One thing I forgot to mention - since the preview photos and logline were released on Monday, I’d been wondering if we might see some ridgeless Klingons, but no luck. Maybe it’s for the best, but maybe it’s a missed opportunity?

Well, I thought that was quite enjoyable.

The black-and-white gimmick was well-used, and I felt it in service of the story, and not just a gimmick.

The story itself was an enjoyable noir caper, and it was fun to see Una getting her hands dirty, Uhura learning about spycraft, and M’Benga being entirely too comfortable with the whole thing. The guest cast was pretty great, too - I last saw Andy McQueen as Jesus Christ himself in “Mrs. Davis”, a show that no one seems to have watched, and it was cool to see him in a very different role here.

Demore Barnes was very compelling as Kor…but the gravitas he brought to it was so reminiscent of Michael Ansara to me, I almost wonder if he should have played Kang instead.

Alexander/Neelix/Jack Crusher teamup when

Who was asking for more Alexander stories?

If there’s one thing I’m pretty confident Terry Matalas wants to do, it’s bang his old action figures together.

Well, given their other mission statement of Getting the Band Together, I don’t think we’re going to be seeing less Kirk moving forward…

I know people are sort of tossing the season premiere into the “gimmick” bucket due to the nature of the time travel story, but it seemed like a pretty standard episode of Trek to me.

Genre trappings aside, I’m actually pretty intrigued by the logline for this one:

Una is mistaken for a resistance leader and drawn into a struggle against Klingon occupation.

We all know what happened when Jim Kirk went to the movies.

Paramount fumbled it pretty badly from the beginning, with it being a Nickelodeon (the channel) show, until it wasn’t.

And Netflix evidently didn’t care to commission more once they acquired the rights.

The chances are indeed slim, but considering the state of Paramount right now…sure, shoot your shot.

You have not experienced Bonnie Tyler until you have heard her in the original Klingon.

I’m not sure there’s a lot to say about this one. I enjoyed it. The jokes didn’t land quite as well as they should have, but I have to take some responsibility for watching a stoner comedy at 9 am.

The Spirk enthusiasts should be pretty happy, though.

Yeah, I think I remember thinking the same thing.

I suppose that it would be sensible to keep someone with the shuttle Just In Case, though, and the Doc would certainly be more welcome on Kasq.

“The Enterprise crew encounters a phenomenon that forces them to face their innermost fears” is very well-trodden ground for this series, but this is probably one of the best examples. It coasts on a very well-executed horror story, and I thought it did a very good job in not tipping its hand as to which characters were real, and which were hallucinations.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the stories of our two main characters were advanced much, if it all. La’An is still afraid there’s a monster within her, and Spock still has issues with his duality, though this episode could mark the shift of his return to a more “Vulcan” way of being.

I thought the episode handled Kirk really well, though. From the moment they acknowledged that David was going to play a role in the series going forward, I had pretty high hopes - there are a lot of blanks to be filled in, since he was retconned into Kirk’s backstory in 1982. Kirk’s fears of being an absentee father, and of dying in some forgotten corner of space, feel very real, and I think they would feel real even if you didn’t know how it’s all going to turn out for him.

I thought the scene between Kirk and Uhura at the end was very…interesting. Not sure what to say about it, but it was interesting.

Tellar is an overseas territory - doesn’t count.

Surely you mean Qurelane… ̄_(ツ)_/ ̄

Start looking around for a Dukat drawer. She looks lonely.

Coming 2023

As far as actual news goes, this SDCC was pretty thin, to say the least.

No one can say the franchise is dead!

It got a second season, which has yet to air, and then got cancelled. So we’re going to get to see their second year at the Academy, eventually.

Our new vulcan is a flanderisation of vulcans, and not in a good way.

I’ve gotta be honest, I think she’s uncomfortably representative - Vulcans are, by and large, dicks. But the appearance of…

…will likely balance things out in the future.

If they’re going to keep making these, something more subtle might have worked,

Yeah, this was on-the-nose to the point of being kind of a strange thing for her to say.

I don’t think anything will ever top DS9 for me, but I’d put several of the newer shows above Voyager.