So strange to have a thread specifically devoted to an official studio production in this forum.
Is it really, though? The end credits said it was produced by Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Productions, but
not by CBS Studios. CBS got a copyright credit, but that's true of every licensed tie-in. And Secret Hideout, like Bad Robot before it, is a subcontractor, not the owners of the franchise. So I still think it's closer to being a tie-in than a core work. Or maybe it's sort of like the non-MCU Sony Marvel movies, produced by the subcontractor studio but not the primary studio.
This was pretty good, an interesting take on the story, and it does pretty well so far at setting the scene without narration and without clumsy dialogue, although there were a couple of bits where I was slow to catch onto where a scene was set. (Also, the actresses playing Marla and Ursula sound too much alike, so I could only tell which one was speaking in their scene together based on what they were saying.) It's effective at balancing what we know from "Space Seed" and TWOK with what modern productions have established, and it fills in some plot holes, though the idea of there being children aboard the
Botany Bay is something you'd think they would've mentioned in "Space Seed" if it had been the case. And it certainly has a revisionist take on McGivers, changing her motive for joining Khan from love to historical ambition. It serves her better than the episode did, but it feels disconnected from her characterization there, especially with the casting of an actress who sounds nothing like Madlyn Rhue. I am glad they cast Naveen Andrews as Khan, since I would've preferred him to play the role in
Into Darkness.
I hope there will be clarification of the throwaway line about the events of "Space Seed" being redacted from the
Enterprise's official logs. It explains why the
Reliant didn't know about Ceti Alpha V, but it seems arbitrary without explanation. 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.
I also have a couple of continuity quibbles. In "Space Seed," Khan was not the undisputed leader of all the Augments; Kirk specifically says that they began to battle among themselves after seizing power (as Greg Cox depicted in his novels). I think it would've served the story better if Ivan and Hugo had been former rivals of Khan who chafed at having to submit to his leadership.
Also, why in the world would a lowly lieutenant like McGivers refer to her former captain, with whom she can't have had any personal history since he barely even remembered her name, as "Jim Kirk?"
