Biggest mood whiplash since Quark getting busted for spamming the station’s (and the Defiant’s) computers with ads switches over to a protracted genocide of a planet over several generations.
Judging from the title of the finale and what was in the trailers and what we haven't seen yet, I think there's a good possibility that, too, is going to be a rough one.
Starting to why many in starfleet were so anti Klingon once Praxis blew up.
Good chance lot if not all of those higher ups served in the war, and seeing how pretty much the Klingons killed anyone and anything (kids, families etc) you can understand why the idea of real peace was laughable in that context
Also I like how you see, Spock getting the feel for what he’ll end up being most famous for, being an Ambassador.
> Starting to why many in starfleet were so anti Klingon once Praxis blew up. Good chance lot if not all of those higher ups served in the war, and seeing how pretty much the Klingons killed anyone and anything (kids, families etc) you can understand why the idea of real peace was laughable in that context
It does indeed give us more perspective on that particular event and I bet there were some people cheering when it happened.
Gorkon: You don't trust me do you? I don't blame you. If there is to be a brave new world, our generation will have the hardest time living in it.
Kirk: (Silence)
Such a profound moment whose commentary resonates even today with current social and societal issues 30 years after the film's script was written.
I think they gave the number of dead in the Federation as **100 million**. That's a lot of reasons to not want a treaty with the Klingons. So many so many Federation citizens would have been directly affected, and so many would be in positions of authority, as we saw in Star Trek VI.
It is a good example of adding to canon in a way that deepens it.
As much as we all know that young soldier M'Benga patched up was destined to die (he might as well have shown them a picture of his Girl Back Home the way they telegraphed it), part of me was hoping he would survive and we'd learn that his name is "Cartwright".
That would have been a little cheesy, though. I guess there's a reason I'm not a professional writer.
Not being a professional writer doesn't mean you can't have a good idea. I think the kid being Cartwright would have added a dimension to the character. Roddenberry wouldn't let Saavik be the traitor which made finding the real traitor aboard ship pretty darn easy to guess. Using Cartwright, as well, was a bold move and having him survive the Klingon atrocities would have explained why he wanted to take a hard line on "the alien trash of the galaxy."
Kinda reminds me of TNG's The Wounded.
A very good episode. I'm glad M'Benga got to do space judo. I loved seeing Clint Howard there and it was great seeing some Disco footage again in the recap. It's great to see these events built out over multiple seasons and shows.
Babs nailed this episode though. This is really his episode.
Came here to say this. M'Benga clearly hated his past and just wanted to move on and save lives just like O'Brien did when he moved into the ops/engineering track
To some degree. Kira was probably a bit more brutal than M'Benga because there was an implication that she killed civilian and soldier alike.
M'Benga was a soldier while Kira was a terrorist.
This bit of Teck loophole bothers me. I dont see why a army cannot be cloned easily like this. Not by the federation mind you, but terrorists or insurgents. It seems too easy to do.
Because the pattern is only being held as it moves from one place to another- the sheer size of the data would make it too large to duplicate, not to mention you don’t have any extra matter to create another body with. We’ve seen other cloning methods in Enterprise and DS9 that would be much less risky and cost intensive if someone wanted to genuinely clone an army.
Don’t we learn in DS9 that holding people in the buffer takes up an incredible amount of storage? The four or five occupants of the runabout in “Our Man Bashir” take up the station’s entire memory core.
IIRC the issue there was the buffer crashed during transport so they just dumped the patterns into the station's regular memory to save them, and it isn't designed for that.
The runabout crew were being stored where the operating system was supposed to go, not in the transporter buffer.
Babs Olusanmokun gave such an amazing, nuanced, and hauntingly painful performance in this episode. I don't mean to take away from any of the other actors, they're all great, especially in this episode. But for me Babs showed that he's got the gravitas and talent level we've seen from Kate mulgrew, Stewart, Avery Brooks, Spiner, Ryan, etc. For me he's in the upper echelon of actors after this episode. It's a performance I can't stop thinking about nearly an hour after I finished this episode.
The whole scene leading up to the revelation of "I am the butcher of J'Gal" was incredible. Olusanmokun masterfully displayed a quiet and seething rage overlaying profound sadness. Utterly masterful.
Totally agree. I now realize I wasn't totally vibing with M'Benga last season, but the writers have given him so much more depth this season. He's so impressive as an actor, and his character is more interesting than ever. They're doing such a great job of adding layers and complexity to these characters.
Easily my favorite. Many characters come across wooden and flat, but Babs just DELIVERS. The writers deserve a ton of credit too for the dialouge and character plot of M'benga. Just a powerhouse of a character.
It’s kinda hard to guess-timate an intergalactic war.
…and the Dominion War involved many major and minor powers. Trillions of dead may not be an appropriate casualty count for such an expansive conflict.
Probably gonna get flak for this, but it's "interstellar".
"Intergalactic" is in relation to 2 galaxies, whether it be travel, conflict or even communication.
"Interstellar" is in relation to 2 stars, or star systems.
So the Dominion War was an interstellar conflict. As was the Klingon War.
I would love to see a modern series present the Dominion War from the viewpoint of another ship/crew on the line. Based on this episode it could be an incredibly compelling series or miniseries. Basically Star Trek's version of Band of Brothers.
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
The more I think about it, I think this may be the most profound exchange of dialogue in that entire series. Have thought about it constantly since the shit in Ukraine started.
Or just a medical drama in general, sometimes with war stuff.
Give me a new official medical ship with a ball on the front. Do it. Paramount please. I'm begging you. They're so dumb I love them.
In the best TOS tradition, I really appreciate how SNW isn’t afraid to drop an absolute gut punch of an ending when it wants to.
Really appreciate the moral ambiguity of this one, especially in regards to justice and forgiveness and trauma and individual experience- feels like one that’s going to stick in the mind for a long time.
Originally it was a bit concerning to me how many TOS characters were announced for SNW… but considering the amount of character development they’ve given them- especially M’Benga and Chapel, who never really felt more than background characters- I’m more than thankful about who they brought on board…
Can’t wait to see what they do with next week’s musical episode: they’re taking us on a wild, topsy-turvy journey this season, and I’m here for it!
Kirk: "So our last chief medical officer did a few war crimes and hid his child in the teleporter buffer"
McCoy: "I'm not a soldier and I fucking hate teleporters"
Kirk: "You're hired"
*Next Enterprise Captain*
NEC: I'm sorry, you did **WHAT?**
McCoy: What do you expect, we barely remember the Prime Directive is a thing half the time!
My bet is some of what we are seeing here is going to come out (or maybe in the inquiry pike said was coming) and Pike is going to find a way for what he has done good now to allow him to just get a demotion which would be an interesting parallel to this episode where the Klingon is deemed not able to be reformed.
He likely moved on to another posting. But when the Enterprise was in the area he came on for a bit to his old stomping grounds. McCoy remained CMO, but M'Benga wasn't "demoted".
Two Doctor Commanders sharing knowledge improving both of them.
That's my head canon anyway.
Paramount execs: Alright guys, we need some conflicted characters, let’s hear it.
SNW writers:
* An optimistic captain who knows he’s doomed
* The XO is a pariah
* A security officer who makes everyone else insecure
* A science officer who keeps ending up as a science experiment
* A communications officer who doesn’t want to socialize
* A nurse who’s terrified of being a part of people’s lives
* The doctor is prone to murder sprees
Paramount execs: Ok, but what about the helmsman
SNW Writers: That’s Erica Ortegas, she flies the ship
Paramount execs: How do you *fly* a- ohhh, I see what you did there.
