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This week was interesting. I've had some criticisms of Paul Wesley not seeming anything like Shatner's Kirk. It's clear now that this is a deliberate performance choice because Wesley is very capable of playing Shatner's Kirk.
I thought the episode might have been a tad bit too meta. I do like the idea of a proto-holodeck, and I like that it gets indefinitely delayed. My only issue with that is that it took 100 years to solve for it? I figure that would be a fairly big priority, and I feel like Scotty could've solved it if he had enough time.
I haven't seen this week's episode yet, but there was a holodeck of sorts in TAS, so they're not really breaking anything by having one a few years earlier.
As for the swings in tone, TOS had them, too, just not as severe, but watch Balance of Terror (submarine war movie), The Trouble With Tribbles (comedy) and Spectre of the Gun (psychedelic western) and tell me what kind of show it is. I think of SNW as a reaction to DISCO, and maybe an overreaction. SNW was supposed to be episodic, rather then heavily serialized, bright and hopeful rather than dark and grim, and, most of all, fun. It doesn't lean into allegory as much as it probably should to really be a successor to TOS, but I'm happy with it.
I thought the episode might have been a tad bit too meta. I do like the idea of a proto-holodeck, and I like that it gets indefinitely delayed. My only issue with that is that it took 100 years to solve for it? I figure that would be a fairly big priority, and I feel like Scotty could've solved it if he had enough time.
Scotty did solve it, but Pike buried the solution in the file.
You're correct. Complaint withdrawn.
I wrote this review of the musical episode in Season 2:
The musical episode features the Spock/Christine breakup and it happens in a shockingly humiliating and horrific manner for Spock, making a public spectacle of how she is leaving him and leaving Enterprise and didn't even tell him that she was departing until nearly everyone else knew -- except it's not totally Christine's fault.
Christine applied for a fellowship and got in, but held off on telling Spock, wanting to break up with him privately and personally, only to be unexpectedly feted in the crew lounge by friends who were present when she first received the news. She isn't happy about the celebration because there's currently a crisis and she hasn't had a chance to speak with Spock.
Spock sees her and asks why she didn't tell him that she is ending her time on Enterprise and their relationship as well. Christine asks to speak privately, but Spock, needing to trigger a song for more data to resolve the musical security crisis, elects to ask Christine to explain herself in the lounge with a large number of crew present to witness it.
Christine proceeds to belt out a lengthy song with dance accompaniment about how the fellowship is freedom and ambition, and the song indicates that Spock doesn't even factor into Christine's considerations except an afterthought comment about how she wouldn't hesitate to ditch him for a great job. It's not that she contemplated what it would mean to leave him, she flat-out didn't spare him a moment of thought.
Spock been humiliated in front of his shipmates, treated as a joke and an irrelevance in the most insulting fashion possible. He has sacrificed his own dignity and self-esteem to save everyone else's. I've followed Spock's career across TV, movies, novels and comics and I think this is one of the most heroic things Spock ever did. Yes, he died saving the crew in WRATH OF KHAN, but in "Subspace Rhapsody", he has to watch Christine crush every hope he ever had for their romantic relationship in public in a mortifyingly embarrassing display for all to see, and continue face his crewmates after that.
Christine is dismissive and hurtful towards Spock. It's only understandable because the music is making Christine say private things in public, and also because in "Those Old Scientists", where she found out from Boimler that the future Spock will close off his human side, confirming that Christine and Spock's romance has no future.
It's understandable that after that, Christine realized she couldn't let her not-to-last relationship with Spock be a factor in her career decisions. At the same time, due to Christine's withdrawal and silence, and due to Spock refusing to go somewhere private to discuss it (for scientific reasons), Spock is humiliated in full view of the crew happily celebrating how Christine is dumping Spock.
It is a grotesque scene. And without the musical situation where Christine is genuinely not able to moderate and control her emotional expressions and Spock is deliberately triggering them to restore everyone else's privacy, Christine would be a complete monster to behave this way. The musical plot device was essential for making sure there was some outside force to justify otherwise unforgivable behaviour.
