Spoilers Strange New Worlds 1x01 - "Strange New Worlds"

Peck's pained scream was Horta-level. And also very funny.

 

The same T'Pring who will get out of the marriage by having Kirk fight Spock

 

The vial wasn’t re-materialized obviously…. It stayed in the pattern buffer.

 

Watch the scene again. The vial DID stay on the pad and the serum beamed out.

 

Overall I'm quite pleased with the pilot episode. The crew's likeable and they feel more real after one episode than DIS achieved for most of its crew during the 3 seasons I cared to watch. Also liked the legal trick at the end.

Now let's have a look at the continuity issues.

The Gorn have been retconned to an established enemy. La'an's family was killed by them when Una was a mere ensign.

Robert April has been retconned from a white Commodore to a black Admiral. That is if you consider TAS as part of the canon or not. I suppose the most elegant solution would be to remaster "The Counter-Clock Incident" but that's never going to happen.

There's a Chief Kyle and he's of Asian descent. If he is supposed to be the Lt. Kyle from TOS and TWOK that would be another race retcon. Could easily be another character though or maybe TOS-Kyle's husband?

Cmdr. M'Benga is the ship's CMO. That raises the question what he's going to do to get demoted. Or maybe he's the father of TOS-M'Benga?

Lt. Samuel Kirk serves aboard the Enterprise. It was never explicitly said that he was not in Starfleet so there's wiggle room but this is yet another instance of Small Universe-Syndrome.

It takes a huge amount of suspension of disbelief to accept that Spock and Uhura failed to mention in "Space Seed" that they served with one of Khan's descendants.

The Eugenics Wars are merged into WWIII. In "Space Seed" the Eugenics Wars took place in the 1990s and were the last great conflict on Earth 200 years ago. This would've put TOS in the 2190s and clashed with World War III being the last great war. So basically this puts TOS in the 2260s but it effectively retcons the 1990s date.

Whoever is in charge of the uniforms did a terrible job.

Lt. Cmdr. Chin-Riley wears Cmdr. stripes
Lt. Noonien Singh wears Lt. Cmdr. stripes
Lt. Ortegas wears Lt. Cmdr. stripes
The female OPS Lt. wears Lt. Cmdr. stripes
Chapel (who is supposed to be a civilian wears Cmdr. stripes. She was an ensign in TOS, a Lt. in TAS and TMP and finally a Cmdr. in TVH).

This might be a non-issue for many but I prefer consistency between dialogue and visuals. And it's not some background characters but half of the main cast.

Chapel seems way too overqualified to be a nurse.

 

Yep, and the character development makes perfect sense.

 

This and "New Eden(DSC)" are the current peak of CBS/Kurtzman Trek.

 

I would definitely include 'Nepenthe' (PIC), 'If Memory Serves' (DSC), 'Wej Duj' (LDS) and 'Kobayashi' (PRO) as well.!

 

So ... Robert April is now Afro-American, Chief Kyle is Asian and Yeoman Colt is some weired alien. It really does surprise me that they didn't make Doctor M'Benga a a blonde swedish woman!

Speaking of which, I hope we will see a lot more M'Benga than Chapel ... he felt spot on, while she felt like a completely different character. And not in a good way.

La'An turned out to be a pleasant surprise, although I'm not very fond about yet another connection to Khan.

Genetic alterations for an away mission? What happened to cosmetic surgery?

Samuel Kirk? WTF?

Favorite quote: Whoever has the biggest stick wins ...

 

She was a scientist as a civilian. Joined starfleet as a Nurse to find her husband
Then became doctor by the motion picture

 

Yep definitely worth staying up to watch this. The characters are immediately more likeable than DSC and the general shift in tone to being more positive and hopeful is palpable. Loved it. Already planning a rewatch later on the big screen vs my iPad.

 

Changing clothes and equipment during beaming was never possible, including 100 years later (otherwise they'd have done it all those other times). That really stands out as an unnecessary break in continuity.

I don't remember much from those old novels, but as soon as they mentioned the warp bomb, I remembered reading about that in a novel

 

I like the new Asian chief Kyle. His uniform is unique where it has black stripes; it’s late and brain is fuzzy but did enlisted crew always have different unis in tos? I don’t remember.

lol why is the poll inverted?

 

Yeah, I hope we see more him. I think his uniform is supposed to be equivalent of the TOS-jumpsuits.

Enlisted crew in TOS were indiscernible from ensigns. TMP added more variety and TWOK finally a unique jumpsuit and full set of insignia.

 

Great first episode. It reminded me a lot of Star Trek 2009 (which is a good thing).

 

I loved it. I’m going to need a few more watches to give a shit about or notice some of the minor stuff mentioned here, but overall that feels like Star Trek to me. The humour landed in a way that other recent shows just doesn’t. The powerful scenes made me well up at times. I’m not going to use the unconventional voting scale here, but it’s a 10/10 on the standard - higher = better - scale used near uniformly in the review world.

 

Fiance, not husband. They were engaged to be married, but Korby disappeared on the expedition to Exo III before the wedding could take place.

 

The sound effects in that audiobook are permanent fixtures in my memory lol.

 

You can insist that this is a reboot or alternate timeline if you like...to the extent that it matters - not much - I'll just call it a restart. It's a new beginning point for the franchise, and a lot of details will be different from now on without necessarily being part of an intent to substantially alter Trek - unlike AbramsTrek and to some extent a few other recent productions.

Canon is futile.

I like the Abrams movies, to a great extent.