And irritating.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x04 - "Memento Mori"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
This weeks episode started up with yet another unnecessary ‘previously on Star Trek’. Previous episodes have absolutely nothing to do with this weeks episode, it was almost an overly gratuitous ‘last time’ as if the whole point was to stop these episodes from being able to be aired independently and out of order in syndication as stand alone episodes. Imagine if TNG episodes had a last time on Star Trek ‘sting’ in between each episode? It would have totally confused a casual viewer who only wanted to dip in and out of the series casually.
In the actual opening sequence of the episode, it was nice to hear a log entry being recorded over a long visual effect ‘beauty shot’ of the Enterprise, there was no rush or urgency for a change, it was quite solemn, and it set the proceeding scene perfectly. The crew of the Enterprise were observing a memorial day very similar to our Remembrance Sunday/Armistice/Poppy day, this memorial could actually be a historical continuation of this day which had been expanded from it’s earth origins in to a Federation wise annual event, an event honouring those who had been lost during their service to Starfleet and the Federation in both exploration and battle. Exploration seems to have had just as much of a heavy toll as battle in the Star Trek world, they both seem to go hand in hand, but Pike’s crew all seem to think that it is all worth the sacrifice of others before them, and they also seem to realise the potential that they could all end up sharing the same fate as those before them during their mission to seek out strange new worlds and expand the Federation. It is curious to note that Una has no memorial pin? Is that because pins are only given to crew members who have served on ships that have been lost? Maybe Una has never served on any other ship but Enterprise and has never suffered a loss like this as of yet? I will need to to clarify this point to myself on a rewatch.
Hemmer and Uhura have a B story together in this episode which leads to a lot of character development for the pair. The duo start off working together in Engineering before disaster strikes (more about that later!). Uhura is a bit self conscious again as she has been in previous episodes, it does not help that Hemmer is making it known to her that he is hard to impress... but Uhura definitely believes that she is up to the challenge and steps up to impress Hemmer regardless. These two characters are starting to ‘ship’ together really well. Hemmer is developed more like a ‘typical’ Aenar this episode too, more true to how his species were depicted in Enterprise. I can imagine him being an ‘off world’ Aenar this time around rather than a grumpy Andorian.
The plot moves on as the USS Enterprise responds to a distress signal from a colony world, I love this kind of old fashioned and traditional Star Trek story telling with the ‘never get old no matter how many times they are repeated’ Star Trek tropes! We have already had a comet threatening a world, and now a colony distress signal! What’s next? A super human with a god complex and accompanying super powers? Space Nazi’s? I can’t wait to see the episode where the crew are delivering medical supplies to a plague ravished world!
As our heroes explore the devastated colony, we get vibes from the Alien movie franchise, almost like the production staff are trying to replicate the suspense that was given during the film ‘Aliens’ in particular. This episode even had an abandoned dog barking at the away team to make them jump, a disheveled little girl also came along just like Newt did to tell of her horror encounter with the Gorn… but they called her Fig instead of Newt. Does all of this mean that La’an is the new Ripley? La’an is starting to turn out as my surprise favourite character so far this season so she can be a Ripley if she wants, she can’t be any worse than Janeway was as Ripley in Macrocosm?
The next thing that started to come to mind after all of these sci-fi stereotypes had played out was the soundtrack… wow! We have an amazing musical score so far in this episode! It is very TOS like and even has a few musical patterns and riffs which are familiar to those who enjoy traditional TOS scores. This all leads up very well to the opening credits at long last, yes, this is all one big long teaser so far… the Gorn begin their attack!!!!
La’an uses her past experience with the Gorn to advise Pike that they should try to run from the them, she believes that the Enterprise has been led in to a trap, that the colonists are all dead and are actually not real… that they are holograms which the Gorn have used to lure more prey to their hunt. I should have figured this out earlier, because all of a sudden La’an was right. The colonists were actually long dead, and a trap had indeed been set for the Enterprise crew.