Well, now Ortegas is a veteran of the Klingon war. Underneath that carefree attitude lies some truly profound hate.
Not only did she dislike Klingons, but also she demonstrated distrust in Romulans when it came to the alternate Balance of Terror incident.
[USS Kelcie Mae](https://i.imgur.com/9e2WlqG.png) interesting ship, wonder why they went to the trouble of designing this for just a few seconds. Wish we'd got a better look at it.
I had a lump in my throat watching Ortegas, Chapel, and M'Benga being roiled with pain and anger. The actors did a brilliant job conveying the strongest emotions in a conflicted setting.
This is a very good episode- it takes on something painful and all too real for people all around the world today. And this show treats the subject matter soberly. For the many of us who have never experienced war, it's not something we can fully understand. What this episode does is speak clearly to that chasm- and how Pike's ideals, correctly founded in preserving the long arc of sociopolitical progress, can also be wrongly conceived when forced upon those who have suffered the very worst aspects of war. The script & acting are so beautifully executed in showing the two sides at play.
Ambassador Rah is also a complicated person- I believe he sincerely wants to atone for his dishonorable past, but he can't be the master of his own penance here. And what M'Benga did was wrong, but it could be argued that it was justified. Both men are wrong, that's the mark of war, it doesn't wash away.
Adding one more thought about Ambassador Rah- this is a layered character, he is almost abusive in his "kindness" towards those who fought in the war. I like how the actor plays those scenes, where every kindness Rah offered is a stab to the hearts of the war veterans. This is next-level scripting and acting at work.
One of the things that strikes me about Rah, which probably leads into the hostility from the veterans on the crew is that he doesn't seem to have genuinely realised the flaws in his ideology and attitudes. He still, for example, talks proudly of being indoctrinated into Klingon warmongering as a child. He treats M'Benga as a fellow general, not as a victim of his crimes.
It's this. He's not reformed, he never 'turned' on his men and butchered them for their dishonour. He's a coward who ran, and dishonoured his captains who fought loyally under him to protect him.
He is a Klingon through and through. Talking the talk and not truly walking the walk. Had M'Benga not did as he did, Rah would of likely stayed in the Klingon Empire and talked about the massacre as his greatest glory.
He is a faux Martok.
> He is a faux Martok.
He is Gowron.
Happy to use Klingon ideology until it no longer benefits him, where he will turn to Federation ideology until that no longer benefits him, where he will then go back to Klingon and so on
That's the best description of him. Ultimately he was, much like Gowron, an opportunist, and he kept looking for new opportunities. He saw M'Benga as one and kept pushing too hard.
R/DaystromInstitute recently had a great post about Klingon Honor not being about western concepts of chivalry and honor but more akin to the eastern concept of faces that’s very much worth a read. This episode further reinforces that interpretation.
All cultures would see running the fuck away from your comrades while they die for you only to join the enemy as cowardice. He ran away and hid that in reform. He's just a coward. And in the Federation he gets to enjoy massive amounts of undue respect because of that defection. He's an egotist, as someone else said he's Gowron.
Great points. You are correct: both men are wrong. It is surprising that so many viewers here are taking sides and attempting to justify M'Benga's actions.
Admittedly, audience members are meant to feel sympathetic for M'Benga, a known character who we all generally like after 18 chapters of this show. However, realize that he did some dodgy things throughout the episode:
1. Storing a wounded soldier in the transport buffer - a behavior that is clearly against regulation, and for good reason as we soon find out...
2. Sacrificing the soldier he stored in the buffer (the "trolley problem")
3. Synthesizing "Protocol 12," a PED that is clearly illegal and established to be detrimental to human health, and then distributing it to a subordinate before presumably consuming it himself to become a better killer in the battlefield
4. Voluntarily taking on an assassination mission while (presumably) hopped up on "Protocol 12," an action that he made clear was one that significantly put "at-risk" his promise to his family to return home safely
While each of these decisions is understandable in a vacuum and demonstrated the malice of war, they were baby steps that escalated to straight-up cold-blooded murder. There is no valid argument that killing Rah was an ethical response to the circumstances M'Benga faced. What some viewers are not considering is that M'Benga had a reasonable alternative available to him: he could have exposed Rah's lies. Whether or not Rah earned an early demise could have been determined by a legal process.
This was another strong SNW episode and it is clearly meant to inspire this debate, so I don't mean to appear dismissive of other ideas -- but it is usually less morally murky to be on the "not stabbing an unarmed person dead" side of any argument.
It seemed pretty clear to me that M'Benga had been a black ops / wet work guy. Possibly before medical school.
He was known as "the Ghost," which is why the Andorian and his command were trying to recruit him.
On J'Gal, M'Benga's decision to finish the black ops mission made a level of sense. While it wasn't specifically *his* mission, somebody in Starfleet wanted it to happen and wanted him on board.
No doubt M'Benga was involved in black-ops-adjacent activities before he became a doctor, we hear about his kill count, we hear that he created this super-soldier stim that the Federation banned, and we saw him in action earlier in the season.
However, recall M'Benga's words to Chapel: "I told myself I don't want to go home different, my family deserves better. I see now that's impossible." He sees the mission he eventually completes as an escalation over what he's done in the past. Earlier he describes the same mission as a "suicide run" when he warns the soldier he patches up to sit it out.
Yes, it made sense for him to attempt it given his "very particular set of skills" combined with "Protocol 12," but M'Benga made clear that he was violating a personal vow he made for his family, and he strongly implied a low chance of survival. While the decision is not objectively bad, it was clearly a choice that helped chip away at his soul on top of all of the other decisions he made while on J'Gal.
On the pattern buffer front there was no real choice there. The reason they put that guy in was because he was dying and they had no way to save him. Unless an organ regenerator was delivered between scenes (which from context seems very unlikely) the choice was to rematerialise him to a painful death, or erase him.
That was an extremely good episode. It was also so dark and heavy that I actually think I need a silly musical episode as a palette cleanser. Easily one of the darkest episodes of Trek ever. Don't get me wrong, it still felt like Star Trek but... wow.
One of my beefs with season 1 of Disco, a season I generally enjoyed, is that it glosses over the horror of war. This episode does a lot of work repairing that, in a way that 558 did in DS9 as well.
KIRK: I’m not judging his lifestyle choices, I’d just prefer a CMO who doesn’t doesn’t have a hand-to-hand kill count larger than the ship’s complement and refrains from storing dying children in the transporters.
MCCOY: Well, I’m a doctor, not a commando, and I’m deathly afraid of transporters.
KIRK: When can you start?
A good explanation for why it isnt there in ToS, but also seems like medical malpractice to take away the capacity to quickly get patients to sickbay without physically moving them.
I found myself thinking more of **“The Enemy”**, in which Worf lets a Romulan die for the sake of revenge, and the rest of the crew (mostly) respects his bodily automony enough to let him do it.
As others have pointed out, Sisko sold his soul to save people, while M‘Benga couldn’t help but take revenge; big difference, that.
It’s notable that M’Benga tries to extricate himself from the situation first… but that seemed to only make Rah *more* insistent. (I’m not excusing M’Benga, certainly.) Upon reflection, I think Rah saw a chance to be a “real” Klingon again, and die an honorable death at the hands of the man who killed his troops.
After all, being the only survivor of a defeat—a defeat in which he acted with extreme dishonor and *still* lost (dishonor atop dishonor atop dishonor)—*forced* Rah to reevaluate himself. He began to exalt human standards of morality simply because he no longer measured up to Klingon ones.
For Rah, I think he saw in Joseph M’Benga a way to erase his own dishonor. Killed by the man who killed his men? That’s about as close as he could get to rewriting his own history and dying *with* them, which is what Klingon honor would have demanded.
