straight character even though obviously she's completely straight in TOS (unless you count ridiculous hairdos as gay).
theBgt
@Lynos
In the future, Scotty and Ortegas went on the shuttle with Uhura.
When the black hole pulses did whatever they did (I never get the technobubble) Scotty died in the past, so he was erased and never went on that shuttle in the first place. Ortegas also wasn't in that shuttle. I think. Cause when Uhura asked if ORtegas was dead they "facetimed" her to see she is alive and Ortegas was a the Star fleet Top Gun school, teaching young pilots talking in 21century slang and disobeying orders.
Captain Janeway said it better, time travel gives me a headache!
Paul
It was a good episode, and definitely don't want to be like... "but it would have been so much better if this season hasn't been trash... it's like having one good scene in a otherwise terrible movie", but I won't. ;)
This should have been an excellent 4/4 episode if once again the writers had not defaulted to... meh... time just reset because okay!
They consistently fail with the science stuff, which they should recognise is a core part of why Star Trek was so popular... why it inspired people to become scientists and engineers... I couldn't get past the "we shall now return you to your timelines, thanks for the baby" speech. Like why did time reset? Nothing in the story suggested it would.
Baby conceived in the future, born in the past... but then what happened to the baby when time reset? The birth sequence made no sense either. An alien should be alien... many species on our planet procreate very differently to humans. Not so strange worlds...
I have to admit I'm also still reeling from a recent interview with the showrunner where he just s**** on fans criticism and is like.. nope... we're doing it our way... when really the reality is... the studio likes the dress up episodes because they get clicks and can be marketed more easily than space adventure episode 4. Kind of like if Enterprise relented and had a boy band each week.
But where are Star Trek fans in all this? Isn't this supposed to be for them? It's a level of disrespect coming from the leaders of nutrek that I honestly find disgusting. I no longer have faith they can do Pike's end justice.
But I agree with 3/4 for this episode.
The Queen
@ Lynos - Yes, I had that thought too, about the future timeline being canceled. I'm not sure I agree with Bgt about the details, but then, that's the whole problem with the timey-wimey stuff, you can make a case for practically anything. I suppose the writers won't follow up and tell us what "actually" happened. But I wish it would be a canceled future, because that would eliminate a lot of the annoying little problems with this episode, which had so much potential and only half delivered.
I don't care who has what sexual preferences as long as they keep it off the screen.
Atoz
"I didn't remember that from all the way back in Amok time, "
Not "Amok Time." SNW'S "Spock Amok" from season one. The only dish Chapel had her fingers in in Amok Time was a bowl of Plomeek soup.
Lynos
Lol, Atoz, I had my Amoks confused.
StarMan
I'm just rubbernecking, but given how bad S4 sounds, it'd be thoroughly entertaining if Paramount quietly slipped into their next earnings call that both SFA S2 and SNW S5 were write offs.
episodenull
@JamesD
Don't forget the omnipresent "fun."
The defenses aren't entirely devoid of merit – the most substantive defense I've seen is that TOS, being originally pitched as "Wagon Train to the Stars," was designed for genre pastiche such as this, and SNW is the first post -TOS series to really take that ball and run with it.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but ignores two questions: if TOS was a much genre pastiche as SNW has become, and if SNW is doing "Wagon Train to the Stars" at all well. On both counts I have to say no.
One of SNW's big failings is a lack of guest cast, which forces the main cast to assume whatever tropey personality type is needed for the story. TOS kept consistent characterizations (more or less) and brought in guest stars to carry the genre of the day.
SNW ends up feeling more like a theater troupe than a cast of characters worth coming back to watch every week. I can only surmise why, but I was reading something today about how Hollywood has basically stopped hiring day players due to costs, resulting in a steep reduction in bit parts and guest stars; what stuck out to me the most was a comment from a working screenwriter about getting notes to limit a script to five or six speaking main characters only and cut everyone else. So there may be directions from the top to write things this way.
Makes the show feel very limited and cramped if so, though.
