It sort of seems to do it again and again and again, though, without requiring the replicator machine. Sort of like the difference between an elevator and a helicopter, I guess.
It's worth pointing out that we STILL haven' seen or identified the Chief Engineer or CMO after two seasons of knowing they exist and are just obliquely referred to. This reset shows that they've had significant casualties since Airiam's funeral, with some <90 people left out of a pre-Burnham crew count of some 136.
Or then not everybody volunteered.
The CMO and CEO can easily be among the casualties at this point, letting people like Stamets, Reno, Culber and Pollard do their jobs with some recognition.
The show now has something like six engineer characters with speaking parts: Stamets, Reno, Nilsson, Nhan, Tilly and Burnham. Many of these are high-ranking. Some wear Sciences colors, but that never stopped them from being engineers foremost. And of course the Emperor is something of an engineer, too, and is rather rank-fluid (what happened to her captaincy anyway?).
And the man who's supposed to make sense of this still calls himself "Acting" Captain...
- Control surfaces which are dynamically 3D, meaning they form themselves to the user's hands. Arguably this allows for a more tactile interface where the user's more nuanced inputs can be read physically or even biometrically.
...But then wearable tech actually makes use of projected interfaces one manipulates with conventional keypresses (even if at empty air) by naked fingers. Go figure.
- Some weapons can similarly be called up as needed, though they would still need to initialize before being ready to fire. I guess it frees up space on your utility belt.
And makes one wonder why utility belts are allowed in areas where weapons are not. Tracking a personal transporter seems easy. Blocking one is not, and yet the Mercantile can function, after a fashion. What's to stop folks from transporter-raiding the dilithium stands, whose forcefields can be brought down with apparent ease?
- One notable thing that HASN'T changed is the definition of a sector. In TNG "The Wounded", it's mathematically implied that a sector is a region of space some twenty light-years across. This is later corroborated in assorted publications of the era. Here, Sahil's scanners have a range of 600 light years, and was unable to "scan beyond 30 sectors". And these are SHORT range sensors? Or are we implying that the starbase (sic) would be networking with other installations?
Burnham's reaction is also surprising, given that she apparently used to live in a Federation that did
not extend 600 lightyears in every direction (judging by the onscreen maps of her environs, even if we discount evidence from elsewhere in the franchise).
Scanning probably isn't the actual issue, and even those two mystery ships Sahil sorta-tracks are located and sorta-identified by their active emissions, possibly including their transponders. If a Starfleet ship decided to fly quiet, she could be a couple of lightyears from Sahil and remain unnoticed.
- Personal, wearable transporters, with a re-use recharge cycle of thirty seconds.
...Which they screw up in the one scene where it counts. The first two beamings involve lots of cuts, and the first one allows for the 30s recharge while the second one is much shorter onscreen but could nevertheless involve 30s offscreen. But the third one, where Booker actually brings this up, drags on for almost a minute. It's not the recharge, it's the attempt to find a lake in which to lose the bloodhounds. So why does Book flat out lie to Burnham there, and risk her noticing that the 30s are already up? (Because there's no risk of her noticing anything at all in that state?)
- Burnham's serial number ends in "SHN". I'm guessing this is a nod to her first apparent Starfleet assignment on the Shenzhou; the shuttle a younger lieutenant Georgiou had a similar truncation of the ship's name, although that was apparently an error as she was serving on the Archimedes at the time.
...They changed it for the second time the "footage" was shown, though.
There's fairly little rhyme or reason to serial numbers overall, but if one discards TAS and ST4:TVH as outliers, the format seems to be lettersnumbers-numbersletters, and SNH nicely goes with the ship the pertinent folks served on while Tilly's CDT goes with rank - and may be "optional", since TNG era numbers generally omit the final letters. That is, the first three parts are fixed throughout a career, but the final letters denote temporary status that the user may or may not wish to bring up.
Which of course works very poorly here, since Burnham is married to the
Discovery now and hardly gives a thought to the
Shenzhou.
- There's no real clue of where in space Hima is, but it's probably outside of the familiar core Federation worlds of the 23rd century. That said, the key species we see here are all familiar, so being in the alpha quadrant is probably a given. There is a stable wormhole some hundred light years away; perhaps they are referring to Bajor, but who knows what else could have been discovered or created and stabilized since then.
Also, Booker is chronically short on interstellar gasoline, despite the heist, but manages to take Burnham to a supposedly central'ish Federation relay station nevertheless. Or is it really out on the fringe and for that reason can only spot two Starfleet ships on a good day? I suppose we'll learn in the third ep when we see Earth again.
