I caught that too. That and the number of colonists they beamed out at once made it feel like they were just rushing to tie up all the loose ends and finish the episode.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x01 - "Hegemony, Part II"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
I shall not be watching it. I will wait till 2029 or 2030 when all episodes have been released...good day sirs and goodbye.....
I lied i watched both of them and all I could think was....THIS IS WHAT WE WAITED TWO FULL YEARS FOR???
I truly think Trek needs like a real break. Not 4 years like we got between ST:ENT and the 2009 film but like 10 years. Yeah I will be closer to death but I just don't care anymore. Not saying I haven't liked any of the TV stuff from 2017 till now. But it took 3 and a half seasons till I really liked episodes of Disco and sadly SNW has just gotten worse for me as it has gone on. I liked much of season 1. Season 2 was just filled with too many gimmicky episodes and then of course all the weird retconning and fan wanking. I know there are a lot of you who love it and that's cool. But I'm just tired of it all already. There is not much they can do at this point to keep me interested. I shall just be content with TOS through Voyager and Picard. Everything else I will view like a fan production. Some good stuff but most of it just not my thing. Good Day Sirs and Goodbye forever... 
A century later the Enterprise-E beams Worf out of the Defiant while the Enterprise's shields are up. Presumably the computer or transporter operator, who would know the frequency of the shields, would account for that during transport allowing beaming to be possible.
For Batel, I think the solution was to somehow nourish the baby Gorn inside of her, so they wouldn't come out? Then I think they somehow liquified them, there was a line about how Batel's body would "reabsorb them", although that would put her at risk of infection, hence Una's blood. I'm not quite sure why they couldn't just use a well-placed scalpel to finish off the Gorn, then solve the infection problem later.
As for the Gorn warping thing, I was also completely confused. I thought it was a sort of relay system that transports Gorn ships from between those two stars back to their homeworld? If so, I really don't understand whether that's a natural phenomenon, or why they put it between two binary stars, or what purpose it served, other than "we need a place where Gorn can surprise the Enterprise, and Enterprise can't call for help, but we don't want to use a nebula again"
Not sure I get this. Pilots should be no harder to write for than doctors, or engineers. Your job isn't your personality.
Off the top of my head, I'll come up with two different pilots right now:
- Conceited hotshot. Super-competitive, always thinks they have something to prove due to suppressed insecurity. Takes dumb risks which occasionally blow up in their face, even if they don't blow up the ship.
- Depressive, older, hates their job. Was pressured into it by overbearing parents. Knows it's the one thing they're best at, though, and keeps at it, just because they'd rather succeed at something they hate than fail at something they love.
I lied i watched both of them and all I could think was....THIS IS WHAT WE WAITED TWO FULL YEARS FOR???
Really feels like the network has given them extensive notes between the seasons to progressively make SNW more and more "safe." I'm not sure if it's because the early experience with DIS and PIC burned them so bad, or they're trying to tamp shit down due to trying to get approval for the Skydance merger, but the show feels sanded down, in a weird sort of way.
Because situations that involve them are around the bridge.
Star Trek doesn't always involve that. It involves being off the ship or on a mission. The reason why pilots are hard to write is because were their skill sets show up is for a very narrow part of the Star Trek format of storytelling.
Look at Paris: he becomes a medic, a commando leader, a romantic partner, an investigator, a history afficionado. He is written in a way that ensures he is always a part of the action, but that has nothing to do with being a pilot.
I lied i watched both of them and all I could think was....THIS IS WHAT WE WAITED TWO FULL YEARS FOR???
I wonder if she'll stay on the ship when her brother, Gary comes aboard?
Yes, that has happened. The Talos 4 mission has already happened
Scotty came up with recursive power feed to keep the signal from degrading with no ship power. M'Benga just kept his daughter in the buffer, not completing the re-materialization sequence until he wanted to read a story.
Honestly, the idea of a large Starfleet vessel having a "pilot" is pretty silly. Obviously there will be multiple shifts, and we can just presume that we're mostly seeing "day shift" or whatever. But beyond that, the big starships are more like aircraft carriers or battleships. Pilots fly planes! Characters in NuBSG like Starbuck and Apollo make sense as pilots, as they go out on short-range missions or attack sorties. Ship helmsmen's are more just interchangeable dudes who take orders from the officer of the watch, with more experienced folks subbed in when conditions are choppier/when doing more difficult movements.
This isn't even getting into the consideration that Starfleet vessels should be much, much more automated. Honestly, the computer should do most of the flying, under normal circumstances.
Looking back at say TOS, there really isn't much evidence that Sulu is the helmsmen, versus Chekov being the navigator, beyond the orders Kirk gives to one versus the other. We don't even begin to see helmsmen confused for pilot until Tom Paris, who was meant to have the hotshot pilot archetype. And they've been kind of stuck in that idea since - probably because people with an actual military background aren't really involved in the shows any longer.