Daya
Celia Rose Gooding and Paul Wesley clearly took the extra effort to figure out how to embody Nichols and Shatner's mannerisms without aping them. Especially for this episode, where we see them almost in the TOS era.
I wish Ethan Peck had done the same so that we'd have finally seen a little bit of Nimoy shine through. Peck sounds too robotic/monotone to me, which is ok for young Spock. But Nimoy was calm, confident, naturally logical, not uptight. His logic was not angry. It was sometimes wry, even trolling, but always relaxed, not angsty. Peck has Nimoy's voice, but I hoped he'd have Nimoy's poise one day. Did anyone else feel the same?
Atoz
"the most substantive defense I've seen is that TOS, being originally pitched as "Wagon Train to the Stars," was designed for genre pastiche such as this, and SNW is the first post -TOS series to really take that ball and run with it."
I was just talking about TOS being pitched as "Wagon Train to the Stars" the other day. Now I have no problem believing that Gene may have used that phrase while pitching the show, but neither of the pilots nor the series itself bares any resemblance to Wagon Train, or any television western for that matter. I've watched thousands of episodes of tv westerns, movies, and radio programs, and I just don't get the comparison The only episode that feels remotely close to a western, imo, is Mudd's Women. You may have seen a plot like that one on Bonanza after it had jumped the shark. Yeah, Spector of the Gun has western historical figures and The Paradise Syndrome has Indians but they don't have the feel of westerns. Even if you count SotG that's only two episodes out of 80.
I can see TOS borrowing from space operas, Horatio Hornblower, and WW2 movies, but it bears no more resemblance to Wagon Train than Mission Impossible or Mannix did.
P.S. Wagon Train was never a favorite of mine, but my stepfather liked it. I remember that he particularly enjoyed an episode featuring Lou Costello in a dramatic role. WT has a regular cast, but it almost feels like an anthology show because each episode focuses on a new guest actor. There are a lot of familiar faces among those guest stars for anyone who has watched much 60s tv.
P.P.S. If anyone is interested in digging into some old westerns I recommend Gunsmoke (both radio and tv versions), The Rebel Johnny Yuma, the dramatic episodes from the short-lived Sam Peckinpah series The Westerner, and The Wild Wild West if you like the idea of a steampunk Sean Connery era Bond set in the old west. The WWW is formulaic to be sure, but fun. There's another good one called The Outlaws (1960) but it's extremely hard to find.
For western novels I'd recommend The Searchers by Alan LeMay, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, and Ramrod by Luke Short.
My favorite western movies are Lonesome Dove, Unforgiven (Eastwood version), Warlock (1959),....actually there's too many to list. Those would be three of my favorites though.
FlyByTom
I'll say it, I found it hard to force myself to watch this one, I felt so burned by the season overall. In the end, I felt it was OK, not really anything special to me. Sort of a portmanteau of Stein's Gate's plot and All Good Things. Not bad but I'm kinda sick of how often Time Travel is featured in Strange New Worlds to the point where main characters can sit down and talk about how it gives them a rumbly tummy.
MidshipmanNorris
To be honest, even as an anti-establishment person (or perhaps especially because of my status as such), I kind of relished that the future Spacefaring Military Force (whatever Roddenberry said in the 70s, that is what Starfleet is) was depicted as a lot more progressive, a lot more science-heavy, and a lot more exploratory and humanitarian than current militaries are being used for, but still, as it were, a Military Service with protocols and procedures and regulations.
I feel like that is all missing from SNW. They give a nod to it when it serves the plot, but it is no longer the plot. Space Exploration and Diplomacy and Combat and Science Puzzles that we might find out in the cosmos are being sidelined in favor of the flavor of the week, and endlessly referencing the already-very-referenced pile of episodes that have come before.
They are not letting anybody with any original ideas for what we might find out in space through the door. The writers seem to want to abandon the basic premise of the show.
So why don't they just do another show, with new characters? Why try to sucker us into watching, if they are not, in effect, doing a Star Trek Show?
