Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x06 "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail"
SpaceScotsman @ SpaceScotsman @startrek.website Posts 0Comments 122Joined 2 yr. ago
SpaceScotsman @ SpaceScotsman @startrek.website
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My thinking was he was almost dead. What's a kid's last words going to be if he's almost dead? "I want my mummy". If that was the last thing coursing through his neurons, the nanogenes would pick that up and might think it "normal".
The banana gag was great, and I think it starts to signal the doctors ongoing hatred of guns. He was quite quick to grab one at the end of Dalek, but now he's more critical of them.
As for the cliffhanger resolution, I would struggle to answer if you asked me to name one episode where a cliffhanger was resolved well.
This is a really good episode and pairs nicely with the previous one.
It's got really nice character work - Nancy being street smart enough to turn tables on the home owner, and a touching twist of her being a single teen mother (and everything else that implies). Jack is a lot more tolerable on this one now he's stopped his fake persona, even if the sonic pissing match is a bit much for me.
The direction in this one is really nice - multiple times there is a sequence where the characters are chatting away and not realising something critical has happened around them. For that I absolutely love the scenes in the doctors room, with the typewriter, and the teleport during the dance.
The explanation of how the child is able to control radios and all the hints leading to the final answer to the puzzle of what's happening are well written. It's a story straight out of black mirror with an all powerful AI gone wrong - a story still very of our times. My only gripe there is his on earth does the child remote control the typewriter, but given how well that scene was done I don't mind it.
The set design of the bomb site is great and really gets the vibe of a hastily erected military encampment. Music wise I again feel that it was a bit much, especially when it interrupts the sweet but creepy lullaby.
Random other remarks :
- why on earth was Jack riding the bomb? It's so ridiculous but it works for his character
- the doctor says he's done a software patch and will email the upgrade - even in 2005 those words in that order are a bit dated
- doctors final words to doctor Constantine made me wonder if this was meant to be a real historical person, but I did a quick search and apparently that's not the case. Maybe a missed opportunity there?
Given it's been established the only person who can really help control Batel is Spock, and he is incommunicado for the whole episode, both Batel and Gamble should have been in confinement as soon as possible.
The auto-red alerts did stick out a bit, but it kind of makes sense. The computer knows where everyone is and what they usually do, and behaviour-based intrusion detection systems are starting to become normal cybersecurity concepts even today.
The story is reminiscent of more classic trek - away mission, something goes wrong, and the crew have to fix it. There was a lot of classic science fantasy tropes in here - right from the start with the blood magic to open the prison up. When immortality was first mentioned, my immediate thought was that immortality would involve consciousness transfer into another being, and we kind of got that, but not from the immortal beings themselves and instead from others that snuck in through the gaps in between dimensions. I guess these creatures are some sort of lovecraftian indescribable horrors. Seeing how Pelia and Batel both reacted to them suggests there is some shared history amongst many of the species that now exist, and that they all know instinctively to fear them.
They killed off a named character (F for Gamble), which is surprising, but definitely raises the stakes for the rest of the show. I was really not expecting that, and getting such in your face gore (pardon the expression) was quite a lot to take in. The evil doesn't really seem quite well contained in the pattern buffer, and I hope the crew notice this pretty quickly. If it's messing with the computer system, if it can quantum phase itself around any barriers, it should be obvious fairly quickly something isn't right. And the pattern buffer has shown that it can't keep stuff stable forever without continually re-materialising it, which seems like a really bad idea, so that needs dealing with.
Amongst the characters, Spock really shines out here as the voice of reason. If they had listened to him in the first place this whole thing could have been avoided. While I get where the archaeologists amongst the team were coming from, they should have been overruled, and Spock's only flaw here was not putting his foot down. As security, La'an should have pushed behind him on this, and chapel shouldn't have let her desire to explore cloud her judgement.
