Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x01 "The Broken Circle"
Logline
A distress call from Lt. Noonien-Singh compels Spock to disobey orders and take the USS Enterprise and its crew into disputed space, risking renewed hostilities with the Klingons in a bid to aid their shipmate.
Written by Henry Alonso Myers & Akiva Goldsman
Directed by Chris Fisher
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The M'Benga-and-Chapel-are-Max-Payne sequence went on far too long: only one group aboard the ship had weapons (and Stormtrooper accuracy) of any kind? I'd have preferred a stealthier sequence: after reprogramming the transponder, they use a series of Jeffries tubes to get to the airlock with the intent of opening it to escape but the ship takes off to ruin that plan.
Other than that, it was a decent episode to get the season going. Spock's emotional journey will be a focal point of the season, which I'm okay with. SPECTRE The Broken Circle Gang is probably going to show up again and I wonder if we'll eventually see some TOS villains retconned to be members. Carol Kane will be fun and with what was said of her species, I'm betting on her making at least two ENT references during the season.
Interesting that the false-flag ship is Crossfield-class: the saucer is a clear match but the drive section is completely different. Were the Discovery and Glenn modified from that spec to fit the spore drive research project or was the ship we saw a wartime refit of the class?
So Die Hard on a spaceship? We did that with Starship Mine already but I definitely wouldn't mind seeing it again. Is Starfleet's version of the Hippocratic oath "First, do no harm, unless you have to, in which case go hard."?
As for the Crossfield-Class, I thought it might either be that the classification of Discovery made them change the format of it for obfuscation purposes. Either that or they built that ship from salvaged parts from the war, and the saucer/transponder was from a Crossfield, and Uhura was simply reading from the transponder code the ship class.
That was my take as well on the ship. My reading was that they picked up a bunch of salvage from the war, and kit-bashed it all together to make a ship.
also can we please stop it with the trope "oh no, how are we going to survive this jump through space without a suit? ...Oh whaddya know we're just fine." Just give them fucking suits, it's lazy writing to create more suspense for no reason.