Sung
I must admit, I'm kind of shocked at the positive response for this episode. Either it was objectively good or I'm just subjectively checked out at this point of the show. Or is it that because the bulk of the season was so poor that even a middling episode like this one qualifies as good?
Was there a single episode this season where there was zero talk of hooking up between characters? As soon as Uhura and Chapel were chatting and Chapel began to spout about Spock, a part of me died yet again. NO REAL FAN CARES ABOUT THE ROMANCES. NOT ONE.
Writers, do you know what romance really is in Trek? Please watch The City on the Edge of Forever, and this bit of dialogue between Joan Collins and Leonard Nimoy.
SPOCK: Interesting. Where would you estimate we belong, Miss Keeler?
EDITH: You? At his side, as if you've always been there and always will. And you? You belong in another place. I don't know where or how. I'll figure it out eventually.
SPOCK: I'll finish with the furnace.
EDITH: Captain. Even when he doesn't say it, he does.
"Captain. Even when he doesn't say it, he does."
This is the only romance that matters (a bromance, naturally, and that's the key -- naturally, not forced, 100% organic).
I realized now what has happened to SNW - it has been afflicted with the DISCO disease: the weeping Trek syndrome. I had such high hopes after seeing the first episode of this season, not realizing the dropoff would be Wile-E-Coyote precipitous.
episodenull
@Atoz
"Now I have no problem believing that Gene may have used that phrase while pitching the show, but neither of the pilots nor the series itself bares any resemblance to Wagon Train, or any television western for that matter."
You misundertand. The phrase was not about making Trek a literal space western, but about the format and production process: a stable of recurring characters wrapped around what was essentially an anthology series carried by the guest star of the week, where they could keep costs down by recycling standing sets. The comparison to Wagon Train was a shorthand for what we today would call a procedural, designed to be digestible to studio heads.
In that respect, SNW is doing the genre anthology element, but they're missing out on the guest star angle.
Of course, anthology went partially out of the window on TOS once Gene Coon started building out a semi-consistent internal mythology, but so it goes.
Not a Merry Man
I'd have to disagree. The premise of Trek is assuming an optimistic, far-flung future in which many of the problems plaguing humanity today have been resolved. Importantly, Trek doesn't TELL you how this happened anymore than it explains it's mythological technology. It plops you on this future, in the midst of a crew pushing the boundaries of the imagination. This is the potent combination of the western, exploratory, frontier peregrinations infused with the grandeur and exoticism of sci fi in the boundary-less void. It's a real wagon train alright, just hitching a different sort of ride for the audience. It's completely opposite of a procedural.
Mike A
Pulled this up. Makes sense to me What do you think?
“The Pitch and Structure"Wagon Train to the stars": He referenced the popular 1950s western TV show Wagon Train, where a traveling group moved through a new location each week, encountering fresh moral dilemmas, local characters, and conflicts.
Episodic formula: Instead of a dusty wagon trail heading west, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise traveled through deep space, stopping at a new "frontier" planet every week.”
Not a Merry Man
Yep. That was his pitch. Westerns were huge back then. It made sense, at least to NBC. Apparently, CBS liked Will Robinson better.
Mike A
I was more of Rawhide fan. Just loved that theme song. Who was that Rowdy Yates character?
Not a Merry Man
Don't know. But let me ask you this - have you ever asked any cattle whether they feel lucky?
Mike A
Never did. They always struck as too hungry to bother
Colin Daniel Lindsly
By the time Star Trek aired, American viewers had been exposed to two sci-fi anthology series - The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. The concept was proven. The major difference was that Star Trek had a recurring cast.
Personally, for myself, I would have liked it if they had shown James Kirk as the captain of a destroyer. This idea dates back to the Making of Star Trek. It makes sense, and it shows the wartime experience of those involved, for Kirk to start his captaincy on a smaller, less important ship before moving onto a more important ship. It has been forgotten that the Enterprise and her sister ships were thought as the aircraft carriers of Starfleet. The most important and valuable ships of the fleet, whose captains were selected from a small pool of the very best that Starfleet had to offer.
