Strange New Worlds (spoilers)

[Crazedwraith]

Episode 8 released on Thursday when episode 7 should have been released so it looks they've all been moved up a slot.

And boy was it a dark episode. A ptsd story with flashbacks to the klingon War from disco s1. (curiously lacking in any disco iconography, costumes or props aside from a clip in the previously on). Very well made obviously but did not click for me.

They seem to do very little exploring of strange new worlds on Strange New Worlds.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

The body armor in M'Benga/Chapel's flashbacks did seem a bit DISCO-ish, but the uniforms didn't seem so. The Klingons in the flashbacks of were more like TNG types, which was a bit disappointing considering that at least a DISCO type was spotted in 2x01.

I was expecting to see some more Ortegas involved since she was also a "war hero" and not much was explored in the memory episode. Maybe next time in a future episode...

[Evilchumlee]

The body armor in M'Benga/Chapel's flashbacks did seem a bit DISCO-ish, but the uniforms didn't seem so. The Klingons in the flashbacks of were more like TNG types, which was a bit disappointing considering that at least a DISCO type was spotted in 2x01.

I was expecting to see some more Ortegas involved since she was also a "war hero" and not much was explored in the memory episode. Maybe next time in a future episode...

nuTrek is bad with consistency, even internal consistency.

The body armor was absolutely the SNW style, and it should have been the DSC style. I mean, whatever, easy to handwave. There's different types of body armor. Whatever. There's no particular reason there needs to be only ONE body armor available.

The uniforms were SNW too, they are the just the standard under suit for the body armor.

I feel like SNW is basically soft retconning DSC to some extent. When they went to Rigel, the left behind crewmember was totally wearing an SNW-style uniform under the other stuff, not a DSC or DSC-Enterprise style uniform. It's a small detail, but it's there.

I have to say Season 2 hasn't been *bad* by any means, but I feel like it's been a bit of a letdown from S1. S2 has been relying too heavily on the comedy episodes... I enjoy a good comedy episode now and then, but in a 10 episode season, you've got space for like, one. MAYBE two. There has also been, as someone previously noted, an odd lack of exploring strange new worlds. The show seems to want to slip back into something a bit more serialized and dark, it's like nuTrek can't help it.

I hate that every character has to have some dark past. M'Benga is almost on overload now with darkness. Like, lay up on the dude! Damn. Chapel isn't too bad, anyone not previously on Enterprise was in the war, so they have war stories. That's fine. Uhura makes me happy just because there (so far) isn't some super dark, looming secret about her. She's just Uhura, wiz-kid kinda unsure about what she wants to do with her life but seems to be finding her niche.

I'm also really tired of Kirk. I really don't like this iteration of Kirk. It's nothing against the actor, I just don't buy him as Kirk. He's a different character. I've literally like, forgotten he's Kirk and have to remind myself. Two actors from both fan created TOS continuations did a more far more convincing Kirk. I feel like casting really missed the mark here, which sucks because they did a good job with Spock and Uhura. We also just... don't need this much Kirk. Showing up in the "Balance of Terror" episode should have been enough. Kirk gets PLENTY of Enterprise time later.

As much as my earlier reaction to recasting legacy characters was negative, i've changed my tune and don't care anymore, just... don't botch it like Kirk. I kind of want to get rid of pointless engineer lady and just bring in Scotty already. Maybe leave McCoy out of it. Always felt like McCoy came along with Kirk. There's certainly a plot relevant reason TO bring in McCoy... M'Benga is pretty much of out of his damn mind, so eventually all of his crap will catch up him and they'll need a new CMO, but we know he stays on Enterprise. I could see all of issues overwhelming him and having in to bring in a new doctor.

Oh, and also SNW managed to botch in an epic manner Kirk and Spock's first meeting. "This is Spock". "Come sit down."

Really?! That's the best you could do?

[Evilchumlee]

The body armor in M'Benga/Chapel's flashbacks did seem a bit DISCO-ish, but the uniforms didn't seem so. The Klingons in the flashbacks of were more like TNG types, which was a bit disappointing considering that at least a DISCO type was spotted in 2x01.

