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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E05 - "Charades" Episode Discussion
How did you guys feel about this one? There were some funny moments, like T'Pring's dad being shot down by the mom whenever he was enjoying himself. Not a fan of all the teen romance movie stuff that's in the newer Trek shows though.
I love what a silly premise it was. The episodes where the character has to deal with this thing for the duration of the episode and then it’s all solved in an hour is just classic Trek.
This one wasn't my thing at all. Which is a shame because last episode was one of my favorite NuTrek episodes ever. This season in general has been really weirdly anti-Vulcan. Like every Vulcan except for Spock is treated like some asshole because of their culture instead of like, a valuable contributor to whatever is going on. Other Trek series have had this problem, but it just seems consistent here.
I also feel like the writers are overestimating how much people care about the Spock x Chapel romance, I really didn't even remember it was a thing until this episode. The whole plot to this episode was just a mess. Like, okay so we've discovered this entirely new species beyond our comprehension (which can easily communicate with humans, universal translator really showing it's worth there) which inhabits an entirely different dimension, and furthermore we have discovered a portal to said dimension. And what's this fact used for? It's just a plot device to make Spock human and make Chapel admit her feelings about Spock. Like people travel to this new dimension to talk to these new fantastic beings and it's brought up as something of significance only in the last minute of the show. Instead we divert away from this device which could be a really interesting story to focus on... the embarrassing dinner with SO's parents cliché.
Also, I don't mean to be that kind of "well, acktualy" kinda person, but a big development of last season was that we learned the transporter stores people's buffer patterns, right? Could they not just throw Spock into a transporter and energize him back as his regular self? Just a thought.
Just not much happened in an hour long runtime when I feel like there were plenty of opportunities to do something cool with the setup. For this being a show about the Enterprise and exploring strange new worlds; seeking out new life and new civilizations, they really don't spend a lot of time doing that.
I kind of see where you're coming from, but I didn't see T'Pring or her father as assholes. I'm very sympathetic to T'Pring, and I like her. They're certainly playing up cultural differences as an element of Spock's story, but personally, I perceived T'Pring's mother's behavior not as an anti-Vulcan stereotype but as an example of a bigoted relative, something many people have had to deal with, and bigots often use culture as an excuse for their biases.
I did wonder about the buffer patterns. Sometimes you can feel the hand of the writers at work setting things up in a very specific way and for me, this was one of those times. While I liked the episode, the whole "we must get the solution prior to the mind meld" felt like an artificial ticking clock. They've been building up to the Spock-Chapel thing for a while, and I had fun seeing that play out.
I liked this episode, it wasn’t the best but it was fun. I think the show doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is ok. This episode didn’t have much to say, except it explored old-style tv tropes about mothers in law and some immature romance stuff, which is also ok as long as it isn’t every episode.
I do agree the plot had problems and as a sci-fi fan, I also must complain about a few things. First of all, this new civilization that we met: Did I get confused, or wasn’t it on a moon near Vulcan? I’m just not sure because there was something mentioned about it being over a light year away from the Enterprise which was at Vulcan. Anyway, it’s pretty close to Vulcan. And the Vulcans didn’t fully explore it hundreds of years ago? They knew there was a civilization there but didn’t bother to fly something into the gravity portal thing?
Second, I’m also a bit confused about the nurse chapel romance with Spock. On TOS, this was kind of a slow burning one-sided thing that was a bit in the background and Spock was a bit oblivious about it. But in this show, they at least have a fling. And spoiler alert, but the relationship with T’Pring is much different and they aren’t close at all on TOS. As this show goes on, we have other divergences from TOS, and at some point it can’t really all be retconned. So is this show an alternate universe?
I understand where you're coming from, and honestly you're probably right. I reading back I got a little heated over Trek, I blame it on Reddit. I was looking at another thread recently and @kfwyre said something to the effect of people having a "detox" period after switching over from other platforms to here, which I agree with after coming here lol. Anyways, I do still feel like the tropes are a lot of my problem with the episode. At least I'd like to see some more sci-fi tropes as opposed to romcom tropes, but in terms of a property that has notoriously bad early seasons, S2 of SNW is doing alright so far.
I do feel certain relationships are being rushed into really quick for how slow of a burn romance usually is for adventure-of-the-week. Like it feels like they're not necessarily shooting for longevity. However I'm not as versed on TOS as every other series as I only made it through about a season before getting caught up in studies, so having the context that Spock and Chapel had a small thing going in TOS leaves much more room open for things to change.
As I understood it the portal had opened recently, recently enough that the crew of the Enterprise thought it a good idea to get in a shuttle to go touch it and see what happens like a child poking a dead squirrel with a stick. I kid, but honestly the episode was just weak on the sci-fi front.
Kinda, yeah. I'm not so into all of the differences between the shows that I can name all the continuity errors between series, this Memory Alpha article is much more succinct than I am, but it goes something like this: TOS (including the films), TNG (also including the films), VOY, DS9, and ENT are all designed to be on the same timeline and work with eachother to ensure a consistent universe. Let's say that's Prime timeline. More shows may or may not be in the Prime timeline, but we'll get to that. Then comes in the J.J. Abrams films which are in an entirely different timeline called the Kelvin timeline. We don't talk about the Kelvin timeline. Then DIS comes along and that starts us on the Discoverse. The Discoverse technically includes just DIS and the Star Trek shorts that CBS was doing, but it's a little muddier than that.
Discovery was originally meant to be a direct prequel to TOS, I think this is still the official position of Alex Kurtzman who is the head honcho for all of NuTrek, but because of all their retcons, redesigns, and general lax nature in regards to keeping continuity with the shows that came before it, DIS cannot fall in the same timeline as the Prime Timeline. Picard comes along, and although there are some inconsistencies, it doesn't have enough relation to DIS for many to call it part of the Discoverse, and it was more intentionally designed to fit into the Prime timeline since it's a sequel to the end of TNG films, so many people place it there. LOW and PRO both firmly fit into the Prime Timeline as well.
And so all that's left is the question of SNW, which really doesn't fall into the Discoverse or Prime timeline. SNW retcons the retcons and changes the ship redesigns and tech to more closely fit with TOS and where the Prime Timeline was around that time. HOWEVER, it still remains that the functions of technology like transporters and warp drives are beyond where they should be at this point. Also, there is crossover between the characters and worlds of DIS and SNW, so if these shows are on two different timelines, they undoubtedly merge at points.
so tl;dr: SNW exists in a grey area between the timeline of ST: Discovery and the Prime Timeline that most of Trek exists in. However, if we're to disregard the character crossovers between DIS and SNW, and assume that something will happen before SNW concludes that leads Spock and Chapel to have the same relationship that they do in TOS, then SNW more closely aligns with Prime Timeline. If we don't disregard those, then it's more grounded in the Discoverse.
At some point, reading all that, I think it's just easier to say everything is either the prime timeline or the 2009 movie one, since retcons aren't really anything new for other series that are undoubtedly all in one timeline. Random example: in Monster University it's said Mike and Sully just met, while in the original film it's said they've known each other longer than that. Look up fan wiki trivia pages for basically any popular franchise and there will be similar issues. Sometimes writers just make mistakes.
Ha, yeah. Not sure you can ever ask the Star Trek fandom to take the easy approach to anything! Besides, it's more fun this way so we can all have our own Pepe moment explaining the diverging timelines. The article I linked in the above comment is some great reading for Trek trivia!
Through a season and a half, so far, of SNW, the writers seem to be very determined to paint Vulcans as overt bigots. That is, when they're not using them as comic relief.
For some reason, the writers have decided that "logic" means "asshole." Every Vulcan who appears on screen tends to be very deliberately rude to (especially human) characters. This episode, the academic course guy Chapel was interviewing with is a key example.
Historically in Trek, Vulcans are logical, not assholes. It's logical for an academy to have academic standards, and such standards would exist for a reason. Perhaps to ensure the student can keep up with the coursework, to avoid needing to divert to remedial areas before advancing with the true core of the course. Perhaps because the course will be a collaborative effort of group research forging into new academic areas, and again not wanting remedial involvement to delay those who are ready.
So it's logical if they've set standards and Chapel hasn't cleared them. But that's not how the show had the course administrator play it; they had him play it as a bigot. They had him show up having already decided humans suck ass and would have never in a million years possibly had a chance, and he showed it openly. They had him play an angry prejudiced human with ears basically. Same as with T'pring's mom, who was clearly told to play her role as insanely bigoted towards humans.
