Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x07 - "What Is Starfleet?"

[Nerys Myk]

If I could summarize the message of the episode in a single sentence, it's "The system works." If you look at Star Trek as portraying a more optimistic future, that's completely fine as a message. But if you think of Star Trek as being an allegorical mirror held up to our present, it does come across as a bit icky.

She was hoping for something which was a bit more nuanced ala DS9, which didn't shy away from the dark underbelly of Starfleet. YMMV.

Still don't get the complaint. Not everything needs 0to be a mirror to our times. Sometimes broader themes are at play.

SNW has done dark before, no need for this one to be.

 

[Fateor]

Plus, Jessie Gender lays out clearly how the staging fails the Trek theme.

Maybe, but she's wrong.

The staging was about as star trek as you can get, it's just the way that was presented to us was from biased outside observers perspective instead of the omnipresent third person perspective we're used to.

 

[Trekker4747]

I'm watching Jessie's review now, and I think she's tying real-world stuff too strongly. It's not a mirror.

 

[MarcKyle1964]

Starfleet is a military. It's a very different kind of military from modern ones, but it is a military, nonetheless. This isn't inherently bad. The Federation is definitely NOT militaristic

I always thought that it was a military with a science kink. Like Horatio Hornblower mixed with Darwin.

That was one of the finest hours of Star Trek I’ve ever watched. And I don’t just mean Strange New Worlds. I mean the entire frakking franchise.

This 61-year-old Trekkie (a Trekker for 51 years and counting) firmly believes that the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself would have been proud of this episode. I am confident that “What Is Starfleet” will be showing up in top 10 fan favorite lists in the coming years.

That was magnificent.

Same here for the 61 years here - this ep is definitely rewatchable! I gave it a 10

M*A*S*H* did this documentary format with similar effect.

Liked the one with the clock, too.

I enjoyed Ortegas opening up and M'Benga closing up but the most heartbreaking character piece is Uhura, who is still quite closed off, having lost touch with her one friend from the academy, leaving her with no family except her 'work friends'. I wonder if this is a conscious nod to TOS Uhura - beautiful, intelligent, vivacious, and yet also aloof and alone, with no family or long term relationship outside her job. That's not to say she was unhappy, but it could be an indication of how her early life trauma shaped what she wanted out of life.

An intriguing, well constructed episode. It doesn't score a 10 from me as its emotional impact was light compared to 10s like Best of Both Worlds, Inner Light, the Visitor, Balance of Terror, Subspace Rhapsody, and All Good Things etc. I will give it a 9.

She was the best part in a stellar (pun intended) episode. I can relate to having no family, having been adopted and then disowned. The only people who came to my wedding were our friends and her family.

The entire run of What We Do in the Shadows.

Love that show!

Apologies for the multi quote, but I avoid the threads about specific eps until after I've seen them to avoid spoilers.

 

[Noname Given]

...Considering some of the epic episodes we had back in the Berman era...

- About the only TNG episode people really rave about is The Inner Light which honestly could be considered a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode as the Star Trek part of it is a backdrop and hell, the people who sent the probe hoped the one who was affected by it would go on to teach the rest of the Universe about their now dead culture (since he lived in it for 70 faux years) - but no Picard goes right back to being a Star Fleet Captain and the ONE cultural artifact that they could put in a museum (the Flute) just sits on a shelf in his quarters gathering dust.

IMO DS9 has a couple of contenders with In The Pale Moonlight and The Siege of AR-558

For me - nothing so far has ever topped TOS S1 - The Corbomite Maneuver for really encapsulating everything that's a core concept of the STAR TREK premise in one 50 minute episode.
^^^
That's still (IMO) the best episode of the Star Trek franchise made to date.
(And it was also the first regular episode actually filmed after the two pilot episodes so yeah, they got it right -- right out of the gate.)

 

[Detached Nacelle]

- About the only TNG episode people really rave about is The Inner Light

I daresay it wouldn't be one in my top 10 or probably top 15. In fact I might make the controversial statement and declare it overrated compared to other episodes

 

[saladdays]

- About the only TNG episode people really rave about is The Inner Light which honestly could be considered a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode as the Star Trek part of it is a backdrop and hell, the people who sent the probe hoped the one who was affected by it would go on to teach the rest of the Universe about their now dead culture (since he lived in it for 70 faux years) - but no Picard goes right back to being a Star Fleet Captain and the ONE cultural artifact that they could put in a museum (the Flute) just sits on a shelf in his quarters gathering dust.

Tbf, we don't really know what Picard did with all that information. He could have definitely taught a lot of other people about them. True, it was an abrupt return to captaincy, but TNG never carried over many plot lines to other episodes. The flute, I assume that was a way to tie that episode to Picard even while not mentioning it onscreen. But yeah, you would think it would be in a museum somewhere.

 

[F. King Daniel]

This wasn't bad.... wasn't great, either. It was on the very high end of okay.

Of course my first thought was of the cancer upon Star Trek that is the Axanar fan film, although this smashed that to pieces by being about much more than pewpew battles and Garthwank.

The giant space butterfly looked wonderful. I just wish they went further, and Pike and crew dealt with the space genocide instead of only referencing it.

 

[Mudd]

The giant space butterfly looked wonderful. I just wish they went further, and Pike and crew dealt with the space genocide instead of only referencing it.

How much engagement with the indigenous societies of non-Federation worlds are you advocating?

Don't want to trip over some red line around the Star Trek Vision.™

 

[JonnyQuest037]

5 out of 10, and that's being generous. The documentary format added nothing, the camera shots distractingly called attention to themselves throughout, and the cutting was WAY too frantic. I coud barely follow the story because every shot was screaming, "Look at me! LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEE!!!"