I was expecting to see some more Ortegas involved since she was also a "war hero" and not much was explored in the memory episode. Maybe next time in a future episode...

nuTrek is bad with consistency, even internal consistency.

The body armor was absolutely the SNW style, and it should have been the DSC style. I mean, whatever, easy to handwave. There's different types of body armor. Whatever. There's no particular reason there needs to be only ONE body armor available.

The uniforms were SNW too, they are the just the standard under suit for the body armor.

I feel like SNW is basically soft retconning DSC to some extent. When they went to Rigel, the left behind crewmember was totally wearing an SNW-style uniform under the other stuff, not a DSC or DSC-Enterprise style uniform. It's a small detail, but it's there.

I have to say Season 2 hasn't been *bad* by any means, but I feel like it's been a bit of a letdown from S1. S2 has been relying too heavily on the comedy episodes... I enjoy a good comedy episode now and then, but in a 10 episode season, you've got space for like, one. MAYBE two. There has also been, as someone previously noted, an odd lack of exploring strange new worlds. The show seems to want to slip back into something a bit more serialized and dark, it's like nuTrek can't help it.

I hate that every character has to have some dark past. M'Benga is almost on overload now with darkness. Like, lay up on the dude! Damn. Chapel isn't too bad, anyone not previously on Enterprise was in the war, so they have war stories. That's fine. Uhura makes me happy just because there (so far) isn't some super dark, looming secret about her. She's just Uhura, wiz-kid kinda unsure about what she wants to do with her life but seems to be finding her niche.

I'm also really tired of Kirk. I really don't like this iteration of Kirk. It's nothing against the actor, I just don't buy him as Kirk. He's a different character. I've literally like, forgotten he's Kirk and have to remind myself. Two actors from both fan created TOS continuations did a more far more convincing Kirk. I feel like casting really missed the mark here, which sucks because they did a good job with Spock and Uhura. We also just... don't need this much Kirk. Showing up in the "Balance of Terror" episode should have been enough. Kirk gets PLENTY of Enterprise time later.

As much as my earlier reaction to recasting legacy characters was negative, i've changed my tune and don't care anymore, just... don't botch it like Kirk. I kind of want to get rid of pointless engineer lady and just bring in Scotty already. Maybe leave McCoy out of it. Always felt like McCoy came along with Kirk. There's certainly a plot relevant reason TO bring in McCoy... M'Benga is pretty much of out of his damn mind, so eventually all of his crap will catch up him and they'll need a new CMO, but we know he stays on Enterprise. I could see all of issues overwhelming him and having in to bring in a new doctor.

Oh, and also SNW managed to botch in an epic manner Kirk and Spock's first meeting. "This is Spock". "Come sit down."

Really?! That's the best you could do?

[Lord Revan]

To be fair the Enterprise did seem to be wearing a different set on uniforms even in DSC, not standard Blue+Metallic ones and the way the story goes there was probably not enough time to issue new uniform prior to DSC season 2.

[Evilchumlee]

To be fair the Enterprise did seem to be wearing a different set on uniforms even in DSC, not standard Blue+Metallic ones and the way the story goes there was probably not enough time to issue new uniform prior to DSC season 2.

What I meant there was that he was wearing the current-style SNW uniform, but he would have been left on Rigel years prior to DSC.

I also noticed something while thinking about uniforms...

Ortegas is a bit of an oddity. She's Conn, which should be Command Division but she wears red for Operations.

Mayweather world Command Gold, Detmer wore Discovery's weird color system Command Gold, Sulu wore Command Gold, La Forge wore Command Red at Conn, Tom Paris wore Command Red.

Detmer is the odd one out, seemingly being the wrong department. I have two guesses here... one is that Starfleet is still in-process of moving away from the DSC-style uniforms/department colors/organization and hasn't settled everything just yet.

OR possibly Conn is an oddity of a position that is not department-specific. Command or Operations can both potentially be permanently assigned to Conn, it isn't locked to department. Makes an amount of sense, different pilots may have different skills and tracks. A fighter or workbee pilot would be Operations/Tactical, a general purpose pilot would be Command, mostly just divided by career tracks (which can easily swap anyway). Conn may be essentially an "entry level" command position to work through that track, while it's a more specialized career track for Operations/Tactical.

