So… La’an goes back in time to bootstrap paradox Pelia into becoming the engineer she is in the current timeline, and saves Earth’s next Hitler from being killed, because without that, humanity never really gets it’s shit together. And ::speculation alert!!:: maybe her leaving that gun there begins his murderous spree, so maybe she bootstrap paradoxed Khan into being the tyrant he becomes, too.
What a wild ride.
I just … this series… is just so consistently enjoyable. I love it.
Seriously. They need to stop giving us time travel stories to shoehorn Kirk into the series. Let it stand on its own without having to hearken forward to the Original Series.
It’s a good show, and it deserves to be its own good show.
I agree. SNW has a really strong cast, and great writers. The show truly can be episodic without referencing any previous canon and still be fantastic and even appreciated more by new watchers of Star Trek.
I enjoyed the episode. I think what makes SNW stand out for me is the characters. All the main crew are interesting, likeable characters, and that for me is generally a key ingredient for great Star Trek.
It has been quite a weird opening to the season. We haven’t had the crew together on the bridge (or even the ship) for 3 whole episodes. I’m guessing there was a real world reason for this (i.e. availability of the cast), but kind of hoping the next episode is a bit more “normal”.
Also, given that Kirk features, it was a missed opportunity to open with “Personal log: We’ve. Travelled. Back in Time…” without further explanation.
I don’t think we’re going to see in this show any Starfleet officers committing information to personal logs that could threaten history.
SNW seems very conscious that personal logs aren’t entirely personal beyond access.
Una recorded and deleted her personal log acknowledging she is Illyrian in season one.
Later shows in the continuity have revealed to us that some personal logs to become available to next of kin, or are even studied by future Starfleet personnel.
Having Uhura pointedly resist providing the personal logs to La’an in ‘Ad Astra Per Aspera’ also underscored to us that it’s the ethics of communications officers that protect privacy.
While possible, it’s also possible Janeway is just fucking with him and where Chakotay hides his booze is an open secret.
That conversation was in the elevator, and Chakotay had just said he wasn’t going to talk about what the experience was like because of the temporal prime directive.
Ah, well I had a more thorough comment typed out, but unfortunately that was on the thread that got locked and the app I’m using on mobile ate my response when it failed to post.
The gist of it though was that I was pleasantly surprised by this episode, as I’m not usually one for the time travel themes. The ending was painful (as in, the writing was very well done) to watch and hit me harder than I expected!
And it was also cool for them to reference DDG instead of Google, I’d be happy to see that sort of thing happen more often on TV.
As a purist, I’d say watch them all and in release order, but if you really have to be choosy with your time, here’s a list of things you can skip (in my opinion):
Star Trek Into Darkness
Discovery (whole show)
Picard S1 and S2
Short Treks
I know suggesting skipping Discovery outright is going to be seen as… extreme, but I suggest doing so only if time is a crucial factor. It’s a dizzyingly uneven show with the lowest points of quality in all of Trek. However, it also has some incredible highs and some truly great characters, so if you find the time to watch it, you should. And I know I’m in the minority on this, but I found Short Treks to be unwatchable.
On the flip side, Lower Decks is incredible, and Strange New Worlds is good. The third season of Picard is excellent. Prodigy is a little weird but it’s got a lot of strength. Star Trek Beyond is also a surprisingly good movie.
TOS also has some truly awful episodes, but it's pretty easy to ignore them.
I think the low points of DSC and PIC stick out for two reasons:
Recency bias. It's been 15 years since I last watched Code of Honor, and I rarely even think about it except when it's time to make memes about season 1.
Serialization. You can watch TNG, skip bad episodes like Code of Honor or Sub Rosa, and not really lose out on anything. But if you watch DSC and skip a bad episode, you blow a giant gaping hole in the over-arching story.
I never watched Prodigy, but seeing Paramount fall into the same pattern as HBO Max by summarily removing content will guarantee that I cancel my current subscription and take to the high seas.
With physical media dying off or at least not prioritized, this compounds the situation because for a lot of these shows there’s no hard copy of the media that you can fall back on or keep as a personal archive; it’s all up to the whims of whoever’s in charge at the moment.
So much this, we cancelled our HBO sub as soon as all the crap/shit TLC/Discovery stuff was put on the platform. That kind of crap is exactly WHY we ditched cable in the first place, and exactly WHY i was willing to pay more for the quality content HBO was producing and had in its library.
