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Spoilers Star Trek: Khan 1x05 - "Imagination's Limits"

Rate Episode 5

  • 10 - Excellent!

    Votes: 2 14.3%
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    Votes: 3 21.4%
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    Votes: 4 28.6%
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  • 1 - Terrible

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  • Total voters
    14
I listened to this episode in the morning but didn't have time to post earlier. My thoughts:

The Great Debate between Sulu and Lear about Khan. Nice to see Sulu be able to sink his teeth into a steadfast position. As steadfast in support of Kirk and Spock as he was in "Flashback" as well as in TUC. Perfectly in character for Sulu during this period and it makes sense that he'd be set in his beliefs. These beliefs happen to be right in this case, but he's set in them, nonetheless. Lear's line, "This is the part where you say you've served under them for years... " was pitch perfect. It's nice to see someone who thinks Kirk and Spock aren't infallible. Before someone says I'm not on Kirk, Spock, or Sulu's side, I am. I just appreciate that there's someone like Lear who's willing to challenge what Sulu thinks.

Lear has an open mind. But the question is: is her mind open to the possibility that she's the one who's wrong about Khan? In a previous episode, I said that we were seeing Khan in a different context because we're seeing him only among his own people, not among anyone who he would consider to be an enemy. As soon as the Elborians crash land on Ceti Alpha V, we see how Khan deals with other peoples, and how he wants to kill them, since he sees it as either Them or Us.

Marla tries to reason with Khan, and that's interesting to hear. She has a perspective as a former Starfleet Officer that Khan never had. Aside from meeting Spock, how much experience has Khan had with encountering alien life? Exactly.

No surprise that Ceti Alpha VI exploded in the fifth episode, at the exact midpoint of this series. The big surprise was Khan and his people encountering any other alien life from another planet while exiled on Ceti Alpha V. Neat idea for Khan to encounter them and to have them communicate with him telepathically.

I'll be honest, I've been a Star Trek fan for 35 years and never in ALL of that time have I ever thought about where Khan might've gotten water from. It's just something I never thought of. Nice for this episode to answer a question that never even occurred to me.

I'm going to give this entire series another listen, once it's finished. Sometimes I have a hard time being able to tell who's who. Not that I need much reason. Star Trek: Khan is the real Star Trek find of 2025. I give this episode another 10.
 
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some of the voices sound too "artificial" to me

Are you saying you think some of the voices are AI-generated? I haven’t personally noticed any tells, but I am interested in what you base this on.

They say each week in the credits that it is recorded under a SAG-AFTRA agreement. I tried to do some quick Googling to see if they would have to disclose in the credits if AI was used, but I couldn’t find anything at a quick glance, and I don’t have time to dig deeper right now.
 
Are you saying you think some of the voices are AI-generated? I haven’t personally noticed any tells, but I am interested in what you base this on.

I think they probably mean it the way the word has historically been used in that context since long before so-called "AI" was around -- that the actors' performances didn't sound natural or convincing enough. I didn't notice such a thing myself, though.
 
I think they probably mean it the way the word has historically been used in that context since long before so-called "AI" was around -- that the actors' performances didn't sound natural or convincing enough.

As in "wooden", "overdone", "like fan film actors", all of which I didn't wanna use :shifty: :shrug:

Fair enough, although I personally feel that saying "the voices sound artificial" is a strange way to convey that. (And I can honestly say I don't recall ever hearing such a phrase used historically in that context.)

Also, I have to agree with Christopher; I haven't noticed anything like that, either.
 
Fair enough, although I personally feel that saying "the voices sound artificial" is a strange way to convey that. (And I can honestly say I don't recall ever hearing such a phrase used historically in that context.)

Really? It's been used that way since Shakespeare at least.

3
a : not being, showing, or resembling sincere or spontaneous behavior : fake
an artificial smile

Their concern seemed artificial.

