Chronological rewatch from a historical perspective

That threw me for a spin as I didn't recognise half the episode titles and so I suddenly thought my brain had finally given up on me.

Felt quite relieved when I googled them and found that they were fan productions and so I wasn't actually going insane

 

Check them out some time, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Quality productions, fan or not, and fit seemlessly in a viewing order. Again, IMO, YMMV.

 

Main reason for not having seen many of the fan stuff is not knowing where to source it.

Would be up for giving it a try

 

Complete series of Star Trek Continues is on YouTube still.

 

Also, the regular denizens of this BBS's very own "Fan Productions" forum can help out with finding any other Trek fan films.

Kor

 

Again, in my old age I'm conflating episodes again. I need to watch The Tholian Web before In A Mirror Darkly, Not Mirror Mirror. The memory is the first thing to go.

Anyway, the first season of Discovery never really recovered from the overly long detour Into the Mirror Universe. The first nine episodes made for a pretty nice arc in and of themselves, but the digression Into the Mirror Universe didn't give them enough time to properly setup or land the ending with the two episodes that remained.

However, our first time viewer would get their first look* at the most beautiful ship in the entirety of the franchise. I'm of course talking about the Enterprise NCC-1701. No bloody A, B, C, D or E. And that alone makes it all worth it.

* At the exterior. We see interiors and the bridge in Q&A.

 

There is so much to love about Discovery season 2. The character work is just top-notch. The texture and depth added to the Sarek clan is just amazing. Here, we arguably see this family at its lowest ( I do say "arguably" here. This family has always been portrayed as deeply dysfunctional.) Literally everyone is pissed at everyone else. Despite this, you can still clearly see how much they love and depend upon each other. Amanda is a force of nature that I would never want to cross.

Discovery season 2 transformed Christopher Pike from a canonical curiosity to absolutely one of the best characters in the entire franchise. The moment where he accepted his fate for the greater good in Through the Valley of Shadows sends shivers down my spine every time I watch it. That scene would possibly give our theoretical first time watcher a sense of mystery, foreboding and foreshadowing about Pike's fate.

In fact, all of the major supporting characters got a bit of a spotlight... in the first half of the season. Tilly with her sentient mycillial hitchhiker, Stamets and his struggles with the newly resurrected Culber, and Saru realizing the truth about his people and liberating them from oppression. Even some of the the secondary supporting characters got some development. Owo was raised on a Luddite colony. Detmer is an ace pilot and gearhead who's been flying since her early teens. Airium got a wonderfully touching spotlight / send off. Admiral Cornwell was a great character and her sacrifice was genuinely moving and heroic. The ready room scene in An Obal for Charon is one of my favorite scenes of the season and it could have used more like it.

For better or worse, the second half of the season the focus switched more over to Michael and her relationships with Spock and her mother. There's still some really good stuff there, but I wish they would have continued developing the secondary cast a bit more.

There are a lot of great individual episodes. Brother, New Eden, An Obal For Charon, The Sound of Thunder, Project Daedalus, If Memory Serves and Through The Valley Of Shadows are all standouts. In fact, I would probably put If Memory Serves on an all-time top 20 list.

Where it tends to fall apart is in its attempt to be serialized. The Red Angel, Section 31, Control, Michael's mother, a threat to all sentient life in the universe... It was just too much. It really does fly off the rails in the two-part finale story-wise. I love the character moments. I loved the Discovery's crew choosing to join Michael on her journey to the Future. Spock and Michael's reconciliation and farewell. But the story just flies off the rails. They have to go to the future to keep Control from acquiring sentience, but Control is on the ship with them and will just be going to the future with them. I'm sure the people in the future will appreciate that. But wait! The Control threat is actually defeated before they jump to the future, but they jump to the future anyway! Bwuh?

The whole epilogue where are they essentially saying that "we must never speak of this ever again" was unsatisfying on many levels because I never actually saw any reason for Spock to have mentioned any of these events in the future anyway. Spock was never one to reveal personal information about his family to outsiders. Kirk didn't even know that Spock's father was a Vulcan Ambassador until he was standing right in front of him, he didn't mention he had a fiance until he had to go home for his wedding day, and he didn't mention he had a half-brother for another 25 years after that. Easy-peasy. Spore Drive? Deemed unfeasible due to necessary human genetic manipulation and classified. Why didn't Spock mention he had a sister? You didn't ask. Easy-peasy.