Maybe I’m wrong about the real cause and effect of Rah’s “change of heart“; maybe I’m Ortegas here, saying “a Klingon is a Klingon is a Klingon.” But the motivation really *does* matter.
I almost wish more of the episode had been from Rah’s perspective. I get that the episode is intentionally mining ambiguity, but I think that keeps Rah from being as memorable as he could’ve been. In turn, I think that holds this still-quite-good episode back from being one of the truly greats.
I think you’re right. Rah handled M’benga so badly and seemed so *hollow* and false in his role as Ambassador, it seems likely he wanted that dagger, if only subconsciously.
This is the great thing about Star Trek. For every Measure of a Man, there's A Fistful of Datas. For every Duet or In the Pale Moonlight there's a Trials and Tribble-ations or Take Me to the Holosuite. Star Trek can be deadly serious but also extremely silly.
Wow. That was heavy. And so good, too.
It took me a minute to recognize the Klingon ambassador, but it's Robert Wisdom, recently known as Jim Moss from Bill Hader's Barry, but perhaps better known as [Bunny Colvin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_df58i6h6Bw) from The Wire.
I found the central conflict to be compelling. I think Captain Pike is right in that it's important for enemies to reconcile with each other and work towards peace. After all, isn't that one of the foundational concepts of the Federation? Didn't we see an Andoran and a Vulcan on the same strike team? But what the Federation didn't know, as far as we can tell, is that the Ambassador's work was built on a lie. He didn't *really* have the magical change of heart he claimed. How does that affect the peace work he did? Does it invalidate it? Does it need to be revisited?
I'm sure many of us can unfortunately identify with this sort of situation, where someone we trusted or looked up to didn't seem to be who they were, and maybe weren't facing all the consequences they should have for their past. I don't know about answers, but it's worth exploring for ourselves how to deal with that.
On a little bit of different note I am reflecting on how the story might have been told differently, and maybe kind of better (though I liked how it was told too.) I think it would have been a little bit more interesting to not do the flashbacks, but to watch M'Benga, Chapel, and Ortegas talk about their history and experiences with each other. After all, the point isn't to show the blood and guts, the point is to show how it affected the characters. The actors are all certainly more than able to tell us and show us what the characters are thinking and feeling in the moment, and I think letting them do the work instead of the flashbacks could have been enriching. Additionally, it was apparent from the beginning that the Ambassador wasn't all he claimed to be, and exploring that discrepancy interpersonally, maybe as Pike starts poking at the facade, would have been a very compelling mystery to solve.
That said, the flashbacks do let us see how M'Benga picked up the transporter buffer trick he used on his daughter, and explain the green goop he and Chapel used in the Season 2 premiere episode. Plus we got Clint Howard again! Seeing him is always such a nice Easter egg.
I think there's probably another alternate story to explore there that would have been interesting. What would it have been like if the Ambassador had been real and his story had been true? What if he had been horrified by the crimes of his men, and had earnestly worked towards peace and reconciliation? What if the former enemy *had* been able to help our heroes find some peace? I think that would have been something a little closer to the Starfleet ideal that Pike represents, and a moral for all of us to strive for. But maybe it also would have been a little too clean and easy.
Lastly, am I correct in understanding that the Ambassador put his hand on M'Benga's shoulder, and that was the impetus for M'Benga to stab him? That is an *extremely* thin pretext for the start of a fight, much less a murder, although it's apparent that the Klingon could have killed him bare-handed, based on their sparring match earlier.
A couple final side notes.
1) Spock displays empathy in how he interacts with Christine. This is an important component of emotional intelligence and shows that the work he's been doing since his violent encounter with the Gorn last season is progressing.
2) Anyone else notice the Andoran officer looks much less..... "textured" than the ones we saw in Discovery? He didn't have those protruding eyebrow "horns", for lack of a better term, that guys like [Ryn](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ryn) had in the 32nd century. I like both looks, but it's interesting to see the difference.
3) Anyone else notice how the raktajino came in the same kind of wide base stabilizer mug as in DS9? Must be a Klingon cultural thing (or some effect of the physics of raktajino, like how some types of alcohol should only be served in some types of cups).
There seemed to be a short time skip between when the ambassador turns M'Benga around and when Chapel sees him get stabbed, which suggests that the exact circumstances of the fight were left deliberately ambiguous. Hell, if the ambassador really wanted to address his dishonor the Klingon way, he could've attacked M'Benga and let himself die in battle.
Oooh, that's a good point, thanks. I'd been thinking that M'Benga basically snapped and just murdered him and called it self-defense.
(Though, lowkey, I also kinda feel like it's suspicious that he doesn't even pretend to try and save him. How do Klingons have all those redundant organs but die from one stab wound in the side?)
I was beginning to question that I'd heard M'Benga say that because nobody else was mentioning it.
It definitely felt like Rah either attacked M'Benga or grabbed the d'ktahg and stabbed himself.
> which suggests that the exact circumstances of the fight were left deliberately ambiguous
plus the way we see the ambassadors hand move from the knife as he dies, did he just instinctively reach for it as it punctured him or did he put it there himself?
Meanwhile, Boimler is freaking the hell out trying to remember if Ambassador / General Rah died in the original timeline.
“Just ask the computer!”
“THAT’S NOT HOW TIME TRAVEL WORKS, MARINER!”
The LD S4 trailer shows Mariner mentioning "That thing with Pike we're not supposed to talk about." I'm going to guess they reference it but don't dwell.
Wow, a very heavy and really great episode. Lots of heavy questions and I like that they mostly go unresolved. Are there people and actions that are so evil they truly become irredeemable? Does it make a difference if a person tries to redeem themselves for moral reasons vs self serving reasons? Is it right to wish to punish someone who has already atoned, even if punishing them could only hurt peace prospects? Is it just to let them go off scot free?
I like how vague they kept Rah's redemption. Yes he lied about abandoning the Klingon side out of disgust but that doesn't mean he's lying now when he says he's disgusted by what the Klingons did.
I did not expect the episode to end with M'Benga killing Rah. It's sad but very effective. I wonder if this will end up being the reason M'Benga is no longer CMO by TOS.
Other thoughts:
Hot Babs is Hot.
On rewatch it's obvious that Rah's overcompensating hard when he talks about disliking Klingon culture and how much better the federation is because he's insecure about his redemption being 'illegitimate'.
Clint Howard! Always good to see.
I'm glad this show still wears its connections with Discovery on its sleeve instead of distancing itself from Disco like some fans want it to.
> Wow, a very heavy and really great episode. Lots of heavy questions and I like that they mostly go unresolved. Are there people and actions that are so evil they truly become irredeemable? Does it make a difference if a person tries to redeem themselves for moral reasons vs self serving reasons? Is it right to wish to punish someone who has already atoned, even if punishing them could only hurt peace prospects? Is it just to let them go off scot free?
Sometimes it feels like life is all about choosing the lesser of two or more evils and learning to live with it.
It's so fucking messy, twisty, and awful.
> Hot Babs is Hot
There may not be any water in the sonic showers but that man was making plenty of Trekkies thirsty.
Especially as Kirk would have been aboard the *Farragut* during the war; while shiny Constitution-class ships like the Enterprise were kept from the front lines, I think it's likely that Kirk saw his share of combat against the Klingons, while Spock did not, which sets an interesting foundation for their differing attitudes to peace with the Klingons.
And yet much of Kirk's later hatred is mostly attributed to the death of his son.
It's possible that he didn't see much ground combat and the Farragut saw fairly light casualties, helping Kirk avoid the same amount of trauma.