Pike and the Enterprise do something REALLY cool now. I have not seen this manoeuvre in Star Trek since I played the old computer game Star Trek: Klingon Academy; Pike takes the Enterpise in to a brown dwarf star, hoping that his ships shields will outlast the shields of the Gorn as he takes his ship deeper and deeper in to the sun, hoping that the Gorn shields will buckle under the pressure and heat before the Enterprises do. This is a similar strategy as also used by Captain Kirk in the Mutara Nebula in TWOK, Picard in the ‘Mutara like’ nebula in BOBW used to hide from the Borg, and also used by Archer whilst entering the Delphic Expanse when escaping the Duras Klingons in the episode that I can’t remember the acronym of… the Gorn ship even implodes eventually due to the resulting blast and pressure - just like in the Klingon Academy game! Oh I sooooo want to play that game again now! I used to love adjusting my shield power and hull strength etc to do this EXACT same thing!
The B story plot deepens as a result of this attack, Hemmer and Uhura find themselves trapped in engineering together with the threat of what could be an ‘atomic blast’ due to a cascade reaction in what I assume must be the warp core? Again, I would have to rewatch to confirm the source of this atomic threat.
We now find out that that the giant double decker sickbay is actually useless in a medical emergency such as the one resulting from this Gorn attack. Enterprise has little to no medical supplies available and very limited triage facilities, no back up or independent power supplies to support the onboard equipment etc. M’Benga and Chapel begin to resort to ‘archaeological’ or herbal/Ayurvedic/old fashioned medicine instead to treat the many injured crew.
Back to La’an, she is quite pessimistic about other people and species that she encounters as she has had nothing but bad experiences with the world around her so far, first with being constantly bullied as she was growing up (see last weeks episode) and now through life experiences with species such as the Gorn. La’an is very blunt, too blunt to the point of being bad for the morale of people around her, even Pike pulls her up for this and says that it needs to stop. La’an believes that if anyone emphasise with an enemy then the enemy will take advantage of this and use it as an advantage against the weakness of empathy… this is kind of like the thinking that her distant relative had don’t you think? Maybe this is why Khan did not have empathy in Space Seed and TWOK as he was instinctively thinking in the same way? A genetically imprinted instinct? It is also said by La’an that the reason why no one has ever seen a Gorn is because they leave no survivors to tell the tale… no witness’s. But I have another theory.
Do the Gorn actually exist at all? Are the Gorn an illusion? As much of an illusion as the holograms are which lured the Enterprise to near destruction in the first place? Are the Gorn almost a mythical race in the Star Trek world? People have fought them, but other than Kirk have never actually seen them physically as they only fought a representation of the Gorn via their ships…maybe the Gorn are a defensive construct of a species who want to be left alone.
There is a species called the Metron’s, they were in the last episode that the Gorn appeared in which actually made sense, many decades ago. In this episode the Metron’s pitted the the USS Enterprise and the Gorn against each other. Captain Kirk even wrestled a Gorn in close combat on a planet’s surface, the Gorn ripped Kirk’s shirt exposing his bloodied chest to the elements of Cestus III. But what if the Gorn are actually an illusion too, just like the colonists were? Maybe they are a defense mechanism generated by the Metron’s in order to protect their territory from other species encroaching on their domain? Star Trek: Enterprise kind of ruined this idea though in it’s episodes “Through a Mirror, Darkly I and II”,so I accept that I am totally wrong here because of canon, but it would be a cool concept. The Gorn could almost have been a ‘boogeyman’ used to scare people by the Metron’s, like we use demons and ghosts to scare children. These Boogeymen just happen to be deadly though.
Funnily enough, Hemmer’s fingers stopped working in this episode… last night I did a back flip In gymnastics and accidentally dislocated a finger on my right hand, so I know how he feels and can emphasise with the character! My finger is in a splint and I have to type my opinions of this episode tonight with my thumb!
I can’t even do the Vulcan salute at the moment as you can see!
We have a double non Trek movie cameo now.. a pho-TRON-torpedo! Instead of being fired as per usual, the Enterprise drops a torpedo on to the Gorn ship like a dambuster! And Oh my word that Gorn mother ship looks beautiful, kind of like a more organic Breen ship. It still could be a powerful Metron illusion though.
