Josh Reviews Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season One (Part Two)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a prequel series set about a decade before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series.  It’s set on the original U.S.S. Enterprise, under the command of Captain Christopher Pike.  (Captain Pike, then played by Jeffrey Hunter, was the lead of the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”.  That pilot was rejected by NBC, but much of it was later reused as an extended flashback in the two-part Original Series episode “The Menagerie”.)  After Captain Pike, now played by Anson Mount, appeared in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery (in which he was by far the best character), this spin-off show was put into production.  Ethan Peck as Spock and Rebecca Romijn as Number One reprised their roles from Discovery, and a new cast featuring new characters mixed with a bunch of TOS characters was assembled.

Click here for my review of the the first five episodes of Strange New Worlds season one, which I watched last spring.

While many other Star Trek fans seem to love this show, I am sad to report that I don’t know what show they’re watching.  I found this first season of Strange New Worlds to be staggeringly mediocre.  It’s better than Discovery and Picard... so maybe some Trek fans are just so glad it’s not as abysmal as those shows?

It’s a shame, because as I wrote in my initial review, the series has great production values and a terrific cast.  I like these actors a lot.  But the show is continually hamstrung by its poor writing.  This is not good science fiction, neither is it good character-based storytelling.  Episodes often have a cool set-up that falls apart in the second half.  There are plot-holes and continuity problems all over the place.

For a show that is supposed to be a prequel to the Original Series, it shows almost the same disregard as Discovery did to any sort of attention to Star Trek canon and continuity.  Now, on the surface, Strange New Worlds seems to embrace Star Trek continuity, while Discovery ran away from it.  But that’s just on the surface.  The show features many Original Series characters, which I guess is supposed to make old-school Star Trek fans happy.  But I don’t think it does right by any of them.  The characterizations seem way off from what has been established.  I think this show would have been MUCH stronger had it had this same cast, but playing different characters and not being set on the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Because, in my humble and correct opinion, one simply cannot set a show on the Original Series Enterprise and completely redesign it.  The bridge of Kirk’s Enterprise is one of the most iconic TV settings ever.  If you think it looks dumb and old-fashioned, then make a different show.  (You’d be wrong in thinking that, by the way.  I think the original Enterprise bridge design would look amazing when brought to life with today’s production values.)  If you don’t want to pay attention to the established backstories for Spock, Uhura, Chapel, etc., then just create different characters.  Oy.

It took me a while to come back and finish season one.  I really did try to enter into every single episode with hope and an open heart.  I want to love live-action Star Trek again.  Here are my comments:

06 — “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach”

