Actually the more I ponder it, the more it stops holding up and I don’t really care for it.

• The show really undercuts Kirk (IMHO) by having his plan be 1) risk killing himself by accident by hiding amid the radioactive phaser whatever it was to establish a bluff, and then spike his CO’s drink with a high potency drug he only just learned of and he shouldn’t be playing around with because, I don’t know, he’s not a doctor. This is smarter and better for the character than showing us Kirk staking out the moral high ground, standing that ground, and finding another resolution?
• M’Benga deciding to not only go along for the ride on this but take the blame doesn’t do him any favors either. I know they’re setting up M’Benga’s departure to mesh with TOS, but if this story went “M’Benga takes the moral stand and relieves him even though maybe Starfleet won’t support that stance after the fact” that would have been a stronger character point too.
• Really, while this sets up “M’Benga will wind up departing but Kirk will be cool with him coming back later in TOS because he knows the true story”, the idea that M’Benga is allowed to stay in Starfleet after admitting to drugging his CO to have an excuse to relieve him of duty is kind of wild. Or at least how that came to pass would be a good story (that we’ll never see).
• Watching this again, I hear Picard saying Starfleet’s first duty is to the truth and wondering when exactly Starfleet got there, because it’s sure not in this episode.

Just got to watch this week’s. It was all right, I guess, compared to most of the rest of the season. My best praise is it was good enough to make me forego head-desking that they found yet another reason to get Kirk aboard the Enterprise for a story about him.

Well now we need to re-remaster that episode, obviously.

I don’t know what to take from that episode. The ending with Pike almost saves it, but I feel like I wasted a lot of time to get that payoff.

I will always reserve judgment until seeing it (taking the hypothetical stance that this actually gets made), but it’s not an exciting description of a Star Trek project (to me).

Now I can’t find it again of course, but someone on BlueSky observed that they apparently didn’t have a final-final draft of “The Man Trap” because the line at the end where Spock is yelling to McCoy that the Salt Vampire is ‘killing the captain, shoot it’ wasn’t in the performance.

This amuses me for no obvious reason. Maybe it’s the combination of Spock yelling frantically to begin with, and to do the un-Star-Trek thing and just kill it.

Besides Lower Decks and Prodigy, you mean? 😆

Other random thought: I kind of wish they’d gotten the gross body stuff out of their system with “The Griffin Incident” and would stop with it already.

He is wearing a pin above his delta which I can’t quite make out but it looks like the design on the tunic he wears in TOS: “The Cage”, which is an Earth map encircled by laurel leaves.

Yep. TrekCore.com has this good clear picture of it.

An episode that was a breath of fresh air after last week. Dropping Boyce into it was…interesting.

I don’t know that the onscreen countdown clock really worked, though. At least not for me.

That’s one of the available modules!

I didn’t grab that one, but I downloaded the TOS, TNG, and a Myst one. Good times.

I also guess I never particularly noticed her bare feet before, now that Starfleet Academy started emphasizing it as a Lanthanite trait or quirk. Or was it not a thing before and they made it a thing for this season?

Puppet Pelia threw her shoes at one of the Orions early on.

I’m sorry but no. Of all the “and it didn’t happen/gets reset at the end” episodes of Star Trek – possibly of all of television – that was the biggest waste of time I’ve ever subjected myself to.

Yes, you clearly are then. If this episode is a dud I’ll have slid overall into Discovery levels (sorry DIS fans) of “I watch to be in my favorite universe for a hour and to keep up on the lore, but I have no expectation of being wowed by what I see” mode for the rest of the run, quite likely.

If it manages that level I would consider it a minor miracle.

Exactly! And this season to date has me tilted heavily toward “faceplant”.

I hate to be pessimistic but I’m dreading the hell out of this episode.

Right now it’s hard to imagine they’re going to bring Kurtzman and Secret Hideout back for anything Trek-related. It’s pretty clear Kurtzman’s era as Trek overseer is done.

I had that thought too at times during the episode. Doing the whole thing in black or white pulled me out of any noir mood every time we were back on the Enterprise.

Better episode this week, mostly because they gave Una something to sink her teeth into. Ironically, I thought the past episodes went too far into their genre, but this one didn’t lean in hard enough. The black and white just got distracting, especially every time the plot moved back to the Enterprise and the story there noticeably was weaker.