Ortegas' brother is a crap filmmaker.

The pace of the cutting in the final edit is distractingly fast this week.

100%. The interview with Spock starts with Ortegas' brother instructing Spock to look into the camera. There are then SEVEN cuts to new camera angles in the next ten seconds. Spock should've said, "Which camera? There are 12 on me."

A nitpick, but did anyone else just not believe Spock would tell such a vulnerable childhood story in a documentary interview, for public consumption?

Not for a fucking second.

TOS Spock: I'm so private that I won't even reveal my parentage or my engagement to my two best friends until I'm forced to.

SNW Spock: I'll talk to some rando documentary filmmaker about my childhood trauma & let him film me having alone time with my girlfriend.

This Spock is not the later Spock of TOS.

That's for sure. I've long since considered SNW to me an alternate version of the Trek universe rather than a true prequel, and episodes like this just reinforce that interpretation. There is just no way I can believe that this Spock evolves into TOS Spock.

 

[eschaton]

5 out of 10, and that's being generous. The documentary format added nothing, the camera shots distractingly called attention to themselves throughout, and the cutting was WAY too frantic. I coud barely follow the story because every shot was screaming, "Look at me! LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEE!!!"

Ortegas' brother is a crap filmmaker.

As I said upthread, I have a hard time rating this, because I think that this episode did exactly what it set out to do (making a realistic documentary by an inexperienced film school grad), yet the result is often hard to watch.

 

[DaveyNY]

That's kind of my point. I mean who knows if there was originally more to it, but there's not even enough in here to draw any parallels to real-world conflicts. Nor is there a need to make such a reference. The issue is that the info about that war was so vague and lost among all the exposition that I had trouble keeping apart what side we're helping here, and whether they were the winning or the losing side, and what planet we were going to, and so forth. It was at the same time too vague and too convoluted. This aspect of this otherwise excellent episode would have profitted from this conflict having been established earlier.

The conflict really isn't the main point of the episode, there really was no need to delve further into it.

 

[DaveyNY]

I thought it had some good individual scenes but overall was terrible as an episode.

The idea that Spock of all people would casually mention he was a childhood cutter on a TV documentary was a rough start.

I think perhaps that some folks are missing the point that this Spock, is not yet the Spock of TOS and are reading too much into his future personality for this time period.

 

[Fateor]

- About the only TNG episode people really rave about is The Inner Light which honestly could be considered a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode as the Star Trek part of it is a backdrop and hell, the people who sent the probe hoped the one who was affected by it would go on to teach the rest of the Universe about their now dead culture (since he lived in it for 70 faux years) - but no Picard goes right back to being a Star Fleet Captain and the ONE cultural artifact that they could put in a museum (the Flute) just sits on a shelf in his quarters gathering dust.

They had the entire probe and whatever data they could dig out of it.

 

[Firebird]

100%. The interview with Spock starts with Ortegas' brother instructing Spock to look into the camera. There are then SEVEN cuts to new camera angles in the next ten seconds. Spock should've said, "Which camera? There are 12 on me."

That part was just insane. There’s no reason they needed to machine-gun cut between EVERY angle they had available in that moment. Most talking-head interview segments in docs are usually shot with just two cameras, and that’s only done to hide edits when they chop out lulls in the response or bits they don’t need. Seven angles just for one interview is ridiculous.

 

[DaveyNY]

That part was just insane. There’s no reason they needed to machine-gun cut between EVERY angle they had available in that moment. Most talking-head interview segments in docs are usually shot with just two cameras, and that’s only done to hide edits when they chop out lulls in the response or bits they don’t need. Seven angles just for one interview is ridiculous.

Again, as has been pointed out already, it's very apparent that the young creator of this documentary is obviously not proficient at his chosen trade yet.
Which is also a main aspect of the overall episode.
He has let his personal internal agenda, overrule his sensibilities toward creating an acceptable final product.

One could guess that his production supervisor/editor pointed out the multiple problems with what appears to be his first attempt at an important topic for public consumption.

 

[Tuskin38]

Spock mentions that he ran away to the Plain of Blood, which did appear in Enterprise Season 4 as part of the Vulcan Forge.

Which would make that the third time Spock went to the Forge in canon lol. We saw him go there in TAS Yesteryear but he would also visit it a year later.

 

[Firebird]

Again, as has been pointed out already, it's very apparent that the young creator of this documentary is obviously not proficient at his chosen trade yet.
Which is also a main aspect of the overall episode.
He has let his personal internal agenda, overrule his sensibilities toward creating an acceptable final product.

One could guess that his production supervisor/editor pointed out the multiple problems with his first attempt.

Is that the actual aim of the episode, or is that the interpretation to explain away the wonkiness of the final product? I’m not even focusing on the messaging of the story itself. I’m only looking at the way this was physically put together.

 

[Yistaan]

Spock should've said, "Which camera? There are 12 on me."

Well at least we know now how the Federation Council in Star Trek 4 was able to obtain all those dramatic angles and closeups of Kruge's boarding party before they blew up with the Enterprise.

 

[Fateor]

That part was just insane. There’s no reason they needed to machine-gun cut between EVERY angle they had available in that moment. Most talking-head interview segments in docs are usually shot with just two cameras, and that’s only done to hide edits when they chop out lulls in the response or bits they don’t need. Seven angles just for one interview is ridiculous.

There was a reason.

They wanted to make it obvious that Beto was a recent film school graduate who was absolutely not qualified to be doing what he was doing.