Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x03 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

IonAddis , 1 year ago

I ended up liking this a lot. For one, I’m glad Pelia really is a part of the cast now because I LOVED her introduction and was fearful she’d be a one-and-done character.

But secondly, in the past all I could see with La’an was (as someone else said) “a budget Camina Drummer”. And I love Drummer, but seeing almost!Drummer every time La’an was on screen was so fricking weird.

I think this episode gave La’an some of the development she needed so I wasn’t seeing almost!Drummer all the time.

(And for those who don’t know Drummer is…go watch The Expanse. It’s as if the new (is it still considered new?) Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek had a baby. One part grittier sci-fi universe, one part wonderful character/crew exploration.)

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

I agree. At one point, I wondered if the EPs had wanted Cara Gee for the show.

She’s her own person now. Strong and closed like Drummer but from a very different context.

Many of us who are fans of both Trek and The Expanse have wished Trek had some of the complex strong women along the lines of the Expanse. I can’t criticize the EPs for wanting to bring that into the franchise. Now all I want is a Trek version of Avrasala.

zalack , 11 months ago

I legit thought it was Cara Gee for the first few scenes she was in.

SamC , 1 year ago

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.

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

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.

pinwurm , 11 months ago

A little late to the game but I really loved this episode.

Only thing that didn’t quite make sense to me was the romantic connection between La’an and Kirk. It felt forced - and I feel like the episode would’ve been just as strong without it. Just them bonding as friends, who are going through this deeply traumatic time travel experience together - would’ve been more than enough.

I can appreciate that La’an would be more vulnerable as a result Kirk not knowing her family name, but she oggled him in the changing room before that was revealed. Seemed out of character.

Otherwise, I’m really curious to see what kind of timeline implication all of this will have - and if the watch will make way back in the series somehow.

Tired8281 , 1 year ago

Did she leave that gun with that little boy?

ShakaWhenRedditFell , 1 year ago

Lucky for us this boy is not going to be a genocidal maniac.

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

She left the gun that had shot Kirk in plain sight to be found be the security team she believed were on their way.

And in fact we heard the footfalls of the team running towards the room just as La’an hit the button and vanished. She didn’t even have time to get herself out of young Khan’s sight.

JohnnyDelirious , 1 year ago

I enjoyed that episode a lot, although it would have benefitted from its length being tightened up by ten minutes.

What do we think was the nature of the Romulan interference with Earth? And what time period is Sera, the Romulan agent from?

The DTI agent appears to use 29th century tech, which is several hundred years after the Romulan Empire’s supernovae-driven collapse but possibly around the time of the Romulan-Vulcan reunification of Ni’Var. Is she from that same time period?

Sera also shows Kirk a picture of what looks like a TOS-era Bird-of-Prey as part of her alien conspiracy photo deck. It has the round nacelles typical of the 23rd century, rather than those seen in ENT’s 22nd century designs, or some other design representing the 20th/21st century in which these attacks take place.

Is she a time agent from the 23rd century (with the appropriate Romulan ship in orbit)?

Is that her guessing who Kirk is, and planting the evidence he’s most likely to recognize? Or was that really a Romulan design from the 21st century?

Which leads to me wonder if the Romulans started interfering with Earth’s development only due to temporal war shenanigans, or had they been doing flybys for as long as the Vulcans?

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

Never thought that letting an episode run longer in streaming would be viewed as a negative.

I wouldn’t have cut anything.

CaptainProton , 1 year ago

I really like Paul Wesley’s portrayal and the way Kirk is written. Honestly I can imagine this as a TOS episode with Shatner and co. Some more thoughts:

While I was not sure about the chemistry between the two main characters, I bought into their romance and I especially liked the final scene with La’an: it was an earned moment and the actress was very effective in her delivery. I wish the two had spent some more time talking about what reality they should preserve but I guess saving your brother’s life is a good enough reason to risk everything. I would’ve done the same, tbh. Time shenanigans needn’t be explained, honestly I can believe that the Augment Wars were so destructive that we don’t know many things about the period; could’ve been in the 90s, could’ve been in the 21st century, there are real life examples of such gaps in the historical record, after all (and don’t tell me Sarah Silverman was around for the rise of Khan). Still, a welcome reference.