• I’m happy to have a story introducing us to an interesting, brand-new alien race, and also one that gives Captain Pike a nice juicy main story.
• I loved the bizarre and beautiful city on Majelis.  That was beautifully realized.  It’s fun to meet new, original aliens, and to see the show being able to execute cool, expansive visual effects shots to bring these new alien locations to life!  I was interested in seeing how the mostly secular Pike & co. react to these deeply religions aliens.  (Though didn’t Discovery season 2 tell us that Pike’s father was a professor of comparative religion??  I’d think that’d come into play here…)
• Once again, though, lazy writing somewhat bungles the set-up.  When the Enterprise rescues Alora’s ship and then Uhura’s shot causes more damage than intended (and why is Cadet Uhura in charge of firing phasers in a crisis situation?), how is it that the Enterprise just lets the attacking ship crash into the moon??  Activate the tractor beam!!  (We know the ship has a tractor beam — it’s used later in this episode!!)  Better writing would have set up the scenario with the distances between the ships being such that Pike has to choose which ship to help, and so he chooses the ones who were attacked rather than the aggressors.
• And once again, I was enjoying this episode right up until the end when things fall apart, and suddenly our heroes totally fail and the kid dies.  Come on.  I loved the tense set-up in which Number One and Spock have info but are stymied from communicating with Captain Pike on the ground.  I was excited to see how they’d solve that problem… and then, they don’t?  Come on, they should have found a way to get to through to the Captain.  (Why couldn’t they use the kid’s magic communications device, which the episode had spent so much time setting up?)  And down on the planet, Pike should have been able to beat those guards.  Come on.  Kirk would have.  I’m all for a dark ending, but I want to feel that our Starfleet heroes are competent.  Also, what was the dad’s plan?  We learn at the end that he DIDN’T want the kid returned to the planet.  So why was he just hanging out doing absolutely nothing in the Enterprise’s sickbay for the entire episode??  Why wasn’t he begging these friendly Starfleet officers to help his son???
• I wish Captain Pike wasn’t so ridiculously flustered when the woman beams in.  Again, I want him to be competent.  But other than that, I really enjoyed the story of his relationship with Alora.  It was nice to see Captain Pike in the role of a romantic lead.  I like this glimpse into his past (it reminds me of the early Satine/Obi-Wan stories on Star Wars: The Clone Wars).  I liked the mutual respect between Pike and Alora, and I’m glad she seemed smart and competent and not too much of a damsel in distress.  The only sour note for me was that it was pretty obvious that she was going to be bad, especially when she allows herself to be grabbed by a guard and then kills him.  (I thought she was trying to cover something up there by killing that guard.  Turns out she was just really vicious about protecting her ways.)  Either way, I want Pike to be smarter.  He should be ahead of the audience, not way behind us.
• I liked the La’an-Uhura stuff.  I like seeing them both be smart and tough and I liked seeing a burgeoning friendship there.  But it didn’t make sense to me that they have La’an saying she violated protocol by stealing those data-whatevers off of the crashed alien ship.  Why doesn’t Starfleet have the right to take whatever they want from the crashed ship?  Spock took the neural helmet without any problem.  Again, I wish this writing was tighter.
• Also, one other quibble that has been bothering me for a while: the characters should be referring to THE Enterprise.  Not just “Enterprise”.  I know that Captain Archer on the Enterprise show always called his ship Enterprise without the “the”, but in TOS it was always THE Enterprise, and I think it should be the same way here.

07 — “The Serene Squall”