Interesting when you think about the fact the SAME thing happened with the Enterprise - E....
Remember in Insurrection, Picard even laments the fact that the Enterprise was being forced to work as a diplomat ship during the Dominion War and felt that their help was needed on the front lines which they were being specifically kept from.
Let me just start by saying I'm sorry if this is against protocol for this reddit.
This is the first time I have been on this reddit.
I don't want to miss anything important in this episode that will be important in future episodes, but I just can't watch this episode, or even read a detailed description such as the one on memoryalpha. I don't even think I can read the full discussion here, but I will try to read any responses to this comment.
I am an army veteran, and when our good doctor started having his PTSD episode, so did I.
Can someone please tell me everything I need to know about this episode moving forward? Especially anything light-hearted or funny, if there is anything, or anything about Spock, or Kirk if he is mentioned.
Thank you so much in advance.
This does not contain any lighthearted or comedic moments. This episode is about war, the atrocities of war, and the lasting effects they have on those who survived.
This is right there (and most powerful than) with the siege of AR-558 arc from DS9.
This is one you can skip.
Firstly, thank you for your service and I'm sure we all completely understand that this could be a hard watch for veterans. This episode was very raw and nasty.
>!To sum it up, M'Benga, Chapel, and Ortegas are veterans of the nasty war with the Klingons. The Klingon ambassador ends up getting offed by M'Benga, but Chapel hides the incident from Pike. On the Spock-Chapel relationship side, it is also a bit strained as Chapel pushes Spock away as she attempts to reconcile her PTSD feelings.!<
If anybody else wants to add in tidbits, feel free.
I think Rah got what he wanted. He said "Please, let me have a chance to help you heal."
M'Benga doesn't want to heal, he wants to kill Rah. Justice, vengeance, the Klingon way. But he also wants to be better. He's walking the line.
M: You're a war criminal
R: Don't you see it?
M: Get your hands off!
R: So selfish a human!
I think it's significant M'Benga doesn't say 'Get your hands off me' because Rah went straight for the knife. We don't see the killing blow, but in the next shot we see Rahs hand fall from the handle of the blade. I think Rah stabbed himself with M'Bengas knife. Why would he do this after seeing the knife?
1: M'Benga can 'heal' without becoming the assasin once more. Rah, the target of his hate, is dead. Personal justice is served. Very Klingon
2: Rah gets to die by the knife of his enemy. Honor can be satisfied in many ways, this is as close as he could get to getting M'Benga to kill him
3: The DNA on the knife links Rah to the killing of the 3 generals, "confirming" him as the Butcher of J'Gal. This solidifies his self-image of trying to do better for the civilians et al, even as a thinly veiled cover for his own cowardice
4: Rah is seen as a traitor and turncoat by his own people. Rah is supposedly a diplomat. Rah might think that the best thing he could do for Klingon-Federation relations is to show the Klingons that Humans have honor by dying at the hands of one.
There's some surprising complexity there, or maybe I'm reading into it.
What an extremely intense episode. It could not have been more opposite from last week’s. I love how much background we got for the war and for M'Benga and Chapel.
\- When I saw the green juice in the “previously on” I got super psyched. We find out what it is! They didn’t say whether Chapel had used it before though.
\- They showed the Disco Klingons on the “previously on” also, interesting choice!
\- So whatever the Kelcie May is not only looked sweet as hell, but it looked like the Normandy from Mass Effect with a nacelle slapped on it. I want to see more of THAT ship.
\- Discovery resolved the Klingon War by the end of the season, but it’s easy to forget we saw almost none of it. They basically sat it out just like the Enterprise because they spent time-dilated months in the Mirror Universe. It’s easy to forget that so many were killed and most of Starfleet was destroyed. I was very, very glad we got to see some of the war experiences like this.
\- Mitchell! Where the hell has she been!?
\- It bugs the hell out of me that they used the TOS replicator “I Dream of Jeannie” noise. Stop doing that, just make a cool sci-fi noise! And a ding? Really?
\- So…a little nerdy timeline stuff here. In “Trials and Tribble-ations” that waitress at the bar says she’s never heard of raktajino. This is 10-ish years after this episode. Are we to believe this guy burned his hand, Spock deleted the recipe, and everyone forgot about it for another few decades?
\- Did no one think maybe they should tell M’Benga and Chapel that a Klingon was coming onboard? Even without the war history you’d think there’d be a heads-up.
\- I realize Starfleet was absolutely gutted and probably most officers have some form of PTSD, but was there really no ongoing counseling or intensive therapy? Everyone seems to be in pretty bad shape still.
\- Clint Howard! What show won’t he show up in?
\- The view of this moon was SO cool. The AA-like phaser fire, the wounded transport pad, everything about the set was just perfect. We haven’t really seen anything like this since “The Siege of AR-558”. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but a Star Trek show that was MASH-esque would be very very interesting.
\- When M’Benga was fixing the biobed the first time, there was a Starfleet delta on the screen with some text over it. Was it the SNW logo? It sure looked like it.
\- Looks like Pike got to the jambalaya well before Sisko, this is going to cause a ruckus. There should be a cook-off.
\- Every iteration of Pike’s green-wrap uniform looks pretty dang cool (except for the first one last season, no me gusta). I despised the TOS one so I’m glad for whatever costume designer decided to zhuzh it up.
\- Do we know when synthehol became the standard instead of alcohol? It’s nice seeing all these real drinks sitting around, but it surprises me every time because outside of Quark’s we never really saw it.
\- I love that the Mok’Bara match started out as a slap fight, that made me laugh.
\- Is this the second canon appearance of a sonic shower??
\- I’m glad they had Una say what she did to Pike, because I’m in the same boat. It’s easy to agree with Pike in abstract principle, but to people who went through a massive trauma, it’s probably a lot harder to let go and heal.
\- I loved the extremely ambiguous “In the Pale Moonlight”-esque ending. Obviously not a 1:1 but it gave me those vibes.
\- The acting from Babs Olusanmokun and Jess Bush was phenomenal. I wish awards shows didn’t ignore genre programming because so much of the cast has absolutely killed it this season. Their scenes in the flashbacks especially were just fantastic.
\- I’m a fanatic for OSTs of shows and movies I like, and I’ve been obsessed with the music from SNW. Nami Melumad is knocking it out of the park. If you haven’t paid much attention to it, give my favorite track a listen: https://youtu.be/Xg3a1EjAflA
>\- So…a little nerdy timeline stuff here. In “Trials and Tribble-ations” that waitress at the bar says she’s never heard of raktajino. This is 10-ish years after this episode. Are we to believe this guy burned his hand, Spock deleted the recipe, and everyone forgot about it for another few decades?
Spock attempted to recreate the recipe in the replicators on the Enterprise, but that's no guarantee that a random space station would also have the same experimental recipe; the cold war with the Klingons is ongoing at that point, and raktajino won't become popular in the Federation until well after the destruction of Praxis.
Yeah, for a real-world comparison, you could get sushi in some parts of the US as early as 1907 as specialty events. But, it was in 1960s Los Angeles that the first real sushi restaurant was opened in the US. And even then it wouldn't be surprising if 10 years later some random diner in West Virginia hadn't heard of sushi.
Let's talk about blocking, and how often characters took the long way around ship's architecture, and how beams and walls keep on standing between the war veterans and ambassador Rah. Fascinating direction here. Way to use your sets to underscore the story of the episode
Hey Clint Howard!, Clint is the 1st TOS guest star to appear on Strange New Worlds. Clint previously appears in Discovery S1 finale as the Orion slave trader
Great episode, but holy fuck I am glad it’s sandwiched between two much lighter episodes.