He's artificial and soulless and certainly not above being a poseur.—

Ben Wener and Martin Wisckol


… everything about the movie feels artificial, from the singers' blatantly Auto-Tuned voices to the CGI acrobatics.—
Stephanie Merry


… some of the younger thesps prove adept at sending up the social airs and artificial mannerisms of their characters …—
Marilyn Stasio


Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, / And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart, / And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, / And frame my face to all occasions.—
William Shakespeare
 
I would say that I have noticed a few instances in which the people sound more like casual contemporary individuals in their manner of speech than the slightly-mannered style of dialogue that we are used to from the Star Trek universe- a complaint that several of the CBS Star Trek productions have also shared. But that issue hasn't really affected the main group of Augments, and I didn't particularly notice it in this episode.
 
Really? It's been used that way since Shakespeare at least.

:shrug: I’m not really talking about “artificial” in isolation, I’m talking in context of “the voices sound”. If they had said the performances seemed artificial, that’s another thing. The only one in the examples that talk about how voices sound is the one related to auto-tune, and I can certainly see it used in that context, but that’s apparently not the type of concern the poster was trying to express.
 
:shrug: I’m not really talking about “artificial” in isolation, I’m talking in context of “the voices sound”. If they had said the performances seemed artificial, that’s another thing. The only one in the examples that talk about how voices sound is the one related to auto-tune, and I can certainly see it used in that context, but that’s apparently not the type of concern the poster was trying to express.

I just took it to mean the actors' performances, since in an audio production, they act entirely with their voices.
 
It’s hard to understand what Khan’s supposed superior intellect is all about. Dude is dummer than a bag of hammers most of the time. He’s basically a foil for McGivers to work around. And his second in command is a compete idiot. I suppose authoritarian idiots threatening global upheaval in the 21st century is believable, but it would be nice to have Khan have some memorable qualities besides “he cares about his people”
 
Fair enough, although I personally feel that saying "the voices sound artificial" is a strange way to convey that. (And I can honestly say I don't recall ever hearing such a phrase used historically in that context.)

Also, I have to agree with Christopher; I haven't noticed anything like that, either.
It never would have occurred to me before I saw the other posts that "artificial" could have any other use than to refer to AI before I saw the posts before this one. I've never heard artificial used in that context before.
 
It never would have occurred to me before I saw the other posts that "artificial" could have any other use than to refer to AI before I saw the posts before this one. I've never heard artificial used in that context before.

I find that very hard to believe, since it's hardly uncommon to say that someone's performance or mannerisms are artificial, i.e. insincere and obviously fake. Like I said, even Shakespeare used it that way.

After all, "artifice" means false or insincere behavior, putting on an act or pretense. "Artificial" when applied to a person's behavior or attitude is just the adjective form of that.
 
While I appreciate the support from @JD , we should probably let this go at this point. I was trying to drop the subject in my post from last night, and I'd like to see the thread get back to talking about episode 5, rather than discussing how different members use the language.

On that note... I had my first mid-story ad break with episode 5 this week. Episodes 2 and 3 had a single ad at the beginning, and episode 1 and (surprisingly) 4 had no ads. Episode 5 started with the usual Instacart ad, but then had a mid-story ad break. (I forget exactly when, but I think it was around the one-third mark.) I didn't like it at all, and would prefer they kept all the ads at the beginning. There were 2 ads during the break. The first one was for some kind of travel service, and had a specific URL related to Khan that you could go to for some kind of special offer, so I wondered if this was something that everyone got, that was just embedded in the file for everyone? It even sounded like it could have been Wrenn Schmidt narrating it, but I wasn't entirely sure.

It’s hard to understand what Khan’s supposed superior intellect is all about. Dude is dummer than a bag of hammers most of the time.

I was almost yelling at my tablet over his single-minded insistence on attacking the aliens.
 
this episode only strengthened my belief that Lear is a Kahn descendent. Just one that is more forgiving than someone like La’an.
 
This one was definitely the first time we really saw the Khan from Space Seed and Wrath of Khan. I was a little shocked that he was so determined to attack the aliens no matter what, but it did with what we saw of him in Space Seed. Adding the aliens into the story was an unexpected new complication.
It's really becoming clear that Lear has some pretty serious issues with Starfleet and/or Jim Kirk specifically.
 
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