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Spoilers Star Trek: Khan 1x01 - "Paradise"

Rate Episode 1

  • 10 - Excellent!

    Votes: 3 13.0%
  • 9

    Votes: 5 21.7%
  • 8

    Votes: 7 30.4%
  • 7

    Votes: 5 21.7%
  • 6

    Votes: 2 8.7%
  • 5

    Votes: 1 4.3%
  • 4

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 3

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 2

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 1 - Terrible

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    23
I posited in Living Memory (I think it was) that Starfleet (implicitly Section 31) had classified the events to keep the Klingons from finding out about the Augments, something they were still sensitive about after the Augment virus incident a century before, but this seemed to imply that Kirk himself redacted the logs, and I can't imagine why he'd do that.
yep, from Living Memory. And that seems like a perfectly fine possibility to be honest.

Instead, Starfleet Intelligence had classified the entire incident, not wishing to let the Klingons learn of the existence of dozens of human Augments under Starfleet supervision—least of all the direct progenitors of the genetic line that had caused the Augment Crisis.
 
It's unclear to me if the audio establishes Sulu as offscreen during Space Seed or if his recollections are solely from WoK.

The line about redacting the incident should've been enough to get Kirk court martialed immediately after WoK honestly. Tons of Starfleet officers died who may not have if Kirk reported it to Starfleet.

This seems like something that could've been produced during the 2000s to be honest, not unlike what Big Finish was doing with Dr. Who at the time. Ricardo Montalban was wheelchair bound before he died and I'm sure he would've been thrilled to play Khan again in an audio work where his age and disability wouldn't be an issue.
 
The show itself is great, but the dynamic ad insertion is a killer. I'm sure it's partially my own fault for taking whatever anti-internet-tracking measures I can and keeping ad companies from building a decent profile on me, but it was still weird to have my (re)introduction to Star Trek audio drama be an ad for on-line gambling.

I suppose host-read ads were out of the question?

"I'm Khan Noonian Singh. Your beloved Mr. Spock once observed that superior ability breeds superior ambition, but I've found that superior ability requires a superior homepage. That's why I use Squarespace™."

"To survive in an untamed wilderness requires all the strength one can muster, and even an augmented human cannot exercise his greatest strength without a good night's sleep. That's why I commend Captain Kirk on his decision to provide us with Casper™ foam mattresses. Lightweight and compact when delivered with our other provisions, they expand to a full-sized sleeping surface of unparalleled comfort, ensuring I would sleep soundly even if the world itself were to end..."

Hey, it worked for "Mission to Zyxx." They introduced a key story element in their first season as a framing device for their ads.

Can anyone legally post the sites where it can be downloaded.

Podcasts don't stream, any way to listen to it will involve downloading it, and many will give you the option to save the mp3 file like you could any other. Here's the direct link to "Paradise."
 
I enjoyed this, for the most part. TBH, I found the “Khan and company on Ceti Alpha V” much more compelling than the Dr. Lear/Excelsior bits. I get that they probably wanted a Starfleet-based framing structure, but it didn’t really seem to add much to the story. Hopefully something will come up later that gives the framing story some kind of payoff.

This was already mentioned on page one, but I was surprised to hear there were children on the Botany Bay. You’d think that would be something that came up during “Space Seed”. (Yes, I understand that it’s a retcon.)

Why the artificial ticking clock, though? Lear retrieved all the logs from the surface; I don’t remember hearing an actual reason as to why she would need to stay in orbit of Ceti Alpha V to review/catalogue them all, instead of just taking them back to Earth and doing it there.

(Also, “someone” sent Lear a subset of McGivers’s logs. I wonder if the “who” is going to be a plot point, because as far as we know, all of Khan’s followers were killed on the Reliant.)

All in all, I think this sets things up fairly well, and I am looking forward to more of the story.

The show itself is great, but the dynamic ad insertion is a killer. I'm sure it's partially my own fault for taking whatever anti-internet-tracking measures I can and keeping ad companies from building a decent profile on me, but it was still weird to have my (re)introduction to Star Trek audio drama be an ad for on-line gambling.

I think I mentioned before that I haven’t really been into podcasts in the past. I found out there was a podcast app on my tablet, so I used that to listen to the episode… and there were no ads at all. I didn’t realize that wasn’t the norm.
 
I've only had time to listen to the first five minutes. I stopped at the point where Sulu agreed to travel with Dr. Lear to Ceti Alpha V. This is good. This is very good. Right down to the debate about Khan and talking about the insights that McGyvers had into him.

I'll give this a proper listen, all the way through, tonight when I don't have so many distractions.
 
Why the artificial ticking clock, though? Lear retrieved all the logs from the surface; I don’t remember hearing an actual reason as to why she would need to stay in orbit of Ceti Alpha V to review/catalogue them all, instead of just taking them back to Earth and doing it there.

