Logline
When the USS Enterprise investigates an attack on a colony at the edge of Federation space, Captain Pike and his crew face the return of a formidable enemy.
Written by Henry Alonso Myers
Directed by Maja Vrvilo
The landing party moving through the attacked town positioning themselves around crates and fighting the youngling was like a glimpse of an XCOM adaptation to a tee (with fewer OP melee weapons and grenades).
This one was a bit disappointing to be honest. The darker/space-war episodes are rarely my favourite anyway but this one really suffered from impenetrable plot armour on most of the main cast. Gosh, will Spock and Chapel survive this time?! Of course they will; because it’s Mr. Spock and Nurse Chapel :-/.
And the federation apparently willing to just let it slide that an entire starship and crew were destroyed.
Chapel meeting Spock was a stretch. Proceeding to launch the rest of the ship into the planet after that was unconscionable.
Are the Gorn supposed to be dumb reptiles confused by flashing lights or technologically advanced space fairing antagonists? It’s too much of a stretch to leave unexplained at this point. Maybe part two will clear that up… in a couple of years :-/
And just the general bloodlust among the crew when prepping to go fight. These established affable and charming young scientists and nerds but suddenly it’s season final time and it’s all “the only good bug is a dead bug 😡”.
Some incredible best-of-show set pieces and special effects but a pretty dour end to a fun season of Trek. I’m not against more serious episodes at all, just this one has too many loose ends and inconsistencies.
Gosh, will Spock and Chapel survive this time?!
No, that’s how they get back to the canon. Sad. I’m as confused as you about the Gorn, though. I’m also wondering about the affable/bloodthirsty crew and trying to make sense of the title, “Hegemony.” Here’s one way might make sense: The demarcation line was a power play, kind of like NATO moving to Russia’s back yard or Russia reclaiming Crimea. Pike crosses it, another power play. Are we looking at a battle for unipolar power? Depicting the crew as both affable and bloodthirsty might be a way of holding up a mirror to ourselves. The Gorn are from hell. Demonizing people makes it easier to kill them. Interestingly, toward the end of the episode, Pike has a sentence about understanding the Gorn. Don’t groan. All Star-Trek series have included social commentary. (Remember Pelia’s comment, a couple of episodes ago, about holding onto valuable art in case this no-money experiment in socialism were to fail?)
Just watched this and my biggest gripe with Star Trek will always be that the federation ships are just way too weak. Yes they aren’t supposed to be a battle force, but any moderately powerful enemy and they are toast…at least they had that special crate of better weapons, but why not just make that the norm? Finally, what good are the force fields if everything inside of the ship is getting wrecked with each hit? And send more friggin ships…
For the number of ships, by TOS there are only 12 Constitution class ships, so there might not be more ships to send. We’re a year or so out from the Klingon war, and it doesn’t seem like the Federation is in a position to quickly replace ships. They already lost the Cayuga. Also the admiralty obviously isn’t interested in a Gorn war at all, and certainly not over this planet or the potential survivors.
I will say it’s been shown that Pike is just not a fighting captain. He’s not the person you want in a combat situation. It does make me wonder why he’s a Captain but idk. They really should send the Enterprise back on a deep space mission of exploration and have someone (who is not an evil mirror universe person) more like Lorca or Kirk running these border conflicts or something.
I though everyone and everything getting wrecked was a throwback to TOS.
The enterprise Dansd E are pretty strong
I started with next generation and although there were some wrecking in that, i didnt remember it being that bad…its been a while htough…
You do realize that without shields, they’d have been blown out of the sky in one shot rather than being able to survive in a firefight, right? It’s like saying what’s the point of a kevlar vest if I’m going to get a broken rib from a body shot? If I can live, I’ll take that vest and broken rib, thanks.
Power is relative. There’ve been times we’ve seen weapons from less advanced species than the Federation bounce uselessly off shields or are seen as no threat. We’ve also seen Starfleet ships get carved up like a prize turkey. The Gorn are powerful, that’s just it. That doesn’t mean Starfleet aren’t heavy hitters - at this point it’s just that there’s a stronger kid in the playground.
Yes i realize that it gives them time to basically run away or end up like the other ship in lil pieces floating in space…basically have to rely on some type of trick to win…kevlar vest also doesnt let the bullet wreck your organs, did you not see the people getting tossed around inside the hsip?
Just brought me back to Picard S03 where the Titan, one of their more powerful ships btw, getting folded by some pirate ship with a portal weapon…sigh…
I agree with most people here. Great episode as long as you kinda ignore the fact that only Chapel survived in the saucer section and neither her nor Spock made any attempt to look for anyone else or even acknowledge it.
Rest of the episode I loved and I’m now just a bit sad we are going have to wait so long for the next series.
That being said, I absolutely support the strikes so I’m not complaining about the wait.
They just had to say something like “Scans show nobody’s alive in the saucer section” and everything would be fine I guess.
Let’s wait until part two.
I think we may already have enough to figure out what happened but the technological explanation is yet to come. Much of the plot mechanics related to the Gorn so far rely on issues around what can be detected or transmitted and differences in solutions.
The writers’ challenge for the saucer subplot was that they wanted Spock to be surprised by both the adult Gorn in the environment suit and by Christine Chapel.
Their arrivals behind Spock on the exterior of the saucer were both unexpected, and were key elements of the suspense. His surprise and ours was necessary.
We would have expected however Spock to have done some kind of local tricorder scan of the wreckage when he arrived. It’s possible that a tricorder scan was done, was negative, but we didn’t hear any report because there were no vocal coms back to the Enterprise. Uhura gave a play by play based on telemetry, we didn’t hear Spock report directly.
In that case, we’re owed an explanation about why the new tricorder technology failed. As long as we get it in the second part, I’d be fine.
Given the established interference field technology of the Gorn, I would be perfectly comfortable if the follow up episode acknowledged that the Gorn environmental suits put out some kind of localized disruptive stealth.
The new Starfleet tricorder technology is designed for unsuited Gorn. It’s designed to solve the problem of Gorn biology but not Gorn technology.
Gorn technology is different, they are driven by different species biological imperatives (as in the coronal flares), and that’s an extra hurdle for Starfleet.
We have already seen however that Scott designed a system to both spoof human life signs to Starfleet tricorders and Gorn as well as hide human life signs for hundreds of people. To do this, he used some of the specialized technology from the scientific research array that was studying the nearby sun.
Spock would naturally follow up on his surprise encounter on the saucer. Scott would be the natural collaborator to figure out how it was that the Gorn came up behind him undetected by his tricorder.
So then, what about Chapel in the saucer? If she was the sole human life form, and he completed the scan, why didn’t his technology detect her?
A couple of possibilities exist.
– Chapel’s suit has some local stealth technology. She got into her suit as soon as she saw Spock pass by. Given it was in her quarters it’s a personal suit not a generic one, and she’s established as being a war veteran who had to fight despite being medical corps, and/or
– the distortion field or stealth technology put out by the Gorn’s environmental suit was large enough to hide her as well.
I think it’s far more plausible that Spock simply didn’t scan for life signs, as his mission was to install the rockets and had nothing to do with rescuing any survivors in the first place, he stumbled upon Chapel by accident. It’s also logical to assume that there would not be any other survivors left in the same space as Chapel as from Spock’s perspective, she would have brought such along or at least have informed him of them. Therefore, we can conclude that there wasn’t any misconduct from either of the two.
On the whole a solid episode and the Scott appearance was very surprising and well done.
However why the hell is Christine the only survivor on the cayuga, it makes no sense at all.
Also the fucking cliffhanger is ridiculous