Even T'pring's dad, who clearly defaulted to being polite and non-confrontational, reverted to 'yes dear, I'll be a bigot' in the face of his wife's disapproval. Which doesn't even really make a lot of logical sense, if you think about it; how is it logical to inject emotion into a situation on purpose, which is pretty much what bigotry is. Someone emotionally (for non-logical reasons) deciding they hate someone or something enough to ignore any position that might alleviate the hatred, in favor of embracing said hatred.
Bigotry is not logical. At least, not confrontational bigotry. It's one thing for a Vulcan to say, think, and believe (with cold hard data) something like "Vulcans have superior physical strength to humans" or "Vulcans apply rigorous logic where humans will allow emotions to color their conclusions, thus I (a Vulcan) would be more trustworthy of a Vulcan's conclusions whereas I would feel compelled to double check a human's." That's one thing. The Vulcan would lift the heavy thing with less effort and risk; logical. The Vulcan would check the human's math, find it correct, and nod and everyone would move on; logical.
It's another for Vulcans to be flouncing through The Federation openly saying "humans are inferior, I find you exhausting, get out of my way, stop bothering us, keep to yourselves humans." Which is what the SNW writers are casting the Vulcans as; overt bigots. They've got the Vulcans just purposefully dunking on humans constantly, and that's never how Vulcans were traditionally portrayed in Star Trek.
Nimoy's Spock never did it, neither did Sarak or other Vulcan walk-on characters. Sure they might think or say "we'd be better at this" but they'd never say it with disdain or scorn. They'd say it calmly, as a making-a-point, rather than as a 'fuck you stoopid hooman' the way SNW has its Vulcan characters acting. And further, Spock and the others would generally be intrigued and curious to find (and allow to be demonstrated) that humans had strengths, and could even produce better solutions to problems than Vulcans had come up with. Infinite Diversity in Infinity Combination producing strength and unity.
It's really taking a lot of the fun out of Vulcans, who were among my favorite characters in Star Trek. My favorite ever is Data, followed by (original) Spock, but the nuSpock had grown on me immensely in the first season. Because those characters are logical, but also interested in humanity and in the ways humanity's inefficient quirks can sometimes make magic happen where cold logic might not. I really don't get to enjoy any of that with the way SNW is using Vulcans; they're just setting them all up as assholes and it's becoming both obvious and super annoying.
This episode was doubly annoying because it took nuSpock, my favorite SNW character, and turned him into a clown for basically the entire episode. It's like Peck wanted to get some clips for his audition reel, and this was an episode the show threw him so he could be non-Spock and "showcase his range" or something. So we got a whole episode where Spock pretty much wasn't there, but this other character that looks like Spock was goofing on Spock the entire time.
I want Vulcans back. Not these passive aggressive "fuck you" Vulcans SNW is writing. Logical, emotionless doesn't, shouldn't, mean hatred.
This is a good point, it almost feels like they misread how in older Treks, some of the things Vulcans would say might initially read as bigotry, either to the other characters or to the audience, but that like you say, they are actually saying them matter-of-factly because they are logical, and not with any disdain. That kind of tension was interesting to work with in the context of the stories, and contributed to this sense that they were actually different from humans, alien (and causing us to question our reactions when we experience people who might behave in this way IRL!). Now, I'm getting more of a romulan vibe of general antagonism and dislike for humans. And it also reads closer to this kind of human you see IRL sometimes, that dress up cruelty and lack of empathy in an "i'm just being logical" or "i'm just saying it like it is" kind of thing. It feels more human.
That said, I think it's trouble to expect them to imagine aspects of the show we love in the form we most liked them, and that to do so will inevitably lead to disappointment. So I try to roll with their re-interpretations, and I guess I try to imagine that the relations between the species changes a lot over the course of the timelines. It can be hard, especially when we're literally watching the same characters as older series... But then, they're not really the same characters, somehow, are they?
I think the size of the Trek pantheon can lead discussion to constantly comparing and integrating all aspects of a new show into the context of previous shows, what people did and didn't like about them. We also know that there can be a tendency for some people to take it a bit seriously, but I think for the most part these are just discussion points being made by people who are otherwise enjoying the show. I've complained on these threads about a couple of aspects of the episodes, but overall I've really enjoyed it, and my partner and I look forward to watching it every week.
I liked the helpdesk alien species. It was the right level of alien absurdity that met reality. From the names being colours and the language echoing company or lawyer speak - it was just a beautiful addition.