this week’s SNW really was the biggest continuity clusterfuck they’ve ever pulled lol
like throughout the show little things like april being black, hansen being bald/arabic, m’benga having a different accent, the balance of terror episode not even attempting to look like it takes place during balance of terror aesthetically, the klingons looking like TNG klingons presumably not to have people walking around in weird fu manchu blackface, all these sort of add up to something like “this is the HD version of what happened” and are mostly simple production things that give them room to tell their own stories but man they really REALLY went wild on this episode.
so let me get this straight: it really seems like in order to not set this episode in the 1990s (or the 1980s) because they do not have that kind of budget(?), they made a plot where so many time travellers were trying to kill khan to either baby hitler him or stop the chain of events that led to ww3 and cochrane creating warp, that now the eugenics wars timeline has been pushed up to something like “the present”. literally saying out loud that it was supposed to happen in 1992 but “fate” just reasserted itself. which i guess something happened “after” the events of picard which definitely doubled down on them happening in the 90s and sort of played with the term “eugenics wars” by making them like “iraq wars” i suppose. IN ADDITION this attempted nuclear destruction of toronto/assassination of lil’ khan is only the latest terror attack done by the romulans who have been hiding on earth and maybe killed JFK and did fucking chernobyl and 9/11? absolutely batshit. makes enterprise’s lizard nazis or “roswell was quark” look quaint. I mean they don’t directly say they did these things but the undercover romulan chick saying “Everything I told you was true” really gets right up on the very razor’s edge of implying the craziest shit in the world
like i can’t even think about the actual narrative of la’an falling in love with kirk or character dynamics or anything else because now i am trying to calcuate every aspect of the star trek timeline. i guess there is room to say that one of the many factions of timecops “fixed” things and set the eugenics wars back in the 90s. i commend them for at least hiring a south asian actor to play baby khan after the cumberbatch debacle lol
so theoretically on present day 2023 earth (before the construction of the new lake ontario bridge) there are temporal agents from the 31st century who are fighting a shadow war throughout time, there are probably guys from the 29th century time commission from voyager (which i assume the timecops from this episode work for) there’s gary seven and wil wheaton and all those american doctor who weirdoes, there are immortal lanthanites, there are hidden romulan spies, there are probably still those weird vulcans from carbon creek, there’s guinan and maybe more el-aurians ??? this shit is wild man
It’s absolutely buckwild that teen me watching enterprise thinking “I wonder if this temporal cold war stuff will ever be used to explain how the 90s didn’t have the eugenics wars because 'the timeline was changed” is apparently now the explanation.
Okay I ended up liking that one a lot for the La’an / Kirk stuff, but that scene outside of Khan’s room, man, where the Romulette infodumps everything then dies… not the strongest part of the ep.
Much like M’Benga’s Fight Juice™, that whole time travel story was pretty dumb, but I enjoyed it, because the character work was good and the actors sold it.
This episode was basically a very well-done Lifetime Original Movie starring Kirk and La’an, but I just loved that.
There was this scene where La’an checks in on Kirk on the couch, and a weaker read of Kirk would’ve had him follow her to her bed. I like that Kirk earned that romance over the entire episode. It’s something that TOS of course never was able to pull off, since every love interest of his instantly fell for him the moment her cheesecloth-ass saw him.
The time travel plot was remarkably fumbling and dumb, and I almost can’t think of any reason it needed to happen at all. The main thing I liked about it was how fucked-up Kirk’s timeline was, felt pretty TOS.
I finished DS9 season 2 last night. Pretty menacing the way those guys from the other side of the wormhole can easily get around all of their technology. It might seem even more threatening if I didn’t know that there were a bunch of seasons yet to come so obviously they find some way to deal with the situation.
I randomly learned a couple weeks ago that the actor who plays Nog died a few years back. I can’t help thinking of that during his scenes, and although I watch old movies with long-dead actors all the time, somehow this one feels a little odd. I guess because he’s young in the show, which feels timeless in some ways.
Also, I like how spare and melancholy the show’s intro is. Did you know there’s a full version of the theme song?
unsure where it came from, but sure it came from something. but my brain goes “it is a wound that never heals” over and over as the lyrics for the opening, except for during the slow contemplative part of the song, which is “we are alone and discarded”
watched “The Cage” again to get context for the latest Strange New Worlds and boy it sure is wild to hear original Pike say he “can’t get used to having a woman on the bridge” after watching multiple seasons of cute dad neo-Pike on a majority female enterprise
After the cage I decided to watch the DISCO episode where they go back to talos and see vina and the brain gang and then the menagerie 1 and 2 so i guess i watched what memory alpha describs as “The Talosian arc” although it’s funny that because of the weird non-chrononlogicall production you can “insert” episodes into arcs
the discovery episode definitely helps with why pike would still have such a strong emotional connection with vina. just a second little emotional moment really does help
the larger project of spock on the new shows really does explain why spock was willing to go so far as to lie and hijack the ship and everything. “the loyalty” they mention is has retroactively been earned just by being a tv show basically
SNW is shot so normally by comparison that i forgot how batshit discovery looked: everyone in giant depressing underlit rooms with space god rays and the camera swooping and flooping like wild. what a weird show.
hearing them describe orion slave girls as “animal women” in the cage and the menagerie is so fucked up lol. i gotta hand it to enterprise for inventing the whole orion women are pirate masterminds thing. it’s not great but at least it’s not that
It’s interesting how the few scraps of info about Pike from the cage “he has horses, is from mojave, is handsome and decisive” are expanded on in the future series
the franchise convention that Starfleet does not use security cameras makes the fact that the Talosians just send them an entire fully edited episode of Star Trek even funnier
For a while, before they doubled down on definitely making the cage canon on DISCO, I assumed that the menagerie re-edit where they use the footage of the pike clone to play actual pike was a new canon but nope the scene just happens the exact same way twice.
interesting to imagine what the 1960s version of zac ngyuen would have looked like
also would have been nice if in the pictures of the dead rigel vii crew on SNW they were wearing the uniform sweaters but again they don’t really care about those kinda details so whatever
the kalar on the cage is a real ass cartoon caveman with growling noises they really toned them down on SNW
man kirk really falls in love with leonardo da vinci’s android daughterwife so fast in requiem for methuselah, the whole episode is about a race to beat a deadly plague aboard the ship and he’s just down here getting fucking middle school horny risking the whole mission because he does not have the self control not to make out with a chick for 2 hours. TOS is so wild.
i always think about i think one of the first episodes of tos where they go to that planet and mccoys ex gf is there, NANCY CRATER, and like teh second she transports onto the ship shes in like soft focus and theyre all stretching their pants out for her. And then it turns out shes been replaced by an alien that turns men into pillars of salt or sucks the salt out of their dicks or something and they’re all bummed out about it
