[6.1/10] This was...weird? I don’t know what they were really going for here, and it’s a little disconcerting considering that this was future Picard showrunner Chabon’s work. (Though he’s still playing with house money after “Calypso” as far as I’m concerned.)
As premises go, this isn’t a bad one. Trapping Spock and Number One in an elevator together is a nice play on an old trope, and making it Spock’s first day adds a touch of intrigue (and an excuse to explain his early smile in “The Menagerie”).
But the actual interactions feel odd. The show goes for a certain amount of sexual tension between Spock and Number One that feels ill-calibrated. The Tracy & Hepburn routine doesn't map well onto those characters. And while the question and answer setup is a good one, their shared responses moments are a bit too cute by half.
There’s also some overwriting, which is what’s especially concerning. Both Number One and Spock have speeches or exchanges that feel like statements of purpose or bits of verbiage plainly meant for the audience rather than each other. That gave their conversations a certain inauthentic quality. And while I appreciate the big swing of the pair singing “Modern Major General” together, it just felt tonally strange.
I don’t know. In my heart of hearts, I just wish Discovery and its offshoots didn’t mess around with characters from The Original Series, especially main characters. It was a problem in Season 2, where really only Pike felt fully-formed, and Ethan Peck’s Spock felt out of step with both Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto’s. This is a TOS setting and setup, but it just feels so disconnected from the characters or feel of that era as seen on the original show that it’s jarring to a longtime fan. Discovery has the fig leaf of being a different ship filled with different people, but setting one of these shorts on the Enterprise, and with Spock no less, just lends itself to more dissonance.
Overall, this is a good idea done in a disappointing way, showing that this creative crew’s efforts to redo pieces of The Original Series are dicey at best.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-01-03T04:18:47Z
[6.1/10] This was...weird? I don’t know what they were really going for here, and it’s a little disconcerting considering that this was future Picard showrunner Chabon’s work. (Though he’s still playing with house money after “Calypso” as far as I’m concerned.)
As premises go, this isn’t a bad one. Trapping Spock and Number One in an elevator together is a nice play on an old trope, and making it Spock’s first day adds a touch of intrigue (and an excuse to explain his early smile in “The Menagerie”).
But the actual interactions feel odd. The show goes for a certain amount of sexual tension between Spock and Number One that feels ill-calibrated. The Tracy & Hepburn routine doesn't map well onto those characters. And while the question and answer setup is a good one, their shared responses moments are a bit too cute by half.
There’s also some overwriting, which is what’s especially concerning. Both Number One and Spock have speeches or exchanges that feel like statements of purpose or bits of verbiage plainly meant for the audience rather than each other. That gave their conversations a certain inauthentic quality. And while I appreciate the big swing of the pair singing “Modern Major General” together, it just felt tonally strange.
I don’t know. In my heart of hearts, I just wish Discovery and its offshoots didn’t mess around with characters from The Original Series, especially main characters. It was a problem in Season 2, where really only Pike felt fully-formed, and Ethan Peck’s Spock felt out of step with both Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto’s. This is a TOS setting and setup, but it just feels so disconnected from the characters or feel of that era as seen on the original show that it’s jarring to a longtime fan. Discovery has the fig leaf of being a different ship filled with different people, but setting one of these shorts on the Enterprise, and with Spock no less, just lends itself to more dissonance.
Overall, this is a good idea done in a disappointing way, showing that this creative crew’s efforts to redo pieces of The Original Series are dicey at best.