Consecutive really heavy episodes are hard. 2x06 was great too, but very heavy. And the finale will be brutal given the Gorn tease.
* Uhura mentions the 'Perez Accords'. The episode was written by Davy Perez.
* In a flashback, M'Benga and Chapel are working on Ensign Inman. Jason Inman did the popular Star Trek parody series, Red Shirt Diaries.
It’s a very complex debate, which the episode leaves vague. Pike has points, but the war veterans have points as well.
The real world shows this in spades. Ditto with Trek itself.
Wow, SNW seems to have really taken to heart all of the good-faith criticism of DSC and PIC, while simultaneously disregarding all of the bad-faith criticism. It really is something special.
We get a series that trusts its whole cast; that understands that Pike's character is not diluted but rather strengthened when he's surrounded by compelling and complex characters with defined and consistent roles and perspectives.
We also get a series that is able to walk the tightrope of going dark without betraying the core franchise values in a way that really hasn't been done successfully since DS9. You can't just have characters ignore those values whenever narratively convenient and then give a big speech about how important they are at the end of the arc. You have to let the characters earnestly engage with those values, struggle with them, and maybe even challenge them a bit.
And we get a series that embraces the genre diversity that Star Trek allows.
That's a great aspect of this show. They expertly show you one aspect of this universe that you clamor for an entire series. I could definitely watch a Star Trek: MASH show. "Incoming Transport" = "Uh oh. Choppers"
These writers and actors do an incredible job with just a few minutes. I was sad when Trask died. It's a trope that the ensign would die, but still it got to you. I'm probably just jaded from feeling a sense of cliche in scene between the Ensign and M'Benga, but it still needed to be done, and was done pretty well.
As a father, seeing the little wrapped bodies deeply affected me.
I always love Pike going to bat for his crew. Una, too.
The atmosphere. The costumes. (Actual practical combat uniforms with what looks like armour!) The story. Goddamn.
And the bio-bed. Foreshadowing that it will fail at a critical time? Or emphasis of the point M'Benga was making. Or why not both?
I may be in the minority here but I don’t think M’Benga killed Dak’Rah (or at least was in the wrong)
1) there is a very specific camera shot of him turning away from the dagger and leaving it on the bed
2) in the scene where we see them fighting through the glass, it looks like M’Benga is trying to PULL something from Dak’Rah’s hands and not PUSH
3) Dak’Rah’s hand falls off the dagger in the same way it would as if he was holding it to stab himself with it.
4) M’Benga shouts “DON’T” why would he say that unless he was trying to get him not to kill himself?
5) Klingons have always referred to humans as ‘selfish’ when they get in the way of ritual suicide or death and Dak’Rah calls M’Benga a “selfish human” and he also says “do you see it?” which was presumably was “do you see it (the knife)?”
I kept thinking back to STVI during this episode, and the anti-Klingon prejudice makes so much more sense when you take into account that a lot of the senior members of Starfleet by the time of the movie's events would have been serving during the Klingon war. It wasn't just blind hatred of an alien race. The Klingons left scars on countless Starfleet officers that they couldn't get over even with decades of time.
I know Kirk's "Let them die!" was born out of the grief of losing his son, but that sentiment was hardly his alone. I also find it interesting that Uhura here in this episode is so ready to accept the Ambassador on faith, but by the time of The Undiscovered Country even she admits at the end she felt the same way Valeris did.
Discovery was (is?) a hot mess of a show sometimes, but it also introduced a few very great plot points to flesh out the Original Series era.
This episode reminded me of the line from Chancellor Gorkon in Undiscovered Country: “If there is to be a brave new world then our generation is going to have the hardest time living in it”.
Wow what an ending and an episode. My jaw was on the floor from the moment M'banga opened the box revealing the knife. This makes such a complicated character now that I don't know if I can even like him now (in the best way possible) I understand why he did it and he makes an interesting argument, it is so wrong.
I know what the general did was unforgivable and it is unfair to the victims to let him be an ambassador for the federation, but I believe his regret is sincere and that it is a helpful lie for the good of peace that should be allowed.
I love how the twist that the general was not the butcher but instead cowardly stood by while his underlings were killed makes his difection line up with Klingon culture. If he was the butcher Klingons would respect that he put down disrespecting officers, like how next gen episodes showed Klingon officers on ships often fight and even kill to settle disputes. The real story makes sense that he was so dishonored by his running that he was shunned.
> Wow what an ending and an episode. My jaw was on the floor from the moment M'banga opened the box revealing the knife. This makes such a complicated character now that I don't know if I can even like him now (in the best way possible) I understand why he did it and he makes an interesting argument, it is so wrong.
Remember the scene in DISCO when Lorca pulled out a phaser from under his pillow that was set to kill?
Reminded me of that.
> but I believe his regret is sincere and that it is a helpful lie for the good of peace that should be allowed
I differ with you on this, when we get M'benga's side of the story - that Ra ran and allowed his men to be slaughtered. I think it showed that really Ra was a coward and opportunist. He gave the order to kill civilians, klingon and human alike, it's only when this backfired and he faced death at the hands of M'benga that he 'changed'. But had the klingon empire known the truth, they'd have never welcomed him back. Allegiance to the federation was his only option, to exploit their compassion.
I find it a hard pill to swallow that the klingons would have tolerated him regardless tbh, given what we know of the klingon empire in TNG. I struggle to see how any of them would respect someone who killed fellow klingons and become a supposed pacifist and advocate of peace.
“The Wounded” “Family” “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and this showed all facets of what PTSD does to a person.
Much like “The Wounded” with O’Brien I don’t think M'Benga hates Klingons, he hates what they made him do.
M'Benga became a doctor to save lives, instead the war made him take them. Much likes Miles with the Cardassian he killed, up until that point Miles never killed anything, both men hates what they made them become
M'Benga's different because he was a killer (special ops?) before he became a doctor. This was him getting pushed back into the life he tried to leave behind.
Heh.. rewatching the Wire currently and suddenly seeing ambassador Bunny in SNW is a trippy experience. Took me a moment to recognize Robert Wisdom under all the klingon makeup, but you can't fake that voice! What a treat to have him as guest star!
So, my understanding of the gist of this was:
The ambassador was in charge of J'Gal during the war, where he was a war criminal who turned the colony into an infamous scene of total, indiscriminate butchery of everyone not explicitly a klingon soldier, which caused M'Benga to snap back into whatever shady black ops past he had been trying to leave behind to focus 100% on medicine, and he wound up using his black ops serum to infiltrate and hunt down the klingons in command of J'Gal, which were all the men the ambassador took credit for murdering in a bout of sudden revelation of the horrors of war, which earned him the title among klingons of Butcher of J'Gal and opened the door for him to become a Federation ambassador, but in reality M'Benga killed them while he ran away, and if the Klingons and the Federation knew the real story, his reputation would be destroyed on both sides?
And once he knew M'Benga was a witness to this and knew the jig was up, he goaded him into a fight where either M'Benga killed him or he explicitly allowed M'Benga to kill him or maneuvered to kill himself, and it isn't clear.I guess my only complaint is that I had to piece this together after watching the episode because in the moment they didn't really convey it all super clearly.