I love Pelia, the accent, the delivery, the character backstory, it’s all really good and she is a very nice addition to the cast. I laughed when she didn’t know anything about engineering but it makes perfect sense. Imagine going back in time and asking a 10 year old Einstein to explain relativity to you!

With the positive out of the way, I have to say that I liked the first half of the episode more than the second for the following reasons:

I think they broke into that facility pretty easily. Why did the door open in response to La’an’s DNA? Isn’t Khan just a little kid? Can he enter and leave as he pleases? I thought he was like an experiment they are trying to keep under wraps.

I did not like the antagonist lady and I especially don’t like the suggestion that Romulans have been secretly trying to keep humanity from reaching greatness. I always thought that one of the most important messages in the franchise was that humans were able to rise above their flaws and create a utopia but now it’s the Romulans who were keeping us down and we managed to reach the stars even against these odds. How inherently great humanity is… Not a good message, imo, but perhaps the antagonist lady was simply exaggerating.

Overall a good episode. Kinda lost me in the second half but the final scene was a strong conclusion. Honestly, I can see myself re-watching this in the future.

FormerGameDev , 1 year ago

I think they broke into that facility pretty easily. Why did the door open in response to La’an’s DNA? Isn’t Khan just a little kid? Can he enter and leave as he pleases? I thought he was like an experiment they are trying to keep under wraps.

Seems Khan and all the other kids are probably derived from older Noonien-Singh DNA, considering the name of the facility.

Manabi , 1 year ago

I think it was less humanity's greatness that allowed them to reach the stars in the alternate timeline and more of having no choice but to do so. Earth was a wasteland and they needed more resources beyond what was available in the rest of our solar system. La'an told Kirk at one point that he could be an explorer in her timeline, heavily implying humanity doesn't do that in his.

Spoken_Weakley , 1 year ago

“This was supposed to happen in 1992!”

Is that a reference to how the eugenics wars were supposed to happen in the 90’s but obviously those came and went so they’re softly retconning when the eugenics wars took place?

XiberKernel , 1 year ago

I kinda like this theory. The temporal wars are still affecting the timeline, but time is pushing back to repair the timeline. In-universe reason to both retcon and act as a story element as well (with hopefully a Wesley Crusher appearance at some point?)

lwaxana_katana , 1 year ago

This was definitely my favourite episode of the season, and possibly of the series. I thought Kirk was badly cast, but actually after seeing him in this episode, I get it. He is not our Kirk, but he actually does bring something very Kirk-ish to the role that I hadn't appreciated previously.

arkclr , 1 year ago

That is an excellent way of stating it, re Kirk. He wasn't doing it for me, and I thought I had it figured. He looks like Pine, who tried to mimic Shatner's mannerisms, but didn't really deliver the Shatnerisms. Here I was able to accept him as his own thing, and it was fine.

Mezentine , 1 year ago

The more I think about this episode the more impressed I get. There's so many small moments where they could have taken the easy, obvious choice and it would have been fine, and instead they were just a little more thoughtful and a little more creative and it shows.

They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who's very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise...just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she's one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.

They could have had the Romulan agent just be a cold, ruthless assassin from the future who's here to get the job done, and that would have been fine. Instead she's this slightly unhinged woman, trapped out of time, stuck undercover on an alien world for thirty years on a mission that she's not sure exists anymore and I love the way she starts losing it at the end, that she just wants to kill this kid and be done with it.

They could have cast Khan as a hot 20 something available in the Toronto area and had him to a Ricardo Montalbán impression and give us a tense standoff, and I would have been annoyed at that, but it probably would have been fine. Instead they show us an actual child, and remind is that Khan was a horrifying monster, but he was created by a world with monsters of its own, monsters who built a child in a laboratory and raised him in a basement, and suddenly its a piece of implied context made explicit that I didn't even know I wanted.