There were episodes in the Classic Trek that I found boring or difficult to watch. They were usually the romance of the week episodes. However, I never felt the urge to just watch the beginning, the ending, and get a sample of the in-between as I have been doing with the Kurtzman era Trek episodes. As the popular saying goes, The math ain't mathing.
Atoz is just alright
"Pulled this up. Makes sense to me What do you think?"
Well, when you phrase it like that it does sound similar. But I think, phrased just the right way, you could make Lost and Gilligan's Island sound similar, too. Not having a fixed location is something that they have in common, but neither did The Fugitive or The Incredible Hulk, right? You wouldn't pitch those shows as modern times Wagon Train.
Wagon Train wasn't about exploration, military conflict, military life, police enforcement, and there were no "high concept" ideas that I can recall. As I remember it (it's been a while) it was a western drama series focusing on a guest star's "story" each week and the regular cast's involvement could vary. Yes, the wagon train did travel, but so did Jim West on The Wild Wild West, Johnny Yuma on The Rebel, Grey Holdin on Riverboat or the aforementioned Richard Kimbal on The Fugitive.
It's just hard for me to reconcile pitching Wagon Train and then delivering the script for Where No Man Has Gone Before.
A more accurate pitch would be "You seen Forbidden Planet? Wanna see some more?"
"Who was that Rowdy Yates character?"
Clint Eastwood, of course. Coincidentally, I just saw Eric Fleming, the actor who played trail boss Gil Favor in an old Doris Day movie called The Glass Bottom Boat. Not a memorable movie, but a veritable who's who of 60s tv actors.
My Top 15 Favorite Rawhide Episodes:
(In no particular order)
Incident at Deadhorse (Season 6)
The Race (Season 7)
A Time for Waiting (Season 7)
Corporal Dasovik (Season 7)
Incident of the Portrait (Season 5)
Incident of the Challenge (Season 3)
Encounter at Boot Hill (Season 8)
Incident of the Red Wind (Season 6)
The Calf Women (Season 7)
Incident of the Travellin' Man (Season 6)
Backshooter (Season 7)
Retreat (Season 7)
Incident of the Dogfaces (Season 5)
Incident of El Toro (Season 6)
Incident of the Day of the Dead (Season 2)
Honorable Mention:
Incident of the Blue Fire (Season 2)
Incident at the Buffalo Smokehouse (Season 2)
Incident of the Haunted Hills (Season 2)
Incident of the Valley in Shadow (Season 2)
Incident at Two Graves (Season 6)
Incident of the Swindler (Season 6)
Incident of the Running Man (Season 3)
Vasquez Woman (Season 8)
Incident of the Wager on Payday (Season 3)
Incident of the Sharpshooter (Season 2)
P.S. All this talk about Wagon Train has made me want to revisit it. Maybe I'll find more to appreciate about it now that I'm older.
Atoz is just alright
Hey, Memory Alpha has an article about the original pitch if anyone is interested:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_is...
The text is under the Memorable Quotes subsection. Definitely worth reading as it foreshadows a lot of what we'll see over the years.
Jason R.
Maybe someone has already made this point but maybe the "Wagon Train to the Stars" concept was just a BS pitch to sell the show to network execs who were hung up on Westerns as the big ticket item of the day. Hey buy this show it's just like a western but Innnn SPAAACE
Zota
That's my impression, Jason. That link I posted says that the "Wagon Train to the Stars" line actually came from Samuel Peeples and Roddenberry adopted it. The original memo read:
"Star Trek is a "Wagon Train" concept – built around characters who travel to worlds "similar" to our own, and meet the action-adventure-drama which becomes our stories."
It's an interesting memo, if you have a minute or two to read it.
Not a Merry Man
No, it was a shrewd pitch because Roddenberry believed the show was a sci fi analogue to a certain type of western. So, he could sell it with a straight face. Anyone here ever pitch something they didn't believe in to an audience that can smell BS a mile away? Yeah, good luck with that.
