Logline
Pike leads the crew into a stellar storm, sending the Enterprise back 65 million years.
Story by: Henry Alonso Myers & Alan B. McElroy
Written by: Akiva Goldsman & Henry Alonso Myers
Directed by: Chris Fisher
It doesn’t matter that I love Doctor Who so much that it’s been inspiring my username for a decade and a half, that reference in this episode felt too out of pocket.
I didn’t like the time loop with such big stakes, but overall I liked this episode and the diplomatic A-plot. The scene regarding Translator mishaps was my favorite.
Also, I know feathers on Dinos is a bit of a hot button issue, but was it even the case for therapods?
Lesson learned: don’t give Wikipedia access to prehistoric aliens.
With Scotty having witnessed phasing technology, you’d think he could have it figured out after 65 million years.
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I have mixed feelings about this episode.
The A story, with the diplomacy, philosophising about how to encounter and deal with new species, I enjoyed a lot. The ending of the time loop was rather inevitable, it being a time loop set in the past, but it worked. It was a difficult choice and it had to be made. “Pike must suffer” I guess. The translation system leaking information through subtle differences in grammar is a nice idea, it felt a bit underused as a concept though, would have been a good topic for Uhura to explore. This kind of political, philosophical, with a hint of sci-fi, story is exactly what I want from Star Trek. More of this please.
The B story, down on the planet, with the dinosaurs, didn’t grab me. First off, I don’t understand why they couldn’t just fly the shuttle right to the wreck, why did they need to deal with the Rex? Other than getting the drive, this entire section could have been cut and the episode would not have lost anything. I get the feeling the VFX artists had a lot of fun with that section though.
Overall, it was an okay opener. Extra remarks:
- Our new vulcan is a flanderisation of vulcans, and not in a good way. “I am familiar with all earth dialects”. Really? All 7000+ of them? I hope they get their comeuppance at some point soon.
- Pelia’s voice seems much raspier this season. She makes another DW reference. Didn’t work for me, it felt a bit too obvious and in your face. If they’re going to keep making these, something more subtle might have worked, particularly for this episode given DW has had a few dinosaur episodes.
- I am really enjoying the Scotty vs Ortegas game. Looking forward to more of this
- La’An’s business looks interesting, though I hope wherever this goes is distinct from the stuff we’ve already covered with Bashir, Una, and Khan.
Our new vulcan is a flanderisation of vulcans, and not in a good way.
I’ve gotta be honest, I think she’s uncomfortably representative - Vulcans are, by and large, dicks. But the appearance of…
spoiler
Sarek
…will likely balance things out in the future.
If they’re going to keep making these, something more subtle might have worked,
Yeah, this was on-the-nose to the point of being kind of a strange thing for her to say.
Vulcans can be arrogant, but they also have some personality to balance it out. I think part of the problem is we haven’t seen much, other than a sliver of backstory at the end of the episode
Well I just watched it, but I don’t know what to do with it. It just kinda…happened. Other than a few moments here and there, I didn’t really get much out of it. Eh.
And I really don’t need Pelia dropping more Doctor Who references. One time was amusing and enough.
Pretty good start for the season, nice sci-fi concepts, 7/10
Pet peeves: away team knew it had to be ancient Earth after seeing T-Rex, after riding an alien creature that looked exactly like a horse at the beginning of the episode…
I was sure that the Voth were going to show up when they said it was the dinosaurs’ Earth, I think it’s a miss not to explore that, but that ancient Martian civilization concept was also interesting. It’s not scientific however as we know pretty well that Mars was already bone dry 65M years ago.
Yeah, the T-Rex thing could’ve just been convergent evolution, like with cough cough all the humanoids. Plus, how’d they know about the Martians after the Enterprise was tethered?
I was really hoping they’d connect to the voth too. Would have been a nice little nod.
Jurassic Trek! I love butterfly effect time travel episodes. The Dr Who references were pretty funny too.
That said, uhhhh did the pacing of each scene feel… off? Like the whole edit seemed slightly odd, hanging too long creating awkward moments, ESPECIALLY with every away team scene, and the Sol reveal felt flat. It’s so strange to see editing be an issue in any Trek series but it definitely was a clunky handling of an otherwise really great sci-fi episode.
I do think the away team section needed another pass, either on the writing or the direction. It had some action moments, but at the same time it didn’t feel like anything the away team actually did carried any impact,and never that they were in any real danger. The only bit that actually felt it had real energy was the archeopteryx getting punched in the face.
My guess is the away scene was going to be a lot different. My reason for thinking this is that oddly incongruent end sequence. They had that long CGI sequence at the end, after the entire plot of the episode has finished, where the camera does an extended flyaround on the Cretaceous Earth. CGI isn’t cheap. Someone had to animate all that. That sequence really screamed, “shit. We spent all this money on these dinosaur animations. But now the script’s changed, so we can’t use even half of it. I know! Let’s add an inspiring sequence at the end!”
Annotations for 4x01 up at: https://startrek.website/post/42540204
Don’t get me wrong - I’m glad SNW is back, but the opener was a little meh - not least because it was predictable in the extreme.
