Y’all need to have some fun, this episode is seriously one of my favorites of all time. It was really impressive, they tied together two of my favorite things and did so in a way that not only made some weird sense but was also just fantastic and talented.
Hands down, season 2 of SNW is my favorite trek of all time, so far.
I was expecting fun and was mildly dissapointed by way too much angst.
I enjoyed opening and the closer and chapels song was fun. But the other songs seemed pretty samey with each charecter privately singing their angst in a sterile cgi room. Some of it felt chore. I really glad they tried and the last song/scene was a great concept but personally didn’t land for me.
My girl La’an deserves to be happy wtf
This is one of the issues with having TOS characters in this show. I know they kind of have to be, but their story is already established and that seriously limits how they can be used. Unless we were going to have some more time travel or other weirdness repeating itself, the relationship was doomed to failure from the start.
Not necessarily. They’ve already seriously retconned Pike having foreknowledge of his fate, and used that burden to expand his character immensely. They did a similar thing to Chapel by having Boimler accidentally spoil the fact that she and Spock don’t end up together, and that has been further built upon to allow her to grow as a character. There are enough big gaps in canon to play around a lot.
I think of it like a historical drama. For, say, a show set in the thirties, you know the next decade is going to be all kinds of hell for every single character, but they don’t know it, and the dramatic tension of that is something that can be used to write stories that you can’t do otherwise.
One thing that I loved is that the fact that that is so WEIRD is actually one of the major parts of the plot. I know other places like Buffy have done similar, but I feel like poking fun at the tropes of musical theater kind of enhances it for some people like me (I don’t HATE musicals, but I don’t love them either.)
The Enterprise crew even mentioned bunnies, Anya-from-Buffy’s nemeses, which was amazing!
Probably going to skip this episode because I really don’t like musicals
Just to be clear its just because I don’t like musicals, I’m not bashing the episode
I don’t like musicals either, and I enjoyed it. Adding an exception to “I’ve seen all of the $tv_series” is kind of lame. Maybe you won’t like it, but it only takes an hour to find out. I’ve spent way worse hours in my life than watching a tv show I generally like with a dud episode.
I don’t like musicals either. But I was impressed that the reason everyone was singing was thoroughly encountered, explained and responded to in a classic star trek science fiction way. It was completely at home with how phenomena are explored in TNG and classic series. They didn’t shoehorn it in just to try and make a musical for no reason, and didn’t drop developing the characters and story while doing it either.
I had a lot of fun, and laughed harder than watching any lower decks episodes.
There seems to be quite a tug of war going on in the IMDb ratings. 20% of users voted the episode a 1 out of 10 stars. I mean, sure you might not like musicals. But all the talent that went into creating this show surely doesn’t warrant a 1. 🤷♂️
Once upon a time, a prominent YouTuber released an entire video rant about the fan backlash he was receiving.
He had spent years building up his channel and producing quality content of a very specific type. He had almost a million subscribers, and he was previously received very well.
Then one day he decided to spend months producing and releasing content of a closely related – but different – type. At first it was mostly received well, but it ultimately wasn’t what people wanted from his channel. And it just kept coming.
Enter the rant. The short of his argument was that he was producing quality content with high production value. And that should be good enough for his fans.
But it wasn’t. Because it wasn’t the content that they wanted.
And he kept going. So his views went down. And his subscribers went down too. And he got so frustrated that he ended up just walking away for months.
This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds was objectively good. It was well written and well performed.
But I still squirmed through it. And if I hadn’t suspected that it might be very important to the long-term plot, I probably would have just skipped it altogether. I’ll certainly skip it on any rewatch.
And that’s okay. We’re allowed to like some things and not like others. Strange New Worlds seems to be on a path du jour, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But when people give a simple star rating, they aren’t leaving a professional review. They aren’t considering production value. They’re saying they liked it, or they hated it, or something in-between.
From IMDB instructions on leaving ratings:
Our ratings are on a scale from 1 - 10. 1 meaning the title was terrible and one of the worst titles you’ve seen and 10 meaning you think it was excellent.
That’s it.
That’s why you’re seeing those one-star reviews. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Frankly of the 19 episodes released so far, this is the only one I can say that I really didn’t like. All in all, I think that’s a pretty good average.
I would somewhat agree with you if we were just talking about ranking Star Trek episodes specifically. If Subspace Rhapsody is among the worst Star Trek episodes you’ve ever seen, then sure, give it a 1. That makes sense on Star Trek specific review websites like jammersreviews.com.
But we’re talking about IMDb which ranks all TV shows and all movies, so the ranking scale encompasses everything you’ve ever seen on screen. And now tell me again with a straight face that a well-produced well-written well-acted episode of a franchise that we love ranks in the same 1-star category as the worst non-scripted reality trash TV you’ve ever seen.
It’s brigading to gatekeep their vision of Trek unsullied by franchise content made to appeal to other tastes. It seems many of them wish TOS were never made, or I don’t know how they can view episodes like The Naked Time or TNG’s Naked Now.
I’m highly skeptical that that many of them even hate-watched the episode.
The folks who gave it 3s to 5s seem more likely to be considered views.