Not a Merry Man
Atoz I agree with your point that the guest star of the week was a clear part of the sales pitch. That was a proven method to bump ratings. It was smart on Roddenberry's part. Imagine Roddenberry pitching this. Gents, he would say, imagine our traveling western companions thrust into the exotic unknown environs of space. The western ethos of pushing the frontier is omnipresent because EVERY stop for Trek will be some alien port of call, some anomaly, some awe inspiring intelligence or machine. The exoticism will vary in tone, from encounters with earnest peoples, to conflicts with an array of malevolent forces, to even ominous and strange encounters infused with tones similar to the Twilight Zone. This show will check a whole bunch of well proven viewership boxes. And it will be fun. As our Nation rockets to the moon so this frontier pushing, far future group of intrepid Trek souls will push our stories to new and exotic places. The ultimate frontier in space - a wagon train of American themes and television tropes to the stars. Now, fuck you pay me.
Jason R.
"Anyone here ever pitch something they didn't believe in to an audience that can smell BS a mile away? Yeah, good luck with that."
Lol ya I pretty much do it everyday in court. But I think "BS" was maybe too harsh - it's not that it was some total scam but just a clever angle that maybe even had some element of truth but wasn't really deep down the heart of the enterprise (pun intended). If network execs were gaga about Westerns then it's just good salesmanship to try to pitch it with a western angle. Just my guess. Either that or maybe the western thing really was something Roddenberry et al. had on mind but when they actually started working more on the series it just didn't turn out the way they thought?
Not a Merry Man
Hehe, another legal beagle. You're a pure litigator or a mix?
RuthieB
What I find difficult in rating episodes is that the first four episodes of the first season were so strong, everything else loses something in comparison.
I appreciate the insight @episodenull about the lack of guest cast creating a theatre troupe experience. That's such a great point and a connection I hadn't made. I have often felt like I am watching Anson Mount and Ethan Peck and Christina Chong enjoy playing different characters than watching Pike, Spock and La'an.
It is such a relief to be able to nitpick an episode of star trek that exists in the fictional reality instead of in a dream or entity-created false reality.
This said, the major challenge with this episode is that the premise is flawed. I agree with many others that the one year time difference just doesn't work. Celia Rose Gooding does a pretty good job of differentiating the two Uhuras, but only by regressing our current Uhura significantly. This story would have worked with Cadet Uhura of season 1. Our Lt. Uhura can bluff Andorian pirates, lie to Pike about probabilities of rescuing Ortegas, mislead Kor while being subjected to a mind sifter, but somehow she's apparently incapable of telling Pike she's cleared for duty?
SNW later seasons focus create contexts to explore and develop the characters rather than have characters explore novel or morally complex ideas. I don't personally like that creative choice, but I can enjoy it when done well. Given that the character journey is the point, I can forgive some nonsensical magic-science or awkward plot holes in the service of a good character moment. How did the Uhuras physically switch places? Who cares. But a fundamental flaw in the character arc itself is much harder for me to accept.
Unlike @artymiss and several others, I do think it is possible for someone to change dramatically in a year, but the story doesn't tell us why that would happen. For example, if someone say loses their entire family in a shuttle accident. Or leaves home for the first time. Or experiences their first romance and heartbreak. Or experiences a life-threatening event. Or kills someone. The thing is, our Uhura has already done all of these things. All of which have helped her to grow in significant and welcome ways over the course of the show. This episode seems to dismiss all of the character growth we got to enjoy in Children Of The Comet, Momento Mori, Subspace Rhapsody, The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, A Case Of Chiaroscuro, and Orders of Magnitude, among others.
There are other things that someone could go through that might change them in a year. For example becoming a parent, experiencing a spiritual or religious conversion, or learning that you're going to suffer a catastrophic accident and become unable to walk or speak. But there's nothing that we can point to that would create the contrast that this episode depends on. Instead we get a throwaway line about "you haven't been through everything I have." Like what?!?!?!?!?!
