If you have watched the preview clips you will know the arena is not necessarily happening in real life.
Oh, that's interesting, I hadn't picked up on that. I saw the surreal dual-Spock thing but it hadn't occurred to me that it might not be real. Again, I wouldn't want to prejudge the episode before watching it, it may well end up fantastic, but the apparent presence of yet another "iconic" TOS location and character - plus the Amok Time joke in the title - gave me pause.
Curious. I would imagine identifying the limits of the 23rd century and fleshing out previously mentioned species and ideas would actually be a positive. It allows them to fill in the details of the 23rd century rather than just skipping over these events and moving on to the next planet of the week.
Sam Kirk is a good example. There's nothing about him other than his relationship to Captain Kirk in "Operation: Annihilate." Now, he's an actual person with personal relationships outside just his brother. That's where a prequel shines is giving light and life to previously thin characters.
I don't disagree, I like the treatment of previously underused characters like Uhura and Chapel so far. I just hope a balance gets struck: for example, TNG chose to give us a Klingon crewmember through which to flesh out an existing part of the setting, but at the same time offered us all-new races like Betazoids and Soong-type androids, and also - after a slightly bumpy start including a decent but unnecessary remake of a TOS episode - managed to take that crew into uncharted territory and develop entirely new species, factions, etc. In SNW, our core cast is made mostly of pre-existing characters from pre-existing races, with one exception, Una. I was cheered to see that she's from a new species (though apparently they're from an Enterprise episode, but I don't remember them), that's something that might be able to develop into some entirely unique ways. The inverse-terraforming thing where they engineer themselves to match the climates of colony planets was a really great bit of worldbuilding.
I understand of course that this isn't meant to be TOS or TNG, and the prequel aspect is baked into the whole premise. But the writers have already demonstrated the ability to come up with new stuff - the Illyrians and the Shepherds being an obvious example, even if some plot beats from the latter echoed "The Paradise Syndrome" quite heavily. I hope they move in that direction rather than the "TOS character/location/concept of the week, revisited" direction.
If that's what you see, I guess that's unfortunate. They're doing a really good TV series right now. But I don't suppose we'll run out of series development experts online anytime soon.
The foremost Discovery Development Expert has honoured me with the title of Series Development Expert. I won't let you down.
