This episode just shows that you don't need action, just well performed dialog. I had a few moments that just had me on the brink of tears, but the "feels" were real. I love this series.
This episode continues to maintain the high bar set by episode 1. Good writing and wonderful performances, without a single phaser blast being fired.
I thought it was good, I was getting measure of a man vibes, I am sucker for the starfleet/federation court/tribunal type episodes because it builds on in universe canon. Which this episode does for the most part. It also has good underlying themes about genetic editing and the ethics around it, and a good deal on xenophobia, and how fear and hope can be encapsulated in or by law.
Excellent episode that exposes all kinds of prejudices (and the frequently problematic Prime Directive) in a "dont ask, dont tell" court-case repeal format.
Also, I wouldn't mind seeing Neera (Yetide Badaki) again, she played the part very well, and Una has good taste in "friends".
I found the episode boring, with to strong of a political under tone and message.
An amazing episode.
My favourite mix - Star Trek and court drama!
Damn this episode brought tears to my eyes. Putting nostalgia aside this is becoming one of my favorite Star Trek shows.
This might just be in my top five episodes of any Star Trek. It was amazingly well written, well acted, and shows the ideals of Star Trek better than most anything else. I'd put this right up there with In the Pale Moonlight or Measure of a Man.
Wow that was amazing episode. Well written and performed.
How the...
Another kick ass episode but this time it brought amazing tension through dialogue rather than action. It's also a character centric show, and it was great characters that made be "fall in love" with Star Trek almost 30 years ago and this show have some of the best Star Trek crews I've seen.
I'm also so happy for Rebecca Romijn to finally get a role she deserves.
Ad Astra Per Aspera Una!
This episode marks the beginning of "how political can we make Star Trek?" Discovery was so far over the top that I don't even consider it Star Trek (aside from politics, it's just not Starfleet, it is the reverse of the honorable organization we like), so I had high hopes for SNW, but this episode was more about current events and agendas than it was about anything else. It's just one episode but we all know how agenda driven Paramount is.
I'm still comparatively a Trek newbie, but I've long heard that courtroom episodes are among their most reliable, and Strange New Worlds doesn't break that tradition with its first courtroom one. Riveting, easily my fave of the show so far.
Now that's more like it! This is what I want Star Trek to be, not the "Star Wars light" action scenes from episode 1.
So, Una's put on trial for hiding her origins and her genetic mutations. Of course, this results in a classic courtroom drama with some rousing speeches, much idealism... and frankly, so many clichés and so much kitsch at the end (the clapping - all that was missing was the US flag fluttering in the wind) that it was hard not to choke on it... which kind of soured this episode for me.
That the Federation and Starfleet hasn't changed its attitude towards genetically augmented people is nothing new - we've known that this was the case still in the 24th century with Bashir. The new twist is rather that whole races are persecuted because of their cultural heritage of genetic engineering. Honestly, it's rather discriminating, I guess, in that this is based on a human problem - Earth suffered through the Eugenics Wars, no other species within the Federation. So why exactly do the Federation and Starfleet which consist of many more species other than humans, uphold human laws based on human conflicts? Isn't that specieism/racism? Just because humankind couldn't deal with genetic engineering, no one else shall either? That's what bothered me quite much about the whole discussion.
Then there's the ending: I mean why doesn't she lose her rank and/or commission? It's one thing not to end up in prison for lying. But it's another to still actively serve. The defense lawyer's argument after all didn't refute the charges, it just put them into a new (and honestly, a bit farfetched) light - and I'd have wished for a similarly nuanced view regarding the verdict.
So, while this is a good episode, a shoutback to some of the best episodes of old which needed no action to still be captivating, this one leaves me a bit ambivalent.
The Illyrian Annalise Keating. Loved it.
As a fan of legal dramas and Trek this episode was everything. The feels was strong. And I love social commentary.
That was quite emotional. I enjoyed it. I'm glad it didn't drag on though.
Wow. Just wow. One of the best hours of Trek in many many years. I just sat there filled with all kinds of emotions. This is what makes Trek Trek.
One of the best episodes of Sci Fi television and storytelling of all time. Absolutely brilliant.
This is MY STAR TREK!
I think this episode may have displaced "Darmok" as my all-time favorite. The only thing I don't love about this episode is that I'm skeptical Paramount will go for two episodes with meaningful trans metaphors in the same season, which lowers the odds of seeing my favorite SNW S1 guest character, Captain Angel, in S2.
Three very complex relationships are delicately, virtuosically written and acted in this episode: Una and Neera's wounded friendship, Pike and Batel's colleagues-with-benefits situation, and La'an's changing relationship to her mentor/savior Una. Absolutely brilliant performances from all the actors involved.
We also have a really smart courtroom drama, with a satisfying resolution that avoids the Trek trap of relying on ethical rhetoric alone. The stakes are high, the show earns our investment, and my pulse was pounding more than in most of Trek's action sequences.
Like the very best Trek stories, Una's situation is not about one single contemporary issue - the episode also resonates with immigrant experiences, histories of racial and ethnic discrimination, treatment of disability, maybe other experiences as well - but it is hard to miss the trans overtones here. We have a strained friendship between an Illyrian who can pass and one who can't, a genetically modified Neera clocking a closeted genetically modified La'an and correctly reading the nature of both her guilt/jealousy of Una (who despite the court martial has an easier time coming out than she would) and her internalized fear-of-being-a-monster, an argument against genetic modification that rests on an unscientific idea of what's natural, and a bunch of rhetoric that pretty directly imitates transphobia and common defenses.
