Another comedy episode? You know what, if that’s what SNW is, a comedy series, maybe it doesn’t bother me. If I lower my expectations and just lean right into it, the fact that we have a slightly lower rate of “serious” episodes is fine. Maybe if I keep repeating that to myself I’ll start to believe it.

The whole episode was fun, taken as a series of “what if” vignettes, and I did enjoy it, but it is lacking that spark that makes Star Trek great.

The plot setup is totally contrived, and I am a bit miffed that we missed out on a “how can we avoid breaking the prime directive” episode. And it does seem a bit like a rehash of the episode we already had with spock. As fun as it was to see the other actors do the whole “I’m a different person for an episode” episode. I have no idea why their hairstyles changed so suddenly but I love it anyway. Especially Pike’s JoJo’s-Bizarre-Adventure hair.

This is purely my personal preference - I really am not a fan of montage scenes set to songs in TV episodes in general. So the marching scene at the start just felt awkward to me. Not very trek. I don’t mind this kind of thing so much in films, or in “musical” episodes, but it didn’t really click for me here. It does fit a bit better when I realised this was going to be a comedy episode.

Patton oswalt was great here. For a moment I wondered if the storyline they were going to go for was that Una had been mind-melded into falling for Doug, as a b-plot to mirror what happened with Uhura/Beto. It seems very easy to basically date-rape-drug humans for a vulcan to take advantage of them. I feel like this story idea merits deeper exploration. As it is, we never really get an explanation other than “they’re really into each other”, which is fine I suppose.

All of the new vulcans being mean to spock contrasting with what must be the only vulcan there, Doug, who is envious was an interesting choice but never goes anywhere. Doug never gets a chance to chastise them on their bullying, and I am sure he would have been able to derive a punishingly logical reason why bullying is bad.

The writing completely skipped over the mind melds and catra explorations into 3 of the 4 characters. What did they talk to spock about? How much of a push did Pike need to realise he was hurting his crew? How did uhura initially react when she realised she had brainwashed someone with the intent to further a relationship with them? How did chapel come to terms with the fact that she’ll have to give up her science experiments? This all would have helped to develop the characters. And in the one we did see, given how driven La’an was to become a mirror universe character, I don’t understand how a dream sequence dance with spock was enough to change her mind. Maybe there are some visual metaphors in the direction I’m missing. Or maybe it was literal and Spock dream danced with Pike to change him back too!

Some stand out scenes with Kirk and Scotty. Also Batel speaking out against power, challenging perceptions, and then getting recognition and a job offer all while struggling with a new medical disability. That was a nice outcome.

I really did not enjoy this one.

The “documentary” that ends up being made feels like the worst kind of propaganda that tries to feign a sense of “there’s two sides to every argument”, all while clearly pushing in favour of the agenda the documentary initially tried to critique anyway. It felt at moments like a military recruitment advertisement. I would not choose to watch such a documentary in real life, and watching it within a star trek episode just feels like I’ve wasted my time.

The writing makes use of the idea of military censorship and a film that jump cuts around to not so cleverly hide the fact that the writers are missing a plot. We are presented with a people in conflict, who abuse a creature to create a weapon. We have no other information about the conflict, beyond “there’s mass casualties”. No explanation of why starfleet is involved beyond “starfleet is here to help”. No explanation why they chose to make that kind of weapon in particular. On the matter of the alien war we are left to fill the gaps ourselves entirely, and because our in-universe director is acting in the role of an unreliable narrator, we have no idea if any of what ended up in the film they ended up making can even be trusted. That FOIA disclaimer at the start could be just as real as those films that say “based on a true story” when they are anything but.

We did get some good character development, particularly with Ortegas finally being up front and open about what she’s been through recently. But not really enough for it to feel like it matters. Ditto Uhura and Spock. Furthermore, despite self-harm and suicide being a central theme of the episode, other than an incredibly brief argument with the alien scientists about whether thier victim should be allowed to commit suicide, it’s not really debated. The crew just accept that they need to do an assisted suicide, and that’s that. Fair enough, if that’s how human morals work centuries from now, but then it leads again to an episode without a useful plot. For contrast, multiple past star trek series have had their take on this topic and done a much better job.

After watching this I am left unsure what wider contribution this episode is meant to make to the series. For all the silliness of the comedy episodes, at least they were entertaining to watch and usually had at least one major plot development by the end. This one could have been cut from the season roster and nothing would have been lost.

Random assorted notes:

• The decoded alien vocalisations kind of sounded like whalesong to me. Perfect opportunity for some cetecean ops, right? nope.
• Beto is shown to be incredibly manipulative, especially with recording people who don’t want to be recorded. Why on earth is he not in the brig?
• Many times in the episode the direction attempts to foreshadow someone dying. I thought for a moment the writers were going to be brave and kill off someone in the crew. Particularly when chapel and spock are stretchered in with uhura standing there in shock. Nope, it’s the random alien of the week instead.
• The alien visuals, both the CG and prosthetics were very nice. I like the idea of a species that, like some animals on earth, begins life underwater and then metamorphoses into something that lives in a completely different environment out of water. That was possibly the only highlight of the episode for me.

