Watched it. Spoileriffic thoughts ahead.
FYI, I typed this lot as I was watching it, so it's a bit 'stream of conciousness'.
1) Ugh, the recap of season 1 at the beginning. Didn't need to see any of that unremitting **** again, ta.
2) Flashback to Bonehead's childhood - and still we see a character called Sarek who is absolutely nothing like Sarek ever was in the original show or the movies. Hey ho.
3) Aha, so continuity
isn't a completely lost art. Enterprise's crew complement is in the 200s as set out in the original Trek pilot "The Cage", rather than the 430 that she'll have staffing her when Kirk is in command. Like it.
4) Tilly still being the most likeable character. Maybe they missed the real trick here, and she ought to have been the main character instead of Bonehead.
5) Still kinda hate the intro. Give me a ship thundering past the screen while an Alexander Courage or Jerry Goldsmith fanfare plays every day of the week.
6) VFX game still strong. I may not agree with the showrunners' aesthetic choices very often, but the stuff that the effects people do is exceedingly well done.
7) Did they - gasp! - finally hire a writer who's vaguely competent? The exchange between Saru and Bonehead on the way to meet up with Pike was actually funny. Doug Jones and SMG also managing not to murder the material. Maybe this show finally turned the corner...
8) Anson Mount as Pike is a more than decent casting choice.
9) Heh, there's that scene from one of the trailers with the Saurian dude.
10) So, Stamets wants out. Can't say I blame him. I'd want to get the hell off of any ship that had Bonehead as part of the command structure.
11) Flashbacks again. Giant 'who cares?'.
12) NotSarek doing some exposition. Now, he says here that he wanted Spock to learn empathy from Bonehead (yeah, great choice of teacher there...) so he'd be able to deal with humans better. But in TOS we learned that Sarek didn't want Spock anywhere near Starfleet and humans, he wanted him to take a place at the Vulcan Science Academy. So,
that's a bit weird. Guess we didn't eliminate all those continuity issues just yet.
13) Going to interject another bit of praise. Not only do the VFX guys know their stuff, but the music department is pretty on-point as well.
14) I really don't like the USS Discoball's bridge set. The original Trek bridge had a layout and size that made sense. Sure, you couldn't sensibly show a bridge exactly like that these days as the console interfaces would be a bit...zeerust-y what with the large physical buttons and switches rather than touchpanels. But there's an awful lot of utterly wasted space on the Disco bridge, and stupidly-placed lighting. All in the name of making it look 'advanced'.
15) Roll-call. So maybe now all those Lieutenant and Ensign Rickys from last season can get some actual character in the story. About ******* time.
16) Oh, come on Detmer. He just told you to fly good, and the moment you take the ship out of warp you nearly drive the ship into a big rock. At this rate you'll be a contender for the Deanna Troi Award For Crashing Starships™.
17) "I was expecting a red thing, where's my damned red thing?!"...so yeah, Anson Mount's Pike would have been truly wasted on the utterly horrendous first season
18) Go go gadget telescopic cameras!
19) I see the script is desperately trying to make Bonehead the hero still. Stuff like Pike snapping at her because she wasn't offering him anything constructive before she...offers him something constructive, says that she was trying to tell him that all along and tries to shame him by saying that everyone on the bridge wants to save potential survivors down there. Well maybe if you got to it a bit quicker numbnuts, rather than blathering on. Moron.
20) Oh bother, we're back to the spores. Gonna call this now - the resolution to the story this season will wipe out the spores and render the Super Duper Mega Hyper Drive™ non-working forever.
21) Yeah. Tilly definitely needed to be the main character of this show.
22) Why do these suits that the landing party are wearing have me humming "Go Go Power Rangers"?
23) 9Gs for 11 minutes, eh? Remind me again what
inertial dampening fields are for? You know, the device fitted to every Federation ship larger than a drydock travel pod (hell, maybe even them) that lets you travel at reasonable speeds without smearing the crew into an organic paste on the bulkhead? So, either you have inertial dampers and your bragging about 9Gs is a complete nonsense since you wouldn't feel it. Or you don't have inertial dampers and your pod design is a bit crap.
24) And here we see STD desperately trying to be a combination of prequel-era Star Wars and JJTrek, right down to the sound effects and the unnecessarily spinning ships. They even did the Phantom Menace podracer thing of putting in a little race car engine sound in the mix. Makes my teeth itch.
25) A funny moment for Saru and his ganglia - "Really?! Are you surprised?"
26) Do they think that if they put a character that's even less likeable than Bonehead on screen with her (Connolly) then the folks at home watching will forget that she spent the whole of the first season doing stupid things for stupid reasons? Ah well, Connolly is clearly too dumb to live. And so I cheer as he's broadsided by a big rock midway through a speech about how awesome he thinks he is. I like that we made it past the halfway mark in the episode before someone died of a terminal case of the stupids though, that might be a record for this series.
