2x06 Lost in Translation

I liked the premise of this episode... but the execution was sloppy at best.

First of all Jim Kirk... why does he hang around on Enterprise for hours? Doesn't he have somewhere else to be? And the ending seemed awfully forced when Jim and Uhura were in the bar and all of a sudden Spock joins them... why exactly would he do that? I would have understood if Jim or Spock had played chess and the other one was eager for a challenge... but for Spock to join Uhura and Kirk whom he doesn't know at that point... no, too far-fetched. Also the family drama with Sam... urgh... who cares if Sam thinks his dad might not be as excited about his career in science as he is about Jim's career? Sorry, but I don't need Jim Kirk on this show (especially not one who's as far away from being Kirk as Quinto was from being Spock...

Then there's the resolution about the deuterium aliens... again, I liked the premise... but the ending was way too rushed... it's like they ran out of time. Uhura rushes to the bridge, tells Pike that her hallucinations are actually aliens without any kind of scientific proof... and Pike hurries to destroy a whole station? It's not the resolution itself that bothers me, it's the way it's shown. (And let's just abandon common sense in that apparently there's no big manual emergency button to stop the station from collecting deuterium or just some way to cut the power to the system other than destroying the whole station...)´

Anyway, it's back to rather mediocre episodes - or poorly executed plots, to be more precise. The ideas are there.

Director Dan Liu brings some experience from The Walking Dead to bear, very effectively. While there is Trek that has scared me more (TNG's "Frame of Mind", VOY's "Scientific Method"), "Lost in Translation" might be the strongest at classical horror technique (striking visual effects, pacing, camera work, a good balance of clear conflict and mystery). There was a moment or two when I was surprised this level of gore got by Paramount.

The fact that this story that initially seems to have a very non-Trek vibe ultimately resolves into an extremely standard Trek setup - alien seems scary but is just trying to communicate what they need to survive - is quite satisfying.

So on the horror level, there's a lot that works here. On a plot and character level, there's a lot that's broken. The amount of trust that's placed in Uhura in light of her symptoms and Starfleet's many experiences with space madness, even after she has violated orders and assaulted fellow crew, completely breaks my suspension of disbelief. The Una / Pelia conflict that constitutes the B plot seemed so out of character for Una that I thought whatever Uhura was responding to was also affecting everyone else. I think it was supposed to be some character development for the two of them, but they were such jerks to one another with no real justification that after the episode is over and it turns out they weren't affected by the transmission, I don't understand what motivated them (Pelia, in another jerk move, tells Una it's her grief for Hemmer, but this doesn't totally work for me). We have a scene where Sam Kirk is extremely jealous of his brother James, which also comes from nowhere and is written and acted as extremely petty (I also thought this was clueing some wider effect of the transmissions!). The fact that a giant Starfleet facility can be so effectively sabotaged by one single person who's lost the ability to distinguish hallucination from reality or speak coherently that a) it takes an expert engineer to recognize the presence of sabotage, b) a team of engineers from multiple ships can't address the damage, and c) the facility can't be turned off... that's realllllly hard to buy. The fact that Uhura never finds any concrete evidence of the aliens, and Pike blows up the facility merely on her say-so, is very unsatisfying. That Uhura and the Kirks working together give us a technobabble explanation of what's happening, but doesn't actually advance the plot for the characters (Uhura has already figured the relevant parts out): also unsatisfying.

I lived for the "let's not look at what this relationship is too closely" scene between Spock and Chapel, though. They both give off So. Much. Heat. My heart was a hummingbird in my throat.

The Kirk / La'an scene, though - what was this doing? The fact that this episode introduces Kirk to both Pike and Spock (at least) for the first time for no real reason?

So, yeah. A bunch of horror scenes that really worked and that I liked, one romantic exchange that was pitch-perfect, a bunch of other sloppy and hard to buy scenes, massive plot holes. It's hard to put just one number on this, it's got moments of 2 and moments of 9.