We don’t get to spend too much time with M’Benga this week, though he does share quite a few scenes with Chapel and Una. Chapel is a bit sharp and overly blunt with her delivery of information, lacking in a bed side manner so to speak, but in an ‘emo’ kind of way which the youth will find cool. Una offers to help a fellow crew member with a blood transfusion (I think?) even though she was severely injured herself, M’Benga looked at her with what could be the genesis of genuine love as he recognised her potential sacrifice for others . I think Una’s genetically engineered blood has curative effects on people, a bit like Khan and Kirk’s in that JJ Abrahams ITD movie. I could be wrong, just guessing as will need to watch tonight’s episode again.
Spock also makes a major mistake which is quite unforgivable. Spock states that the Enterprise is being sucked in to a black hole… this is incorrect terminology. black holes ‘pull’ objects towards them, suction is caused by ‘sucking’ things in to a vacuum - a black hole has mass and therefore gravity, meaning that the Enterprise is DEFINITELY being pulled towards it. This mistake is far worse than the ion storm conceptualisation issues that we had last week.
We next get to see Spock and La’an take a road trip… ON THE GALILEO!!!! This must be a joke or something which confirms that the writers were having a laugh when they said that black holes sucked! It is however great to see a Galileo back on screen after all of these years. I have a model of the original Galileo on my windowsill. Spock and La’an next decide to take a mind meld to find out what repressed knowledge she might have about the Gorn in order to help defeat them… she never see’s the Gorn in her mind, so this again could confirm that the Gorn are nothing but a sophisticated and deadly defense mechanism of the Metron’s. La’an did discover that the Gorn communicate via a Morse code like language, using a combination of audio clicks and flashing lights, her brother had deciphered their language and given her a notebook - I hope that she still has this and passes it on to linguistic expert Uhura! This could be a way of communicating with the Metron’s if not the Gorn!!!! On the flip side, La’an also found out about Spock’s secret sister, Michael Burnham. Spock stops the meld before La’an finds out the rest of the top secret information about Discovery and gets himself hunted down by Section 31. The Gorn remind me a lot of species 8472 in this encounter, even their catch phrase of ‘survival of the fittest’ kind of parallels ‘the weak will perish’ . I hope that La’an didn’t catch Pa’nar off Spock though during their shared experience…
I give Star Trek: Strange New World’s episode 4, Memento Mori 9/10!!!
I need to rewatch this though, it was a lot to take in so I might end up editing and amending this first impression tomorrow or soon after!
In the actual opening sequence of the episode, it was nice to hear a log entry being recorded over a long visual effect ‘beauty shot’ of the Enterprise, there was no rush or urgency for a change, it was quite solemn, and it set the proceeding scene perfectly. The crew of the Enterprise were observing a memorial day very similar to our Remembrance Sunday/Armistice/Poppy day, this memorial could actually be a historical continuation of this day which had been expanded from it’s earth origins in to a Federation wise annual event, an event honouring those who had been lost during their service to Starfleet and the Federation in both exploration and battle. Exploration seems to have had just as much of a heavy toll as battle in the Star Trek world, they both seem to go hand in hand, but Pike’s crew all seem to think that it is all worth the sacrifice of others before them, and they also seem to realise the potential that they could all end up sharing the same fate as those before them during their mission to seek out strange new worlds and expand the Federation. It is curious to note that Una has no memorial pin? Is that because pins are only given to crew members who have served on ships that have been lost? Maybe Una has never served on any other ship but Enterprise and has never suffered a loss like this as of yet? I will need to to clarify this point to myself on a rewatch.
Hemmer and Uhura have a B story together in this episode which leads to a lot of character development for the pair. The duo start off working together in Engineering before disaster strikes (more about that later!). Uhura is a bit self conscious again as she has been in previous episodes, it does not help that Hemmer is making it known to her that he is hard to impress... but Uhura definitely believes that she is up to the challenge and steps up to impress Hemmer regardless. These two characters are starting to ‘ship’ together really well. Hemmer is developed more like a ‘typical’ Aenar this episode too, more true to how his species were depicted in Enterprise. I can imagine him being an ‘off world’ Aenar this time around rather than a grumpy Andorian.