27) Always amusing how the safety systems are the first thing to break when the script requires it, but at other times the hull could quite literally be coming apart and artificial gravity will still be working. Go figure.
28) "It's dead, that's the diagnosis". Pike is already my favourite character this season, and I'm only 35 minutes into the first episode.
29) Here comes Bonehead to save the day. Again. And another missed opportunity for the writers to kill her. Could have just splattered her into that rock. A man can dream.
30) "They came down hard." "Titanium snapped in half." Uh...since when were Starfleet ship hulls made out of titanium? A minor quibble I guess.
31) Ah okay, here's Tig Notaro's character. Figured she would be along at some point.
32) More exposition. And I'm revising my previous opinion from 28) - Reno might be my favourite character in STD so far.
33) Welp, that's taken some paint off of the Discoball. Prediction - we don't see the ship from any angle for the rest of this episode that would show the damage. Save the VFX team from having to draw it.
34) 'Re-routing power' looks an awful lot like Bonehead merely tapping her hands on the pipework.
35) Can she be dead now? Please? Damn, no such luck. Oh well. So, was the red angel figure really there or was she just hallucinating due to the shock of her injury? Oh, and chalk up another one of those moments in Trek where suddenly the technology has a limitation right out of nowhere - Bonehead had hold of that sample when she beamed out, but it wasn't transported with her. Unlike the way we've seen transporters pretty much ever work in Trek.
36) Oh no, that's much worse. So the transporter couldn't lock onto it because it wasn't composed of "baryonic matter". You know what a baryon is? A heavy subatomic particle. Protons and neutrons are baryons. TNG already made this mistake before, in the episode that turns into Die Hard On A Starship ("Starship Mine", shonky premise but brilliant episode) where the Enterprise is docked somewhere to undergo a "baryon sweep". Wouldn't have left much behind if they removed all the protons and neutrons, eh?!
37) Some of this kit has a remarkable resemblance to Stark Tech.
38) "This...feels...bad". Sorry Reno, I'm back on the Pike train.
39) "The shuttlebay needs a little TLC". Ensign Tilly, master of the understatement. Actually, strikes me as the whole ship could use a drydock after this episode. The Discoball took a pounding this week.
40) Though clearly the Enterprise is in worse shape. Guess they shouldn't have removed those decks from the neck
41) And more exposition, including the reason why the Enterprise wasn't seen until after the war had ended - she was on a five year mission (presumably much like Kirk's one from TOS) and away from the fighting. Though the line "Enterprise was an instrument of last resort" suggests that when fully operational she's a force to be reckoned with.
42) Yay, continuity! Or at least, a reference. This time to Star Trek VI, and Spock's line "Logic is the beginning of wisdom Valeris, not the end". Clearly a philosophy that he came up with a long time before the events of that movie.
43) Uh...so the interior of the Enterprise is a bit...different.
44) Spock exposition. More Stark Tech (the hologram stuff), which seems to me to be rather less efficient than just looking at a damned screen.
45) I called it at 33), they never do show you exactly how much of a pounding the Discoball took. Apart from the windshield cracking.
46) Well, the Spore Drive is coming back in later episodes. As is Mirror Georgiou, now a member of Section 31 which was easily the least interesting thing to come out of DS9. Klingons have hair again. "Someone, or something, is going to end all sentient life in the galaxy" - do we really need stakes like that? It's not a Marvel movie FFS.
Okay. So, I looked it up and surprisingly the writers of this episode were part of the writing and showrunning staff on the first season. I say 'surprisingly' because their work in that first season was mostly wretched, while the writing in this episode was actually half decent. Yeah, I rag on it a bit in the first part of this post but I genuinely found a lot to like. It's not Star Trek at all, beyond the superficial trappings. But nor is it the mess that the first season started out in, or the even bigger mess that it devolved into. Spore Drive, !Georgiou and Section 31 issues aside, the second season shows promise. Anson Mount is great as Pike. Hopefully we've seen the last of the not-quite-Enterprise for the rest of this season - if she's not on-screen, then I can pretend that they didn't change her
And hopefully Tig Notaro is back as Reno in further episodes, would be a shame to waste a character like that. Mary Wiseman is still great as Tilly. And we have the beginnings of the bridge crew
becoming actual characters! Wonders never cease.
***edit***
Oh, sorry, forgot to check with
@james.miller whether it was alright if I posted in here again
Oh well, since I was posting something vaguely upbeat maybe he'll let me get away with it...
It added nothing to the story, all it did was keep the main characters out of the story to let the war run on in the background and raise the stakes for the season finale. Which was then handled with incredible ineptitude.