There were some highlights. Uhura's talk with Pike was a shining moment for both characters. The production quality and effects are really good across the series but they really stood out in this episode. Small details like M'Ress in the background and the callback to Chapel dating women I appreciate because they make me feel that I'm in a universe bigger than the little slice I see on screen. The space baby resolution was dumb (a breech birth? how do you tell a space baby butt from its head anyway?), but the set up of exploring theoretical phenomena and meeting new life forms is exactly what I want in Star Trek. I'm not sure how to rate episodes when I don't buy the premise but still enjoy some of the journey. At least a solid 2 stars, maybe more.
Jason R.
"Hehe, another legal beagle. You're a pure litigator or a mix?"
So pure I barely even knew non litigation law was a thing until I got into partnership with these guys who practice "law" without courtrooms, judges, or crushing the enemy and enjoying the lamentations of his women.. Who even knew such a thing existed?
Richard James
A lot of the good stuff has already been said by everyone else so I’m just going to chime in and say I really enjoyed the Animated Series references for the future Enterprise. That’s the way to do some fan service right there!
I also agree with Jefferys Tube that this was likely a “just in case” finale in the event this was cancelled. A wise decision in an season otherwise marked by poor ones.
Not a Merry Man
Jason, that sounds like a litigator! Rough life for those that don't love the battle and strategy. You civil or crim, fed or state (on balance)?
Sarjenka's Brother
It's no "Pen Pals," but pretty good outing by SNW S4 standards.
Kyle
@ Atoz: For a good western anthology show you should check out "Death Valley Days", sponsored by the Borax Co. who mined Death Valley in real life. A different story and actors each week.
Adrian
A solid outing and a good vehicle for Uhura. The scene between her and Pike was genuinely touching.
Wished we’d seen more of this quality of work this season, instead of the preponderance of gimmicks and pastiche tropes.
Also, what’s with the writers’ obsession with dopplegangers and doubles this season? It felt like it was all building to something, but it just turned out to be a lazy reliance on the same idea over and over, with no obvious gain.
NotaWitcher
I am half convinced they didn't realize Boyce and Piper were different characters.
Zota
"I am half convinced they didn't realize Boyce and Piper were different characters."
I think you may be on to something. The SNW characters are written so differently than their TOS counterparts at times that we'll never be able to know for certain though. Boyce, so far, doesn't feel like a character returning to the Enterprise or like the one who (seemingly) had a strong relationship with Pike. It's only one scene in The Cage, but the impression I got was that Pike and Boyce had known each other for a while.
Zota
@ Oh, yeah, I remember Death Valley Days. I haven't watched it since I was a kid. You could learn a lot of historical tidbits from that show. I distinctly remember the episode where the U.S. military tries to introduce camels into the southwest.
Mike A
Breaking down individual episodes. All the episodes in season 4 were flawed imo with no really great episodes. The lows were very deep in the deepest possible valley kind of way. Very cringe worthy. However, actually thought Season 4, overall, was still an improvement over the previous season. The overriding problem in both seasons 3 and 4 (I consider both seasons disappointing failures overall) is this lack of commitment to seriously writing actual Star Trek episodes in favor of lightweight comedy, genre homages, and gimmicks, Three episodes in Season 4 stood out to me Valles Marineris, Orders of Magnitude, and Tomorrow’s Enterprise.
Tomorrow’s Enterprise - good episode with my main complaint being the portrayal of one year as being somehow this lengthy period of time where older Uhura wants to council much younger Uhura. The crew in the older timeline. looks radically different. Ludicrous. Makes no sense to me especially when you consider the previous three to four year no one has changed that much in appearance when they were even younger. The space baby thing didn’t really do much for me
Valles Marineris- slow boring start, nice dinosaurs. What made this episode for me was Pikes interaction with the Martian Commander Cassell & his ultimate decision that has a twist
Orders of Magnitude- good to very good with much better potential (even best of the series type potential) with a tighter script
Off-Hour- ignore the 24 hour homage- it’s really a nice Star Trek disaster show. Enjoyed it.