Paramount was always destined to fail, as is Disney+ (though that will take longer). The reality is that what people want is to buy their preferred streaming provider and have access to everyone content on that platform. They are not interested in having to subscribe to EVERY platform just for one or two shows.
I think Disney is one of the few platforms that can survive the streaming bubble. The mouse has acquired an obscene number of huge IPs over the last couple of decades - Marvel, Star Wars, The Simpsons… not to mention Disney/Pixar’s own output. It also helps that even without streaming they make more money than some countries.
I doubt that to be honest, I can dig up more news, but my understanding is that Disney is already struggling to be profitable, they are finding that customers are not willing to pay for their walled content and are cross licensing with other platforms things that they would have tried to keep in house previously.
It baffles me to no end that a company will pull their own IP from their servers. It costs them next to nothing to leave that up for stream. That was the whole premise of streaming in the first place!
Is there a way to get rid of the space on the left and right sides of the screen and make comments and posts cover the whole browser window like old Reddit does?
V. 0.18 disables CAPTCHA support, which we're not willing to do at this time, as there are a lot of bots on the platform. It's supposed to be re-instated in 0.18.1, so we're probably going to wait for that.
From what we understand, it should be possible to simply bypass the warning that Jerboa sends, and use the instance as normal - let us know if that's not the case.
Also, the instance can be installed as a PWA through Chrome on Android phones - I've found that to be a good experience overall.
Ah shoot, I just confirmed this. We had tried it with Jerboa, but we were already logged in.
While we consider our options, I would suggest accessing the instance through your web browser. I don't think you'll have any issues doing it that way, and the mobile interface is pretty decent.
“Your griefs, your pains, fix you to moments in the past long gone. You’re like butterflies with your wings pinned.”
I think this is the theme of PIC season 2, and not just for Picard. Processing and accepting the impact of past choices and actions in the here and now. Seven expressing the impact of her post-VOY treatment by others. Raffi admitting to herself that she holds too tightly to those who are important to her in the now because of her fear of loss based on past experiences. Her loss of: Starfleet; her credibility because of her theory about the sythn attack on Mars; and, herself and her family due to her addictions afterwards. Rios’ moment of growth when he moves on from always feeling adrift since the events on the Ibn Majid. Agnes and the Borg Queen bonding over shared feelings of loneliness. A strange combo, but one I think Alison Pill and Annie Wersching’s strong performances completely sold.
I think PIC season 2’s overarching story is muddled because the separate parts seem related more by happenstance rather than being a solid, cohesive narrative. However, I think season 2’s theme is always strong, and it resonates with me.
One of the things I love about Star Trek is when it makes me think about how I think. PIC season 2 has me doing a lot of self-reflection. I enjoy, and re-watch, PIC season 2.
For an episode whose argument hinged on genetic engineering being a cultural practice for the Ilyrians it is strange they never actually had anybody testify as to what significance it has in Ilyrian culture. Or how it is done and why.
If the genetic engineering is done to adapt to their inhospitable atmosphere why are they doing it to every child? They could just edit the germline once and be done with it.
Altogether it felt like the writers just got very attached to the idea of genetically modified individuals as a metaphor for real world marginalized groups that they lost track both of the in-universe practicalities of the metaphor and the real world implications for the metaphor. This was just outright sympathetic to eugenicists, an ideology that has led to the deaths of millions of marginalized people.
@varda@ValueSubtracted Maybe I missed something but I thought the Ilyrians were all about augmentation, both genetic and technological. I think there’s a huge difference between taking something, making it better and the pursuit of a perfect race. I too would like to know more.
@bulbasaur “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.” Very different from augmenting oneself with current tech, like vaccination.
One of the things I really liked about it is that there was no explosive denouement (apart from PIke’s hug), and Una and Neera didn’t automagically become BFFs again at the end. 25 years is a longass time. Even excluding ideological positions, they’re strangers now. They probably won’t send each other birthday cards. They won’t send each other memes on Whatsapp. They won’t invite each other to weddings and shit.
And that’s okay. Or maybe I’m just projecting. Sometimes I see friends I haven’t spoken to in 10+ years on social media, and I think damn back then we couldn’t let a day pass without at least a text. But whatever the reason for falling out of touch, I would say I’d be glad if they’re thriving and hope things get better for them if they’re not. But no interest in rekindling the friendship or initiating contact. And that’s okay.
I loved it. I do not understand the joke about Spock “outburst”, was there something in that body language that I am missing? And was this a joke inspired by Lower Decks ?
The fact that there was no body language is the joke. The actors were told to sit there as impassionatly as possible.
