• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x04 - "Memento Mori"

Hit it!


  • Total voters
    219
And as @Noname Given has repeatedly pointed out the Gorn seemed to have extensive knowledge on the Cestus III outpost, the Enterprise and both sets of crews and lured Kirk and his officers there with a very clever false signal. The Gorn had obviously been compiling information on the Federation for a while and this just happened to be the first official face-to-face between a starship commander and a Gorn.
 
Biggest problem with the effects was scale, I think.

The black hole looked comically small.
So it must have been on the smallest scale a black hole can be.
It was in the process of consuming a brown dwarf, which accounts for the accretion disc.
Can someone give an estimate how fast the matter in the disc would be swirling around the BH and how dense the disc must be?
It‘s not the gravity that would endanger the ship, it would be high energy particle bombardment of ultra hot gas at close to light speed, I think.
Black holes can be microscopic according to current theory, so I'm not seeing a problem. Not every black hole they encounter needs to be a galaxy gobbler.
 
Remember when Archer kept teasing T'Pol about her micro-singularity theory? That they existed and Vulcans used them as convenient explanations for certain stellar phenomenon?
 
Tradition and nature are different animals. Traditions are adopted, and can be ignored, dropped, or changed over time. Human nature (or Gorn nature) is what it is, and could only be changed over a long, evolutionary process.
We're led to believe that Gorn can change after Arena.
 
This was a 10 for me. Which is rare.

If not for the repressed memory light morse code bit, it would have been a Spinal Tap 11.

Great space battle stuff. Submarine battle stuff conjuring Balance of Terror & TWOK. And others. And they got the black hole science stuff correct, that ain't made up tech-no-babble.

We already have more chatacter development here than non-Burnham/Lorca chatacters got in DISCO S1 combined. Pike, Uhura, Una, La'An, and M'Benga have all gotten tome to be flushed out. Hemmer & Ortegas a bit.

Thought the rememberence day thing was cool.
 
I really liked this ep. I am a sucker for an interesting space battle, especially when they make it like a submarine battle. There was good tension and some good character moments. I liked the scenes with Hemmer and Uhura. And I appreciate that Pike and the crew found creative solutions to survive rather than some cheap technobabble solution. I also really like that the show is making the Gorn into a legit, menacing threat. We never see a Gorn which makes them even more terrifying.

A page from Jaws and Alien.
 
Given what we saw in this episode, the Gorn captain was probably killed for his weakness after returning to his ship.
But if peace was not eventually achieved, why is there later a baseball team on Cestus III? Now that can either be peace achieved through understanding and forgiveness, or via the Federation decimating them in war. I hope it's the former.
 
We're actually not. No mention is ever made of the Gorn changing their ways- only that the Metrons recognized the peaceful evolution of mankind. For all we know, the Gorn remained complete bastards and had to be fought to a standstill in the post-TMP era. :evil:
And aside from the TAS episode "Time Trap", we never really see or hear anything about the Gorn during the TOS era again. (and in that episode you could explain the fact that they are working with every other race there because everyone is trapped oh, and the episode makes a point of saying that aliens who were enemies for decades are working together in that pocket dimension.)

And this is very non-canonical; but in Star Trek Online (a PC game/MMORPG), the Gorn Homeworld was conquered by, and as a result the Gorn are now part of the Klingon Empire, and our enemies of the Federation at the start of the game where there is a war between the Klingons and the Federation.:crazy::shrug:;)

So no not every post TOS S1 - "Arena" source agrees with the idea that after that incident, the Federation and the Gorn solved their differences diplomatically, or became tacit allies of each other.:angel:
 
Fantastic episode. Best of the series to date.

Loved the little exchange between Pike and Spock after he ordered the bulkhead closed.

can’t quite go 10 but 9 seems right. There are just too many little nitpicks for me to go that high.

I am still not a fan of Chapel. I dunno why. I don’t want the docile, always pining for Spock version but this version…eh.