• I bailed on Strange New Worlds for a while after the previous episode.  Months later I decided to return to finish the series, and was greeted by this frustrating episode that encapsulates, for me, many of the show’s strengths and weaknesses.
• What’s good?  I like the classic Star Trek structure, with parallel stories of the landing party in jeopardy and also the Enterprise… and I liked how the Enterprise side of the story got more attention than often happened in the Original Series. There are some beautiful visual effects and some fun action sequences.  There’s great tension in the story right from the opening beats, and I really dug the strong momentum of the episode.  I really liked the main guest star and I was pleased by the focus on Mr. Spock.  It was also fun to see Chris Pike being good natured and unflappable even in a dangerous situation, and using his charm and wits to turn the situation around to his advantage.
• What’s not so good?  I don’t understand why, on a tense mission outside of Federation space, we get multiple scenes of Spock away from the bridge.  All those scenes with the Ambassador should have frankly happened on or near the bridge.  I hate seeing our Enterprise crew act like such buffoons; Pike bungles into one trap after another and then loses control of his ship to a frankly pretty incompetent band of pirates with staggering ease.
• I am, at this point, sick of T’Pring on this show.  I was intrigued at first by the show’s use of T’Pring, but my patience has run out.  Hearing her awkwardly talk about reading human sex books made my eyes roll.  I have really come to dislike the suggestion that Spock spent so long on the Enterprise unhappy and distracted by his long-distance relationship with T’Pring.  I don’t like seeing this!  This feels wrong for Spock.  I also am put-off by the Spock-Chapel stuff.  The problem here is that I really love the character of Nurse Chapel on this show.  She’s great!!  But she’s so good that after only seven episodes I am rooting strongly for Spock and Chapel to get together, which I know will never happen.  So what is the point of all this?  (It also really makes Spock’s coldness to Chapel in the Original Series seen very cruel.  How did they go from the friendship and banter we’ve seen so far to the cold distance of the Original Series?  The stuff on this show hurts Spock’s character, in my mind.)
• Spock is way too violent.  They show him using his Vulcan neck pinch… and also brutally smashing pirates and then hurling them across the bridge.  Totally wrong for Spock.  Also wrong: Spock says he’s “looking forward” to the Kohlinar ritual.  That Spock had already decided here that his goal was to completely purge all emotion feels wrong.  If he wants that, what is he waiting for?  My understanding was that we see Spock attempting Kohlinar at the start of ST:TMP as an indication of how lost he is after having split from his friends on the Enterprise after the events of the Original Series.
• Jesse James Keitel is terrific as Dr. Aspen/Angel — I quite enjoyed her scenes with Spock in the first half of the episode.  (Though I rolled my eyes when, after the pirates attack, we see her and Spock sneaking through the Enterprise corridors and he condescendingly tells her to “remain calm”, even though she was already 100% calm and controlled before he said that.  Poor staging/editing!)  Unlike the painfully obvious twist with Pike’s love interest in the previous episode, I was pleasantly surprised by her turn to evil here.  But I wish she wasn’t so easily beaten at the end.  Why does she allow Spock/Chapel/T’pring to go through that whole routine on the bridge, when she could have immediately cut off communications?!  And then she orders her crew to fire phasers on T’Pring’s vessel… but doesn’t she think the Vulcan she loves is there?  Why was she suddenly risk killing him?  Why doesn’t she show more frustration/sadness, at the end, that she came so close to rescuing her love, only to be foiled?  I also have to comment that I loved that bizarre black cat-suit she was wearing, though I think she shouldn’t have changed into that until after she was revealed as a villain.  My eyebrows rose earlier in the episode when she first came on screen rocking that outfit; it seemed an unusual choice for a supposedly demure counselor.
• I wish that characters other than Spock, Pike and Chapel had more to do.  Why wasn’t chief engineer Hemmer seen at all?  (He’s been entirely absent for a number of episodes!)  Why do Una and Dr. M’Benga have so little to do?
• I continue to feel that the animation of the Enterprise’s movements is off on this show.  This huge ship should be slow and graceful.  It’s shown moving in a manner that is way too herky-jerky (especially in the sequences in the asteroid field) which makes the ship feel too small and weightless.
• Why does the laser trap in the asteroid field look so much like a Tholian web?
• Una says that she and Pike were able to regain control of the Enterprise via “backdoor codes” at the end of the episode.  If they could do that, why couldn’t Spock?  That feels like a weak plot device used to quickly wrap up the episode.
• I’m intrigued by the glimpse of Sybok at the end.  That shot of him from behind looked perfect.  Unlike T’Pring, who was a villain in “Amok Time” and who I didn’t ever feel needed any further exploration, I’d be tickled to see the character of Sybok explored and deepened.  (I have little faith the writers on this series are actually capable of doing that, but at least let me say for now that I dig the idea.)  I assume this means we’ll see Angel again, which I’d welcome.  (Is she actually Sybok’s wife, or was that a lie?)  (Also — as usual, this show moves so fast it’s hard to be sure if I fully caught the exposition — but it sounded to me like Spock said that Sarek had fathered Sybok out of wedlock.  That surprised me, as I’d understood from Star Trek V that Sarek was married to that Vulcan priestess, before Amanda.  But maybe the movie didn’t actually say that?  It’s been a minute since I’ve seen it…)  (Also, it was interesting to hear Chapel call Sybok a V’tosh ka’tur, a term coined on the Enterprise series for Vulcans who’d renounced logic, as Sybok had done.)