Looking forward to the next one, it can’t possibly be worse than this.

I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.

I was convinced up until the reveal that the “alien” was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I’m not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they’re all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn’t go down well for me. It’s a generational ship, none of the original “good guys” were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they’ve killed.

The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn’t need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They’re all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk’s captain literally is not a human.

The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut’s perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.

Random other thoughts:

• Getting to see more of Scotty is really nice, especially his acerbic dialogue.
• Doctor M’benga, head medical officer, warzone survivor, having little screentime other than running phone cables and joysticks around is funny.
• Ortegas getting a light scolding for being a wee bit suicidal is all we got for her ongoing sub-plot.
• La’an has shown a previous liking for Kirk, but we didn’t really have a chance to explore what her new thing with Spock means for that.
• I hope the transporter buffer wasn’t affected by all this now that it’s holding a literal horror from beyond in it

Given it’s been established the only person who can really help control Batel is Spock, and he is incommunicado for the whole episode, both Batel and Gamble should have been in confinement as soon as possible.

The auto-red alerts did stick out a bit, but it kind of makes sense. The computer knows where everyone is and what they usually do, and behaviour-based intrusion detection systems are starting to become normal cybersecurity concepts even today.

The story is reminiscent of more classic trek - away mission, something goes wrong, and the crew have to fix it. There was a lot of classic science fantasy tropes in here - right from the start with the blood magic to open the prison up. When immortality was first mentioned, my immediate thought was that immortality would involve consciousness transfer into another being, and we kind of got that, but not from the immortal beings themselves and instead from others that snuck in through the gaps in between dimensions. I guess these creatures are some sort of lovecraftian indescribable horrors. Seeing how Pelia and Batel both reacted to them suggests there is some shared history amongst many of the species that now exist, and that they all know instinctively to fear them.

They killed off a named character (F for Gamble), which is surprising, but definitely raises the stakes for the rest of the show. I was really not expecting that, and getting such in your face gore (pardon the expression) was quite a lot to take in. The evil doesn’t really seem quite well contained in the pattern buffer, and I hope the crew notice this pretty quickly. If it’s messing with the computer system, if it can quantum phase itself around any barriers, it should be obvious fairly quickly something isn’t right. And the pattern buffer has shown that it can’t keep stuff stable forever without continually re-materialising it, which seems like a really bad idea, so that needs dealing with.

Amongst the characters, Spock really shines out here as the voice of reason. If they had listened to him in the first place this whole thing could have been avoided. While I get where the archaeologists amongst the team were coming from, they should have been overruled, and Spock’s only flaw here was not putting his foot down. As security, La’an should have pushed behind him on this, and chapel shouldn’t have let her desire to explore cloud her judgement.

On sets: Nothing beats a good quarry, love to see that. I really like the exterior and background visuals within the prison - reminds me of the videogame manifold garden (highly recommended if you like first person puzzlers). However, I did feel that the physicality of the room (or just floor) they were on made it very obvious it was a set. The background visuals felt detached from the area where the away team were standing and, backgrounds aside, was too bland for my liking. I think it is a pity we didn’t get to explore more because some parts, especially the exterior and the life form they found, had a really cool design.

The directing was good. It was tense, it captured the confusion in the prison well. The chaos on the ship was exciting and felt like there was a risk of real damage. My only major nitpick was it made it very obvious when the evil was first making it’s presence known. I don’t know if this was an attempt to capture the fact that the evil was there all along and it could choose when to appear, or if it was just trying to signal to the audience “hey, right now something’s not right”, but I would have preferred if it had been more subtle and let us try to figure out what was going on.

Great episode. With an episode like that I can see why they wanted to add some extra comedy ones around it, but I hope there are more like this. Though I could do without the eye gore, in future.

This is a great site. Trying to break it is fun. It’s possible to make a long neck giraffe ship with a giant cowcatcher on the front.

Aside: This is the first time I’ve ever seen a site ask for cookie consent via a submission box. Annoying. At least in EU if the cookies are purely functional, as seems to be the case here, you don’t need to ask permission and you can just notify when the user is about to save to local storage.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot while I’ve been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.

They do have the odd one-off “fun” episode in DS9 - this past week was “Our Man Bashir” which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren’t really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.

When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that’s much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock’s vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that’s about the extent of it at the moment.

And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there’s missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn’t even really there, so that’s a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La’ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.

I wasn’t expecting another “fun” episode. I enjoyed it. The campy awfulness of the old TV set design and costumes was spot on.

Spock-La’an works well, I want to see more of it. It’s difficult to find a lot of plot progress in comedy eps, but pushing their relationship forward a bit is nice. I really hope it goes somewhere meaningful, but this being a prequel, I guess just how far it could go is limited, unless they’re willing to diverge off canon.