It's also quite a moment that really demonstrates why Spock is such an icon and a beloved figure of STAR TREK. He will give up his own dignity to save ours. Spock truly is our friend.
Grizzlor responded with a truly peculiar remark:
Your entire missive on Chapel/Spock was SPOILER rendered moot as a result of the season finale. LOL
Except the season finale... didn't change Chapel and Spock's breakup and merely had a tender moment of rescue for them before Chapel left for her new job.
Season 3 has shown that Spock and Chapel remain broken up. Chapel is seeing someone else now. Spock is seeing someone else now.
So what was Grizzlor talking about... ?
Did Spock have any romantic entanglements in TOS? Because he seems to be quite the player in SNW hah.
Another shift in tone this week, but I think DMD is right about TOS. Even the other series did a bit of that from time to time. And like I said, no matter what the genre, I think the show does a good job.
T'Pring, seen in STRANGE NEW WORLDS, first appeared in "Amok Time" in TOS. "This Side of Paradise" introduces Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland) five years before the first season of TOS (so before "Strange New Worlds") who is said to have told Spock she loved him, but he wouldn't respond to this in any way. He has an intense and romantic interaction with the unnamed Romulan Commander of "The Enterprise Incident" and another with Zarabeth, a prisoner trapped in a 5,000 years in the past ice age on a distant planet in "All Our Yesterdays" whom Spock had to leave to return home. And in the third TREK film, Spock presumably has sex with Saavik as his regenerated body enters the Vulcan mating cycle.
TOS says that Spock's relationship with T'Pring was an arranged marriage and not really a romance, which would explain why Spock didn't simply tell Leila that he was engaged to be married. However, SNW says Spock and T'Pring were a serious relationship; it's possible that when Spock rejected Leila, he revisited his relationship with T'Pring.
However, Spock and Christine dating at all is absolutely not supported by TOS presenting Christine as merely having a crush on Spock that goes nowhere, so we have to take TOS as a previous version of the timeline before the Temporal Cold War pushed the Eugenics Wars closer to Spock's 'present.'
Did Spock have any romantic entanglements in TOS? Because he seems to be quite the player in SNW hah.
Another shift in tone this week, but I think DMD is right about TOS. Even the other series did a bit of that from time to time. And like I said, no matter what the genre, I think the show does a good job.
I just got back from Trek to Vegas. One of the panels included David Gerrold, the writer for, "The Trouble With Tribbles," among other TOS and TAS episodes (and Sliders' "New Gods for Old"). He discussed how he got submitted the outline for Tribbles, hired by Gene L. Coon to write the episode, and generally his career with Trek. One interesting note was that Gene Roddenberry was away during the development and filming of Tribbles. When Roddenberry returned and saw the finished product, he was livid. He did not want a comedic episode of Trek. Ever. He felt comedy would turn Trek in to a kids show. Coon, obviously, disagreed. It directly led to Coon leaving the series.
So it sounds like Roddenberry wouldn't have been too keen on the shifts in tone, either, even though some shifts were present in TOS.
BTW, Gerrold literally wrote the book on how to write for Star Trek. The Trouble With Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek's Most Popular Episode gives the whole story of the episode's development and was cited by several of the writers at the convention as being instrumental in their getting started as writers.
Did Spock have any romantic entanglements in TOS? Because he seems to be quite the player in SNW hah.
T'Pring was his betrothed in TOS. He had a few of romances otherwise. Leila Kalomi in This Side Of Paradise and Zarabeth in All Our Yesterdays come to mind.
Thank you all for your Spock answers. Clearly I need to go back and watch more TOS 
Slider_Quinn21 wrote:Did Spock have any romantic entanglements in TOS? Because he seems to be quite the player in SNW hah.
Another shift in tone this week, but I think DMD is right about TOS. Even the other series did a bit of that from time to time. And like I said, no matter what the genre, I think the show does a good job.