If Hemmer is a super telepath, couldn’t he have just mind controlled Uhura (with permission) to get the job done?
 
I really liked this episode. I give it a 9.

SNW is 4 for 4 so far in terms of good/great episodes. It blows my mind that SNW can succeed so well and consistently right out of the gate but neither DIS or PIC can manage similarly after having much more "shakedown" time.

It did have a few missteps for me:
- Reference to debunked pseudoscience as I mentioned earlier
- Sloppy handling of translation of Gorn language by La'an's bro
- Sparks on the bridge again and shield percentages
- Gorn ship design is not very interesting
- Etc.

But nothing that really detracts from the enjoyment.
I really liked the Gorn ship. Thought it was cool and different. Like how the Borg ship from "Descent" or the Breen ships were non-symmetrical (and the Breen ships, while cool, always looked a little low-res/massless CGI to me) and different.

Now I am looking forward to seeing a conflict between Gorn and Tholian ships.

As for nitpicks, the two I had (in addition to the sloppy Morse code thing - why couldn't La'an just have remembered a communications frequency they had discovered when she was a kid and then just piggybacked on that instead of some silly Morse code equivalent?) were:

- they shouldn't have been worried about losing atmosphere to the brown dwarf, they should have been worried about high-pressure atmosphere flooding the ship and crushing everyone (Voyager actually got this one right the time they were hiding in a nebula, I think it was in "Year of Hell". So score one for the science advisor on VOY.).

- The Gorn ship shouldn't have been crushed the way it was. Each of the three arms should have been individually been crushed to smaller diameters rather than being crushed collectively inward toward the center of the ship. I have noticed other "graphical" errors in other episodes - the graphics department is doing a great job overall, but I guess occasionally it is hard to get the physics right or difficult to match to the live action dialog. One example, in "Children of the Comet", there were a couple of moments where the Enterprise was supposed to be retreating, or the Shepherds were supposed to be retreating, or the Enterprise was supposed to be far from the comet, etc., but when the cut to the external view, it didn't at all match with the dialog. Minor stuff, but annoying in otherwise great sequences.
 
Feels like Star Trek, feels like Star Trek, is Star Trek.


But Nurse Chapel "It's like giving birth out your mouth". Totally different character to the soft, mild speaking one in TOS.
 
Another excellent ep. They're 4 for 4 as far as I'm concerned.

The husband drifted downstairs and watched with me. He LIKED it. This is the man who has said for decades "Trek is dead."

Tonight he said, "Trek is NOT dead."

He liked original Trek and a little of TNG but that was it.
 
Gave it a 10. Solid starship porn was a big plus. Good story. Tactical away team actually seemed proficient. Nice to see everyone wearing armor and carrying rifles. An explanation of how the civilians ended up on the cargo ship would have been nice. While I understand the Gorn wanted to use bait, seemed like kind of a waste. Maybe that’s why they used the hologram trick in TOS.
 
Quite liked this episode.
For those worrying about showing a gorn, they pulled it off nicely without doing so
Pike and Spock has a terrific synergy
And with nothing but a knowing smile I enjoy the humanity shown by M’benga more and more each week
I love Hemmer, phenomenal actor and he’s grow into a character alive felt I’ve known for years in the short time we’ve seen him
Misc:
Maybe we’ll get that refit many of us want
The music is muted and weak, sounds like it was done on a Casio, please hire a new artist to score this show. Thus far the music to me has been the weakest part of the,show
Uhura dialogue was cringy, took me out of what was a nice pivotal crucial scene, please please please don’t turn her into the resident annoying Gen Y character. Like the actor, really liked her in children of the comet. This episode thought she was going to make a tic tok video
Ship is way bigger than reported. Cargo bay was cavernous
 
Ugh, l I have read everyone else’s opinion on this episode this morning, I think that I must have watched a totally different episode to everyone else!? :guffaw:
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top