The plot moves on as the USS Enterprise responds to a distress signal from a colony world, I love this kind of old fashioned and traditional Star Trek story telling with the ‘never get old no matter how many times they are repeated’ Star Trek tropes! We have already had a comet threatening a world, and now a colony distress signal! What’s next? A super human with a god complex and accompanying super powers? Space Nazi’s? I can’t wait to see the episode where the crew are delivering medical supplies to a plague ravished world!
As our heroes explore the devastated colony, we get vibes from the Alien movie franchise, almost like the production staff are trying to replicate the suspense that was given during the film ‘Aliens’ in particular. This episode even had an abandoned dog barking at the away team to make them jump, a disheveled little girl also came along just like Newt did to tell of her horror encounter with the Gorn… but they called her Fig instead of Newt. Does all of this mean that La’an is the new Ripley? La’an is starting to turn out as my surprise favourite character so far this season so she can be a Ripley if she wants, she can’t be any worse than Janeway was as Ripley in Macrocosm?
The next thing that started to come to mind after all of these sci-fi stereotypes had played out was the soundtrack… wow! We have an amazing musical score so far in this episode! It is very TOS like and even has a few musical patterns and riffs which are familiar to those who enjoy traditional TOS scores. This all leads up very well to the opening credits at long last, yes, this is all one big long teaser so far… the Gorn begin their attack!!!!
La’an uses her past experience with the Gorn to advise Pike that they should try to run from the them, she believes that the Enterprise has been led in to a trap, that the colonists are all dead and are actually not real… that they are holograms which the Gorn have used to lure more prey to their hunt. I should have figured this out earlier, because all of a sudden La’an was right. The colonists were actually long dead, and a trap had indeed been set for the Enterprise crew.
Pike and the Enterprise do something REALLY cool now. I have not seen this manoeuvre in Star Trek since I played the old computer game Star Trek: Klingon Academy; Pike takes the Enterpise in to a brown dwarf star, hoping that his ships shields will outlast the shields of the Gorn as he takes his ship deeper and deeper in to the sun, hoping that the Gorn shields will buckle under the pressure and heat before the Enterprises do. This is a similar strategy as also used by Captain Kirk in the Mutara Nebula in TWOK, Picard in the ‘Mutara like’ nebula in BOBW used to hide from the Borg, and also used by Archer whilst entering the Delphic Expanse when escaping the Duras Klingons in the episode that I can’t remember the acronym of… the Gorn ship even implodes eventually due to the resulting blast and pressure - just like in the Klingon Academy game! Oh I sooooo want to play that game again now! I used to love adjusting my shield power and hull strength etc to do this EXACT same thing!
The B story plot deepens as a result of this attack, Hemmer and Uhura find themselves trapped in engineering together with the threat of what could be an ‘atomic blast’ due to a cascade reaction in what I assume must be the warp core? Again, I would have to rewatch to confirm the source of this atomic threat.
We now find out that that the giant double decker sickbay is actually useless in a medical emergency such as the one resulting from this Gorn attack. Enterprise has little to no medical supplies available and very limited triage facilities, no back up or independent power supplies to support the onboard equipment etc. M’Benga and Chapel begin to resort to ‘archaeological’ or herbal/Ayurvedic/old fashioned medicine instead to treat the many injured crew.
Back to La’an, she is quite pessimistic about other people and species that she encounters as she has had nothing but bad experiences with the world around her so far, first with being constantly bullied as she was growing up (see last weeks episode) and now through life experiences with species such as the Gorn. La’an is very blunt, too blunt to the point of being bad for the morale of people around her, even Pike pulls her up for this and says that it needs to stop. La’an believes that if anyone emphasise with an enemy then the enemy will take advantage of this and use it as an advantage against the weakness of empathy… this is kind of like the thinking that her distant relative had don’t you think? Maybe this is why Khan did not have empathy in Space Seed and TWOK as he was instinctively thinking in the same way? A genetically imprinted instinct? It is also said by La’an that the reason why no one has ever seen a Gorn is because they leave no survivors to tell the tale… no witness’s. But I have another theory.