I just got back from Trek to Vegas. One of the panels included David Gerrold, the writer for, "The Trouble With Tribbles," among other TOS and TAS episodes (and Sliders' "New Gods for Old"). He discussed how he got submitted the outline for Tribbles, hired by Gene L. Coon to write the episode, and generally his career with Trek. One interesting note was that Gene Roddenberry was away during the development and filming of Tribbles. When Roddenberry returned and saw the finished product, he was livid. He did not want a comedic episode of Trek. Ever. He felt comedy would turn Trek in to a kids show. Coon, obviously, disagreed. It directly led to Coon leaving the series.
So it sounds like Roddenberry wouldn't have been too keen on the shifts in tone, either, even though some shifts were present in TOS.
BTW, Gerrold literally wrote the book on how to write for Star Trek. The Trouble With Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek's Most Popular Episode gives the whole story of the episode's development and was cited by several of the writers at the convention as being instrumental in their getting started as writers.
Gerrold is a legend as was Gene Coon. Roddenberry was a complete lunatic. His rigid and puritanical views about Trek's future portrayal would have resulted in extinction. Thankfully there were plenty of people around who knew how to write television. Spock, like Kirk, McCoy, and even Scotty, were given several "romantic" stories during the series, because that's how you wrote television. Nimoy was a huge hit with women during the 60s and 70s.
As for SNW, it's an okay show, it's not great. It's almost like a collection of short stories that you assemble into a book and sell it. Ironically, Simon and Shuster did exactly that 30 years ago, and called it Strange New Worlds! I had that book, ha ha. I have yet to get around to the current season, but I've seen some blurbs and whatnot.
The problem Trek has is that they just don't generate many new fans anymore, really haven't in a long, long time. The movies did, but those were obviously separate from the TV stuff. Next Gen, DS9, somewhat Voyager, they not only had Trek diehards watching, they had very large crossover/casual viewers. You can't get that anymore, not with streaming, to the same extent. Trek has buried itself into a corner, where they no longer write stories for the sake of doing science fiction, but have become this bizarre form where they have to follow this Biblical formula whereby characters/canon are the focus. It used to be that canon was kind of used as in-jokes on the newer shows. Often, the studio wouldn't even allow them to broach it. So those writers wrote their own shows and didn't worry about it. Enterprise was the first victim of being shoehorned, and it's only gotten worse.
I don't know that Roddenberry was puritanical. His obsession with the planet Risa is certainly telling.
Ira Steven Behr regarding "Captain's Holiday":
Rick [Berman] says, "You've got to go in to see Gene." So I go in and he's very nice. He says, "I like the idea of the pleasure planet and I want it to be a place where you see women fondling and kissing other women, and men hugging and holding hands and kissing, and we can imply that they're having sex in the background." Huh, really?! I'm going,
"Oh, man, I'm in the freakin' Twilight Zone." I go back to Rick. He goes, "Pft, pay no attention to that, just get the captain laid."
I guess the rest is fair. It is true that TREK is all too often, aside from the feature films, playing to the existing audience, not a general audience. And that audience ages and dies.
So one thing I really liked about the Orville and I think has been affected some with New Trek...is the idea that these are real-life people on these starships. They get drunk sometimes. They show up to work late sometimes. They worry about things and mess up and they joke around.
I think Gene's vision of humanity is sometimes too much. I think it's a wonderful aspiration, but the humans in the show don't always feel human. I don't know if Roddenberry would love where Trek is now, but it just feels like these guys are more rounded now. Not as flawed as they were on the Orville, but not as Vulcan either.
One of my friends talked about giving up on Strange New Worlds because he thought the show was too hard on Spock.
I do feel like Spock gets the short end of a lot of things. He's constantly being teased or transformed or heartbroken or whatever. I think we sometimes ignore the emotional damage that things would cause when they happen to Spock because he always bounces back. But, man, if he was a human, this show could be downright depressing for Spock.