Meanwhile Ortega is the audience eyes, it is just two people sat there with zero emotion.
Embenga can see a difference as is skilled people person and knows other races but we can't see (future doctors must be more akin to vetenarians knowing hundreds of biological systems not just their own like a current doc)
Then the joke is that while on the outside it looks impassionate to a Vulcan that was a "massive outburst". It's a joke on Vulcan lack of emotion
I think this episode was really good…if the issue of discrimination was over literally anything other than a social practice of genetic modification. Star Trek’s hardline stance on linking social genetic modification to eugenics is one of the things that I’ve really appreciated, especially as corrosive “thought experiments” about it have sort of entered back into the discourse. I don’t think you can practice genetic manipulation on a society wide level without it going very bad very fast. At least I don’t think humans can, and the episode doesn’t really make a case for why the Illyrians are better at it.
The core message of this episode is so important, especially at this current moment, and the right of people to self determination and to safety and security in their identities and differences is right at the heart of Star Trek, so I’m glad to see SNW continue to affirm it. But…just…there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or “fixing” populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more. This episode does not actually convince me that in the far future utopia of the Federation the dangers of genetic modification as a practice have been addressed, and in absence of that “It used to happen and its bad, but stuff is better now and can’t we relax a little” is a bit…hollow
I think you could fix this for me if you made it so that Illyrian genetic modification was something that members of their species voluntarily entered into in adolescence or early adulthood. Make it more of a practice that people voluntarily keep up and less of a program that their society runs and the whole thing works way better for me. That also makes the loose analogy to transgender people in our current time, and really just the right of bodily autonomy and self determination, way more coherent.
But…just…there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or “fixing” populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more.
Other episodes did, and I hope we’ll see more of that. Specifically, it’s about Illyrian culture: Genetic modification is deeply ingrained, required in their ethics: “We don’t terraform planets, that’s disrespectful of nature, we transform ourselves”, as heard previous season (I’m sure someone will fill in the episode number). As such the practice doesn’t root in a desire for dominance or superiority, but gentleness towards the universe.
That is, the issue with the eugenics wars wasn’t genetic manipulation itself, but that humanity was war-like and out for dominance and superiority. The augments’ attitude of supremacy simply reflect cultural attitudes back then, they were not caused by genetic modifications, but enabled. (Alternatively: The bad idea of imbuing augments with such a sense was due to bonkers scientists influenced by cultural attitudes).
Or maybe more like entheogens: Drugs that kill one society are used responsibly and for benefit by others because they have cultural practices regulating them, rites (regulations) saying when and where and why they should be used.
If the federation ever gets around to legalising genetic manipulation having regulations written by Illyrians and Denobulans sounds like a very good idea.
What I can’t get out of my head this morning is actually Bashir’s plotline with his parents on DS9, because it captures what’s so insidious about even “benevolent” genetic modification. He’s not angry at them just because they broke the law, he’s angry at them because they decided they didn’t like who he was and chose to transform him into someone else, someone he feels is a different person. And this is actually the fundamental argument against a social program of gene management in real life; it allows society to police what types of bodies and what types of minds are “normal” and flattens species diversity and experience diversity in favor of whatever the norms say is “better”. The danger isn’t just the risk of Khan like supermen, its a moral argument against determining how people’s bodies and minds are going to develop before they can even consent, even before they’re born.
As strongly as I feel about this, I do think you could create a case for why what the Ilyrians do is meaningfully different, the “adapting to other planets rather than making them adapt to us” idea is interesting and complicated, but it felt extremely cursory in this ep
Thank you! Came on here because the episode left such a bad taste in my mouth. I’m a queer person with multiple disabilties, one of which is known to be genetic. Using genetic engineering as the metaphor for marginalized groups felt like a trojan horse to garner public sympathy for genetic engineering.
And through making genetic engineering acceptable then we’re opening up the world to letting parents engineer the gay out of their children and to engineer the neurodivergence out of their children.
Instead of being a story about accepting marginalized groups to me it feels like they’re actively pushing for a technology that can be used to wipe out marginalized groups. Why did the writers do this? They literally did not have to set this up or write it this way.
Also the references to the Eugenics Wars as though they are somehow irrelevant today just did not at all sit well with me as somebody who is high risk for covid. This whole pandemic the drumbeat has been “only those with pre-existing conditions will die” and we have been fighting for our lives to get the most minimal public health measures and the ableds just keep putting their conviences over our lives. Eugenics is still here, it’s still going strong, but we’re just not calling it eugenics anymore.
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