SpaceScotsman

I love that "Lonely Mountains: Downhill" isn't woke, even though it gives fine grained control over your characters design, like a "feminine" body with facial hair.

No, the better solution is to add more black bars to the side so that it fits on to a wide screen.

"Envisioned as an important connecting vein that will one day see trains running from Helsinki, Finland, to Palermo, Sicily,"

Surely the important connecting vein here is a link to Finland, on the other side of Europe and across the sea from Italy, but then I'm not a rail engineer so what do I know.

Yes, if the government was sane and allowed a physical card as an alternative/backup, but the UK gov wants to make it digital only.

Some important context here is that Switzerland already has a national ID card system, this is an extension allowing people to use a digital version if they prefer.

I'm not saying that isn't going to be without its privacy concerns, but them narrowly voting that in is a far cry from, oh I don't know, the UK government forcing an entirely new scheme on people without a referendum.

I\ don\'t\ know\ what\ you\ mean,\ I\'ve\ never\ encountered\ any\ annoyances.

Labour were voted in on a mandate of "change" specifically. Literally, their one word slogan used during campaigning. Now, obviously they're the single transferable party, so nothing was actually going to change, but I do want to make sure no-one forgets that was their one promise.

Pike got his "that's rough buddy" moment.

I am very glad we got to revisit this storyline. There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison, and using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great. I was really interested in that guardian figure from the earlier episode, knowing now that it ended up being Batel in a kind of asymptotic time loop is pretty crazy, but it is a very poetic ending. She can't really live a life with Pike, and this is an ending that gives her meaning.

When Batel's hands started glowing for a moment I genuinely thought she was going to regenerate à la time lord. And in the end I guess she kind of did! I half expected her to start babbling about some cosmic koala when she had stars in her eyes, I'm glad she didn't. The ending took a serious tone, and that worked very well.

This episode uses what is effectively a dream sequence and those you have to be careful with. It works well here because the concept of time, cause, and effect have already been established as in play here so even if it never turned out as the actual in-universe outcome, it still feels like it has meaning. I note that the show giving us Pike's alternate future had he not (will he have had not? tenses are hard with time travel) got in the accident for me cements the fact that he really is going to end up as his future vision told him. There's no avoiding it now.

I am not sure I really followed a lot of the treknobabble in this one. I don't get how the entity managed to reconstruct itself, nor why there was a whole debate about phasers being complementary instead of additive. But as a plot device to get things moving it was serviceable. Also, just a note, if you're firing a stream of ANTI protons into the atmosphere, one would expect the antimatter to annihilate on impact with the upper atmosphere. I did find it hilarious that there's two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats!

The planet design was really cool, the big floating churchey architecture was giving me Halo vibes. It's interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races. I wonder if then the Feds would bother to help them out in the aftermath, or if they just left them to it. They kind of should take responsibility, given it was them that unleashed the evil in the first place. Even if it's just to loan them that eye regeneration thing for a few hours.

Overall, this was a nice finale, and given it didn't end on a pointless cliffhanger, and wrapped up most of the threads well, one of the better ones as TV dramas go.

Oh, look at that pretty twinkling shooting sta- oh shit, that's another one of elon musk's pointless billionaire space toys. I can't even relax by just looking at the stars anymore.

I really enjoyed this one.

We finally get some real movement on the Ortegas trauma that was set up earlier in the season and the solution, forced exposure therapy, is pretty wild. Ortegas managed to overcome it fairly well, which does back up the "she passed her psych eval" stated in an earlier episode. Not only does she overcome a personal problem, but she actually manages some form of diplomacy across multiple alien species. Way to go.

My biggrumble with this episode is the ending. I saw it coming a mile away, there's no practical way to end it other than finding some excuse to write out the good!gorn. I think the episode did not even need the aliens running things behind the scenes, it would have been perfectly fine to just have the spatial anomaly and a crash landing as the setup.

I hope that Ortegas remembers that La'an killed the Gorn, that will make for some nice drama later. I also hope that Ortegas remembers enough that she could try to advocate for the Gorn. While this episode wasn't quite "Darmok", Ortegas shows a lot of aptitude for cross-species communication, and that needs to be used alongside her piloting.

The Uhura-Pike drama was a bit less enjoyable. At the end of the episode pike basically says he would have stayed anyway, which undermines the whole B-Plot of the episode. If anything it should have been a Pike-Una debate. And with a more pressing need than "These people need a vaccine absolutely right now but also they can wait a couple days if need be".

Another comedy episode? You know what, if that's what SNW is, a comedy series, maybe it doesn't bother me. If I lower my expectations and just lean right into it, the fact that we have a slightly lower rate of "serious" episodes is fine. Maybe if I keep repeating that to myself I'll start to believe it.

The whole episode was fun, taken as a series of "what if" vignettes, and I did enjoy it, but it is lacking that spark that makes Star Trek great.