08 — “The Elysian Kingdom”

• I don’t have too much to say about this episode.  It’s decent.  I like the focus on M’Benga, and the cast all seem to have a lot of fun playing the fantasy roles.  Anson Mount is particularly fun as the cowardly chamberlain.
• I wish the ending landed better.  The whole idea of M’Benga keeping his daughter in the transporter pattern buffer never sat well with me.  It just felt too crazy.  A starship’s computer systems — which can be disrupted by all manner of hazards, including many we’ve seen in the previous seven episodes — feels like a staggeringly unsafe place.  And the episode’s opening scenes illustrate how little time it’s realistic for M’Benga to actually have available to work on a cure for his daughter.  Being CMO on a starship is not a small job!  If he was so focused on researching a cure, why not resign from Starfleet and devote his life to research full time?  (That sequence was also so silly; how could M’Benga have just forgotten for hours that he was suppose to check out a landing party?  Where were the landing party personnel if they weren’t in sickbay?  It’s nice that Una shows understanding, but instead of saying the landing party can keep waiting many more hours when she orders M’benga to get some sleep, why not suggest that someone else on the sickbay staff, like Nurse Chapel, could check them out in M’Benga’s place?)
• And so the ending didn’t quite land with the emotion it should have… partly because the solution seemed even crazier than the set-up.  It’s hard to imagine any father entrusting his child to this alien entity that has apparently never encountered another sentient life form before.  It seems creepy, not cute, that this disembodied consciousness is obsessed with M’Benga’s daughter Rukiya and wants to exist forever together with her.  On the one hand, I was glad to see the older version of Rukiya at the very end, who can reassure her dad that she’s OK.  On the other hand, if she ages so fast in seconds, doesn’t that mean that she’s dead by the time the end credits role?  This feels to me like a much sadder ending than I think the show intends.
• The show hits some rare production-values walls here, as the redressed sets don’t look much better than what we got decades ago in TNG’s “Masks”.  And why is the gang imprisoned on the transporter pad as opposed to… say… in the ship’s brig??  (Answer: because a brig set doesn’t exist yet on this show.)
• It’s a pleasure to see Chief Engineer Hemmer back on the show, and again, he rules in every scene he’s in.  I love this character.  “The magic of science prevails!”
• It’s nice to see M’Benga’s first name revealed to be “Joseph”.  (Though I am a little bummed the show didn’t stick with the name Jabilo given to M’Benga in Pocket Books’ Star Trek novels.  An early character poster for SNW gave M’Benga’s name as Jabilo M’Benga, before the studio said that was a mistake.  I wonder why they felt the need to make that change?)

09 — “All Those Who Wander”