On sets: Nothing beats a good quarry, love to see that. I really like the exterior and background visuals within the prison - reminds me of the videogame manifold garden (highly recommended if you like first person puzzlers). However, I did feel that the physicality of the room (or just floor) they were on made it very obvious it was a set. The background visuals felt detached from the area where the away team were standing and, backgrounds aside, was too bland for my liking. I think it is a pity we didn't get to explore more because some parts, especially the exterior and the life form they found, had a really cool design.
The directing was good. It was tense, it captured the confusion in the prison well. The chaos on the ship was exciting and felt like there was a risk of real damage. My only major nitpick was it made it very obvious when the evil was first making it's presence known. I don't know if this was an attempt to capture the fact that the evil was there all along and it could choose when to appear, or if it was just trying to signal to the audience "hey, right now something's not right", but I would have preferred if it had been more subtle and let us try to figure out what was going on.
Great episode. With an episode like that I can see why they wanted to add some extra comedy ones around it, but I hope there are more like this. Though I could do without the eye gore, in future.
You know what? Do it. I want one of these guys to actually built one of these mega data centres. If we're going to ruin the environment anyway, we might as well encourage the billionaires to bankrupt themselves at the same time.
I'm in the UK, and I don't see it expiring on the iplayer any time soon, so I'm up for continuing them. But if there's not any critical mass of others watching along, it might make sense to put it on break, at least until someone else picks the rights up.
The blitz setting was very well done. Sci-fi spaceships aside, this story feels like the kind of ghost story people might have told each other during that era.
Watching this episode for the first time really creeped me out as a kid, and has given me a lifelong thing about gas masks. They did a great job on the writing and direction in this episode, my only note there was at times the background music was a bit too much. It might have been scarier if it was a bit quieter. The CGI on the transformation at the very end still looks pretty good - Creepy as hell.
The story of the homeless kids that have run away is really touching - especially how Nancy tries to raise them politely despite everything going on. The kid who ran away says "there was a man" and I never clocked this when I was watching this as a kid, but re-watching as an adult, it says everything without going into unnecessary graphic detail.
I remembered this being Jack's introduction, I don't remember him being as insufferable. The first time we see him, he's introduced as basically the classic caricature of a perv with binoculars. In this episode he comes across as very unlikeable.
The fact that rose is so smitten with him makes no sense to me, especially given how negatively she reacted to Adam behaving in a similar "sidling up with you just to scam you" way recently. Rose spends much of the episode complaining that the doctor is not "spock" enough, doesn't have gadgets, but he has all the same gadgets as Jack, right down to the space binoculars, just is more selective with when to use them. I don't understand what that plot point is about - Rose just wanting more excitement and that not meshing with Doctor's more peopley approach? This is one of those times where I think they could have cut much of the B-story and not really missed anything.
Various notes:
- Episode starts with a great Red Dwarf callout (Mauve alert / brown alert).
- Towards the start of the episode the camera zooms in on the Masked child a few times, and it's painfully obvious how low the camera quality is here
- The gag with the phone not being a real phone is great - I can't remember if it was ever explained how the child controls the electronics around him
- At one point doctor says "Nobody here but us chickens" - I had to look this one up, and it might be referencing a 1946 song, if so he's off by about 5 years too early.
This is a great site. Trying to break it is fun. It's possible to make a long neck giraffe ship with a giant cowcatcher on the front.
Aside: This is the first time I've ever seen a site ask for cookie consent via a submission box. Annoying. At least in EU if the cookies are purely functional, as seems to be the case here, you don't need to ask permission and you can just notify when the user is about to save to local storage.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot while I've been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.
They do have the odd one-off "fun" episode in DS9 - this past week was "Our Man Bashir" which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren't really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.
When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that's much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock's vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that's about the extent of it at the moment.
And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there's missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn't even really there, so that's a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La'ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.
I wasn't expecting another "fun" episode. I enjoyed it. The campy awfulness of the old TV set design and costumes was spot on.
Spock-La'an works well, I want to see more of it. It's difficult to find a lot of plot progress in comedy eps, but pushing their relationship forward a bit is nice. I really hope it goes somewhere meaningful, but this being a prequel, I guess just how far it could go is limited, unless they're willing to diverge off canon.