There were a few of the gimmick shows that I somehow found entertaining or at least interesting.
The Griffin Incident- to me this was all about the psychological terror within. When seeing this, I was under the impression there would be character development in Season 4. This would be a defining moment on how Kirk would deal with his distance from his son. La’an on her fear of the increased violence & rage within, Spock on his battle with Human vs Vulcan identity. The fact Season 4 quickly forgot about this episode in favor of its gimmick of the week plan; lessened the episode
for me. The Griffin Incident & its psychological terror left no impression on Spock, La’an, or Kirk. The reason? Character development was simply abandoned. This has since become a borderline episode for me.
A Case of Chiaroscuro- a black & white world where suddenly everyone beams into a 1940’s Earth look a like with no explanation does absolutely nothing for me. It’s like they beamed down to a 1940’s film set. Right off the bat, this episode has two strikes going against it. Somehow & against all reason,perhaps even common sense, enjoyed Una, M'Benga,and Uhura stumbling into their undercover operation. Found it entertaining. Couple this with the moral ambiguity in questionable decisions shown to be made by Una, M’Benga, and Chapel made this a very surprising rewatch candidate.
“Human Best Friend” , “Level-Five Transporter Accident”, “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass”, “Once La'An a Time" the less said the better. There was about 5 minutes in Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass that I did find compelling when Pike encounters his daughter.
Conclusion: if you’re doing only ten episodes a season & 40% are absolute stinkers, you’ve got a major problem on your hands. You’ve got to have something to make up for it. Possibly a few great episodes. While I did find a few nice episodes, there wasn’t anything great this season. Far from it. Season 4 much like Season 3 that came before was ultimately disappointing.
A compelling return to form with a Season 1 & 2 type bounce back or better may have been the showrunners best argument for their proposed Star Trek: Season One series. They didn’t deliver. Instead they gave a good argument that maybe it’s time to move on.
The River Temarc
@JasonR: "Who even knew such a thing existed?"
Former corporate lawyers who are now bankers/asset managers/VCs.
Not a Merry Man
The River Temarc - and owners of firms that manage people like Jason. He practices the law. Some of us manage the business of the law.
GNDN
I think I know what it felt like to be a fan of "Star Trek" after hearing it got a third season and then on Sept 20, 1968 watching "Spock's Brain". This season of SNW worse than s3.
As for this episode, solid even if I raised an eyebrow a few times. This outing gave me a good feeling overall.
Jason R.
"The River Temarc - and owners of firms that manage people like Jason. He practices the law. Some of us manage the business of the law."
Haha believe me I wish I didn't have to do the business stuff sometimes.
Malk
Re Jammer’s last comment about not pulling a genre of the week for the final series, I do believe the producers have stated that the episodes will be more straight forward.
Quincy
It's official. This was literally the worst season on record of any Star Trek franchise by a wide margin. It's not even a close call.
They had the seed of a great episode here. Just the seed and they failed to turn it into even a sapling of a good one. This needed a science advisor and a rewrite and it could've been Interstellar for the small screen.
What rational reason did Uhura have to hide the truth from everybody? How does invoking fidelity to the timeline which has ALREADY been messed with make sense? How does Uhura have the expertise to come to any of the conclusions that she makes before she steps out on the hull?
Why leave Spock virtually out of the episode except for a few answers to a couple of questions? Why be so on the nose literal about a "space baby" in "breech position" especially when the baby is shaped like a f'king sphere?!? ("Pull harder to the left! No! Your other left!") Since this is the finale why not have Pike, Uhura, Spock, Chapel/M'Benga, Kirk, and Scotty all from the beginning actively involved in solving Scotty's death flag? Why focus on just Uhura who lacks at least some of the relevant skills necessary to solve the problem?
They actually had Uhura drift gently into a white hole. This was as bad as the strong force neutrinos with the ginormo-gantua-lossal glueballs, hanging lower than Satan's roof, that can stitch human flesh back together, while multitasking manufacturing starship fuel.