I think maybe she was still on the planet surface in that scene, though I'm not entirely sure why. Though it makes sense that she'd want to study the site more fully for physical evidence.
 
(Also, “someone” sent Lear a subset of McGivers’s logs. I wonder if the “who” is going to be a plot point, because as far as we know, all of Khan’s followers were killed on the Reliant.)
I know everyone hates the movie and has purged it from their memories already, but Alok Sahar from Section 31 is probably the only character who would fit this role from what we know so far (I'm not saying it's him, I imagine CBS already disavowed Section 31, so it's probably someone brand new). He was an augment from the Eugenics wars who survived to the early 24th century without explanation. The only likely explanation was that he was among Khan's crew and didn't leave Ceti Alpha 5 on the Reliant with them. That being said, neither the actor nor the character is seemingly in this audio drama so far so it's unlikely but going by the strict evidence from past Trek, he would've been the most likely candidate.
This was already mentioned on page one, but I was surprised to hear there were children on the Botany Bay. You’d think that would be something that came up during “Space Seed”. (Yes, I understand that it’s a retcon.)
This is a pretty massive retcon that clashes with Space Seed considerably. Kirk may not have felt it in his place to separate kids from their parents but still it would've been mentioned in TOS realistically if that was an intention for kids to always be there.

It DOES retroactively make Kelvin Admiral Marcus more evil in that he was literally going to trick Kirk into firing torpedoes loaded with kids at Khan.
 
Why the artificial ticking clock, though? Lear retrieved all the logs from the surface; I don’t remember hearing an actual reason as to why she would need to stay in orbit of Ceti Alpha V to review/catalogue them all, instead of just taking them back to Earth and doing it there.

I guess she wants to know where to look for important artifacts or other documents, and doesn't think she'll get a chance at a follow-up expedition. Still, she should be more open to prioritizing and getting the on-site archeology done first, and analyzing it all later.

I think I mentioned before that I haven’t really been into podcasts in the past. I found out there was a podcast app on my tablet, so I used that to listen to the episode… and there were no ads at all. I didn’t realize that wasn’t the norm.

Interesting. It might be geographic and they didn't sell any ads for the show in Canada, or because you don't have an advertising profile with that company since you haven't listened to podcasts before. This show seems to be using DAI (dynamic ad insertion) where the show has preset spots (beginning, end, and two "act breaks" in the middle in this case), but the podcast distributor automatically decides when you download the episodes which ads, how many, and in which breaks to drop them in, all based on what it knows about your habits from your IP address. Sometimes it gets weird. I once downloaded a show where they didn't put any ads at the beginning of the episode, and then had five or six minutes' worth in a row in the middle.
 
An 8. I by and large enjoyed the first episode, but I found Marla McGivers' portrayal here to be a little too contemporary. I'm glad at least it's fairly grounded in "Space Seed" and TWOK, and not a heavily revisionist SNW-framed take (thus far).

The details of Meyer's first draft script for this project were spoiled on the internet several years ago. It'll be interesting to see what ultimately is retained, changed, and added.
 
I thought it was a good start, though sometimes I got confused when it came to which characters were speaking. I didn't catch if Joaquin was in the first episode. If I got it right, Joachim is Joaquin's son with a non-Augment, but at times it seemed like Joachim was Khan's son.

The story is giving McGivers more agency perhaps (for lack of a better term to get at what I mean), but I don't know if her sudden desire to call the Enterprise felt right to me. It seems like she would've spoken to Khan first to sus out his real intentions before doing that.

Looking forward to hearing the rest of the drama, and I am hoping that there is a story behind how Khan learned about that Klingon proverb that we get to hear here.
 
This is a pretty massive retcon that clashes with Space Seed considerably. Kirk may not have felt it in his place to separate kids from their parents but still it would've been mentioned in TOS realistically if that was an intention for kids to always be there.

It DOES retroactively make Kelvin Admiral Marcus more evil in that he was literally going to trick Kirk into firing torpedoes loaded with kids at Khan.

I'm wondering if maybe the kids were hidden in a separate part of the Botany Bay with shielding that the Enterprise was unable to scan through, but I doubt that 20th-century (or 21st-century in the rewritten timeline) shielding methods would have been able to fool 23rd-century sensors. And of course Kirk would've had to find out when they reached Ceti Alpha V.

But it is pretty much necessary to explain all Khan's twentysomething followers in TWOK, 15 years after being stranded (or 18 years per the Chronology's inexplicable retcon that even Michael Okuda didn't remember the reason for when I asked him about it). At least, it's more straightforward than Greg Cox's handwave that they were born on Ceti Alpha V and matured at an accelerated rate (and it avoids the ramification that the crew that got blown up on the Reliant would've been mostly underage).
 
