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The mid-point episode is out this Monday, October 6! (For some reason, I was thinking there were ten episodes, but there are only nine.) Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Episode description: Khan and his people prepare for inescapable global calamity, and learn they are no longer alone on this world. Are these mysterious new arrivals enemies, or possible allies?
Well, I hope his unwavering commitment to exterminating the first unknown people he meets puts to lie all the complaining about a kinder, gentler Khan.
Well, I hope his unwavering commitment to exterminating the first unknown people he meets puts to lie all the complaining about a kinder, gentler Khan.
Indeed. This episode, no complaints; this was a Khan I recognized. :-)
Overall, I really enjoyed this one- it was the first one to move into unexpected territory. Khan and Marla felt like recognizable extrapolations of their onscreen selves- particularly with Marla trying to act as Khan's conscience, guide him in a different way, and accepting with sorrow that she couldn't move him from his course. It felt much more in character than brazen argumentation; and in general, in character with how you'd have to approach a force of nature like Khan, even as his lover and confidant... with the same caution you'd use to approach a tiger. He may be friendly, but he is not tame.
Learman remains an obnoxious hypocrite- which is not a complaint about the writing, I think she's supposed to be- but it would be nice if they revealed the bee in her bonnet sooner rather than later, as her constant diatribes are getting tiresome. (Her claim that one in her line of work 'needs to keep an open mind' is, I hope, supposed to provoke scoffing- but again, I am thinking that's intentional). Now that she has reached the point of Ceti Alpha VI's destruction (and has the Enterprise scans) and has heard the testimony directly that Khan is every bit the butcher that history recalls, it will be interesting to see how she reacts... if she changes her tune, or tries to gloss over the inconvenient truths she's discovering.
I am very curious ad excited to see where this goes next... an unexpected new paradigm has taken shape here! Although meeting these new neighbors, it does spark me to wonder...
wouldn't it be interesting if the duo of aliens and their Omega Device weapon from the early alternate-storyline draft of the TWOK script were incorporated in as the cause of Ceti Alpha VI's untimely demise (and connected to these visitors in some way)?
I wonder if she will admit in the end that she was wrong about Khan and she indeed had a bit of an open mind on the matter or will she still maintain that Khan was a victim and Kirk is a villain because she has a strange agenda.
I wonder if she will admit in the end that she was wrong about Khan and she indeed had a bit of an open mind on the matter or will she still maintain that Khan was a victim and Kirk is a villain because she has a strange agenda.
She has definitely reached the plausible limits - assuming she is hearing all the details on the tapes that we are in the audio dramas - of being able to hold an alternate opinion. She is now heard that Khan would kill first, ask questions never. That he was going to slaughter a group of shipwrecked survivors. And that the augments themselves concurred with Starfleet's sensor scans that there was no apparent way of knowing that Ceti Alpha VI was going to explode.
So it has reached the point where presupposition and suspicion coming into things has met contrary evidence. If she chooses to hold on to it past this point, then it can no longer be considered a case of good faith investigation. But honestly, I think her character would be much more interesting if she starts to admit the doubts creeping in compared to what she expected to find.
Ironically, she seems to be written as a "fan" of Khan and enamored of him, as was Marla in Space Seed -- except Space Seed was written in 1967 and they are doing their best to try and show more facets of Marla while making the doctor as agenda driven and favoring Khan as Marla was back 60 years ago. Odd dichotomy of how they seem to be handling the two characters.
Dr. Lear seems to have an agenda driven by concern for Augment descendants like La'an and how they're stigmatized for their ancestry. She may be one herself.
This one took an unexpected twist, with the aliens crashing. But it was a good way to show how Khan and his people behave when faced with outsiders, in contrast to how supportive they are with one another. It's a good reminder of what they were really like.
As for the aliens, I find it highly suspicious that they just happened to be in the system when a planet inexplicably exploded. The odds against that being a coincidence would be literally astronomical. And I'm wondering
if their telepathic powers might turn out to have something to do with why Starfleet seemed to forget about Ceti Alpha V and how many planets were in the system.
Incidentally, this is of no relevance to anyone but myself, but I finally decided to open YouTube in my phone browser so I could listen on headphones while I washed the dishes, without having to put up with the multiple commercial breaks they have on Audible. But since the browser treated it as video rather than audio, it stopped playing if I blanked the screen, so I had to leave the screen active in my pocket, which must have drained the battery faster. Though it only cost me about 8 or 9% charge, as it turned out.
But since the browser treated it as video rather than audio, it stopped playing if I blanked the screen, so I had to leave the screen active in my pocket, which must have drained the battery faster. Though it only cost me about 8 or 9% charge, as it turned out.
I run into this annoyance all the time - I use my phone as a listening device at a work that has an 'employees off their phone during work hours' policy. So it is both very awkward and somewhat frustrating to try and find ways to keep the screen active and the phone within Bluetooth range of my headphones without looking like I'm just watching videos on my phone, since I really am just using it for the audio!
I think this is where YouTube tries to upsell you to premium - it looks like that version of the app may stay open even when the screen is off.
This was the first episode where the dialogue fell into "radio writing," with characters narrating what was happening in the battle -- "My gun is coming apart!" and things like that. I guess it's somewhat justified if someone with binoculars is describing what he sees to others, except that Khan was doing it before he was handed binoculars (but I guess he has Superior vision). And maybe it can be justified in the battle scene because there'd be a lot of people spread out and they wouldn't necessarily be in each other's line of sight. Still, it felt a bit forced. I still think they're missing an opportunity to use the framing log entries as a vehicle for narration, the way Star Trek log entries were intended to be used in the first place.
This was the first episode where the dialogue fell into "radio writing," with characters narrating what was happening in the battle -- "My gun is coming apart!" and things like that.
I was having trouble telling if the guns were *really* breaking from some kind of telekinetic power, or if the aliens were just making them *think* they were. (Didn't one of the augments at one point say their weapon was "melting"?) Was this definitively addressed? I don't think so, but I might have missed it. That scene was pretty chaotic and hard to follow.
The possibility that it was all in their minds did occur to me. If not, this could represent a catastrophic loss of resources in terms of weapons as the dying planet's predators grow more hostile...