• Until the last act, I was mostly happy with this episode; I thought it was a stronger episode than the previous three.  It’s entertainingly tense and suspenseful, a well-executed “haunted house” story on a crashed starship, and I like that there’s plenty of good character moments woven throughout.
• And then they kill off Hemmer in the last act, and I once again was staggered by the bad decisions made by the people making this show.  Instead of (mis)using pre-exisiting characters, they’d actually gone and created an awesome new character.  I think Hemmer was the most interesting character on the show!!  And they kill him off before the end of the first season??  What a disappointment.  What a wasted opportunity.
• There are, as usual for modern Trek, a number of problems with the details of the story.  They tell us the crashed ship is of a type that is based on the bones of a Constitution class.  That’s an excuse for them to just use redressed versions of all the usual sets.  But it doesn’t make sense that a ship of this type could be crewed by only 99 people.  (The Enterprise is huge, with a crew of well over 400.  And in the closing effects shot of the Big E towing this damaged ship away from the planet, we see that it’s EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE as the Enterprise!!)  And while the visual of the crashed Enterprise-type ship does admittedly look cool, I can’t conceive of how a ship of this type would even enter the atmosphere, let alone crash while still maintaining its shape/structure.  This really needed to be a much different type of Starfleet vessel.  (What is it with nuTrek and their desire to show Constitution class ships — ships that were never designed to enter an atmosphere — down on planets??  One of the definingly controversial shots of JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek was seeing a Constitution class vessel being built on the surface of Earth; and then in Star Trek into Darkness they ludicrously showed us the Enterprise hiding underwater on the surface of a planet.)  I also object to the silly premise that the Enterprise can’t stay and assist with the mission because the power-cells they’re bringing to Space-Station K-7 decay in transit and will be useless if not delivered promptly.  I find it hard to believe Starfleet doesn’t use something more reliable to power its space stations.  Come on.  Writers: work harder to find a better reason why the Enterprise can’t hang around to help.
• I’m not wild about this radical reinvention of the Gorn.  1) It doesn’t feel like it matches with anything we’ve known about the Gorn in Trek’s previous fifty-plus years of history.  (Admittedly, much of that is from non-canonical books, etc., but I do wish the show had hewed a little closer to what has been developed over the years.)  2) More problematically, these Gorn babies bursting out of an alien’s body is such a bald-faced Alien rip-off that it feels lame to me, nor cool or scary.    And then, as if that wasn’t enough, the show gives us a version of Aliens’ Newt in the form of the girl Oriana, AND then a lame rip-off of Predator-vision for the Gorn’s POV.  UGH.  Look, I am all-for a new Trek show digging into a pre-established alien race and developing them in ways we don’t expect.  TNG did that so well with the Klingons.  And it’s not like the Klingons weren’t well-known at that point!  They were already the defining Trek villain, and yet TNG was able to give them so many new layers.  So I know this can be done, particularly for the race like the Gorn that has not been nearly so well-defined, at this point, as the Klingons were by the time of TNG.  But so far, every time Discovery or SNW tries to bring in a pre-established race or character they seem to just mess things up.  (Hemmer’s death — which I wouldn’t have liked under any circumstances — was further weakened by what felt to me like the dumb and out of left-field plot device that the Gorn’s acid-spit also implanted Gorn babies into him.  I just can’t wrap my head around this.  Gorn babies who are only a few hours old can already reproduce?  And this is how they do it??)
• Also — remember that Spock and Kirk met the Gorn for what I’d thought was the first time in the TOS episode “Arena”.  And Spock chose not to mention this little violent confrontation with Gorn babies??  (Or maybe say to Kirk: hey buddy, watch out for their spit?)  For the millionth time, I say to the makers of modern Star Trek: folks, if you’re choosing to make a prequel, you have to pay attention to the canon.  And if you don’t care about canon, either set the show in the far future (where you can have more freedom to take characters and concepts into different directions) or just make some other kind of show that’s not Star Trek.
• I was shocked that no one — not even pacifist Hemmer!! — makes any attempt to argue that maybe they shouldn’t murder these alien babies, violent though they may be.  Hemmer says something like “I won’t be the one to kill it, but I will do what I must to protect the lives of this crew.”  That’s as weak as Batman saying to Ra’s al Gul in Batman Begins that “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.”  Come on.  This is so weak.  Maybe actually have Hemmer or another of these supposed Starfleet heroes speak up and say, hey, these are sentient alien life forms who we don’t understand (and who don’t understand us) and maybe we shouldn’t murder them?  I thought for a moment La’an would take mercy on the final frozen Gorn, but no, she brutally smashes it to pieces.  Sigh.
• It’s inconceivable to me that Spock would not be aware that Duke has been promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant.  I like the beat that follows, in which Spock marvels at his crew members’ ability to invent drinking games.  But it should have been another officer who made the error, not Spock.  This is a tiny moment, but it’s a prime example of how this show shockingly seems to have a lot of basic misunderstandings of the Spock character.  (And as for the Lieutenant… I know Trek has a long tradition of introducing a never-before-seen crew member only to kill them off… but after fifty-plus years of this, it’s no longer an effective storytelling approach.)  I did really like the Spock-Chapel stuff at the end of the episode (though the problem, as I’ve repeatedly noted, is I don’t understand why the show is working so hard to make us believe Spock and Chapel are destined to be a perfect-for-one-another couple, when we know that’s not to be and Spock barely acknowledges Chapel during TOS.)
• I like Uhura’s storyline, and that final shot of her stepping onto the bridge and looking over at the communications station was great.  (It’d have been more effective, of course, had that communications station looked anything like Uhura’s communications station actually looked like on TOS, but oh well.)
• I wish they showed us even a moment of Chris Pike being more upset at the losses of so many crew-members, including one cadet, on this mission.  (Especially after he was so causal about taking “the kids” on this mission at the start of the episode.)  What’s the one thing we know about Chris Pike from “The Cage”/”The Menagerie”??  It’s that he takes the deaths of any crew members very personally.  Why are we not seeing this aspect of his character on this show?
• After killing off Hemmer, they also make the confounding decision to (I assume temporarily) write off La’an, probably the second best original character on the show after Hemmer.  I am mystified.  And I wish La’an had had a stronger character arc in this episode.  I’d assumed maybe this story would make her confront her hatred towards the Gorn, but nope.  Her arc in this episode is… she yells at the kid, and then later decides to help her find her family?  I wish there was more here.
• And, again as usual, I wish the writers were less lazy and took more time to tie up the story’s loose ends.  Who was that girl, and where did she come from?  Did she know her alien fiend Bentley was infected by Gorn?  (How could she not have?)  SIGH!!!