And of course they could have just had Kirk agree to fix the timeline because its the right thing to do, or because he loves La`an, or because...honestly, because the plot has to happen, this is something that so many stories would just gloss over to keep the story moving. And instead we get one line, "Sam's alive?" and my heart jumped to my throat a little bit and immediately we understand why he's willing to go through with this.

I'm really really impressed with the writers on this episode.

Mezentine , 1 year ago

Although it does remain very funny that they're doing this much work to make us care about Sam Kirk, a character who's fate is to die off screen to a brain parasite before the episode even starts. Sorry Sam.

IonAddis , 1 year ago

I think it’s more that they’re introducing Kirk sideways, by way of humanizing him through how he cares for Sam.

stuck , 1 year ago

Wow. You get my first Lemmy upvote on this post! Thank you for pointing out all these details.

IonAddis , 1 year ago

They could have just had Pelia push a secret button to reveal her stash of alien tech, and that probably would have been fine. Instead they show her as this woman who’s very smart and obviously immortal but otherwise…just a person living through history, which is so much better. Imagining the 250 years between the present and when she’s one of the most famous engineers in the fleet is fun.

It’s not just fun–but it speaks to a different demographic than most shows speak to.

It’s telling older women that it’s not too late to change and grow and learn. Here she is, obviously having already lived a long life–but then we learn she hasn’t ALWAYS been an engineer from the start. She did not begin as someone obviously fascinated by science.

She realized later in life. And then she was able to SUCCESSFULLY pursue her career and become an expert. Just because she wasn’t a child prodigy didn’t mean she couldn’t learn and grow. There’s SO many stories focusing on people who have things 100% right immediately out of the gate. Top grades in school, top performance at work, accolades, reccomendations from the time they were teens.

But this story is of an ordinary eccentric retail worker…who goes back to hit the books and succeeds with her change.

This lesson will go over 75% people’s heads…but in true Star Trek fashion, even if it elludes many, it’ll hit home with the demographic it’s meant to talk to. Older women who feel like they’re too old to change. That they shouldn’t even try. It’s talking to THEM like so many other characters in Star Trek talk to other overlooked people.

And that makes this detail–one out of many in this excellent episode–top Star Trek.

BROMETHIUS , 1 year ago

Am I confused or is this a Star Trek “sub lemmy” that is super active? Is this an rss feed from Reddit or something?

If this is already this active, then fuck yeah lol

IonAddis , 1 year ago

Star Trek fandom is OLD. And a lot of the old fans go back to the BBS and email list days. They’ve/we’ve weathered plenty of technology changes.

This is in fact the one sub I am NOT surprised is so active. It’s one part Old Fandom, and one part the new shows coming out being pretty good, making the fandom alive and kicking instead of moribund and dead.

MichelleBirkby , 1 year ago

@IonAddis @BROMETHIUS oh, I remember fandom when it was hand printed zines through the post - fandom survives, fandom finds a way

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

Mimeoed zines are in my past I confess.

I can’t say they were always as civil as they might be. Even in the late 80s with laserprint copies in vogue, there were folks who thought shouting everything in AllCaps was the way to get their message across.

@BROMETHIUS you may wish to check the pinned message at the top of this community.

This instance was created by the senior mods of r/startrek and r/DaystromInstitute. The original mod of r/startrek is modding here. They’re hoping to attract some of the other Star Trek subreddits to join. The invitations have been made. So far, they’ve decided to keep the number of communities to three in order to let the conversations get going.

williams_482 , 1 year ago

I thought this episode was fantastic.

The pacing was good, the interactions between Kirk and La'an were fun, and the closing acts were a real gut wrench. Being forced through such a traumatic situation and completely unable to talk with anyone about it is a piece of the time travel/Prime Directive secrecy that Star Trek hasn't really dug it's teeth into before, and there's clearly something very powerful to work with here.

Also, hilarious use of their immortal chief engineer. In retrospect, no surprise that someone in that position wouldn't maintain exactly the same hobbies and skills throughout the centuries, and also no real shock that this particular individual got her jollies stealing priceless artwork. And then arguing statute of limitations when she is challenged on it centuries later? Brilliant.