The epilogue does accomplish the purpose of providing a segue into Strange New Worlds. This is where the narrative shifts from Michael to Spock, who will be at the center of the next three television shows (counting SNW and TAS) and 6 movies.

There weren't really a lot of "firsts" for our theoretical first-time watcher in Discovery season 2. Section 31 was established in Enterprise. All of our main characters from the Enterprise were introduced in Short Treks. Even Kaminar, Siranna, Queen Po and the Xaheans (although I did watch this particular Short Trek during the season after Saints of Imperfection) were established in Short Treks.

If we were doing this a year from now, our first time viewer would be moving on to Strange New Worlds and the continuing adventures of Spock, Pike and Number One. There, they would also have the opportunity to meet, at the very least, Uhura, Christine Chapel and Doctor M'benga before seeing them on The Original Series. For now, our first time viewer would move on to TOS, and I believe that they would already have a very firm and solid understanding of who Spock is and how he does things and that sometimes what he doesn't say is as important as what he does say.

As for Michael, Discovery and friends... I'll be seeing you later. Much, much later...

 

I was going to take break before moving on to The Original Series, but if I'm being entirely honest, I've been really anxious to get to this point. As much as I enjoyed Enterprise and Discovery, these are the stories that I grew up with and fell in love with. This is home.

I watched Where No Man Has Gone Before and The Corbomite Maneuver in production order, just for the sake of character "first appearances", but we'll be moving forward in air date order.

Our first time viewer would be introduced James T Kirk, Scotty and Sulu in WNMHGB, and to Leonard McCoy, Nyota Uhura and Janice Rand in Corbomite, at least for now. The ever-present but as yet unnamed Lieutenant Leslie, portrayed by the recently passed away Eddie Paskey, is in both episodes as well.

Knowing in advance the nature of the relationship between Spock and Sarek, our first time viewer would forgive Spock for his comparing Balok to his father.

With the way the franchise has expanded from its beginnings here, it almost feels like there's a narrative gap at the beginning of TOS. Kirk and crew never got an Encounter at Farpoint or an Emissary to set the table. We just join them mid-mission. I have to wonder if Strange New Worlds will serve to fill that gap in such a way that, once the show has run its course, the story will segue straight from Strange New Worlds straight into TOS and it will feel narratively cohesive.

Next up, the Man Trap...

 

The age of high adventure has begun! As much as I genuinely enjoy Enterprise and Discovery, as much as I do all Star Trek, it's easy to see why it was The Original Series that made it all possible. The adventures are just good, rollicking fun. Sometimes goofy, sometimes dramatic, sometimes humorous, sometimes dark, but always fun. It's something that both Berma Trek and new Trek needs/needed more of. And we've never got another character dynamic as fun and crackling as the dynamic between Kirk, Spock and McCoy.

Chronologically speaking, we get what would be the return of Harry Mudd. Honestly, people thought he was too nasty on Discovery, but here is just one step removed from human trafficking and his scheme could definitely have been considered fraud if things that turned out just a little differently. He certainly had no concern for the lives of the Enterprise crew.

We also get what are, for now, the first chronological appearances of Christine Chapel, where she reveals that she has feelings for Spock and that she has been developing them for some time. We also learned that she's been engaged to a man who has been missing for at least 5 years. I imagine SNW will develop this, it really does seem to me to be the only reason to include the character. Assuming SNW starts in 2259, it will be 3 years before Chapel's fiance Roger Korby disappears, and eight years before Korby is confirmed dead, at which point Chapel has already confessed her feelings for Spock.

I also hope they look at Spock and Uhura in Strange New Worlds. We know the pairing happened in the alternate universe, and you do see some definite chemistry between the two of them in early episodes of TOS, particularly Charlie X. In fact, I think Leonard Nimoy and the Nichelle Nichols had more chemistry than Nimoy and Majel Barrett or Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana.

Knowing what happened between Spock and Michael as children, Kirk's use of the epitaph "half-breed" in What Little Girls Are Made Of comes off as particularly cruel. I do realize that Kirk had to clue Spock into the fact that the android was a phony, but ouch...

Seems to me that there was another moment that made me think of Spock on Discovery, but I can't seem to recall what it was. He brought up his mother several times, perhaps that was it. Oh well...

