Ethan peck looked like he had a blast with this episode, screaming into a towel is a mood
I also enjoyed the “subservient” dad who really just wanted to eat good food and play charades but was shot down :'( but then the captain gave him leftovers with a cool snap :)
Also, as a meta comment, I really dislike the scenes where it’s clear they are just I don’t of the LED wall. It looks so fake and the actors just stand there in an obviously empty room. Season 1 of SNW had at least one episode of this, and season 1 of the mandalorian did too, and they really need to follow the mandalorian example.abkut having actual physical props in addition to the LED wall to prevent it from looking fake as hell
Regarding the LED wall, yeah, it was more obvious here. It felt like they were entering one of those gimmicky project-Van-Gogh-art-on-a-warehouse-wall tourist traps.
The episode where Uhura and Hemmer were trapped in the engine room was another one that stood out.
The last episode on Rigel VII was shot in front of the Holodeck (what the call Trek’s AR Wall) and it was breathtakingly good. The emptiness was likely part of the point with this species.
The AR wall was obvious but it doesn’t bother me that much. Environments that require active suspension of disbelief have been a Star Trek staple since the 1960s.
Having grown up watching matte paintings, shaky plywood sets, bubble wrap monsters and people running up and down the same corridor repeatedly and then decades of soulless bad CGI I have nothing bad to say about modern productions standards. There is something special and human about the artistry of matte paintings, scale models and physical sets but I don’t know that today’s viewers have the same capacity for suspension of disbelief. LED walls allow some story telling that would otherwise be to expensive to visualise.