The moment Spock reveals that they’ve travelled back to the Sol system 65 million years ago it becomes all very convenient and the predestination paradox possibility immediately rears its head.
Because, why would a solar storm light years away throw them back to Sol? And 65 million years ago is immediately obvious to any kid with a passing fancy for dinosaurs as the Cretaceous, which probably means there’s going to be a link to the extinction event. The need for and presence of iridium in the plot reinforces that, because one of the things we know about the KT boundary is the unusual presence of iridium.
(I won’t go into nitpicking the science in this one because Trek’s hold on science has been tenuous at best and this episode was more tenuous than most)
But even if you don’t pick up on that bit, what clinches it in the end is when Spock reveals there is a fifth planet between Mars and Jupiter. Although this detail really should have been made known earlier when he initially scanned the system since it’s a pretty unusual feature for Sol and the only reason it wasn’t is because it would give away the game too soon.
Because the moment you have that bit of info, you know how the rest of the episode has to play out - and it should be obvious to every officer on the bridge, not just Pike. Hell, every Earth officer at least should know what’s going on since they should have more than a passing familiarity with their home system. So Pike’s pronouncement that there is no fifth planet in their time lands as less of a dun-dun-dun reveal than it is a “No shit, Sherlock.”
Also, the pile-on consequences were a bit much, I think. Being involved in the creation of the Asteroid Belt is one thing, and sure, I can even buy the distress buoy paradox, but to put the creation of the solar storm and the extinction of the dinosaurs on top of that is over egging it.
There are cute character bits I enjoyed. Seeing dinosaurs is always a joy. The three-woman landing party was fun, and Saffron Burrows’ performance as a complex antagonist was superb.
Cade S’sha’s presence was a bit superfluous, since she had absolutely nothing to do except be an asshole to Uhura, and one wonders if her introduction would have been better served in an episode where she was more of a focus, or she should at least have been given some role in the plot.
It wasn’t a bad episode, but it wasn’t a great one to roll out the new season.
Enjoyable episode overall. I loved the conflict they had with an alien species. I dont mind these kinds of predetermined time travel episodes but I do think they wound up responsible for a little too much. Theyre responsible for the destruction of a planet, the contiunuing redding of mars, and also they killed the dinosaurs. It feels like the consequences were a little too high. A reminder of how nutrek dials everything up to 11. It’s not just butterfly effects changing history it’s like everything.
You know, they really missed an opportunity here. Because this was a bootstrap paradox, there’s nothing they could really do to mess up the timeline. Whatever they make happen was already going to have happened.
What I’m trying to say is, they should have adopted a pet raptor, taken it back to the future with them, and just had it as a regular presence on screen for the rest of the series! 😂
I enjoyed this episode very much, including the gratuitous shot of the dinosaurs at the very end.
It was obvious how this one was going to end, and while I’m not a huge fan of arachnids, I hated that captain Pike never gave the order to destroy the antimatter warhead that was headed to their planet.
I would have loved some Voth references but I don’t really know if the timeline would actually support them.
I dont hate that pike let it happen, but also letting someone genocide an entire people and blow up a planet is a heavy move to make so casually even if it did already happen. I would have preferred the usual cliche of them trying to do the right thing and then missing the mark only to realize this was meant to happen.
Yeah that is the thing. Just because you know that the planet would eventually be destroyed, doesn’t mean you know that this is the particular moment it was supposed to happen. It could have happened in some unrelated event 45 million years ago instead of 65.
I would have loved some Voth references
My only “complaint,” because the Voth are one of my favourite dumb Trek things. But it’s not really a complaint, and you can easily assume the Voth are simply gone by this point in history.
I mean, they were evolved from hadrosaurs, and those only evolved in the late Cretaceous. The Voth would have had to be there at least within a few million years of the end.
A good start for the season, a serious sci-fi episode. We need more of these and less of the silly ones, I can take a funny episode now and then not all the time like on S3. I think they need to explore more about the characters relationship on the episodes, the only real interactions are the ones between Scotty and Ortega on this one.
I had some T’Lyn vibes with the new vulcan girl at the begging of the episode, not much at the end.
That was great! I thought I knew where it was going but it totally surprised both me and my wife and we were like, “Damn, that was pretty good!”
Very hyped for shore leave episode now, the crew has earned it!
I really liked that episode. This is what star trek should be. Diplomacy with Sci fi. That’s why I fell in love with Star Trek in the first place.
spoiler
It seems that ther are trying to establish that you can’t chang established lore. So basically what that means, fate of Pike is sealed. They will put Pike in a wheelchair after the series.
I don’t think there was anything that showed they couldn’t change the past; Pike just made the right choice to avoid changing it. If they tried to shoot down the missile and something went wrong, that I would maybe take as a sign the past is fixed.
Ok. Fair.
this threads usually are spoilers ok, you don’t need to tag them (that should be in the Original Post)
Edit: Also I think Pike’s fate is sealed I think it was the intention since the beggining
If Pike’s fate were truly sealed his future self wouldn’t have needed to come back and tell him changing it was going to go badly for the Federation.
So what part of this was from Jurassic Park?
