Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x09 - "Terrarium"

[JonnyQuest037]

I was gonna give it a 9 for some of the things you list...but then a Metron appears. Is this bad writing or an attempt to repair TOS continuity? I haven't decided yet.

It's not TOS continuity that needed repairing. It's SNW that's failed to jibe with a single standalone episode from 1967. There was no continuity snarl until SNW decided to take the Gorn in a different direction.

Like Dr Who?

No, even Doctor Who hasn't been running continuously since it premiered. It originally ran from 1963–1989, and then was revived in 2005. So it was off the air for 16 years of its existence, outside of one TV movie in the 1990s.

 

[TRON JA307020]

People aren't questioning that she fired, but rather why the writers chose to have the entire security team's phasers set to kill. Obviously La'an panic-firing wouldn't have mattered if the phasers were on stun, as is often shown to be standard procedure (and this mission is a textbook example of why).

The answer is that the writers really wanted the Gorn to die by La'an's hand because a) it's a dramatic ending and b) so the Metron could sneer at humans for being violent and thus get the "we hope somebody passes our test in the future, wink wink" reference to Arena in there.

Quite right Starflight. They wanted that moment that goes to the arena in the future. They want to say they did it first and the arena is a follow up. Tired of them trampling on tos and trying to outdo the tos original stuff. Its not working. I would watch The Squire of Gothos and The Arena any day over the ones SNW produced.

 

[Trekker4747]

Based on the information she had at the time, what she did was not a mistake. Unfortunate result, sure, but she had a split second to make a decision. It’s also what happens a lot of the time in police shootings.

And we question those and get upset when courts cast them aside.

A few years ago some cops responded to a call about a kid with a gun in a park and the cops literally just pulled up to the kid a shot him, gun was a water pistol.

You can make all of the arguments in the world the cops had "reason to fire" because they saw a gun and couldn't take the time to see it was a toy without risking their lives. We still question this incident because it appears they didn't try anything else.

Now, maybe the show will focus on this in a future episode (I kinda doubt it) if it does and La'An admits her mistake, fine. Right now we question it because anytime someone kills someone we should.

 

[Starflight]

Based on the information she had at the time, what she did was not a mistake. Unfortunate result, sure, but she had a split second to make a decision. It’s also what happens a lot of the time in police shootings.

Again though, the rifle has a stun setting. La'an having the trigger discipline of a disgraced modern-day SWAT officer wouldn't matter if the weapon was set to stun, so the question is why the team's rifles were set to kill. It's not like stun is some weird esoteric bit of hidden lore, it's a core component of the franchise and indicated in some episodes to be standard procedure, so it's natural people would wonder why it's absent without explanation here, and why the security team appear to be doing the opposite of what Starfleet landing parties are typically depicted as doing.

And the problem, for some viewers at least, is that that question has no in-universe answer. Rather than feeling like an organic end to the story, it instead feels like an unfitting convolution created by the writers because they really wanted to get the Metron scene in, and also felt they had to put the toys back in the box to allow the events of Arena to occur.

It's absolutely possible to write a script in which La'an kills the Gorn (either through anger or perceived necessity) that doesn't raise these issues. All the story really needed was some reason as to why the security team would have their weapons set to kill before beaming down (even an incredibly lazy one like "oh, there's some weird probably-actually-Metrons radiation here that's jamming our stun setting, we'll have to set to kill and check our fire" would have gone some way to mitigating it).

 

[Mudd]

Based on the information she had at the time, what she did was not a mistake. Unfortunate result, sure, but she had a split second to make a decision. It’s also what happens a lot of the time in police shootings.

True. I'd call it an error in judgment, though.

 

[Mudd]

It's not TOS continuity that needed repairing.

It does now. And it would require changing about, oh, one line of dialogue in "Arena."

But that would be a bad idea. Better to just shrug it off.