That makes Tom Paris a bit of an oddity then as well, but Paris was alittle more complicated than we might give him credit for. Paris certainly enjoyed piloting and was good at it... but if he was actually going to get back into Starfleet for real, he didn't necessarily want to just specialize in piloting, instead getting intto a command track.

Tl;dr The other conn officers we've seen were good pilots and enjoyed piloting, but were using it as a stepping stone to other things. Ortegas is a career, specialized pilot. She's basically Starfleet Top Gun.

[Formless]

Frankly, who cares? A lot of us have no desire to watch the first two seasons of Discovery, so any "continuity errors" between it and SNW are welcome IMO. Retcons aren't a bad thing, sometimes they make a new work more accessible and digestible. They abandoned the Discovery era uniforms because the costume department didn't want to keep those around anymore, as they clash with the visual style of the new series, which in turn is based on the Original Series uniforms that everyone wanted the Discovery crew to be wearing in the first place. I bluntly do not like that the Discovery uniforms were based on the Enterprise uniforms because those were ugly pieces of crap even if they were based on real Air Force style jumpsuits. This is space, base them on actual astronaut uniforms if you aren't going to respect the style of the original series.

Its easy to focus too hard on continuity when the franchise has often retconned its continuity on purpose. What happened in the 1990's in the Trek universe? No one knows because TOS said one thing, and then the 90's actually came and went without those things happening. So they retconned it, and only recently bothered to say "oh, yeah, time travelers keep messing with the 20'th and 21'st centuries, pay no more attention to the man behind that curtain". Trill had their appearance completely overhauled without explanation because the original makeup looked ugly on the actress they decided to hire to play a Trill as a regular. That's it, that's the explanation. The spots look more unique anyway. And then, speaking of uniforms, there's the mess that is Generations, where the costume department was apparently going to roll out a new uniform style, but at the last minute they ditched the new uniforms for unknown reasons and raided the DS9 costume department, but didn't have enough of those either so they had a mixture of TNG and DS9 costumes. Which would be fine, except that characters keep changing uniforms between scenes without explanation, creating continuity headaches throughout the entire film!

But lets set aside the continuity headaches that created. It also proves that in-universe, the idea that Starfleet goes through stages of offering multiple uniform styles until crews settle on one they prefer the most is proven by that movie, long before Lower Decks would do the same thing but with different postings having new or old style uniforms, with the Starbase having both. SNW is clearly following that tradition, showing that during the war the Discovery uniforms were already on the out and the SNW interpretation of TOS uniforms being slowly phased in. The only show that makes this confusing is really Picard, because every season seemed to want to show a different uniform in flashbacks, without considering what was going on in Lower Decks and Prodigy. I can see the Prodigy uniforms being an evolution of the Lower Decks uniform that was rolled out just a couple years later after finally phasing out the First Contact gray uniforms. It would fit the trend set by TNG itself, where the original unitards were an uncomfortable atrocity that none of the actors liked, but even after being replaced it took a little while before the costume department settled on a design everyone was happy with. Maybe someone at Starfleet HQ thought that the white trim had gotten a negative reputation because they decided to roll out the new uniforms on the California fleet rather than on the flagship like was traditional? Who knows. And who cares.

[Crazedwraith]

you seem to care quire a lot given that essay on how we shouldn't care?

if we just say fuck it who cares discussion grinds to a halt doesn't it?

[Formless]

you seem to care quire a lot given that essay on how we shouldn't care?

if we just say fuck it who cares discussion grinds to a halt doesn't it?