Dana Horgan, who penned this episode w/Onitra Johnson, joined Supergirl in Season 4, the same season that introduced Nicole Maines' Dreamer. She wrote or co-wrote a number of Supergirl episodes that included nuanced, intersectional, and emotionally resonant treatments of transgender identity, IMO writing transness better than many more conventional queer dramas like The L Word reboot and Orange is the New Black. The script is brilliant in a ton of other ways too - highly compressed, quotable without being quippy, gives lots of room for the actors to act, clear on a first listen but with layered meanings for later reflection/rewatching - but the treatment of the trans metaphors in this episode was especially deft.
The limited victory in this episode - we find a loophole for Una but the lead judge signals that nothing is going to change for other genetically modified people - is a daring dramatic choice, and felt true to the contemporary struggle, where things are not easy and getting harder; Neera's response had me choked up. And the fact that Star Trek for whatever PR reasons can't say directly that trans lives matter - transphobia is notably absent from the episode's references to Earth history, and Wheaton and Romijn carefully skirt the issue in the Ready Room episode - makes the metaphorical work in this episode especially poignant.
And if you don't like politics in your Star Trek... well, I am not sure how you could so seriously misunderstand the nature of the franchise, and I'm not personally able to separate my experience of this episode from its real-world resonances. But I do think it's a very strong drama independent of the metaphors.
Valerie Weiss' pitch-perfect direction gives these actors so much support and breathing room to shine. Give her more Trek, please!!!
On top of this, there's a very funny Ortegas / M'Benga / Spock moment that gives us our first glimpse of a fun M'Benga / Ortegas dynamic, deepens all three of their characters, and plays off M'Benga's history on Vulcan. Plus a bunch of deep-cut TOS visual references (reimagining some corny TOS costuming and prop work into genuinely regal dress uniforms and a majestic set).
S2E1 had me a little worried for this season. I am not worried any more.
JAG meets Star Trek. Great episode
Today I'm self-medicating with evocative emotional responses. Today, I don't interpret this as convenient. Today I'm reminded of Jorj McKie's court tactic to force opposing Gowachin cousel to change *stance in, "The Dosadi Experiment," by Frank Herbert -- just because it felt as satisfying. Again, not weighing in on how realistic it was -- just how I got to soar.
SPOILER: And, anyone who missed Una & Spock's Gilbert & Sullivan duet while stuck in a turbo-lift can watch the, "Star Trek: Short Treks," S02E01, "Q&A," here: https://fmovies.to/tv/star-trek-short-treks-vq7o6/2-1
[please use uBlock Origin browser extension, or some other advertisement and pop-up blocker to protect your sanity.]
*this is an over-simplification
A little long winded but what a great episode.
almost died as a kid with a broken leg because she would be found out....so she never had a body scan by a federation doctor in the 20 some years she was in Starfleet?
Now there's something we just don't get enough of - being preached to about oppressor & victim classes, and discrimination.
After establishing a following with a pretty good 1st season, and an initial episode of the 2nd, someone weaseled their way over to the punch bowl and dropped a turd in it.
Not sure if this is a hit & run, one-off, or if this is what they really intended the series to be about. I guess we must decide.
I watched this after Those Old Scientists, and knowing that story this really hit me in the feels. I was worried how it would handle it, but it was done perfectly, plus I loved the lore reveals for April's Enterprise years.
it's just me or is Rebecca Romjin getting hotter with age :heart_eyes_cat:
A solid JAG-like episode, but one with a couple of rather significant issues for me:
The writers weren't at all consistent with whether the problem (from the Federation's perspective) was with Illyrians or with AUGMENTED Illyrians. To me, that distinction is as significant as the difference between immigrants and ILLEGAL immigrants.
A real-world Adm. Pasalk would have NEVER allowed Batel to be lead prosecutor, given her close ties to Pike and the fact that there was every reason to believe that Pike had been hiding his knowledge of Una's heritage. And for her part, Batel should have recused herself for that very same reason. But then we wouldn't have had as much drama, I guess...
but why was she keeping it a secret from her own lawyer (or her crew for that matter) that she turned herself in? I get that from a writing perspective it makes for a twist, but it doesn't make sense to do that from the perspective of the character.
When I realized I was watching ST: Law & Order I was like, damn, this is gonna be boring. And it kinda was until it got interesting, throw in a few twists and I was engaged, which pretty much coincided with when Yetide Badaki showed up.
Then of course it got a little predictable, but it wouldn’t be Trek if it weren’t predictable, and it would be Trek if they could resist the need of spoon-feeding you, but it was relatively restrained here compared with no-holds-barred abuses like on Picard. And hey, it wasn’t the Borg! ;)
All in all a decent episode, I wonder if this is laying down the foundation for Illyrians to play a bigger sole in the story arc — hoping it does and it’s not simply a one-off case study.
One thing: Badaki held a masterclass in acting, most others were made to look like they were still in acting school by comparison and their basic acting skills started to be semi-cringy.
This episode combined 2 great loves of mine: Star Trek and legal dramas. Loved it!
Shout by SerialWatcher05BlockedParent2023-06-22T18:54:36Z
That was a masterpiece. Truly, not everything has to be about space battles or exploration, this episode can stand on its own legs and it reflects why the ideas of Starfleet are so important for us to grow as a species, and an important reminder that the law should not be taken as a compass for justness. That testimony was poignant and the acting from the lawyer was stellar. Not just because she is using this case as a proxy to denounce the injustice her people suffered, but also because we witnessed her healing process throughout the episode, and understanding the choices Una and her family did and not holding It against her anymore.