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I know it will never ever ever happen, but I would really love either a full season with Kirk in charge or a second spin-off with Kirk in charge or a Paramount Plus movie with Kirk in charge. I think we've never really seen in Trek an established ship adjust to a new captain. Not like Voyager where the whole crew is new to each other, but a crew that already works together well adjusting to a new voice. And I think Paul Wesley is really really good in the role, and I'd love to see more of him. He adds something to every episode he's in, and I think that's why they loop him in whenever possible.
I don't want to lose Pike, but seeing Kirk take command and having him earn over the crew would be really interesting television, I think.
I know they've pitched a spinoff that would basically be Kirk's Enterprise pre-TOS. Rumors are that Skydance is going to let Kurtzman's contract expire, end all the currently running or in-production Trek, and start over in a few years. Who knows if that's true, but it would explain cancelling SNW, cancelling Lower Decks and Academy's rushed 2nd season.
EDIT: and for the record, I though Four and a Half Vulcans was the series worst episode to date.
EDIT: and for the record, I though Four and a Half Vulcans was the series worst episode to date.
I've seen a lot of this sentiment. I think the episode was entertaining, but I think there were a lot of issues with it. I think the issue mainly goes to the idea that the writers and/or the cast had a fun idea, but they didn't really think through some of the issues. And in an attempt to get an idea they liked on screen, they (pun intended) made the episode illogical.
The whole premise was a little flawed. So they needed Vulcans to do the repair work, but Spock is the only Vulcan on board the Enterprise? I know there aren't a ton of Vulcans in Starfleet compared to humans, but no one besides Spock?
Second, they made a joke of the repairs taking hours and then only taking seconds. But if the repairs only took seconds, couldn't Spock have done it by himself? Did it really take five people?
Third, they made some sort of implication that Spock's DNA allowed the converted Vulcans to show Spock-like emotion and logic, but that's done with training, not DNA.
Then there's silly cartoon stuff like Pike's hair changing.
So the question has to be asked - do writers of modern Trek know what Vulcans are supposed to be like, or do they know archetypes? Are these Trek writers or just Sci-Fi writers? I don't really know, but are there signs that these writers revere Trek? Are there easter eggs and references that only true Trek fans would know?
I enjoyed this comedy episode...
But I don't know if I can really support the plot. Isn't the point of Vulcans that they experience emotions so intensely that they have to control them severely or they will hurt themselves and others? Why do all the humans-made-Vulcan have all the emotional control that Vulcans spend years learning from birth to young adulthood?
The question of what Vulcans are supposed to be like really depends on the writer. Spock in the original show is honourable, kind, thoughtful, caring, but has a peculiar and eccentric way of showing it. However, nearly every other Vulcan we meet on the original series is condescending (Sarek), detached (T'Pau) or outright malevolent (T'Pring); there's the sense that Spock is an atypical Vulcan and also half-human. It's hard to say what Vulcans are "supposed to be like" as it's a moving target. Tim Russ' Tuvok was very much of the Spock mold in demeanor, but Russ' performance and the writing (occasionally) added quite an edge: Tuvok was manipulative, sarcastic, a bit ruthless, albeit not very consistently as the writing could be painfully generic.
ENTERPRISE, despite rendering Vulcans as being a lot like Sarek or T'Pau or T'Pring, is often criticized for its (admittedly underwritten) Vulcans in Seasons 1 - 3 and lauded for offering an 'explanation' in Season 4 for why the Vulcans weren't more like Spock, which has also muddied the waters a lot.
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I think the SNW writers are obviously fans. They've taken some liberties like with the Gorn, but the references to Vulcan cuisine (tasteless soup), the explanation for why the Eugenics War has been pushed back, the use of Roger Korby and Trelane, and the details regarding Kirk's son are obviously indicative of deep familiarity with the series even if they're using the Temporal Cold War to justify continuity shifts.