Do the Gorn actually exist at all? Are the Gorn an illusion? As much of an illusion as the holograms are which lured the Enterprise to near destruction in the first place? Are the Gorn almost a mythical race in the Star Trek world? People have fought them, but other than Kirk have never actually seen them physically as they only fought a representation of the Gorn via their ships…maybe the Gorn are a defensive construct of a species who want to be left alone.
There is a species called the Metron’s, they were in the last episode that the Gorn appeared in which actually made sense, many decades ago. In this episode the Metron’s pitted the the USS Enterprise and the Gorn against each other. Captain Kirk even wrestled a Gorn in close combat on a planet’s surface, the Gorn ripped Kirk’s shirt exposing his bloodied chest to the elements of Cestus III. But what if the Gorn are actually an illusion too, just like the colonists were? Maybe they are a defense mechanism generated by the Metron’s in order to protect their territory from other species encroaching on their domain? Star Trek: Enterprise kind of ruined this idea though in it’s episodes “Through a Mirror, Darkly I and II”,so I accept that I am totally wrong here because of canon, but it would be a cool concept. The Gorn could almost have been a ‘boogeyman’ used to scare people by the Metron’s, like we use demons and ghosts to scare children. These Boogeymen just happen to be deadly though.
Funnily enough, Hemmer’s fingers stopped working in this episode… last night I did a back flip In gymnastics and accidentally dislocated a finger on my right hand, so I know how he feels and can emphasise with the character! My finger is in a splint and I have to type my opinions of this episode tonight with my thumb!
I can’t even do the Vulcan salute at the moment as you can see!
We have a double non Trek movie cameo now.. a pho-TRON-torpedo! Instead of being fired as per usual, the Enterprise drops a torpedo on to the Gorn ship like a dambuster! And Oh my word that Gorn mother ship looks beautiful, kind of like a more organic Breen ship. It still could be a powerful Metron illusion though.
We don’t get to spend too much time with M’Benga this week, though he does share quite a few scenes with Chapel and Una. Chapel is a bit sharp and overly blunt with her delivery of information, lacking in a bed side manner so to speak, but in an ‘emo’ kind of way which the youth will find cool. Una offers to help a fellow crew member with a blood transfusion (I think?) even though she was severely injured herself, M’Benga looked at her with what could be the genesis of genuine love as he recognised her potential sacrifice for others . I think Una’s genetically engineered blood has curative effects on people, a bit like Khan and Kirk’s in that JJ Abrahams ITD movie. I could be wrong, just guessing as will need to watch tonight’s episode again.
Spock also makes a major mistake which is quite unforgivable. Spock states that the Enterprise is being sucked in to a black hole… this is incorrect terminology. black holes ‘pull’ objects towards them, suction is caused by ‘sucking’ things in to a vacuum - a black hole has mass and therefore gravity, meaning that the Enterprise is DEFINITELY being pulled towards it. This mistake is far worse than the ion storm conceptualisation issues that we had last week.
We next get to see Spock and La’an take a road trip… ON THE GALILEO!!!! This must be a joke or something which confirms that the writers were having a laugh when they said that black holes sucked! It is however great to see a Galileo back on screen after all of these years. I have a model of the original Galileo on my windowsill. Spock and La’an next decide to take a mind meld to find out what repressed knowledge she might have about the Gorn in order to help defeat them… she never see’s the Gorn in her mind, so this again could confirm that the Gorn are nothing but a sophisticated and deadly defense mechanism of the Metron’s. La’an did discover that the Gorn communicate via a Morse code like language, using a combination of audio clicks and flashing lights, her brother had deciphered their language and given her a notebook - I hope that she still has this and passes it on to linguistic expert Uhura! This could be a way of communicating with the Metron’s if not the Gorn!!!! On the flip side, La’an also found out about Spock’s secret sister, Michael Burnham. Spock stops the meld before La’an finds out the rest of the top secret information about Discovery and gets himself hunted down by Section 31. The Gorn remind me a lot of species 8472 in this encounter, even their catch phrase of ‘survival of the fittest’ kind of parallels ‘the weak will perish’ . I hope that La’an didn’t catch Pa’nar off Spock though during their shared experience…
I give Star Trek: Strange New World’s episode 4, Memento Mori 9/10!!!
