Star Trek Social Club

An interesting, deliberately thought provoking 🤔 question for a lazy long weekend Sunday morning…

Setting aside whether specific fans like specific ‘gimmicks’ (crossovers, musicals, bringing back Kirk or Khan) or tropes (transporter malfunctions), Space.com is posing the hypothesis that the proportion was too high in Strange New Worlds second season.

There’s no arguing that the season was successful in drawing in large audiences week after week. Taking a look back though, was there too much trippy-Trek(TM) dessert and not enough of a meaty main course? YMMV surely.

For my part, I can both agree that trippy Trek is something I’ve been wanting more of, and that I would have welcomed 2 or 3 more episodes were more grounded or gave the opportunity to see more of Una as a leader and dug into Ortegas backstory.

The 90s shows seemed to be bit embarrassed by trippyness, although Voyager found its pretext allowed even stern Janeway to pronounce ‘Weird is our business.’ One can argue that the high proportion in SNW is a feature, not a bug.

I’d still prefer a 12-15 episode season though.

There are inspiring, epic quotes in Star Trek. Words that stir the soul, shining a light on paths to a brighter now and a better future. But, what about those bits of dialog that don't have a stirring message, that you enjoy just because you enjoy them?

One of my favorites, from DSC season 3, Episode 1:

"I don't know. But it was temperature-sensitive and really valuable, so it's probably ice cream."

Burnham is captured and being questioned at the Merchantile. After being spritzed with a dose of space truth serum, Burnham's captors question her about stolen cargo. When asked by her captors what the cargo is, a very drugged up Burnham says the above with serious sincerity. I love the entirety of Burnham's chattering and behavior while she is under the influence of the space truth serum. That particular line always makes me smile, though.

Do you have a favored, not particularly inspiring, you just like it, Star Trek quote?

Interesting extract from a longer /Film interview with in-demand director Roxann Dawson.

I appreciate how she speaks with respect for the shows of the new era.

Westwood's historic Crest Theatre reopens as the Nimoy - Los Angeles Times

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-09-01/westwood-crest-theatre-nimoy-reopening-cap-ucla-fall-preview

@startrek #StarTrek

At the moment I follow the @startrek@startrek.website bot, but it reposts every single reply to every single thread, which is a bit much.

Season-long prerelease reviews are an exception to this community’s rules about posting reviews. (The mods prefer our members to prefer to post their own episode reviews here.)

It seems that today’s the day that Paramount’s embargo on ‘spoiler free’ (in theory) season reviews for Lower Decks season 4 comes off, and the first pro reviews are now posted by some who have seen the screeners.

From Inverse:

• each one of these 30-minute episodes is nearly perfect. Just as the USS Cerritos presents the workhorse of Starfleet, with Season 4, Lower Decks again proves it is the workhorse of the entire Star Trek franchise.

From SlashFilm - view with caution, a bit more spoilery

• /Film Rating: 9 out of

Any to add to the list?

Early Review: ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 4 Levels Up But Keeps The Laughs

Light spoilers within.

@startrek #StarTrek #StarTrekLowerDecks

https://trekmovie.com/2023/08/31/early-review-star-trek-lower-decks-season-4/

Rob & Kev float through the highlights of the season two finale of Strange New Worlds, "Hegemony", before seeking out other instances of our characters floating in zero gravity, including "Star Trek: First Contact", "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country", and the Enterprise NX-01's "sweet spot".

In "All Those Who Wander", we see the Enterprise away team visit the crashed Peregrine, find frozen and/or mutilated bodies of the crew outside and inside, two survivors inside, and a log from the captain explaining that they'd picked up three castaways, one of whom (an Orion) killed himself with a plasma grenade to prevent the Gorn eggs he was previously infected with from hatching, and this caused the crash. We don't ever get a detailed explanation of what happened.

Memory Alpha says:

After a week of contending with the Gorn, Gavin and her remaining crew, numbering approximately twenty out of an initial complement of ninety-nine, decided to lure the hatchlings outside to protect their civilian passengers. However, in doing so all of them would succumb to hypothermia or Gorn attacks.

( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Peregrine )

This leaves a lot of open questions:

1. The Gorn eggs inside Buckley can be explained by him having been infected before the Peregrine picked him up (gestation period can vary per species) or having been sprayed by a Gorn before the Enterprise away team arrives. But what happened to the Gorn that the Peregrine's crew were originally fighting?

2. Do we just assume that the Peregrine crew's plan worked, all those Gorn were lured outside, and then died in the cold somewhere that their bodies were not found, instead of getting back inside? If the plan worked, where are the civilian passengers? Did one or more Gorn stay inside/go back and kill them? If so, where's that Gorn?

3. The Orion blew himself up, and this damaged the ship enough to crash, but did not kill the Gorn inside him, as they were still able to attack the crew. That seems a bit of a stretch.

It's a great episode (and 100% fine by me they're borrowing from Alien lore to develop the Gorn as antagonists), but 2/3 viewings later these seem like gaping oversights. Could it be some sort of big play for later when we discover something like a Gorn ship arrived there before the Enterprise and interfered with the crash site/beamed Gorn off?

This is an old one, but a good one, and StarTrek.com decided to republish it for whatever reason.

I say "alleged" because this has not been corroborated by any other sites that I've seen, but this site's track record is pretty good.

Wikipedia link

This is the episode where voyager is fractured into different time periods, some in the past, actually most in the past, and one in the future, each located in a different region of the ship, with Chakotay being able to move freely between the time periods. He's trying to return the ship to a single timeline, recruits past Janeway to help him (with some dialogue essentially foreshadowing Endgame), and manages to do so after dealing with Seska, who's on the ship in her past time period, causing some trouble.

It's a nice episode and a good way to do a sort of flashback/clips episode but also develops some nice Janeway-Chakotay character.

At the end, when things have been restored, Chakotay tells Janeway that he can't tell her what happened because of the temporal prime directive. Janeway then reveals that she knows where Chakotay's secrete stash of cider is located, which was revealed to past Janeway earlier in the episode. Chakotay asks how she knows, and she says she can't reveal because of the temporal prime directive.

The whole thing is done as light banter ... but, are we supposed to take this seriously and understand that past Janeway actually remembers her conversations with Chakotay during their movements between the time periods? It makes sense that she would, as both her and Chakotay were given a treatment that enabled them to cross the time fractures without being erased. If Chakotay retains his memories, shouldn't past Janeway have also?

If true, then in the timeline Chakotay finds himself in, Janeway has known the whole time of the rough plot of the whole voyager series up to season 7. Which would be a huge statement, especially if it's that same Janeway(s) in Endgame. You have to remember that this past Janeway was from before they even got to the Delta Quadrant. Awkwardly, as the whole crew is eventually enabled to cross time barriers, many of them from the past, including Borg Seven, they'd all have some memories of what's to come (though arguably not nearly as many as Janeway).

The only argument I can think of for why past Janeway wouldn't actually have retained her memories is that the ship was restored back to the time of the cause of the fracturing, which was an anomaly of some sort in Chakotay's time, and which Chakotay prevented from happening, and so altered all the timelines affected by the fracturing. Having not thought this through enough, I'm not sure how much sense that makes, or should make. But still, why Janeway's comment at the end ... the only on-screen way she could have of knowing about the secret stash is by retaining her memories as past Janeway.