Pike's fate In The Menagerie now comes across as the fulfillment of established plot threads and foreshadowing and the conclusion of a character arc, rather than the one-off tragic tale it was originally meant to be. I imagine it will just become more poignant the more we invest in Pike in SNW.

 

Well, Balance of Terror certainly provides us with some problems, doesn't it? On the surface it's easy to rail against Enterprise and Discovery for not being consistent with Balance of Terror, but if we are being honest with ourselves, Balance of Terror isn't even consistent with the rest of the original series.

When else has the Enterprise required active phaser crews running a phaser room totally separate from the bridge? And since when do phasers look and sound like Photon Torpedoes while behaving like depth charges?

I once held every word of those original 79 episodes as sacrosanct, but now that we have a fictional storytelling universe with over 800 entries in it, one simply has to accept that not everything is going to fit in as easily as a couple of puzzle pieces. The story at hand must always come first.

And what was really the most important part of the story, the fact that neither Vulcans nor humans had historically seen a Romulan is left intact.

So, at the end of the day, I simply must accept that some of the dialogue coming from Spock and Kirk as apocryphal (Gene Roddenberry himself came to determine some parts of the original series as apocryphal in his later days). That was obviously not the way the earth-romulan wars were fought and and Starfleet has faced cloaked adversaries on two separate occasions before this.

The only way they were able to crack the Klingon cloak on Discovery was by utilizing the ship to perform 130 odd micro jumps in a short period of time. Obviously, the Romulans of Kirks era came up with a cloaking system that the Federation was unable to crack.

*heavy sigh*

I'm curious as to how some of the rest of you justify the discrepancies in your head. Do do the mental gymnastics that I just did or do you simply cry "foul"? Honestly, either option is equally as legitimate as the other.

 

Which is the attitude I'm taking.

 

Oh. One thing about Balance of Terror. When Spock surprised everyone at the briefing table by suggesting they attack first, my first thought was, "Ah, 'the Vulcan hello,'."

 

Bottom line on Starships Dedication plaques.

 

Well. You thought Balance of Terror caused problems? Trelane was said to be observing the Earth of 900 years ago, but he's aware of Napoleon. That would place Star Trek in the... 27th century?

And in Space Seed, it said that it took years to travel in between planets up until around the year... 2018. I remember some egos back in the 90s, but I don't remember genetically engineered supermen.

God, I love this shit.

So, this is the Khan that Arik Soong's augments spoke so highly of. He seems nice. Ceti Alpha 5 seems like a wonderful place. I hope he'll be happy there.

 

So, in This Side of Paradise, which is set in 2267, it's established that Spock and Leila Kalomi had met on Earth 6 years earlier. The association with such that Leila developed feelings for Spock and she affected him enough that, once exposed to the spores, he reciprocated the feelings. I expect to see the story their past told in the third season of Strange New Worlds.

 

What? War with the Klingons? Again?

Errand of Mercy has the "return" of the Klingons and the Organians. I never cared for the appearance of the Organians in Observer Effect as it just didn't seem to be compatible with the species we meet here. I still don't think so. The Organians in Errand of Mercy just want to be left alone and contemplate the universe and find the presence of corporeal beings uncomfortable. I just don't see them going out and possessing corporeal beings and conducting experiments or making observations or whatever the hell they were doing on Enterprise. Oh well. It would seem that not all Organians are alike.

As for the Klingons, this is the first time we meet Kor, but we have already met several members of the House of Kor, including Kol and Kol-Sha. On an in-universe level, I wonder how much of the story of what went down the last time Kol-Sha confronted L'Rell that Kor is aware of. I would love to see Kor appear on Strange New Worlds to see this addressed, but he and Spock would have to be kept apart as Kor did not recognize him here. With the Klingons and the Federation at war, one could assume that L'Rell is no longer in power.

And, of course, the Klingons as seen here are all obviously recent recipients of the augment virus vaccine, so that's still obviously a problem in the Empire and there has been a recent outbreak. It does make sense that they would separate vaccinated and unvaccinated, which could explain why we only see recently vaccinated Klingons in the original series.

 

Maybe they were another faction of Organians, or something. Or maybe the writers just did a TOS name drop without actually trying to be consistent.

Kor