I need to rewatch this though, it was a lot to take in so I might end up editing and amending this first impression tomorrow or soon after!
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There's character development in every episode that is carried over to the next.
The main plots might be episodic, but the characters stories aren't.
V
Vale
Guest
As with every other Strange New Worlds episode to date: not great, not bad, still better than Discovery.
Not sure how I felt about the definite thematic beats recycled from The Wrath of Khan (submarine-style battle with no visibility on a heavily damaged ship, etc). And the science seemed really hokey this time round even by Trek's usual low bar, but I'm well versed in just gritting my teeth and getting on with things where that's concerned now.
I do find I am already starting to split characters into ones I like and ones I don't though. I have certainly not yet warmed to La'an Noonien-Singh.
Not sure how I felt about the definite thematic beats recycled from The Wrath of Khan (submarine-style battle with no visibility on a heavily damaged ship, etc). And the science seemed really hokey this time round even by Trek's usual low bar, but I'm well versed in just gritting my teeth and getting on with things where that's concerned now.
I do find I am already starting to split characters into ones I like and ones I don't though. I have certainly not yet warmed to La'an Noonien-Singh.
Kinda wish it were.
Checking my 1975 ST Blueprints it looks like the bowling alley was on Deck 21 and then hangar deck on 19.
Seems far more "Energy Efficient" then completely relying on Force Fields to prevent the vacuum of space from sucking you out into the void.The docking tunnel in this episode looks sooo much better than those ones held together by forcefields in DSC Season 2
You're the second poster to say this, but the rescued colonists were quite real. The hologram was hiding the Gorn ship, and La'an used the description of the attack by the real colonists to deduce who was the attacker.
More likely, since main power was off they couldn't make more of those supplies.
Yeah, plus you can see them in Sickbay in the scenes there.
I also noticed they used another word in place of 'replicate' like a TNG era show would use.
I'm blanking on it. Maybe resequence?
StarShip FloorPlan Layout in 3D CG Animation
I have a thread that talks about a YouTuber who did the entire FloorPlay Layout of the various Hero Ships in 3D over in Trek Tech section of this forum.
This is why I need to rewatch the episode!
The Metron’s made me see it!!!! I will watch an episode twice before saying anything about it from now on so that I do not get in to trouble.
Correction: not sucked, blown out into the void.
Fair enough!
A common mistake, sir.
But what's the difference? In both cases an overpressure is pushing you into a certain direction.
Blowing is pushing, sucking is pulling. In the case we're talking an area of "something" (air) is pushing you into "nothing" (space/a vacuum.)
Gave it a 9, quite good, few quibbles but there minor.
Communicate with light? A View Screen to advanced tech ? Gotta shine a light on the hull? Also, light would mean a Natural ability to create said light, albeit we've already seen twice the gorn talking .. And never communicate with light.
Gorn Ship was.. Funky.. Didn't much care for them giving and twisting all the time. We know those ships weren't tholian now..
Also. Slingshot around the singularity should have cost them some time.. Maybe months if not years like Interstelar.
Edit: could have shown a Gorn on the bridge like Enterprise shows the romulans controlling the flea ship.
Communicate with light? A View Screen to advanced tech ? Gotta shine a light on the hull? Also, light would mean a Natural ability to create said light, albeit we've already seen twice the gorn talking .. And never communicate with light.
Gorn Ship was.. Funky.. Didn't much care for them giving and twisting all the time. We know those ships weren't tholian now..
Also. Slingshot around the singularity should have cost them some time.. Maybe months if not years like Interstelar.
Edit: could have shown a Gorn on the bridge like Enterprise shows the romulans controlling the flea ship.