I do not give the slightest of damns about a TOS one-liner placing Kahn in the 1990s. This is a good story which wouldn't work properly otherwise, and that was a poor choice from writers who couldn't have possibly known better. Absolutely do not care, and so much happier for it.

After a fairly meh first episode, SNW S2 has reeled off a pair of real bangers. Looking forward to the next installment.

goGetF1 , 1 year ago

But they also managed to explain the moving of the Eugenics Wars as the result of time hijinks, some of which we’ve seen on screen. I think this is a credible explanation Star Trek can use for TOS retcons without being too dismissive of canon.

MooseGas , 1 year ago

I am so late to this. I was up at the cottage for the long weekend and missed the episode until today.

Khan could be my neighbour.

astroturds , 1 year ago

Kirk was superb, I don't think I could have accepted the car scene if it was anyone else. It's Kirk, of course he's going to drive like a nutter. I was genuinely shocked when he got shot. I thought there couldn't possibly be a way for him to make it but they still got me.

La'an has grown on me so much, she was the one I was most dubious about in the early episodes of season one. I felt really sorry for her at the end, losing Kirk and being unable to talk to anyone about what she's experienced. She's gone through some pretty serious trauma already due to her genes and name and now she's had to go through this pure insanity. I wonder what the significance of the watch is.

ObsidianBlk , 1 year ago

This does bring up an interesting observation… The Temporal Agents apparently have no qualms about coming to not only take back their gadgets and gizmos after someone from the past uses them, but seems to just drop in on the past and cryptically hand out missions to those same ancestors out of literal nowhere! This time travel stuff can be so mentally damaging that even those agents trained to directly work with it (Captain Brackston, for example) can mentally break. Whatever stress La’an was shouldering at the start of the episode has now surely compounded.

You would think that Starfleet of the future would have put together some form of “Temporal Psychology” department, or something. People who’s jobs are to go back to ancestors emotionally effected by time travel, and help them deal with any trauma. Telling La’an to, basically, just “shut up and suck it up” is a horrible way to deal with someone who, essentially, just saved your existence. I get she can’t talk to any of her contemporaries, but surely someone from the past could pop-in and act as a counselor of some sort.

IDK… I felt the temporal agent’s cold response to what La’an had to deal with was rather un-starfleet.

cybervseas , 1 year ago

Yes I was thinking the same thing, like “Lady you’re acknowledging how difficult this is to bear, could you offer like 6 free therapy sessions at least?”

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

Maybe they know that she has Pelia there to comfort her?

La’an couldn’t tell Pelia the details around Khan or the Romulan incursions, but if Pelia recognizes her and asks after the handsome young companion she has with her in the 21st century, she could at least offer comfort for his nonexistence in this presence. I doubt Pelia could see La’an with this universe’s Kirk and not put her memories together.

cybervseas , 1 year ago

She was discount Camina Drummer for me at first. Now I see her as her own character with a lot of potential.

SSH_2023 , 1 year ago

So does this retcon how Khan comes to power in the 1990s and pushes the eugenics war further in the timeline? I have seen some people say this was done to keep the timeline consistent with ours.

StillPaisleyCat , 1 year ago

Yes. Time heals.

Key events are preserved but the details may change and slip a bit. The details can include slippage in the dates.

The 90s date was implicitly overwritten by TNG’s premiere where Roddenberry himself decided to shift WW3 to the mid 21st century.

People had head canoned the link between the Eugenics wars and WW3 out of existence, while also ignoring that TOS implied Warp was discovered in the late 20th century.

Accepting that temporal incursions alter the Prime Timeline just makes sense of events like Voyager Endgame.

vewave , 1 year ago

It was a fun ride overall. Especially with Kirk basically treating the mission as a field trip for the first 20 minutes. I'm glad I didn't completely jumped ship after Paul Wesley's incredibly wooden delivery of "oh my god, what have you done" nearly broke me. Meanwhile, the romance felt forced and rushed to me, so I didn't feel much at the end. But the most shocking reveal to me: George Kirk... is apparently still on the Enterprise?!

khan_shot_1st , 1 year ago

The romance stuff felt very forced to me too