r/startrek: The Next Generation
Star Trek news and discussion. No slash fic...
Maybe a little slash fic.
New to Star Trek and wondering where to start?
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Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 01-24 | Film | "Section 31" |
| 07-17 | SNW 3x01 | "Hegemony, Part II" |
| 07-17 | SNW 3x02 | "Wedding Bell Blues" |
| 07-24 | SNW 3x03 | "Shuttle to Kenfori" |
| 07-31 | SNW 3x04 | "A Space Adventure Hour" |
In Production
Strange New Worlds (2025-07-17)
Starfleet Academy (TBA)
In Development
Untitled comedy series
Wondering where to stream a series? Check here.
So, bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed Spock smashing bloodwine, and the general idea of the plot, decent Klingons etc. I did not enjoy unexplained spacewar drugs, feels like a very non-Star Trek thing.
That being said, I really wish they would stop harping the "do the thing do the thing" angle every time anyone sits in the Captain's chair. It's been in every show now and it's just such a tired and stale joke that it's moved over time from being funny, to tiring, to outright annoying.
~~I'm not entirely sure if I have to spoiler tag this since this is in the discussion thread but I will anyways since the rule doesn't say the threads are an exception to the rule.~~ Edit: Thanks ValueSubtracted for the clarification on this.
Really disliked this one. And I loved just about all of season 1.
One of the main things for me is that the pacing felt far too quick.
For instance, when getting the injection of the super serum, they only briefly mentioned M'Benga's issue with it and quickly moved on without any sort of issues beyond that brief line.
I also have some issues with the characterization and general way the crew acted. They seemed a lot less professional in this and unlike an actual Starfleet crew.
Spock's emotional side, while I suppose justified in-universe, made him feel a lot less "Spock" to me. I was fine with his behavior in season 1 but this just feels a bit far, to the point of him being nearly unrecognizable. His "I would like the ship to go. Now" make me physically recoil in cringe with how unfunny I found it to be.
M'Benga and Chapel just beating up a bunch of bad guys three separate times felt incredibly unnecessary and I fail to see any sort of reason there couldn't have been some sort of clever escape rather than bland, mindless fighting. I think I skipped a whole minute total of them just punching the bad guys with how long the scenes drew on for. And the way M'Benga's issue with the super serum was just brushed over with a fleeting line came across as poorly executed.
La'an outdrinking a klingon seemed rather ridiculous and all I could think of was that it seemed like a bad D&D introduction to a stereotypical "cool" character. And then her burping? Did they really need a burp joke in this? It came across as uncharacteristically juvenile for the show.
That said, I did like a bit of it. Visual effects were great as always and I appreciated the slightly different intro. I'm glad the cliffhanger from last season both wasn't immediately resolved or dwelled upon too much. The false flag operation was a neat idea and it was cool to see yet another type of ship. The Klingons looked and sounded perfect and much more similar to how they were in 90s Trek, I'm glad the design was changed to this from their design in Discovery.
Overall, I very much disliked it, despite a few positive elements to it. No hate, I just disliked those parts of it I talked about.
Finally, this isn't any sort of issue I take with the show but they said that the false flag ship was Crossfield class. However, it didn't look anything like a Crossfield class beyond the ring in the saucer. Did Starfleet change the Crossfield class to a different design?
I agree with a lot of your concerns. Two medical staff taking drugs and beating a mob of Klingons senseless with little hesitation and no apparent ramifications is horribly, horribly out of tone with what I’ve come to expect from Trek.
Spock is another issue. I’m fine with him undergoing growth and having a full character arc - but I really don’t see this Spock becoming the one in TOS — a Spock who disobeyed direct orders from Starfleet and was reluctantly able to potentially kill two crew members goes on to have the disastrous experience as leader in the Galileo Seven? Best I can see is he actively goes as hard as he can on suppressing his human side in the near future but that wouldn’t make him suddenly forget what emotions, illogic, and all that human baggage feels like when he’s interacting with humans later in his career.
(And for the record - I really enjoy Ethan Peck as Spock and watching his struggles with his emotional control. I just don’t feel like it’s the same character as in TOS and don’t see how he’d get there.)
I must say I'm already a big fan of Pelia.
I think this got things off to a reasonable start, but it doesn't feel like the strongest episode out of the gate. Maybe it's because the show deliberately chooses not take on the cliffhanger of the last season in the first episode. Starting the season with only part of the cast undertaking the mission I think also makes the episode feel a bit slight.
It's also a bit of a darker episode than the last season, but I'm not sure if engaging with the Klingon civil war aftermath is actually necessary in this episode. In fact, leaving out the Klingon stuff here would make it a bit less stodgy to me. I guess there is some curiosity as to what SNW characters were doing during the war, but it really feels like here, the only reason they framed this entire episode around the war was so that M'Benga and Chapel could juice themselves up with a substance that they never quite introduce before using it and Die Hard Klingons for a chunk of the episode. There's maybe some M'Benga trauma, but giving the character another trauma moment where some (particularly Ortegas) remain comparatively lightly characterized feels...meh.
It's probably all the Discovery elements, both in plot and in set design on screen, that make me feel this way, but I was hoping that Discovery would learn the best lessons from Strange New Worlds. This episode has me slightly worried that instead of that, Strange New Worlds may be learning some bad lessons from Discovery. That said I'm hoping things get better across the season. I thought this was good but just not quite what I wanted from the season opener.
The M'Benga-and-Chapel-are-Max-Payne sequence went on far too long: only one group aboard the ship had weapons (and Stormtrooper accuracy) of any kind? I'd have preferred a stealthier sequence: after reprogramming the transponder, they use a series of Jeffries tubes to get to the airlock with the intent of opening it to escape but the ship takes off to ruin that plan.
Other than that, it was a decent episode to get the season going. Spock's emotional journey will be a focal point of the season, which I'm okay with. ~~SPECTRE~~ The Broken Circle Gang is probably going to show up again and I wonder if we'll eventually see some TOS villains retconned to be members. Carol Kane will be fun and with what was said of her species, I'm betting on her making at least two ENT references during the season.
Interesting that the false-flag ship is Crossfield-class: the saucer is a clear match but the drive section is completely different. Were the Discovery and Glenn modified from that spec to fit the spore drive research project or was the ship we saw a wartime refit of the class?