SpaceScotsman

Maybe she was an undercover romulan, sent to report if enterprise go too close to finding the cloaked ship, and now that Reeger is likely no longer a threat, and enterprise probably isn't going to want to follow up, her job's done so she's off.

M'Benga covering for Kirk is really good, I like that the setup for this was laid a couple of episodes ago. Kirk fighting on behalf of the crew to keep them from doing war crimes - it shows the level of camaraderie this crew has, which admiral reeger likely never experienced, and helps continue to cement Kirk as a member of the enterprise.

I really enjoyed this one. The core moral dilemma of orders versus morals, captured in a strong A story and a decent B story. Genuine character growth, and an out for M'Benga that made sense, was in character, and felt justified. The direction was really nice, it captured the tense nature of the episode. The treknobabble for the A plot was pretty decent, and in the B plot I enjoyed the cave set - it felt used and full, not bare like they sometimes do. I really enjoyed the acting here - the Andorian leader gave me a hint of cardassian in his analytical takedown of humans, and the badmiral was really enjoyable from his upbeat arrival to steady decline into madness. The two Kirks getting along really well was enjoyable, and the synchronised walk and talk at the end was a nice way to wrap up the episode.

From this season's approach, I'm guessing this episode drawing from old war films, in particular I am getting flavours of submarine hunts, chasing after wakes, and handling big questions of WMDs, the sanity of the chain of command. This is exactly the way I like those references embedded, allowing the trek to shine through, rather than the gimmick taking over.

My only immediate quibble in this episode was when Uhura went Rambo in the caves, it did feel like the Andorians went down a little easy, but I wasn't that bothered by it. A'Sha leaving is fine, I guess, she didn't feel very present throughout the season anyway.

Please, more of this type of episode.

Human infested cities. Cat infested cafés. Cattle infested farms.

I agree that Pike's retrospective of his alternate life was a good idea to explore - its the kind of thing that older trek series would quickly shuffle on after that week's episode (like O'briens stint in virtual jail). Pike has done a lot of thinking about coming to terms with his vision of his own future, so thinking about his alternate future was a necessary next step.

I just wish it had been given a better story in which to bubble about. If it's a serious character point, let it be told in a serious story. Let us see his job as a captain of a discovery-science-diplomacy ship lead him down that path of self reflection. Adding a comedic glamour filter on top of everything, in my opinion, cheapens the end result. It bugs me that so far we had erica/scotty needing to be drunk to learn to get along, spock needing to be dreaming / nightmaring, and now pike and co. stuck in a Q game in order to grow as people.

I actually had no idea who Deidre Hall was, though from the visual language I got the impression she was meant to be "someone important". I assumed they had picked a random actress and were making a meta-joke about guest actors on TV shows. I was half expecting her to vanish at the very end.

One of the things I love about Star Trek is when it allows us to see the best of humanity when faced with hard sci fi, working together despite adverse circumstances. TNG exemplified the utopian vision of humanity struggling against the odds but working together to get by. Voyager took aliens-of-the-week to an extreme yet still kept space for good character interactions alongside the sci-fi. Even DS9, which in its conception is closest to a soap opera, managed to mix family dynamics with spacefaring adventure. I will accept these older series had their fair share of stinkers, but all of these series were able to blend pastiches of classic film and stories into their episodes without it being hammy and grating.

Now, this episode. The key line is "Space adventures leave little time for humans to deal with their inner struggles". This line is important because it is wrong.

1. We've barely had any space adventures
2. The best star trek does allow time for humans to deal with inner struggles

I enjoy Rhys Darby but not in this one. I'm glad they didn't make this one be all a dream in the end and I like that the final scenes show some real character moments, but Uhura and M'Benga (and possibly also Pike) could have had their conversations in amongst non-gimmicked episodes. Also, the ship has a counsellor? Either they're new, or haven't been doing their job very well. How many times has Spock broken up with someone now? Didn't care for the gimmick this episode. I fast forwarded through parts of it.

One big thing you need to think about is accessibility. This is something that came up in a conversation with a local representative in the UK - for children in public schools it is a requirements that any technology have good accessibility and not leave anyone behind. And accessibility tools on linux are, suffice to say, not great. Especially when compared with those on other closed systems. My local government ended up going with iPads for kids in schools, and the accessibility tooling on these was a factor in that choice.

I was wondering if this was meant to be the "origin story" of the dermal regenerator.

For a moment I did wonder if pelia was going to be the one who goes out to take the readings, and it would be her going out with a bang.

This one felt like we were halfway towards a proper episode. The plot had a big ethical decision, it had opportunity for growth, a decent if treknobabbly sci fi threat. But this episode really suffered from prequelitis - it never really felt that Chapel was going to do anything other than try to save Mbenga, we know mbenga survives in some capacity anyway, and Chapel's decision is made within seconds with little room to explore "when should you let a patient go". Ditto Spock's grand sacrifice going out into the radiation, and a lack of tension around the pod being ejected. There was a lot going on here, possibly too much. The clear stand outs here are Scotty getting his drive and motivation to own engineering on enterprise, and nurse chapel getting the push to likewise take more agency of her life on enterprise.

I guess this is meant to be borrowing from the 24 style of show - the only 24 I've ever seen was when the Simpsons parodied it. Overall I didn't really like that particular style of direction / editing, but it wasn't terrible. It kind of bugged me that we only learnt what the threat we were counting down to was half way through the episode. This episode would probably have worked just as well without the counter, it didn't add anything for me.

Random notes:

• The reference to the lift sketch was amusing
• Getting a bit more scortegas friendshipping is cute
• Good we managed to avoid some lizard space babies at warp limit
• Once again our Vulcan cadet comes up with a line that sounds superficially vulcan but which under scrutiny makes no sense ("I'm a vegetarian, therefore the thing you said about meat is illogical").
• Lastly, this is probably one of the first instances where the crew acknowledge that starfleet ships apparently do not having proper electrical wiring and grounding on the control panels. That got a laugh out of me. They should fix that.

Indie games are good, but if privacy is a concern be careful of any game developed in a big engine like unity. My firewall pings a warning every time I launch a unity game because they all send analytics data back to unity. If it's single player and you block all outgoing connections by default, you're fine though.

Worth noting that the trendline in that plot would be pointing down anyway, before you include season 4. That tends to happen for every long running TV show.