Look, if your assertion is that old Trek handled continuity better when old Trek fully embraced episodic storytelling and the Magic Reset Button (even before Voyager), I feel free to mock that assertion or the relevance continuity with Discovery has on discussions of Strange New Worlds. What does it matter if the crew are wearing the new uniforms in flashback sequences to the Discovery era war? No one who watches will bat an eye at it unless they really care about Discovery, which most of us don't. And if you insist that old Trek would never do that kind of thing, we already have precedent for Starfleet issuing multiple uniforms at the same time going all the way back to the original series, where there are instances of the uniforms seen in the pilot episode still in service. Starfleet doesn't care, the writers don't care (because that's the costuming department's job, not theirs), so why should I care? Why derail the conversation about the actual episode with a long tangent about fucking uniform discrepancies? I care a lot more about literally everything else than I do about nitpicking visual shit like set design and costumes and the ranks of background characters the show doesn't bother to really focus on anyway. No one cared about O'Brian's rank until he got promoted to recurring character on DS9. And no one cares about Detmer because Discovery's writers don't care about the ship's bridge crew unless they hold the rank of captain.

[Crazedwraith]

Did I in fact make that claim? No, I did not.

It's your perogative not to care and if you want to talk about some other aspect of the episode, which you don't seem to have done so far, feel fucking free.

[Formless]

Did I in fact make that claim? No, I did not.

It's your perogative not to care and if you want to talk about some other aspect of the episode, which you don't seem to have done so far, feel fucking free.

Who said I was talking to you in the first place, jackass?

[Evilchumlee]

Frankly, who cares? A lot of us have no desire to watch the first two seasons of Discovery, so any "continuity errors" between it and SNW are welcome IMO. Retcons aren't a bad thing, sometimes they make a new work more accessible and digestible.

Discovery is terrible, I agree.

It just, does exist within the greater universe. I would be happy for Paramount to pretty just say "this isn't part of the rest of everything" and i'm cool. It's just odd there's not even internal consistency.

I do just like to look at things from an in-universe perspective.

Maybe someone at Starfleet HQ thought that the white trim had gotten a negative reputation because they decided to roll out the new uniforms on the California fleet rather than on the flagship like was traditional? Who knows. And who cares.

It is clear that Starfleet will, fairly often even, have multiple uniforms.

[Evilchumlee]

I just watched this musical thing. It wasn't... as bad as I thought it would be, but I have to admit I kind of skipped through the songs mostly. I think I got most of what was in there.

It was such a stupid... but on-brand for TOS... idea.

I actually didn't hate nuKirk as much as I usually do here.

I love the new Klingon look. A bit of a "pat myself on the back" moment... their costumes are VERY close to a concept I had drawn up for a "re-imagined TOS Klingon uniform."

Lore note: Not sure how I feel about D7 and K't'inga getting thrown around apparently interchangeably now. I have thought about in the past that D7 may not be a class name, but a type. Like the Enterprise is a "Constitution-Class Heavy Cruiser", the Klingon ships are "K'T'inga-Class D7 Battlecruiser", D7 being a TYPE of ship, not a class. By that logic, not every D7 would need to be any particular ship. If we absolutely must still include DSC in things, it does cover the absolutely idiotic "D7" that shows up in Season 1.

[Crazedwraith]

Did I in fact make that claim? No, I did not.

It's your perogative not to care and if you want to talk about some other aspect of the episode, which you don't seem to have done so far, feel fucking free.

Who said I was talking to you in the first place, jackass?

The fact you quoted me, jackass?

No-one was claiming old trek was some bastion of masterly continuity. I mentioned the clothes thing and people went with that conversation because you know they were interested.

[Crazedwraith]

So moving onwards, Episode 9, the episode where music is used to close down existing character subplots.

Using musical to force the crew to reveal their feels is a time honoured tradition for musical episodes, it kind of feels a little cheap to end things like Chapel/Spock like this. It's another side effect of the short seasons that we barely get Spock/Chapel together for any length of time before it all crashes down. Spock getting dumped by epic joyful musical though was certainly a thing though.

La'an and Kirk not doing it via song was good though and I did enjoy their subplot and that it was doomed by canon and continuity via Marcus and David. Still I hope we stop seeing him though. It's getting contrived.

I have odd feeling Batel's going to bite it via gorn on her priority one mission next episode.

[bilateralrope]

I just watched this musical thing. It wasn't... as bad as I thought it would be, but I have to admit I kind of skipped through the songs mostly. I think I got most of what was in there.

It was such a stupid... but on-brand for TOS... idea.

That's one thing I like about the more episodic format. When they come across a bad idea for an episode, it's only around for one episode. They have more room to experiment.

Though it does make me wish for longer seasons.

[Crazedwraith]

Though it does make me wish for longer seasons.

The short seasons are absolutely the weakest point of SNW at the moment. Not just in an 'I want more way' but the speed of the subplots, such as Chapel/Spock getting together having two episodes of being bombard with problems then splitting comes off very fast.

And given they have a similar sized main cast the old shows it leads to characters being massive short changed in terms of focus. Particularly Ortegas and Una, even Pike feels out of focus this season.

In the old 20+ episode seasons everyone could have a couple of focus episodes and there still be room for ensemble/plot episodes as well.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

Tl;dr The other conn officers we've seen were good pilots and enjoyed piloting, but were using it as a stepping stone to other things. Ortegas is a career, specialized pilot. She's basically Starfleet Top Gun.

Back in S2E1 Ortegas did mention about having her own "warp command" so she's probably still eyeing a career for commanding, or maybe (for head canon) it's something that came up after she started out as operations. It also might be why she was somehow enthusiastic when she was originally assigned to the away team for Rigel IV.

[Evilchumlee]

Back in S2E1 Ortegas did mention about having her own "warp command" so she's probably still eyeing a career for commanding, or maybe (for head canon) it's something that came up after she started out as operations. It also might be why she was somehow enthusiastic when she was originally assigned to the away team for Rigel IV.

I think there would still be room for command positions within the operations track. At least once in TNG, we see an Operations Admiral. One would assume that the head of Starfleet Medical would be in blue, right?

Although I took the "warp command" thing to mean more that she had designed a maneuver.

The short seasons do hurt the show. I'll always despise how the Spock/Chapel thing was handled. Might have been ok, if there was more time for it.

Looks like we're gonna be "treated" to more Gorn.

[Lord Revan]

Also who is where tends to fluctuate, there's at least some episodes of TOS where Uhura wore gold instead of red, so it's possible that there's some positions that can be in multiple departments based on where that task is in the ship in question.

[Evilchumlee]

Also who is where tends to fluctuate, there's at least some episodes of TOS where Uhura wore gold instead of red, so it's possible that there's some positions that can be in multiple departments based on where that task is in the ship in question.

I want to say there's two episodes, I think they were largely still using the uniforms from "The Cage".

There are certain times where even from an in-universe view, i'm comfortable just.. ignoring. This might be one of them.

To actually reconcile it in-universe, perhaps Starfleet decided to briefly turn Communications into a command position before realizing, no it's Operations (and then even later on, eliminating the specific position entirely in favor of just "Operations".)

[Lord Revan]

It could also that there's more to what department a person, then the most obvious position like Hoshi Sato was the coms officer, but she's in science department due being a xeno-linguist.

[Evilchumlee]

It could also that there's more to what department a person, then the most obvious position like Hoshi Sato was the coms officer, but she's in science department due being a xeno-linguist.

That's true too. Not every position is necessarily going to be strictly departmental.

Actually thinking about it, not only are there kind of "any department" positions like Comms, but there's probably at least some rare occasions where more defined positions are still manned by a different department. I can think of scenarios were you might have a Science/Medical Department as Security... perhaps something like an infectious disease lab, there may be people who in the field and acting as security due to the specific needs of that type of security.

Engineering/Medical for cybernetics? Geordie was something of a "Doctor" for Hugh.

In the case of Conn or Comms... there's really no particular reason for a specific department to be needed to handle that. Science would probably be LESS likely to be Conn, but not impossible. Comms makes absolute sense.

[Lord Revan]

I suspect most starfleet officers have at least basic training at starship piloting and navigation so if the only person available to pilot a ship happens to be a science officer the ship ain't screwed, sure they wouldn't as good at as dedicated helmsman but could still do well enough that the ship might be able to get to a starbase to recrew (or handle the job during the graveyard shift).

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

Sulu also started out in the TOS series as a science officer, blue uniform and all.

The S2E10 trailer is out. Things SERIOUSLY don't look good.