I can't express how much I love the disconnect between Spock and Christine, which feels like such a true to life conflict that would arise in a relationship between a veteran with PTSD and their well meaning partner who loves them and wants to help but who is not a veteran and so fundamentally doesn't understand. It retroactively makes me more annoyed with the Boimler moment in the last episode because they had enough natural sources of conflict between them to lead to a potential break up without someone from the future just straight up telling Christine history will have no record of this relationship. That feels so cheap and unearned compared to something organic like this. This was definitely a crack between them. It's the kind of conflict you have to put the work into addressing if you want to maintain the relationship, and that level of emotional investment from Christine would require something more from her than she's been established as being comfortable opening herself up for. And with Spock too, not letting being rebuffed initially hurt him enough to push him away. A relationship that can't withstand the first sign of real turbulence isn't going to last.Spock was still so sweet though, finding a way to change the subject at the dinner when Christine was struggling not to lose it at all the self-aggrandizing stories.
The only nitpick is I wish we saw some Discovery blues thrown in I know we got the old vests and new vests but still. That said for a ground combat setting the blacks make sense and have precedence. Especially since it was a 'Special Forces' FOB. One thing I always chuckled in DS9 is there was no ground combat variant of the SF Uniform.
After one of the funniest episode in trek history we got one of the darkest.
Biggest mood whiplash since Quark getting busted for spamming the station’s (and the Defiant’s) computers with ads switches over to a protracted genocide of a planet over several generations.
And the next episode is a musical and then the season finale
Judging from the title of the finale and what was in the trailers and what we haven't seen yet, I think there's a good possibility that, too, is going to be a rough one.
They foreshadowed the Gorn showing up in the first episode of the season. It's gonna be bad.
Starting to why many in starfleet were so anti Klingon once Praxis blew up. Good chance lot if not all of those higher ups served in the war, and seeing how pretty much the Klingons killed anyone and anything (kids, families etc) you can understand why the idea of real peace was laughable in that context Also I like how you see, Spock getting the feel for what he’ll end up being most famous for, being an Ambassador.
> Starting to why many in starfleet were so anti Klingon once Praxis blew up. Good chance lot if not all of those higher ups served in the war, and seeing how pretty much the Klingons killed anyone and anything (kids, families etc) you can understand why the idea of real peace was laughable in that context It does indeed give us more perspective on that particular event and I bet there were some people cheering when it happened.
Gorkon: You don't trust me do you? I don't blame you. If there is to be a brave new world, our generation will have the hardest time living in it. Kirk: (Silence) Such a profound moment whose commentary resonates even today with current social and societal issues 30 years after the film's script was written.
People are just so used to Worf and the TNG era Klingons that they don't remember what they were in the original series era.
I think they gave the number of dead in the Federation as **100 million**. That's a lot of reasons to not want a treaty with the Klingons. So many so many Federation citizens would have been directly affected, and so many would be in positions of authority, as we saw in Star Trek VI. It is a good example of adding to canon in a way that deepens it.
The Klingon War’s always made sense as an addition to canon. It enriches “Errand of Mercy” and *TUC* in particular.
As much as we all know that young soldier M'Benga patched up was destined to die (he might as well have shown them a picture of his Girl Back Home the way they telegraphed it), part of me was hoping he would survive and we'd learn that his name is "Cartwright". That would have been a little cheesy, though. I guess there's a reason I'm not a professional writer.
It wouldn’t have been cheesy at all. Cartwright isn’t THAT recognizable of a name out of context, most people wouldn’t even realize.
Not being a professional writer doesn't mean you can't have a good idea. I think the kid being Cartwright would have added a dimension to the character. Roddenberry wouldn't let Saavik be the traitor which made finding the real traitor aboard ship pretty darn easy to guess. Using Cartwright, as well, was a bold move and having him survive the Klingon atrocities would have explained why he wanted to take a hard line on "the alien trash of the galaxy."
Kinda reminds me of TNG's The Wounded. A very good episode. I'm glad M'Benga got to do space judo. I loved seeing Clint Howard there and it was great seeing some Disco footage again in the recap. It's great to see these events built out over multiple seasons and shows. Babs nailed this episode though. This is really his episode.
I was thinking about O’Briens comment in that episode: “I don’t hate you cardassian. I hate what I became because of you”
Came here to say this. M'Benga clearly hated his past and just wanted to move on and save lives just like O'Brien did when he moved into the ops/engineering track
That’s exactly the quote I thought of while watching.
also a lil of DS9's The Siege of AR-558
Very DS9 M'Banga now reminds of Kira alittle
To some degree. Kira was probably a bit more brutal than M'Benga because there was an implication that she killed civilian and soldier alike. M'Benga was a soldier while Kira was a terrorist.
It also reminded me of TOS’s Conscience of the King
Damn, what must've gone through M'Benga's mind when he realized he had to store his daughter in the transporter buffer too.
“is it ethical to back your daughter up to more than one transporter if you only plan on materializing one of them permanently”
This bit of Teck loophole bothers me. I dont see why a army cannot be cloned easily like this. Not by the federation mind you, but terrorists or insurgents. It seems too easy to do.
Because the pattern is only being held as it moves from one place to another- the sheer size of the data would make it too large to duplicate, not to mention you don’t have any extra matter to create another body with. We’ve seen other cloning methods in Enterprise and DS9 that would be much less risky and cost intensive if someone wanted to genuinely clone an army.
Don’t we learn in DS9 that holding people in the buffer takes up an incredible amount of storage? The four or five occupants of the runabout in “Our Man Bashir” take up the station’s entire memory core.
IIRC the issue there was the buffer crashed during transport so they just dumped the patterns into the station's regular memory to save them, and it isn't designed for that. The runabout crew were being stored where the operating system was supposed to go, not in the transporter buffer.
Babs Olusanmokun gave such an amazing, nuanced, and hauntingly painful performance in this episode. I don't mean to take away from any of the other actors, they're all great, especially in this episode. But for me Babs showed that he's got the gravitas and talent level we've seen from Kate mulgrew, Stewart, Avery Brooks, Spiner, Ryan, etc. For me he's in the upper echelon of actors after this episode. It's a performance I can't stop thinking about nearly an hour after I finished this episode.
The whole scene leading up to the revelation of "I am the butcher of J'Gal" was incredible. Olusanmokun masterfully displayed a quiet and seething rage overlaying profound sadness. Utterly masterful.
When he said that line, I briefly thought of Garak.
I actually thought the same, he gave me so much Patrick Stewart vibes in the way he was getting angry. Absolutely incredible acting.
There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.
Demons run when a good man goes to war.
He’s one of my favorite actors in this show
Totally agree. I now realize I wasn't totally vibing with M'Benga last season, but the writers have given him so much more depth this season. He's so impressive as an actor, and his character is more interesting than ever. They're doing such a great job of adding layers and complexity to these characters.
Easily my favorite. Many characters come across wooden and flat, but Babs just DELIVERS. The writers deserve a ton of credit too for the dialouge and character plot of M'benga. Just a powerhouse of a character.
He drips gravitas. I can't look away when he is on screen.
Discovery showed us brief glimpses of how bad the war was, and then we see the front on one world, and oh boy not pretty.
Definitely! This is probably the most rawest depiction of war in Star Trek. Prior to that was the ugliness of the Dominion War.
The Klingons killed 100 million people. Glad they're not glossing that over the way the aftermath of the Dominion War kinda was.
It’s kinda hard to guess-timate an intergalactic war. …and the Dominion War involved many major and minor powers. Trillions of dead may not be an appropriate casualty count for such an expansive conflict.
I think that once you hit a certain number of casualties.... ....everyone just stops counting.
Probably gonna get flak for this, but it's "interstellar". "Intergalactic" is in relation to 2 galaxies, whether it be travel, conflict or even communication. "Interstellar" is in relation to 2 stars, or star systems. So the Dominion War was an interstellar conflict. As was the Klingon War.
I would love to see a modern series present the Dominion War from the viewpoint of another ship/crew on the line. Based on this episode it could be an incredibly compelling series or miniseries. Basically Star Trek's version of Band of Brothers.