The plot setup is totally contrived, and I am a bit miffed that we missed out on a "how can we avoid breaking the prime directive" episode. And it does seem a bit like a rehash of the episode we already had with spock. As fun as it was to see the other actors do the whole "I'm a different person for an episode" episode. I have no idea why their hairstyles changed so suddenly but I love it anyway. Especially Pike's JoJo's-Bizarre-Adventure hair.

This is purely my personal preference - I really am not a fan of montage scenes set to songs in TV episodes in general. So the marching scene at the start just felt awkward to me. Not very trek. I don't mind this kind of thing so much in films, or in "musical" episodes, but it didn't really click for me here. It does fit a bit better when I realised this was going to be a comedy episode.

Patton oswalt was great here. For a moment I wondered if the storyline they were going to go for was that Una had been mind-melded into falling for Doug, as a b-plot to mirror what happened with Uhura/Beto. It seems very easy to basically date-rape-drug humans for a vulcan to take advantage of them. I feel like this story idea merits deeper exploration. As it is, we never really get an explanation other than "they're really into each other", which is fine I suppose.

All of the new vulcans being mean to spock contrasting with what must be the only vulcan there, Doug, who is envious was an interesting choice but never goes anywhere. Doug never gets a chance to chastise them on their bullying, and I am sure he would have been able to derive a punishingly logical reason why bullying is bad.

The writing completely skipped over the mind melds and catra explorations into 3 of the 4 characters. What did they talk to spock about? How much of a push did Pike need to realise he was hurting his crew? How did uhura initially react when she realised she had brainwashed someone with the intent to further a relationship with them? How did chapel come to terms with the fact that she'll have to give up her science experiments? This all would have helped to develop the characters. And in the one we did see, given how driven La'an was to become a mirror universe character, I don't understand how a dream sequence dance with spock was enough to change her mind. Maybe there are some visual metaphors in the direction I'm missing. Or maybe it was literal and Spock dream danced with Pike to change him back too!

Some stand out scenes with Kirk and Scotty. Also Batel speaking out against power, challenging perceptions, and then getting recognition and a job offer all while struggling with a new medical disability. That was a nice outcome.

I really did not enjoy this one.

The "documentary" that ends up being made feels like the worst kind of propaganda that tries to feign a sense of "there's two sides to every argument", all while clearly pushing in favour of the agenda the documentary initially tried to critique anyway. It felt at moments like a military recruitment advertisement. I would not choose to watch such a documentary in real life, and watching it within a star trek episode just feels like I've wasted my time.

The writing makes use of the idea of military censorship and a film that jump cuts around to not so cleverly hide the fact that the writers are missing a plot. We are presented with a people in conflict, who abuse a creature to create a weapon. We have no other information about the conflict, beyond "there's mass casualties". No explanation of why starfleet is involved beyond "starfleet is here to help". No explanation why they chose to make that kind of weapon in particular. On the matter of the alien war we are left to fill the gaps ourselves entirely, and because our in-universe director is acting in the role of an unreliable narrator, we have no idea if any of what ended up in the film they ended up making can even be trusted. That FOIA disclaimer at the start could be just as real as those films that say "based on a true story" when they are anything but.

We did get some good character development, particularly with Ortegas finally being up front and open about what she's been through recently. But not really enough for it to feel like it matters. Ditto Uhura and Spock. Furthermore, despite self-harm and suicide being a central theme of the episode, other than an incredibly brief argument with the alien scientists about whether thier victim should be allowed to commit suicide, it's not really debated. The crew just accept that they need to do an assisted suicide, and that's that. Fair enough, if that's how human morals work centuries from now, but then it leads again to an episode without a useful plot. For contrast, multiple past star trek series have had their take on this topic and done a much better job.

After watching this I am left unsure what wider contribution this episode is meant to make to the series. For all the silliness of the comedy episodes, at least they were entertaining to watch and usually had at least one major plot development by the end. This one could have been cut from the season roster and nothing would have been lost.

Random assorted notes:

• The decoded alien vocalisations kind of sounded like whalesong to me. Perfect opportunity for some cetecean ops, right? nope.
• Beto is shown to be incredibly manipulative, especially with recording people who don't want to be recorded. Why on earth is he not in the brig?
• Many times in the episode the direction attempts to foreshadow someone dying. I thought for a moment the writers were going to be brave and kill off someone in the crew. Particularly when chapel and spock are stretchered in with uhura standing there in shock. Nope, it's the random alien of the week instead.
• The alien visuals, both the CG and prosthetics were very nice. I like the idea of a species that, like some animals on earth, begins life underwater and then metamorphoses into something that lives in a completely different environment out of water. That was possibly the only highlight of the episode for me.

Looking forward to the next one, it can't possibly be worse than this.