Logline
Captain Pike and his crew welcome a Klingon defector aboard the USS Enterprise, but his presence triggers the revelation of some shocking secrets.
Written by Davy Perez
Directed by Jeff Byrd
I liked it, but two things went a bit too far.
The bio-bed acting up was just too silly of an issue to bring up. I mean this is starfleets flagship with the best of the best on board and M’Benga keeps working on this bio-bed, never fully fixing it? Sounds weird.
Second, they are making this whole keeping a person buffered in a transporter thing way too useful. Like the only downside seems to be that if you get a malfunction you may need to “delete” the person. I remember some episode of another series, was it Rikers clone in TNG? Where they were worried about integrity of the pattern, since it was stored so long. Did not seem to be a problem for his daughter though. Don’t like how this is so trivialized, it would solve so many problems if this could be done “professionally”.
You raise some good points but your condescending intro was seriously unnecessary and uncalled for.
Sure it could be symbolic. It could also be just a bio-bed. If its used as a metaphor it is a terrible one in my opinion, seeing as this is an advanced future with massive technological advancement. Why out of all people on this ship is it M’Benga doing this, never succeeding, but at no time an actual engineer, you know, like someone with 1000+ years experience, is asked to fix it? I get it that its part of his character that he is handy, but still this is medical equipment, its essential, it needs to work 100%. How would this not be escalated to relevant personel? This is not the war times depicted in the flashbacks, they have resource to do this. Also quite some time has passed since the Gorn attack.
I rather agree with one of the other posters who said its a setup for something to come.
So, thanks for your comment but seriously work on your attitude if you consider posting more than just this one comment.
Being 100% honest with you I never intended to attack anyone personally and would greatly appreciate help in highlighting where I’ve done that. I’d normally reread my comment to try to figure out where any misunderstanding could have occurred in situations like this, but the comment’s been removed. I put considerable effort into that comment and don’t want this to happen again in the future.
There was the episode with Scotty in TNG (Relics) where there was indeed the problem of the pattern of the person who was in the buffer with him degrading, but that was over decades (2294-2369), while M’Bengas daughter was in the pattern buffer significantly less time. She was also rematerialised from time to time and it was noted that not doing so risked the integrity of the pattern, which contributed to the issue seen in the TNG episode.
They should take the idea of “storing people in buffers” all the way to extreme and explore it like Black Mirror does. What does this mean if everyone had the opportunity to store people in buffers? Can everyone sign up for this service and instantly beam you into a buffer whenever you have an incurable diseases at the time? Is there a service to auto-beam you into the buffer if the ship is about to crash-land? Can richer people pay to have poorer people’s buffer be deleted when you run out of buffer space? What happens if there is a glitch and people who are in the buffer experience 20 years in real-time?
I think there’s so much potential for more exploration here. It would be cool to have Charlie Booker on a Star Trek episode, as he kinda did a fun/excellent/dark Star Trek Black Mirror episode too.
I thought it was played like pattern buffer storage is an m’benga special skill he is better at than his peers . It was not something she was taught at the academy
@RootBeerGuy @startrek The transporter is essentially magic. If you think too long about it, you’ll wonder why, for example, *everyone* doesn’t “store their pattern”, and thus become effectively immortal. Or why a pattern can’t be materialized multiple times, to generate an army of clones.
I love Trek, but it’s much more space opera than hard sci-fi, and often the “sciencey” bits are purely for narrative convenience (see also “holodeck”).
Yep, particularly with the Riker clone, it seems like the safest way to do away missions would be to send down an instance of the crew rather than the actual crew. But then what would they do with all those extra red shirts?
David Brin’s book ‘Kiln People’ explores this idea.
The problem is, as we saw with Tom Riker, the duplicates have their own existence and experiences. Should they just be destroyed like Tuvix in order to restore the originals?
Re: the transporters.
Patterns in the buffer usually degrade over time - The TNG Technical Manual says patterns can last about seven minutes before degradation begins. Obviously, Scotty was able to extend this dramatically, though with only a 50% success rate.
They did touch on this in SNW season one, when M’Benga said he had to rematerialize his daughter periodically. However, the timeframe, while not specified, seemed a helluva lot longer than seven minutes.
The Tech Manual notwithstanding, on screen we’ve definitely seen longer than seven minutes, notably VOY: “Counterpoint” and DIS: “Stormy Weather”. I take it like I do the original Tech Manual’s statement that you can’t fire phasers at warp.
I love the TNG Technical Manual but anything onscreen has to trump it.
I’m much more fussed about rapid organ fabricators and dermal regenerators being a thing this early.
I think we’re going to have to buy into 23rd century technology being ahead of were we expect from TOS - but not necessarily ahead of some of the wild claims (and therapies) Bones had access to in the movies.
For all we know, 24th century transporters have an advantage over the 23rd century design but at the expense of superior pattern storage.
About the bed: There seems to be an ongoing sub-plot about random systems on the ship glitching out. I’ve seen speculation they’re quietly setting up some kind of AI takeover issue later on. Note the odd shot the episode ends on, with the bed’s info screen flickering again.
This episode exists because of the stupid Starfleet rule of having traumatized veterans of the war have to interact positively with the supposedly bad-to-good turned war crime enemy. That’s a classic example of people acting stupid for “plot” (e.g. we couldn’t have this episode without the stupid bit).
It is great to see characters who were undeveloped in TOS get fleshed out. The characters feel real and motivated by their history. It beats interpersonal drama designed purely to create conflict within the crew.
I know Orville was widely disliked by critics for uneven tone because they wanted to shove it in a pigeon hole but variety is where episodal tv really shines. I don’t think Orville did this as effortlessly as SNW is currently doing but it had its moments. Given the substantial departure from Discovery and Picard I wonder if Lower Decks or SNW could have existed in Kurtzman’s Star Trek without MacFarlane showing there was still demand.
I hope they use the release of inhibitions in the musical episode to delve into the inner thoughts and feelings of some of the characters as they did in Buffy’s Once More With Feeling. The characters revealed a hell of a lot in that episode. It would be a waste to back off after this episode and not use what on the surface looks like a lightweight episode to dig deeper.
Can we just have a quick shout out to Jess Bush who is such a talented actress. Nurse Chapel experiencing RAGE was so convincing!
She is really good. I loved TOS, I loved other things Majel did, but I never thought before this show I’d actually be taking the Nurse Chapel character seriously.
@rob_t_firefly @stuck Strange New Worlds has two excellent stand-ins for Majel, and I am always glad to see my daughter’s namesake celebrated by giving her roles such respect.
Fancy meeting you here, old pal!
I was always a bit sad that we couldn’t get more of Majel’s Number One back in the day, I considered that the main missed opportunity of the original pilot, and SNW has really paid off in that respect as well.
I didn’t know Majel in real life, of course, but based on all she shared over the years in her work and her speaking publicly about it all I think she would have approved of what SNW is doing with her roles.