- OTOH, the worms are supposed to have at one point been "everywhere". Does this imply that they emerged as a species after the Discovery gang left, and have since become endangered?
Burnham doesn't appear to be familiar with them, at any rate. Perhaps they're veritable rabbits, and somebody from far away released them to endanger ecosystems everywhere near Earth, too? But we can believe in this being the far frontier for all the familiar humanoids, too. Although in that case Booker probably isn't even remotely human, since his roots appear to be in an environment that was always full of the worms. (But he's also a man without a sense of history, knowing little about the Burn.)
- Book's ship's artificial gravity is still working. However the front window must also be acting as a viewscreen, as it shows the horizon beyond as lining up properly with the interior orientation. [My guess is that whoever storyboarded the exterior of the crashed ship shots didn't tell the VFX guys doing the greenscreen of the viewscreen]
This happens quite a lot in the first two eps. Supposedly an artifact of there being so much location shooting, which must be unfamiliar to the VFX team.
- Benamite (crystals, from VOY "Timeless") is commonly-enough known as a catalyst for slipstream travel, but "no one" has it. Perhaps the Burn extended beyond just dilithium crystals? In Voyager they had just one shot to use it, as it would take years to synthesize more. Either way, Book implies that his ship has the capacity but not the fuel, so zipping around via slipstream may have been commonplace pre-Burn.
Or then the ship isn't really multifuel, and going slipstream would involve Book being both rich enough to buy the benamite and rich enough to buy the engine.
- About the Gorn: They were first contacted in TOS "Arena", which puts the skeleton seen in Discovery S1 a little out of place; however it was not referred to directly by name in that instance so it gets a pass. Here however Burnham seems to know about them, and is surprised that they can destroy two LY worth of subspace, presumably during the rush to develop practical non-dilithium methods of FTL travel.
Or then she's just generally surprised, and lets the odd name pass.
Kirk in "Arena" says "I face the creature the Metrons called a Gorn", suggesting that not just the face is new (as with the Ferengi or the Romulans) but the name is as well. It's difficult to see a way around this.
- Book compares Burnham's arrival to the Gorn's dirty deed. Are we saying that stuff like that were a lesson to the people around here to stop trying and get used to a galaxy with such restricted travel?
Supposedly so.
- The "blue grenade" weapons the bad guys use is cool and yet impractical. It requires you to be within line of sight and also for you to expose your full body to whatever you want to zap. I'm not REALLY sure why they were using it other than to buy time to escape, but I'm not sure why they'd have these things around in the first place.
Might be it's not a weapon at all, but more like a futuro-broom for the janitor Book mauled. But it's an odd balance: Book and the doped Burnham are quite happy murdering people left and right, so stun in itself should not occur to them as a preferred option. Can't their tear-apart rays do area effects and blow the Mercantile sky high? (OTOH, they can't even do basic 24th century auto-aiming.)
- However, there's no real tuning of hailing frequencies or anything like that. How would the gadget know to contact her ship?
True Believers always use the Starfleet frequency?
- Somehow the trance worm knows how to crunch and munch the bad guys, where we see them dismembered and everything. And yet, Molly only "Boimlers" Burnham before Book starts uttering his magic words. Was she really lucky, or was Molly more perceptive somehow? How intelligent are these creatures?
Possibly very, and the hypnosis might have been two-way telepathic, Molly quickly finding out that Burnham is a good guy and therefore possibly an even greater threat to the Molly/Book tryst than the villains - but also figuring out the tryst would be endangered by a flat-out vivisecting.
- Presumably "Sanctuary Four" has defenses to keep poachers from beaming the population away. It would arguably be more advanced tech than what we've seen so far this season.
So the Orion-Andorian Yakuza at Requiem is just a bunch of lowlives with little in the way of actual resources? It's weird Booker doesn't dance all around these guys with his superior tech.
- Sahil's status is not clear. One minute he's welcoming B&B to Starfleet, then he identifies himself as the Federation liaison. Provisional officer or no, he doesn't seem to be wearing a Starfleet uniform. We know Starfleeters are often assigned to non-Starfleet embassies and offices, but does Sahil's station indicate that Starfleet and the Federation's offices have mingled somewhat more than in more familiar eras?
I trust Sahil would be the Starfleet liaison to the Federation, were his status official... Although it's weird that this sort of a professional would be the last man standing on a relay station.
Of course, we never learn that he would be. Possibly the station still has a few hundred people aboard, each refusing to venture to communal spaces because they have found the hard way that this is the only way to cut down on homicide.
Timo Saloniemi