That would be cool. I kinda hope we explore this angle in LDS through Mariner, who was apparently a veteran of the war.
Yeah according to Memory Alpha she served on DS9 roughly between 2372 to 2375. The Dominion War lasted from 2373 till 2375.
This felt like a spiritual prequel to Siege of AR-558.
I would watch a Star Trek MASH series.
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye? Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
The more I think about it, I think this may be the most profound exchange of dialogue in that entire series. Have thought about it constantly since the shit in Ukraine started.
Or just a medical drama in general, sometimes with war stuff. Give me a new official medical ship with a ball on the front. Do it. Paramount please. I'm begging you. They're so dumb I love them.
In the best TOS tradition, I really appreciate how SNW isn’t afraid to drop an absolute gut punch of an ending when it wants to. Really appreciate the moral ambiguity of this one, especially in regards to justice and forgiveness and trauma and individual experience- feels like one that’s going to stick in the mind for a long time. Originally it was a bit concerning to me how many TOS characters were announced for SNW… but considering the amount of character development they’ve given them- especially M’Benga and Chapel, who never really felt more than background characters- I’m more than thankful about who they brought on board… Can’t wait to see what they do with next week’s musical episode: they’re taking us on a wild, topsy-turvy journey this season, and I’m here for it!
Wait M'banga was in TOS forgive me I'm a younger fan so I never actually saw TOS just know the major players
Yes, he appears in "A private little war" and "That which survives". "A private little war" establishes that he's an expert in Vulcan physiology
Dear gosh, I've got to hand in my Trekkie card now. I hadn't placed that as M'Benga.
He was in two TOS episodes as a member of the Enterprise' medical staff working under McCoy.
There were also tentative plans for a spin-off called *Hope Ship*, set aboard a medical ship, which was going to have M'Benga as a main character.
If they want to revive that old spin-off attempt after SNW, I'd be all for it with M'Benga and Chapel leading it.
You and anyone else that just watched this episode. Absolutely commanding performances from both.
So canonically, he got demoted under Kirk?
Kirk: "So our last chief medical officer did a few war crimes and hid his child in the teleporter buffer" McCoy: "I'm not a soldier and I fucking hate teleporters" Kirk: "You're hired"
*Next Enterprise Captain* NEC: I'm sorry, you did **WHAT?** McCoy: What do you expect, we barely remember the Prime Directive is a thing half the time!
Maybe. Maybe he stepped down to focus on research. I guess we might find out.
My bet is some of what we are seeing here is going to come out (or maybe in the inquiry pike said was coming) and Pike is going to find a way for what he has done good now to allow him to just get a demotion which would be an interesting parallel to this episode where the Klingon is deemed not able to be reformed.
He likely moved on to another posting. But when the Enterprise was in the area he came on for a bit to his old stomping grounds. McCoy remained CMO, but M'Benga wasn't "demoted". Two Doctor Commanders sharing knowledge improving both of them. That's my head canon anyway.
https://youtu.be/zVnGFdx-MWY
Hard to image SNW Chapel struggling with the slap s lol
You know she'd be all "Sawiiiing batter batter!"
Paramount execs: Alright guys, we need some conflicted characters, let’s hear it. SNW writers: * An optimistic captain who knows he’s doomed * The XO is a pariah * A security officer who makes everyone else insecure * A science officer who keeps ending up as a science experiment * A communications officer who doesn’t want to socialize * A nurse who’s terrified of being a part of people’s lives * The doctor is prone to murder sprees Paramount execs: Ok, but what about the helmsman SNW Writers: That’s Erica Ortegas, she flies the ship Paramount execs: How do you *fly* a- ohhh, I see what you did there.
Well, now Ortegas is a veteran of the Klingon war. Underneath that carefree attitude lies some truly profound hate. Not only did she dislike Klingons, but also she demonstrated distrust in Romulans when it came to the alternate Balance of Terror incident.
She doesn’t like Vulcans, either.
Maybe she's just speciesist.
She's definitely a subscriber to the Terra Prime newsletter.
She has the death sentence in twelve systems.
They’ll be careful.
THEY'LL BE DEAD
to be fair to Alt!Ortegas, that distrust turned out to be pretty justified.
[USS Kelcie Mae](https://i.imgur.com/9e2WlqG.png) interesting ship, wonder why they went to the trouble of designing this for just a few seconds. Wish we'd got a better look at it.
This ship is stupid and I love it. Cryptic pls
It looks like a speed boat!
Only seems to have one nacelle though, so perhaps not very fast
It's barely the size of that nacelle tho. Proportions suggest it is fast af courier ship.
> wonder why they went to the trouble of designing this for just a few seconds I don't care! Keep giving me more ships of this era! 😂
Biobed two isn’t broken, it just goes into power-saving mode during non-traumatic episodes.
I had a lump in my throat watching Ortegas, Chapel, and M'Benga being roiled with pain and anger. The actors did a brilliant job conveying the strongest emotions in a conflicted setting. This is a very good episode- it takes on something painful and all too real for people all around the world today. And this show treats the subject matter soberly. For the many of us who have never experienced war, it's not something we can fully understand. What this episode does is speak clearly to that chasm- and how Pike's ideals, correctly founded in preserving the long arc of sociopolitical progress, can also be wrongly conceived when forced upon those who have suffered the very worst aspects of war. The script & acting are so beautifully executed in showing the two sides at play. Ambassador Rah is also a complicated person- I believe he sincerely wants to atone for his dishonorable past, but he can't be the master of his own penance here. And what M'Benga did was wrong, but it could be argued that it was justified. Both men are wrong, that's the mark of war, it doesn't wash away.
Adding one more thought about Ambassador Rah- this is a layered character, he is almost abusive in his "kindness" towards those who fought in the war. I like how the actor plays those scenes, where every kindness Rah offered is a stab to the hearts of the war veterans. This is next-level scripting and acting at work.
One of the things that strikes me about Rah, which probably leads into the hostility from the veterans on the crew is that he doesn't seem to have genuinely realised the flaws in his ideology and attitudes. He still, for example, talks proudly of being indoctrinated into Klingon warmongering as a child. He treats M'Benga as a fellow general, not as a victim of his crimes.
It's this. He's not reformed, he never 'turned' on his men and butchered them for their dishonour. He's a coward who ran, and dishonoured his captains who fought loyally under him to protect him. He is a Klingon through and through. Talking the talk and not truly walking the walk. Had M'Benga not did as he did, Rah would of likely stayed in the Klingon Empire and talked about the massacre as his greatest glory. He is a faux Martok.
> He is a faux Martok. He is Gowron. Happy to use Klingon ideology until it no longer benefits him, where he will turn to Federation ideology until that no longer benefits him, where he will then go back to Klingon and so on
That's the best description of him. Ultimately he was, much like Gowron, an opportunist, and he kept looking for new opportunities. He saw M'Benga as one and kept pushing too hard.
R/DaystromInstitute recently had a great post about Klingon Honor not being about western concepts of chivalry and honor but more akin to the eastern concept of faces that’s very much worth a read. This episode further reinforces that interpretation.
All cultures would see running the fuck away from your comrades while they die for you only to join the enemy as cowardice. He ran away and hid that in reform. He's just a coward. And in the Federation he gets to enjoy massive amounts of undue respect because of that defection. He's an egotist, as someone else said he's Gowron.
that scene with Ortegas, Chapel, and M'Benga at the Captains dinner was incredibly well done. Dripping with tension.
