This one should have taken a lesson from "Shore Leave" where the story was written heavy on fantasy and wound up being rewritten while being shot to try and pull it back. SNW thinks it's great to lean harder into it, and you get whatever that was.

Just got around to it...that was an episode, I guess. I think this season has officially drained me. I watch it, I just shrug.

Just for reference/funsies.

It's basically that for literally one second of screen-time (if you pause so you can read it), Cardassia is marked on the map with a "Wormhole" marked near it.

So if you're in a frame to be mad, you're mad because the DS9 wormhole seems to be on the map a century before it's known. Or more esoterically, there's a wormhole stable enough to mark on a map when TNG told us there were historically no known stable wormholes.

I basically would headcanon it as "they thought it was stable and marked it, but later it turned it was not". Or I would just not be freeze-framing and nitpicking this stuff in the first place.

Really though, I think making detailed maps on the show marking all sorts of places just opens a door for problems. Geography is second to travel times from A to B among "things work in whatever way makes sense in this story and otherwise forget it" in Star Trek. (Edit: I guess geography and travel time is all of a piece, but you know what I mean.)

Boy, I just discovered that people are picking apart the star map in this episode. There's a hair trigger to just get angry about anything at this point 😂

Actually the more I ponder it, the more it stops holding up and I don't really care for it.

• The show really undercuts Kirk (IMHO) by having his plan be 1) risk killing himself by accident by hiding amid the radioactive phaser whatever it was to establish a bluff, and then spike his CO's drink with a high potency drug he only just learned of and he shouldn't be playing around with because, I don't know, he's not a doctor. This is smarter and better for the character than showing us Kirk staking out the moral high ground, standing that ground, and finding another resolution?
• M'Benga deciding to not only go along for the ride on this but take the blame doesn't do him any favors either. I know they're setting up M'Benga's departure to mesh with TOS, but if this story went "M'Benga takes the moral stand and relieves him even though maybe Starfleet won't support that stance after the fact" that would have been a stronger character point too.
• Really, while this sets up "M'Benga will wind up departing but Kirk will be cool with him coming back later in TOS because he knows the true story", the idea that M'Benga is allowed to stay in Starfleet after admitting to drugging his CO to have an excuse to relieve him of duty is kind of wild. Or at least how that came to pass would be a good story (that we'll never see).
• Watching this again, I hear Picard saying Starfleet's first duty is to the truth and wondering when exactly Starfleet got there, because it's sure not in this episode.

Just got to watch this week's. It was all right, I guess, compared to most of the rest of the season. My best praise is it was good enough to make me forego head-desking that they found yet another reason to get Kirk aboard the Enterprise for a story about him.

Well now we need to re-remaster that episode, obviously.

I don't know what to take from that episode. The ending with Pike almost saves it, but I feel like I wasted a lot of time to get that payoff.

I will always reserve judgment until seeing it (taking the hypothetical stance that this actually gets made), but it's not an exciting description of a Star Trek project (to me).

Now I can't find it again of course, but someone on BlueSky observed that they apparently didn't have a final-final draft of "The Man Trap" because the line at the end where Spock is yelling to McCoy that the Salt Vampire is 'killing the captain, shoot it' wasn't in the performance.

This amuses me for no obvious reason. Maybe it's the combination of Spock yelling frantically to begin with, and to do the un-Star-Trek thing and just kill it.

Besides Lower Decks and Prodigy, you mean? 😆