You cannot approach a white hole the same way you cannot escape a black hole. All roads inside a white hole lead elsewhere, just like all roads inside a black hole lead to the center. You cannot gently drift into one. That was so colossally stupid I had to stop myself from deleting the episode right then and there. This ridiculousness is similar to the problem with that episode of The Orville where they just dip into a black hole and hide out for awhile and then poke their heads out to see if the coast is clear.
What do writers gain by pretending that white holes are just black holes' race-swapped incestuous Lannister? What is lost by simply looking up the physics of white holes and actually including SOME of that in the story? Would it hurt the showrunners to just call Neil deGrasse Tyson or SOMEBODY! Would it chap their @$$ cheeks or something?!? Get yourself a whole tube of Chapstick and make the damned call!
Jason R.
"It's official. This was literally the worst season on record of any Star Trek franchise by a wide margin. It's not even a close call."
Picard Season 2 has entered the chat.
Mike A
Fortunately, SNW has something working for it (given the current state of the writers room & its misguided direction) that shows like Discovery & Picard did not have. SNW is episodic. Those other shows were serialized. Huge, Huge difference. Serialized drama is like reading a long novel. Done well it’s engrossing page turning. Incredible art. You have a beginning,a middle, but, at the end of the day, it’s building towards something. It’s building towards an end. In serialized drama or a long novel, the ending is all important. You have to deliver the ending. If you blow it, you run the risk of mass alienation, of people losing interest, becoming disillusioned, dissatisfied. They’ll turn on the whole product as they’ll perceive you failed to deliver on what was promised, failed to deliver the goods. A bad ending just makes people feel they just wasted their time.
Let me give an example. Game of Thrones was a cultural phenomenon. The books had intricate characters, world building, page turning plot twist, building towards something magical, something great, something fantastic. The showrunners adapted the books into a serialized show to TV & the world couldn’t get enough if it. Just one thing was missing. An end. The fantastic ending that was promised. The showrunners ran out of those finely detailed pages. The intricate characters, the world building, the plot twist. They were gone. Do I really need to go any further to emphasize the importance of an ending in serialized shows? As far as NuTrek attempt at serialization, well the results speak for themselves.
SNW is episodic. It has self contained stories. At the end of the day, it’s really more about a collection of episodes than some sort of beginning, middle, ending. Sure some feel the need to rewatch entire seasons of episodic TV to see how the characters grow from one season to the next.The reality is it’s not really necessary. You can pick and choose. It’s more about the individual story, the individual episode. For me, SNW has always been about the collection of individual episodes. A failed season is not as catastrophic as it would be for a serialized show where the rewatch potential would be greatly diminished if not totally non existent. Episodic TV is more like a collection of short stories as opposed to the one long novel. Sure the long novel is more rewarding (Breaking Bad, The Wire. The Sapranos, even some sections of DS9) but how often is it really done well? So yeah I’ve collected some episodes this year, Maybe not as manny as I would like. Sure it’s disappointing there weren’t any great episodes There were a few nice ones. The trash is not really that important in the long run. You simply just know you’ll never watch it again. It’s episodic. You can pick and choose.
Diamondo
I thought it was crap.
And I’ll tell you why. Uhura in this series is annoying. With all the others you could see they put experienced people on the bridge. You don’t have a cadet as a bridge officer.
Other than that this episode is some sort of AI written rehash of ‘tng - all good things’ only not as good. The scenes with scotty make me sick.
This series is movie quality with some great characters and acting. Make Sci-fi for gods sake. Star Trek themed Sci-fi.
The budget for shows goes on getting new subscribers as all tv series are now streaming. So they obviously aren’t gonna get new subscribers in the last seasons so they have cut it all and given us this crap.
It is crap and it’s not fair.
Why not stick an episode where data from tng comes in or something. Might as well as we’re doing crossovers and puppets and all that junk.
Submit a comment