I’m with the others that say it’s a really good episode, until you start picking apart some of the decisions. Pike taking the word of a person who has been suffering hallucinations, with no evidence, then preceding to destroy a massive infrastructure project with no real hesitation…it didn’t feel earned. I know he trust her, and Kirk, but damn that was an extreme leap of faith.
That's frankly what caught my attention, even as I was watching the episode. The decision turns out to have been right, but on thin-to-nonexistent justification.
I think what justifies it is the second case that they encounter. The other guy provides them with scientific evidence that Uhura was experiencing something that wasn’t unique to just her.
It was definitely a leap of faith for Pike, but his decision was bolstered by someone (Kirk) that he knows can make the right decisions too.
This might be a case where they compressed too much for coherence.
Yeah, there was the other guy. But in my mind, not enough had apparently been done to confirm a superficial and partial similarity of symptoms.
To give an idea of the dissonance, I'm remembering somebody (I think it wasn't Miles O'Brien who got the line) encountering the Cardassian systems on Deep Space 9 and complaining that they weren't triple-redundant.
In academia, we call it parsimony in a way that doesn't quite seem to match a dictionary definition that I just dredged up on line: It's when an explanation seems straightforward and satisfactory. For me, that was missing.
I think a challenge for script writing here is keeping the story moving without dragging this too far into soap opera territory. How much do we really want get into the weeds here?
Maybe the writers thought this was too deep in the weeds. Maybe they just ran out of episode time. Maybe we agree they didn't get the balance right here.
i was just thrown by the fact that nobody considered the possibility that it was a plot by Romulans or Gorn to get the Federation to self-sabotage. they stated they were at the edge of known space, so i thought a much more cautious attitude was required