10 — “The Quality of Mercy”

• At first, this episode excited me.  For a show that usually doesn’t seem to care a whit for Star Trek continuity, this episode was a surprising deep dive into Trek history, bringing us right back into the events of the Original Series episode “Balance of Terror”.  I love seeing future Pike in the maroon uniform of Star Trek II through VI.  (Though it irritated me that they couldn’t resist adding patterning to the sleeves.)
• But I was hugely disappointed by the episode in the end.  What was the point of any of this??  To tell us that Strange New Worlds’ Captain Pike is a worse captain than the Original Series Captain Kirk??  Tell me about it!!  It’s crazy to me that this is the moral of this episode (which is all about how Pike would have bungled the “Balance of Terror” interaction with the Romulans, whereas Kirk succeeded in saving his ship and avoiding interstellar war).
• I thought it was a big mistake for Discovery to give Pike knowledge of his future fate in “The Menagerie”.  I had been hoping that maybe this show would build to Pike’s being able to avoid that fate.  It seems like something relatively easy to do.  (Just tell someone about his knowledge of the accident that will lead to his radiation poisoning before it happens!!)  And yet, disappointingly, this whole episode seems to be built on the premise that Pike MUST suffer that horrible fate.  This unavoidable tragedy feels like an anti-Trek idea, which has repeatedly had characters use time travel in order to fix a grievous wrong.  Why is that suddenly not OK here?  It’s crazy to me that the show suggests that the universe would be much WORSE off if the hero of the show survives.  I just do not understand this.  (And remember, Pike’s letter at the end of the episode reminds us that he’s not just going along with sacrificing his own life, but also the lives of the other four people killed in the accident.  So they don’t “deserve” to live either?  Come on.)
• I thought it was a wonderful and bold idea to see Captain Kirk, here in this alternate timeline as Captain of the Farragut (where we know Kirk served as a Lieutenant, from the Original Series episode “Obsession”).  But the execution of this idea was abysmal.  First of all, the actor cast as Kirk (Paul Wesley) was all wrong.  He looked way too young, and he played the role too seriously; he was missing Shatner’s twinkle.  This Kirk was a bore.  Worse, he was an ineffective captain, getting his ship destroyed only a few minutes after he appears on-screen.  I was surprised that this Kirk leans towards attacking the Romulans in the briefing room scene, rather than being more cautious about starting a war.  I was disappointed Kirk’s Farragut was so easily disabled by the Romulans.  Come on, Kirk is smarter than that.  And, after the Farragut is lost, I thought that Kirk was arrogant and wrong when he confronts Pike, both in Pike’s quarters and on the bridge.
• I liked the way the alternate timeline story wove in and out of the familiar events of “Balance of Terror”.  I liked that we jumped into the middle of the wedding on the Enterprise (as happened at the start of “Balance of Terror”).  I liked seeing the similar version of the Outpost 4 Commander, Hanson, in the burning command center.  The dialogue was the same, although we had a very different-looking actor.  That was cool.
• In this episode, set seven years after the events of Strange New Worlds season one, why does everyone on the Enterprise look identical?  No one even has a new hairstyle?  Why couldn’t they have spent a little time and budget to change up the costumes & hairstyles a bit?