I would also note: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" implies that the reason TOS and SNW continuity don't match up is because the Romulans have, in the Temporal Cold War, repeatedly attempted to erase the United Federation of Planets.
The Federation is the core continuity discrepancy of all the early Season 1 episodes of TOS: the Federation doesn't seem to exist until Season 1, Episode 18. It's only after that point that constant inconsistencies with the era (22nd or 28th century?) and Kirk's employers (United Earth Space Probe Agency, Star Service, Space Command, Spacefleet) seem to solidify into an undated future (later said to be the 23rd century in WRATH OF KHAN) and Starfleet. The fact that the writers chose this one specific target for the Romulan time travellers to explain discrepancies indicates a deep familiarity with the source material.
I think there's a real question about SNW and whether the writers really understand TOS or just know the TOS tropes. There's probably a mix on staff, and Nicholas Meyer wasn't a fan of TOS at all, so it's not a requirement for writing good Trek, but this was an episode where I think it bit them a bit. Except in extreme circumstances, TOS Spock was always in control of his emotions, but was never robotic. Sarek, T'Pau, T'Pring also weren't robotic. Going back to Enterprise, Surak, Soval and T'Poll weren't emotional, but weren't robotic. While I though it was clever to have Pike redo his opening credits voiceover as a Vulcan, it's robotic. Ethan Peck's Spock is often robotic, as were Pike and Chapel.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy the show in general. There are just times when Trek-isms show up on screen rather than Trek. There was a lot of that in the JJ-verse films as well.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the crew's over-the-top behavior as Vulcans can be chalked up to the fact that they didn't grow up with the training true Vulcans get. They're initially overwhelmed by Vulcan emotions when they first transform. Perhaps the extreme personality traits are how they manage to keep those emotions in check.
ENTERPRISE, despite rendering Vulcans as being a lot like Sarek or T'Pau or T'Pring, is often criticized for its (admittedly underwritten) Vulcans in Seasons 1 - 3 and lauded for offering an 'explanation' in Season 4 for why the Vulcans weren't more like Spock, which has also muddied the waters a lot.
Enterprise Season 4 is (I think) the only live action Trek I haven't seen. Help me understand what the explanation was.
ireactions wrote:ENTERPRISE, despite rendering Vulcans as being a lot like Sarek or T'Pau or T'Pring, is often criticized for its (admittedly underwritten) Vulcans in Seasons 1 - 3 and lauded for offering an 'explanation' in Season 4 for why the Vulcans weren't more like Spock, which has also muddied the waters a lot.
Enterprise Season 4 is (I think) the only live action Trek I haven't seen. Help me understand what the explanation was.
I wrote about that two years ago:
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 972#p12972
I don't know that Roddenberry was puritanical. His obsession with the planet Risa is certainly telling.
He was puritanical when it came to his view of what Star Trek should be. His way or the high way, and it often stood entirely in the way of common story telling. If they'd left it up to Gene, the show would have been canceled after one season, and never brought back. Same for TNG. Gene's vision of the future was utopian but also too stringent and unrealistic.
Enterprise Season 4 is (I think) the only live action Trek I haven't seen. Help me understand what the explanation was.
That's funny, because it was probably the first case of Trek fan service, which has come around several times since. I personally enjoyed it, but I think the Enterprise cast were miserable with it. SNW is very very high on fan service.
I really liked the SNW finale. Although, and this is a hugely nitpicky thought, but I didn't like the inclusion of a modern song. Has Trek ever done that?
It's not the first SNW to do it, but I don't recall any other Trek series doing it, unless you count ENT's theme, which I don't as it wasn't used in universe.
There were parts of the finale I liked. Parts that I thought made no sense at all or were, at best, highly improbable.
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I thought Pike getting to live his life with Batel, even it if didn't stick, was a nice touch. Her happening to go through everything necessary to defeat the bad guys through the course of the season was... a choice.
So, didn't we once have BBCode for spoilers?
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