Podcasts don't stream, any way to listen to it will involve downloading it, and many will give you the option to save the mp3 file like you could any other. Here's the direct link to "Paradise."
You're mistaken, I've streamed dozens of episodes of Big Finish Dr. Who, Batman: The Audio Adventures, and Marvel's Wastelanders on Spotify. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure Apple Podcasts, and I think I <3 Radio also stream podcasts.
 
You're mistaken, I've streamed dozens of episodes of Big Finish Dr. Who, Batman: The Audio Adventures, and Marvel's Wastelanders on Spotify. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure Apple Podcasts, and I think I <3 Radio also stream podcasts.

On a technical level, they're downloading, not streaming. Like, if you turn your phone's wi-fi and cellular off after you start playing an episode, you'll be able to fast forward to any part of it even without an internet connection. When podcast players say they're "streaming," it's more accurate to say they're not pre-downloading episodes before you start listening to them (which was your only choice back when we listened to podcasts on actual iPods, and still might be if you're on a limited or low-coverage cellular data plan, like me), but instead download the whole episode once you tap "play."

This is different from how YouTube or Netflix work, where they're only giving you the bits of the video you're going to see in the next few seconds continuously, and stop feeding you data if you pause. For a podcast, there's a file somewhere on the internet (well, nominally, DAI means it's built on-demand when someone tries to download it and not just sitting there) that the podcast feed can point to with a URL. You can link to it, as I did in the earlier post. There's no secret web address I could put in that'll point me to a .MP4 file of a video on YouTube or movie on Netflix that'll play using my web browser's controls, and that I can easily download to my hard drive with one click, downloading something for a streaming platform like that requires more specialized tools.
 
Oh, I've never heard of that kind of downloading. When I see/hear downloading, I think of the process where you permanently download the file onto your device.
 
Listened to the first episode while working today and really enjoyed it so far. As others have noted, a couple of times it was difficult to keep track of who’s speaking and where we are, but for the most part I could follow along pretty easily. The use of sound effects is spot-on and it’s interesting how much they help to set the right Trek time period.

Loved hearing Tim Russ reprise Tuvok once more (although, naturally, his voice does sound a bit older), and I really enjoyed both Wrenn Schmidt and Naveen Andrews as McGivers and Khan respectively. The writing thankfully reimagines McGivers as much more three-dimensional than her TOS version and I thought her line about wanting to study Khan’s story as a way to make her own mark on history both made her motivation to follow Khan much more believable and revealed a character trait that she may have in common with Khan.

However, I can already tell that I’m growing tired of the whole angle of depicting Khan as this charismatic and sage leader everyone seems to worship. Isn’t he great with kids and isn’t he generous to let Marla bunk where she wants? I thought the “Khan! Khan! Khan!” chant was a bit over the top and clichéd, but I get that they probably just want to establish that most of his people are still loyal early on and that in the course of the story some will start to oppose him. I’m curious to see where they are going with the story.

Funnily enough they gave Andrews’ Khan the line “We live and die together with and for one another“, which perhaps coincidentally sounded vaguely similar to the oft-repeated mantra from Lost: “Live together, die alone”. Given how similar the situations of Khan’s people and the Losties are, I wonder if there will be more such instances where they slip in allusions to Lost. :lol:

Listened on YouTube, by the way, and had no ads whatsoever playing before, during or after the episode.
 
Just finished listening to it.

Nice to "see" Khan trying to build a new civilization on Ceti Alpha V. And Marla's right. These people who were bred never had a chance on Earth, one way or the other. More insight into the Augments, how they see Marla, and -- unexpectedly -- how they see Joachim, who's only half-Augment.

For the framing device, George Takei and Tim Russ slip effortless back into their roles, even though their voices sound unavoidably older. A nice, classic Star Trek debate. Bear sees an opportunity to find out more about Khan. Sulu is initially resistant but unafraid to learn more about Khan. Tuvok is uncurious about Khan, but I get the feeling that as this story progresses, he'll become fascinated. Pun intended.

If you don't know what's going to happen next, this episode makes you really think the Augments on Ceti Alpha V have the potential to create a new society with an improved Humanity. Loved all the historical references.

Naveen Andrews makes an effective Khan. Especially a Khan who's a leader to a new civilization. I was already familiar with Wrenn Schmidt as Margo from For All Mankind. So, hearing her hear as Marla was a treat. Marla as far more of a historian here, far more decisive, and has to wrestle with the notion of why she's there after one of the women plants doubts in her mind.

This series is off to a great start. I'm excited for more and, at the same time, am dreading when Ceti Alpha VI explodes. I give it a 9.
 
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