As opposed to the other silly ideas in the franchise?
As others have noted, TNG did this well with the helm, and no I don't think it has to do with military background. I think it's the weird mission creep that bridge crew equals main characters that happened on Voyager and continued on. TNG had rotating members at the helm, and usually one died to show the mission was dangerous.
I liked it, was it silly and going.. Huh? sometimes? Sure. but it was fun, exciting etc. and was about to Riot if they killed Ortega... kept on hinting on it... was like NOOOOO, Don't you F'n Dare! You haven't given her her own episode yet!!
Wesley was pretty consistently the at the helm for a few years, but you're right that it was typically extras. Which honestly makes more sense, as it's not a department head like position. Nothing was worse than Harry Kim though. The one random-ass ensign who was somehow invited into all the officer briefings, despite the ship having dozens of other ensigns.
IMHO, the two shows that handled this best out of classic Trek were DS9 and ENT. DS9 because the show seldom really focused on what was happening in Ops, and we were mostly essentially dealing with folks in senior management positions. And ENT because the ship was small enough to excuse why we didn't see more crew rotations.
In more modern Trek, LDS obviously just ignored the bridge, for the most part. And PRO literally had no one onboard the Protostar but the kids, meaning it worked quite well. While I didn't like PIC that much, I think the Season 1 setup of a small crew going on a special mission gelled fine. There was just no good excuse why they returned for Season 2 (and then they ditched them for Season 3).
DIS really, really struggled though. Nowhere can this be seen more than Tilly, who went from one of dozens of assistants to Stamets in the spore drive, to somehow his only assistant by the season's end, to command training, to briefly XO, to leaving for Starfleet Academy, to back again for some reason. But all the characters were negatively impacted by this to some degree, which can be seen due to the fact that by the fifth season, they didn't even have a story role for most of the main cast, any longer, and just fit them into the story on the margins.
Anyway, the Ortegas issue can just be dealt with by giving her an episode, and a deeper sense of identity than "I fly the ship!" I can go for entire episodes, for example, without thinking about La'an as Chief Tactical Officer/security/whatever her title may be.
As a long time fan since 1969, I do not agree.
My thoughts echo what others are saying, good, but not quite as good as Part 1, definitely rushed - to the point that it almost seems scenes were cut along the way, such as showing the actual protocol of Spock/Chapel saving Batel, i also swear that there's a snippet of dialog on the Gorn ship where the party says something about "just barely getting away", which made me feel like i had missed something. I think @tomalak301's idea of having this episode be a longer TV movie they aired in late 2024 was a good one, it definitely seemed like things needed more room to breathe and provide more context to set things up.
I think you'll just have to chalk that up as one of those conventions that filmed scifi uses to make things more visually interesting, i dont think the sizes, or probably more egregious, the distance between them, should be interpreted literally.
It's actually worse, after Wesley left the ship, they reused the same character, Ensign Gates as the Conn officer, for forty-six episodes and no one ever thought that character was underserved and needed more development.
Her first mission off the ship and she gets stabbed by a Gorn. I think she's going to die this season because something seems to have been left behind by the gorn. . Sulu will be here for season 4.
It's not the clearest shot, but my first impression was that there are bones sticking out where the fingers were. That and her comment about half her hand being gone had me leaning that direction.
You can definitely see her using her fingers in later shots though, but I was leaning toward it being a makeup error.
I found it very strange the first two episodes stuck precisely to around 46-47 minutes, with the first feeling a bit overstuffed, and the second understuffed. You can make streaming shows as long or as short as you like, after all.
Makes me wonder if they want to sell this for syndication at some point.
You very beautifully missed the point.
Because you just created two wonderfully great dramatic characters. And I'm sure there's a similar dramatic character inside Ortega.
What makes pilots more difficult to write than engineers or doctors... Is Star Trek. Specifically it's plot tropes.
Doctors & engineers have to play off of each other or other characters (case in point: Spock assisting Chapel to save Batel). They can do that in their offices, on planets, calm or in crisis. They can do that alone, or when everybody's watching. There's TONs of ways to integrate doctors or engineers into an adventure story.
A pilot is always sitting behind his desk. And whenever they do something significant, it gets very expensive and vfx heavy for the show.
That means - the only way to write a lot of Star Trek stories for pilots is OUTSIDE their main job. Like Tom Paris relationship to his father, his criminal background, his relationship with B'Elanna, becoming a nurse...
I'm sure if Ortega was part of the love triangle with Spock, we'd have tons of stories with her already. As is, the writers still don't have much outside of her job to do, and her job itself just lends a lot less to exposure than, say, the guys who have to analyze the anomaly of the week.
Similar threads
- Poll
- Poll
- Poll
- Poll
