Noted?

Rosalind Lear appears to be hiding some kind of alternative motivation for investigating into Khan and Ceti Alpha

I didn’t find this surprising in the sense that she’s seemed…biased, to say the least. But the scene with Tuvok was nice, even though in the moment I was wondering if it was Lear or Delmonda that was meant to be the liar. Context suggests it’s her, though.

The song the young augments were listening to was Your Touch released in 2021.

Interesting. I wonder if it’s a favourite of Kirsten Beyer or something - I’m a little surprised that they went to the effort of clearing a pop song of any kind.

Khan’s odd mercy towards him

I see it as a means to an end - looking like he’s living up to his end of the bargain with Delmonda. A dangerous game to be playing, though.

the inevitable loss of McGiven’s to the Ceti Eel.

I know this is consistent with the film, but part of me wishes she had met her demise more directly as a result of some choice that Khan made, if only to reinforce just how foolish she had been to join his little cult in the first place.

The way they’ve been talking, it sounds like they’re playing with the idea that Kirk seemed pretty comfortable on the Enterprise in his first episodes, so there may be unseen stories to be told before TOS season one.

Yeah…it would be nice if they could give it a permanent home, or maybe do a touring exhibit.

Paramount got rid of its theme park division back in 2006, but is some Prodigy(!) content at a theme park in Turkey, and there were plans for a Paramount park in China that included Trek content, but I have no idea if it’s still in the works.

It was temporary, after regular park hours - they had a bunch of IPs that aren’t normally part of Universal.

They’re already planning one for next year, but details on what it will entail are scarce.

As the series continues, I find I’m a lot more interested in the worldbuilding than the story itself.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in there - I hadn’t considered the fact that Khan and his people were unfamliar with Federation technology, and the fact that McGivers uses that to her advantage is a lot of fun. I enjoy listening to them go about the day-to-day business of survival - maybe it’s the Naveen Andrews of it all, but it reminds me of the first season of “Lost”.

The framing story continues to be pretty irrelevant, but it’s nice to hear them diving into the burning questions surrounding TWOK. How could the Enterprise crew have missed the fact that one of the planets in the system was about to go critical? How could the Reliant crew not have not noticed a missing planet upon their return? Now that these questions have been raised, I assume answers will be provided…

IGN has a (very) brief teaser trailer

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?

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.

She sort of sidestepped the question in the interview…my answer would be “no, but who cares if the story’s any good?”

Interestingly, I see someone at Memory Alpha has been incorporating stuff from the first two episodes into related pages…we’ll see if that sticks.

See, I meant what I said last week about being bad at listening to podcasts!

That’s an interesting question. Kirk seemed pretty determined to let Khan and his people have a real chance on Ceti Alpha V, so it makes sense that he’d allow them some tools, and even weapons.

But this episode also makes a bit of a big deal out of Khan’s reaction to Starfleet technology that’s much more advanced that what he’s used to. Some kind of throwback/antique weapon would make sense.

I thought this was a decent one. They continue to walk the line of adding depth to Khan without necessarily casting him in a positive light.

I’m a little surprised they dropped the Sulu/Tuvok framing device, but I didn’t really miss it.

RIP Joaquin, I guess the guy in TWOK is your kid.

the fanatasy/hallucination wss made by Batel

Yeah, I think you’re right - that’s the only anwer that makes any kind of sense. I was just thrown by the fact that Real Batel showed absolutely no awareness of, or interest in, what had happened when Pike snapped out of it. At least, that’s what I remember - I haven’t gone back to double-check.

I think Discovery handled Pike’s “destiny” in the best possible way by rooting it in character.

Pike grabs that time crystal because he’s dedicated to the mission, and to Starfleet. He will eventually save those cadets for the exact same reason. There doesn’t have to be anything metaphysical going on there - he affirms that that’s the kind of person he is, and that’s why he’ll end up in that situation one day, even knowing it’s coming.

It makes me sad that SNW has been diluting that.

Or is it only a combo thing?

That seemed to be the implication. In which case, I think it might have been better to have Batel get more fully “possessed,” and take the angle that she knows exactly what’s going on, and what needs to be done. It would take her agency out of the episode, but…the episode didn’t really give her any agency as it is.

I wanted to sleep on this one too see if there would be anything I would appreciate after some reflection, but…no, not really.

I thought that the way they came to understanding what was going on was a little rushed and a bit too speculative

I think this is a big part of what didn’t work for me. They really wanted to get to the fireworks factory, and sidestepped most of the interesting potential in order to get there.

The extended fantasy/hallucination was the strongest part of the episode, but…it seemed to be entirely about Pike. Did Batel even experience it? The episode seemed completely uninterested in what she might be going through as she prepared to sacrifice herself.

And the conflict itself suffers from the “pah wraith problem” - I’m fine with the idea of a conflict between primordial good and evil…but it’s hard to make it interesting. All you can really do is focus on how it affects the people involved, and they were only semi-successful at that.