Hollywood AR walls don't hold anything against a holodeck, but we're getting there. It's cases like this that make me think I wouldn't enjoy one for real though, I'd just spend all my time getting paranoid. And did La'an get permission from everyone to use their patterns?
This earlier holodeck is lacking in any kind of true failsafe and is relying on the simulation program alone to not hurt people. Later on the enterprise, they never really figured that out. Scotty should have wrote his notes on safety much bigger than footnotes.
The writing staff must have been using this episode to vent their frustrations of the TV industry. When they were writing it, I wonder if they knew yet they had a confirmed 5 seasons, or if this was written during a hiatus.
I guess the takeaway message from this episode is "you can always rely on those around you". Except when they're holographic murder simulations, then all bets are off.
I just finished Hail Mary Project which I started last week - really enjoyed it. It scratched a perfect itch for some optimistic sci-fi.
The music is disappointing in this one because until now Gold has done a pretty good job. The bit you point out with the chords stood out to me. It did sound like there was an error in processing. Had it been at one peak moment, say a pivotal realisation, it might have been a good way to highlight things are going wrong. But it just seems to happen randomly. The rest of the score is kind of bland this episode.
This is a really nice episode. Not the best but definitely above average. It's a very human one - these are the ones where usually RTD excels, so it's interesting to see it was written by someone else.
The premise is a very natural one to imagine when you've got a time machine. Of course it leads to classic time travel shenanigans - the doctor ends up very upset at what rose has done, which is understandable, but I think he is being a bit unfair. This is rose, and much of the modern audience's, first real experience with a paradox. The doctor could have done a better job of explaining the stakes instead of leaving an emotionally struggling person to witness their own parent's death. Throughout this episode he keeps his very frank and pointed style of talking, but he starts being the emotional support for much of the human cast present, which is a great way of showing his heart starting to grow after he has been so pessimistic since we met him. The moment when he is standing up in front, like a priest preaching to his flock, is an especially nice image.
Rose's dad seems to really have struggled in life. Pete is really smart - he figures out the reality of whats happening fairly quickly, but he seems to struggle socially. He obviously has his own problems with confidence and relationships, and jackie really isn't helping. She goes on a few tirades here, but its never clear if what she is saying is accurate or whether that's just her viewpoint. The whole trip seems to break rose's interpretation of her dad, and that's possibly the bigger message to take away from this episode than the paradox: If you time travel, you might find out things that break your idealised version of the world.
The tardis losing its inside is a really great way to demonstrate what is happening, and how the tardis itself works. It reminds me of an old tom baker explanation which I really like: https://youtu.be/JJ01T3_E6YQ?t=48. The episode also serves as an example of a fixed point in time - Rose's dad has to die, so she can be raised in a certain way with her mum, so she can meet the doctor and do everything else she needs to.
The reaper designs are really nice. The flying monster motif makes a reapparance in the next season, and gargoyles get a brief mention in Blink. The gothic image is one that doesn't appear so often in popular sci-fi so it's nice to see used here, especially against the backdrop of the church. The monster designs looks pretty good even if the texturing and animation is a little janky. As far as beings in charge of timeline discrepancies go, they are more interesting than the weird bonemonsters from the most recent series finale.
Extras:
- I forgot about the mickey joke - that was fun
- The doctor mentions the isle of wight in 1987, I had to look this reference up. There was a massive storm back then that hit the south of england really badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1987
- The adults all scream when the aliens are attacking. In the playground none of the kids scream when the same happens. I wonder if that was an intentional choice or if someone at BBC standards had an issue with a bunch of children screaming as they died
I think I am starting to lean towards ebooks for the convenience when reading novels and prosey nonfiction.
However for reference books a physical thing is easier to flip through, and for anything with illustrations, physical still has better quality.
I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.
I was convinced up until the reveal that the "alien" was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I'm not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they're all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn't go down well for me. It's a generational ship, none of the original "good guys" were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they've killed.
The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn't need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They're all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk's captain literally is not a human.
The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut's perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.
Random other thoughts: