Hegemony, Part II

How to get rid of the magog eggs. Oh wait, these are not the Magog. I don't know if I mind the crossover or not. I do think they could have come up with something better. I also think they could have done far better with Andromeda than they did and they could have continued with other series and moives. But we get to enjoy Star Trek even if they shift quality and dedication to what Star Trek is in each series. I have grown to like this series more and more even with its mistakes. And they did make this work without a tesseracting machine which is a plus. I would have to rate this series up there either as the second or third best. How they are doing such a better job over the Crying Burnham show is beyond me. How can there be two recent series that are polar opposites in the same universe?

Very entertaining. Filled with action and high stakes drama. Plus, a cool new take on classic original series characters.

It was an excellent follow up to a very compelling cliffhanger from the previous season. For me personally, the best episodes are ones that go all out with dynamic space battles and power struggles with other beings.

Good job.

After all the tension buildup in the last episode, unfortunately this has been slightly on the disappointing end.

As someone else posted here, there were too many parallel problems cramped into a single episode, leading to a rushed resolution that sounded like lazy pretense even for a Sci-Fi world like Star Trek.

And just as an example: beaming people from an alien ship using alien transporter codes? What was that? And just using transporter codes, how did they avoid beaming the already digested folk?

Of course there were some references to other Star Trek tropes, like shield modulation frequency etc., but not executed elegantly.

It's a weak start for the season, but let's see what comes next.

There's a persistent criticism in fandom about Star Trek series that depict Starfleet as too emotional, not following orders, just not very military in this quasi-military organization and I agree with that to some extent.

That certainly isn't the problem in this episode, where Our Heroes must mount a rescue mission, deal with a medical crisis, and fend off possible invasion, while thinking on their feet at a quick pace.

I loved the opening sequence where Pike is taking suggestions on creative ideas for dealing with the crisis at hand, batting away some and finally glomming onto the likely option. The other crises are also handled via quick, intelligent, creative thinking, which is only possible if the writers are creative and intelligent too.

Sure, the solutions are fake technology but they have plausibility, not just "re-route the frazzleblaster up the yin-yang" technobabble that Star Trek is infamous for.

However the need to wrap this all up in an hour (or 40 minutes to leave room for ads) means that the overall solution to the Gorn problem comes a bit out of left field and seems pretty convenient.

And the fast pace means that some "resolution" scenes that show people being rescued, patients being revived, etc must be dropped. The minute the characters devise the solution, the assumption is, the solution is implemented without the emotional catharsis of actually seeing it happen.

But overall this is what I want to see from Star Trek. This series is just so much more smartly written than other recent series on Paramount+.

This extremely tense, well-paced episode concerning the war with the Gorn revolves around Pike's ability to make so many split-second executive decisions that determine the fate not only of the Enterprise and its crew but the entire Federation.

I'm surprised at the torrent of criticism in reviews posted here which critically miss the point. Somehow Hitchcock is considered a genius of film suspense, but his movies depend on many instances of what he termed the MacGuffin -basically a black box plot device used to propel the story without revealing exactly how key elements work.

Here, in Davy Perez's screenplay, we have dozens of scientific ideas or concepts submitted by Pike's crew (or Spock to Nurse Chapel in sick bay to save their ailing collelague) for him to act upon. Any one of which are crucial to survival and victory, but for which the details are irrelevant -the viewer cannot be expected to understand the scientific basis for all this.

So taken as entertainment, this is just what the doctor ordered - an action-packed, at times frightening sci-fi adventure. The relationships between the crew members are easy to identify with, and contributions to the success of the mission are well-distributed among them.