Hegemony, Part II

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.

We pick up after a 2-year cliffhanger, and come out swinging, only to be given a weak solution to end the episode, and sadly, Strange New Worlds is continuing down the path of disregarding what came before them, in TOS Prime Canon Trek. Further placing this show in an alternative parallel timeline to the original.

The A Team of Spock, Pike, and Una all work on trying to solve the issue with the infected Captain Batel and save the Enterprise from being overwhelmed by the Gone attack force. The B team, composed of La'an, Ortegas, and Dr. M'Benga. Are trying to self-rescue after being captured by the Gorn's portable lunch-mobile. Good thing Ortegas can fly anything on the spot.

It has been a long wait for the third season of Strange New Worlds.

I do wonder if it was a misstep to end with a cliffhanger and then wait so long for it to be resolved.

The Gorn threat is real. Captain Pike needs time to think and asks his crew for potential solutions. It looks like the Gorn are encroaching further towards Federation space. Pike intends to stop them.

Chapel and Spock are working together to stop the Gorn hatchling forming from Batel's body and going after the crew. A cunning and gory plan from the Gorn. They need to somehow safe Batel.

The segment loses momentum as once again Star Trek characters want to talk about their feelings.

Then there are the captives inside the Gorn ship. La'an looking for ways to escape from the ship.

This was a very cinematic episode that promised more than it delivered.

To me it felt flat and underwhelming. A lot of the technobabble was just junk.

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+.

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.