There is a trend this season of defining characters by their relationships, and since women are so often defined by their relationship to a man in media, I can see how that would ring alarm bells. But in this case, every character is being defined by their relationship. Spock is shown to have gotten past his relationship with Chapel by hooking up with La’an, and La’an is shown to have gotten past her trauma with the Gorn by hooking up with Spock. Pike and Batel spend the whole season focused on their future together. Chapel is now just Corby’s girlfriend, which sucks, but it’s equally true that Corby is just Chapel’s boyfriend - we learn practically nothing about him outside of that and his profession. In general, this has just been the romantic entanglement season of SNW.
That is, apart from Ortegas, who had the best arc this season. It’s ridiculous to say that her trauma with the Gorn is “not touched on” until Terrarium - I don’t see how you could watch this season and not see it playing into every scene she has up until that point. It feels like that the article writer knew her arc didn’t suit the point they were making, so they just tried to downplay it.
Yeah. Honestly, it’s kinda funny—their sci-fi has a shaky grasp of science, their drama is tedious and annoying, the basic storytelling fundamentals are purely vibes-based and miss actually connecting setups to payoffs half the time… but every romantic episode has been at least okay, imo.
Unfortunately, that’s turned every character into this. Sigh…
Maybe this creative team would be better for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
I’ve just started season two and this is kind of how I feel too. It’s not a bad show, but a lot of it is just mediocre. The characters are especially bad since they all feel like bizarre caricatures of Star Trek memes and the attempt at comedy often feels out of place.
The Orville, for all it’s silliness, had much better writing and characters that actually felt genuine.
The show is entertaining enough for me to keep watching though.
Yeahhh… Every once in a while, there’s a solid episode! But pretty often, it feels to me like their big dramatic moment doesn’t actually follow from the rest of the events.
I still enjoy SNW, but I can’t see myself going back to rewatch it, like I’m rewatching DS9 right now.
I’ve never seen The Orville, but I hear a lot of good things about it around here! I just finished Babylon 5 for the first time, and after that, SNW really does feel all the more poorly written.
And that’s with some, frankly, terrible acting in the first season of B5!
Definitely check out The Orville. It took me a few episodes to realize that it is a comedy first, but after that the serious episodes felt strange to me 😅
their sci-fi has a shaky grasp of science
That last episode of season 3 with “ley line bus routes” was… 🤦 … something.
Yeah, that was… a hell of a choice. I was specifically thinking about the “epigenetics of elemental good and evil” plot point from that very episode as I wrote it.
A good show to have on in the background while waiting for the stupid humans.
Dint STD already do this? That was the show runners/execs goal with that show
Who ever wote this article wants an all female cast I swear. All of the male arcs have women in them and there are fewer male arcs than female. There is a strong female lineup with a good balance of screen time.
Ya cant make everyone happy
That feeling when someone makes a really good point and makes me wonder if S3 was not as good as I thought it was.
I think it’s completely possible to enjoy a flawed creation.
And in this case, I think La’An’s story this season was fairly strong, even though it was heavily (if not entirely) tied to her relationship with Spock.
Ortegas got an entire episode devoted to her, but the criticism about her experience with the Gorn being largely overlooked prior to that is completely fair.
Uhura certainly had less to do, and I think Una was pretty short-changed this season.
I want to speak to this a bit because I enjoy a lot of flawed things, SNW included. I also don’t spend time complaining about entertainment I don’t like because if I don’t like it I just don’t talk about it at all. I used to spend that energy but it got old.
Side story: A friend of mine is a huge Wheel of Time fan. He has reread the books dozens of times. He started a book club where we worked at the time just to have someone to discuss them with (which i joined). This was in the days leading up to the final 3 coming out, so quite a while ago. It’s flawed. 90% of the plot could have been fixed by saying “then they actually talked to each other”. Women characters weren’t generally treated with care. Hell, dudes weren’t either in a lot of cases. When Brandon Sanderson took over the character voices changed. And I have bitched about all the issues with the books. But only because I really enjoyed them.
So when I come out and complain about yet another Spock romance, how the women aren’t being treated right, reversing the polarity of the jammy dodger flow (oh, that’s Doctor Who), Trelane vs Q, or whatever else it’s because I genuinely like Trek. I don’t talk about DS9 or the later seasons of Discovery because they’re just not my cup of tea. I’m going to let the people who like them have their own conversation without my negative opinion tainting the conversation.
Your comment about WoT - if they just talked to each other - resonated with me. I gave up reading the series halfway through because of that. If they just had Post-it notes, that would have made a difference.
As a fellow enjoyer of some flawed things, I haven’t gotten too far into this season. I’m a quarter of the way through the “holodeck” episode. I’m just not caring about the characters’ lives at this point.
I want to but I can’t.
I also find it odd that, apparently, the Federation is incapable of diagnosing and treating PTSD or mental illness in general. They have replicators and matter transportation but not therapy.
Sure, I think the key is balance in all things. I absolutely loathed the third season of “Picard”, but I’m not going to jump into every conversation about it I see just for the sake of saying so.
But if it makes sense, and is relevant…I might, if I feel like it. There’s room to talk about what you disliked about something, and why. It just shouldn’t be your entire personality, y’know?
Well said, there’s criticism and then there’s jumping in to give an opinion.
It was good, don’t agree with this article at all
Somebody in the comments says there have been 950 episodes of Trek. Has anyone done the math? Is this factual?
Sounds plausible, TNG, DS9 and VOY each had around 170 episodes, that’s already around 510 episodes. I checked the actual numbers and if you consider Short Treks as actual episodes then it’s indeed exactly 950.