Hollywood AR walls don’t hold anything against a holodeck, but we’re getting there. It’s cases like this that make me think I wouldn’t enjoy one for real though, I’d just spend all my time getting paranoid. And did La’an get permission from everyone to use their patterns?

This earlier holodeck is lacking in any kind of true failsafe and is relying on the simulation program alone to not hurt people. Later on the enterprise, they never really figured that out. Scotty should have wrote his notes on safety much bigger than footnotes.

The writing staff must have been using this episode to vent their frustrations of the TV industry. When they were writing it, I wonder if they knew yet they had a confirmed 5 seasons, or if this was written during a hiatus.

I guess the takeaway message from this episode is “you can always rely on those around you”. Except when they’re holographic murder simulations, then all bets are off.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn’t mention steam or valve. I don’t know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they’ve explained it very badly.

What happens when anti-porn organisations like Collective Shout go after the currency exchanges?

Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on. I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.

This could have been a bottle episode and might have been better for it. The plant was a macguffin that could have been anything. A molecule on some random asteroid could have served the same purpose and allowed the plot to continue mostly unchanged.

Maybe without the zombies that would have given more time for focusing on discussion around what the characters are feeling - More of ortega’s struggle; something better than spock’s mind meld which seems to serve as nothing more than foreshadowing for something that’s going to be said out loud a few minutes later anyway.

If the writers were going to use zombies in a story, then they should actually use them as part of the plot.

This was an ok episode. Very character focused rather than sci-fi.

Everyone should recognise what is happening with ortegas, they really shouldn’t be letting her do anything until its figured out, nevermind chain of command training. There must be something seriously wrong with starfleet’s psych evals if she had one and they didn’t spot this.

Last week I did wonder if the Gorn DNA was going to cause problems, and here we are going to get a… hybridisation of some sort. I wonder where this is going to go - hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went. We know Pike must suffer, and I wonder if he is going to have to deal with losing Batel altogether on top of everything else. I wonder if she is going to have to deal with heightened violent emotions, as the mind meld suggested, and end up having to be “dealt with” in a permanent way.

Zombies. M’benga’s “don’t call them that” was hilarious - Zombies in Star Trek just feels kind of wrong. They were alright, but, it’s zombies. The fact that it came from genetic modification with plants reminds me a bit of Cordyceps which has featured in many other zombie stories. Something that did bug me is M’benga is a medical doctor, and the best mask he could bring was some sort of fabric wrap? Do they not have surgical masks or M95 masks in the future? I wondered if the story could have been about saving the infected, maybe a “do I have to make the choice of cutting off this limb to save someone” moral quandry. The closest we got to that was the klingon that got bit and immediately vaporised. Zombies were kind of just set dressing / a mechanic to keep the characters moving forwards.

A running theme in this episode seems to be the characters falling out of their comfort zones. For all but Scotty, this seems to leave them worse off than when they started. It’s good to see him slowly making progress after being thrown in the deep end.

Misc notes:

• The gravity loss shot was very nicely done.
• For all that I didn’t like the zombies I did like their design. There was one bit where one got stepped on the head and it slowly deflated, like it was made of plant material.
• With all the AR wall stuff, I liked the actors having some set they could really interact with.
• The viewscreen has a “rear view mirror” display :) why isn’t that always visible in the corner?

My point was that brave’s solution, like Signal’s, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don’t want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.

They haven’t blocked the windows feature, they’re using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.

My theory - M’benga’s daughter had a degenerative disease and her pattern was stable enough to put into the buffer.

But Batel’s problem is she has loads of living Gorn inside her, and so has Gorn DNA in very close proximity to her own. At one point they even say they’re co-dependent on each other. They probably didn’t want to end up with a “The Fly”/Tuvix situation.

This was a good mix to start with - a serious episode and a fun silly one.

The first acts as a really good introduction for Scotty, giving him a chance to build up his character with some insurmountable engineering problems that, with some coaching, he surmounts. The second is a nice way to round off Spock and Chapel’s relationship, poking fun at the mess that following the canon has left us in, using Trelane as a stand-in for the fans.

various thoughts on the plot:

• Ortegas seems to have been left with a bit of trauma, being part digested will do that to you I guess. Hopefully La’an will spot this and help out.
• Una mentions a “couple of litres” of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because “a couple of litres” is a lot.
• Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language. It gives me a headache and I have to close my eyes whenever they do this. There were quite a few instances of roll in the first episode that were a bit too much for me.
• John de Lancie and Rhys Darby make the perfect duo for these characters.
• Scotty mentions not drinking, but ends up having to take some when he eats something dodgy at the batchelor party. Previously (later?) Scotty has been shown to be a fan of drink, I guess now it’s canon that had there not been alien interference, he may have always been teetotal.
• While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars. Then, at the end of the episode when the ship has been suspended between the stars for a long time, no real mention is made of this. I guess the blood infusions and operations just kind of negated all that? Feels like Chekov’s gun got loaded and then forgotten about.

I take issue with this article using the language “lagging behind in the use of generative AI”. That language seems to imply there is something wrong in this behaviour.

Netflix’s short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that’s a problem.

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem