Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
view the rest of the comments
It’s not a bad episode, but it’s not going to go down as one of SNW’s strongest, and it’s an oddly dour note to set as a tone for the upcoming season. The first season premier was full of optimism and hope even when circumstances seemed dire, and this episode at times almost seems to be the reverse. We are now reminded that so many characters are carrying the trauma of the Klingon War: Ortega knowing how to hide among asteroids, Chapel with her medical knowledge, and M’Benga who has apparently been carrying Emergency Punching Juice on every single away mission. And to hammer the point home, April makes it clear that the Gorn are coming in force and Starfleet is not going to be at peace during season 2 of a show called Strange New Worlds. I could be wrong, and I’m not saying it can’t work as a season-long arc, but we’re very far from Pike giving an anti-war, aspirational speech to the 21st-century-equivalent aliens.
I’m also worried that the writers of SNW are building toward some Big Moment for Spock which will make him decide that he needs to shut down open expression of his emotions for all of TOS, and that’s how they will reconcile the two shows and two portrayals of the character.
Pelia is great, though. A fantastic twist on the old “alien observes humanity from the outside” Trek character, and clearly much more willing to get down and dirty with the technobabble than Guinean ever did. Here’s hoping this chief engineer actually gets an episode devoted to her…
The Pelia plotline was by far the most interesting part of the episode in my opinion, I think it is hilarious and fascinating that a nearly immortal creature stumbles into a heist in progress and is like "sure, I'll help, I'm so boredddddd"