• Why isn’t Sulu on the Enterprise?  Where is McCoy?  (He was at the wedding in “Balance of Terror”.)  Spock at one point says “the doctor can perform a scan,” without naming the doctor, which I thought was a way to playfully avoid featuring McCoy while also jeeping open the possibility that he was there, just not seen.  But then later we see M’Benga, so that’s clearly not the case.  Where was Styles?  They use Ortegas in the Styles role, jumping to conclusions and spoiling for a fight with the Romulans.  I can understand that they want to give Ortegas something to do, but it doesn’t make sense that she’d be as angry and unprofessional as Styles — she’s worked with Pike for years!!
• I was happy to hear Scotty’s voice on intercom, though his line about not being a miracle worker was too on the nose for me.
• It was cool to actually get to see the outposts along the neutral zone, which were talked about a lot in “Balance of Terror”.  That episode said they were constructed on asteroids, and it was awesome to see that brought to life.  But I hated the shot in which the Romulans destroy Outpost 4, while we can see that the Enterprise is sitting right there.  Wait, what?  Why is the Enterprise just sitting there?  They should be out of phaser range, rushing at warp speed to get there!!!
• I loved hearing the TOS music cue when the Romulans are first seen on screen.  The Original Series era Romulan ship looks great, as does plasma weapon.  While I would have preferred to have seen the Roman costumes look closer to what we saw on TOS, I thought the updating was interesting.
• While I was super excited to see the return of the Romulan commander (from “Balance of Terror”), as with Kirk, the casting was way off the mark.  This dude didn’t look anything like Mark Leonard and he didn’t have Mr. Leonard’s intelligence and dignity.  This was a much more boring version of the Roman Commander.  And where was his old friend?
• It’s fun hearing Spock refers to the “Prime” timeline, something fans have been doing ever since J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek film created a new timeline.  (But to me, neither Discovery nor Strange New Worlds are actually in the Original Series “Prime” timeline!!!)
• In this episode, Spock delivers all the exposition about the Romulans; I thought that worked better in TOS when Kirk and Spock put it together by working together and combining their insights.
• I like the new suggestion that the Roman communications signal was bouncing off the nearby comet, which helps explain how the Enterprise could intercept their visual transmission, as we saw happen in “Balance of Terror”.
• If we’re paying attention to continuity, the U.S.S. Farragut should be Constitution Class, same as the Enterprise.
• It didn’t make much sense to me that Starfleet help was days if not weeks away, but the entire Romulan fleet was able to shows up in two hours.  That was silly.  Though the ships looked cool, and it was fun to see Denise Crosby as the Roman Praetor.
• I liked seeing the “The Cage”/”The Menagerie” style uniforms in the photo that old Pike holds.
• At the end, old Pike sympathizes with “our” Pike by saying that he was thinking the same thing when he went through this.  But come on, you lazy and awful writers: old Pike DIDN’T go through this experience!!!  That’s the whole point.  Old Pike changed the events of “The Menagerie” so he survived.  So he didn’t go through this experience in which young Pike is convinced not to do that.  Sigh.
• I also have to point out that awful extra on the right side of screen who looks up at the sky when they beam up at the end.  UGH.  That’s not how it works.  You’re not being airlifted up by an alien tractor beam.  Is there no quality control on this show???

So… sigh… I’m afraid I didn’t much care for Strange New Worlds season one.  I believe this show has potential.  But the writing has got to improve.

So far the only modern Star Trek show that is any good is the animated Lower Decks (which is AMAZING — my review of season three will be coming soon!) — everything else has just been dreck.  I wish fervently this was not the case, and I continue to hope that writers of the caliber of Tony Gilroy and his team on Andor will someday come back to Star Trek.

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