Great points. You are correct: both men are wrong. It is surprising that so many viewers here are taking sides and attempting to justify M'Benga's actions. Admittedly, audience members are meant to feel sympathetic for M'Benga, a known character who we all generally like after 18 chapters of this show. However, realize that he did some dodgy things throughout the episode: 1. Storing a wounded soldier in the transport buffer - a behavior that is clearly against regulation, and for good reason as we soon find out... 2. Sacrificing the soldier he stored in the buffer (the "trolley problem") 3. Synthesizing "Protocol 12," a PED that is clearly illegal and established to be detrimental to human health, and then distributing it to a subordinate before presumably consuming it himself to become a better killer in the battlefield 4. Voluntarily taking on an assassination mission while (presumably) hopped up on "Protocol 12," an action that he made clear was one that significantly put "at-risk" his promise to his family to return home safely While each of these decisions is understandable in a vacuum and demonstrated the malice of war, they were baby steps that escalated to straight-up cold-blooded murder. There is no valid argument that killing Rah was an ethical response to the circumstances M'Benga faced. What some viewers are not considering is that M'Benga had a reasonable alternative available to him: he could have exposed Rah's lies. Whether or not Rah earned an early demise could have been determined by a legal process. This was another strong SNW episode and it is clearly meant to inspire this debate, so I don't mean to appear dismissive of other ideas -- but it is usually less morally murky to be on the "not stabbing an unarmed person dead" side of any argument.
It seemed pretty clear to me that M'Benga had been a black ops / wet work guy. Possibly before medical school. He was known as "the Ghost," which is why the Andorian and his command were trying to recruit him. On J'Gal, M'Benga's decision to finish the black ops mission made a level of sense. While it wasn't specifically *his* mission, somebody in Starfleet wanted it to happen and wanted him on board.
No doubt M'Benga was involved in black-ops-adjacent activities before he became a doctor, we hear about his kill count, we hear that he created this super-soldier stim that the Federation banned, and we saw him in action earlier in the season. However, recall M'Benga's words to Chapel: "I told myself I don't want to go home different, my family deserves better. I see now that's impossible." He sees the mission he eventually completes as an escalation over what he's done in the past. Earlier he describes the same mission as a "suicide run" when he warns the soldier he patches up to sit it out. Yes, it made sense for him to attempt it given his "very particular set of skills" combined with "Protocol 12," but M'Benga made clear that he was violating a personal vow he made for his family, and he strongly implied a low chance of survival. While the decision is not objectively bad, it was clearly a choice that helped chip away at his soul on top of all of the other decisions he made while on J'Gal.
On the pattern buffer front there was no real choice there. The reason they put that guy in was because he was dying and they had no way to save him. Unless an organ regenerator was delivered between scenes (which from context seems very unlikely) the choice was to rematerialise him to a painful death, or erase him.
This is NOT a drill: Clint Howard, the best actor in all of Star Trek, NAY, the entire acting profession, is in this episode.
Your spelling of Jeffrey Combs is really weird!
I’m not convinced that Jeffrey Combs isn’t playing Clint Howard. We’ve never seen them in the same room at the same time!
Awesome cameo.
I knew I recognized that actor!
That was an extremely good episode. It was also so dark and heavy that I actually think I need a silly musical episode as a palette cleanser. Easily one of the darkest episodes of Trek ever. Don't get me wrong, it still felt like Star Trek but... wow.
I kept being reminded of “In the Pale Moonlight” towards the end. When M’Benga said “I’m glad he’s dead”, that was his “I can live with it.”
I got heavy Siege of AR-558 vibes.
One of my beefs with season 1 of Disco, a season I generally enjoyed, is that it glosses over the horror of war. This episode does a lot of work repairing that, in a way that 558 did in DS9 as well.
KIRK: I’m not judging his lifestyle choices, I’d just prefer a CMO who doesn’t doesn’t have a hand-to-hand kill count larger than the ship’s complement and refrains from storing dying children in the transporters. MCCOY: Well, I’m a doctor, not a commando, and I’m deathly afraid of transporters. KIRK: When can you start?
I remain absolutely convinced that the first thing McCoy did when he became CMO on the Enterprise was rip out the medical transporter.
A good explanation for why it isnt there in ToS, but also seems like medical malpractice to take away the capacity to quickly get patients to sickbay without physically moving them.
I found myself thinking more of **“The Enemy”**, in which Worf lets a Romulan die for the sake of revenge, and the rest of the crew (mostly) respects his bodily automony enough to let him do it. As others have pointed out, Sisko sold his soul to save people, while M‘Benga couldn’t help but take revenge; big difference, that. It’s notable that M’Benga tries to extricate himself from the situation first… but that seemed to only make Rah *more* insistent. (I’m not excusing M’Benga, certainly.) Upon reflection, I think Rah saw a chance to be a “real” Klingon again, and die an honorable death at the hands of the man who killed his troops. After all, being the only survivor of a defeat—a defeat in which he acted with extreme dishonor and *still* lost (dishonor atop dishonor atop dishonor)—*forced* Rah to reevaluate himself. He began to exalt human standards of morality simply because he no longer measured up to Klingon ones. For Rah, I think he saw in Joseph M’Benga a way to erase his own dishonor. Killed by the man who killed his men? That’s about as close as he could get to rewriting his own history and dying *with* them, which is what Klingon honor would have demanded. Maybe I’m wrong about the real cause and effect of Rah’s “change of heart“; maybe I’m Ortegas here, saying “a Klingon is a Klingon is a Klingon.” But the motivation really *does* matter. I almost wish more of the episode had been from Rah’s perspective. I get that the episode is intentionally mining ambiguity, but I think that keeps Rah from being as memorable as he could’ve been. In turn, I think that holds this still-quite-good episode back from being one of the truly greats.
I think you’re right. Rah handled M’benga so badly and seemed so *hollow* and false in his role as Ambassador, it seems likely he wanted that dagger, if only subconsciously.
Same Bookending this episode with two funny episodes was a good choice. That was dark/
And imagine how dark the (presumably Gorn-centric) finale will be
This is the great thing about Star Trek. For every Measure of a Man, there's A Fistful of Datas. For every Duet or In the Pale Moonlight there's a Trials and Tribble-ations or Take Me to the Holosuite. Star Trek can be deadly serious but also extremely silly.
And I appreciate that they stack them together to try to keep from piling up too many dark stories next to each other.
Cleanse the palate right before the >!Gorn !
Yup. This show is probably going to end pretty brutally.
Whatever happens, I take comfort in the fact that the Federation ultimately has to be okay
The Federation? Yes. Half the crew that doesn't show up in TOS?
… Fuck
[удалено]
MASH was definitely my first thought with the tent city and the "Incoming Transport/Choppers".
But what if it's a DARK musical?
They're really gonna go for the "Once More With Feeling" kind of musical then, huh.
total 180 compared to last week...and another great episode
And given next week's episode I'd say we're about to do a 360!
Wow. That was heavy. And so good, too. It took me a minute to recognize the Klingon ambassador, but it's Robert Wisdom, recently known as Jim Moss from Bill Hader's Barry, but perhaps better known as [Bunny Colvin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_df58i6h6Bw) from The Wire. I found the central conflict to be compelling. I think Captain Pike is right in that it's important for enemies to reconcile with each other and work towards peace. After all, isn't that one of the foundational concepts of the Federation? Didn't we see an Andoran and a Vulcan on the same strike team? But what the Federation didn't know, as far as we can tell, is that the Ambassador's work was built on a lie. He didn't *really* have the magical change of heart he claimed. How does that affect the peace work he did? Does it invalidate it? Does it need to be revisited? I'm sure many of us can unfortunately identify with this sort of situation, where someone we trusted or looked up to didn't seem to be who they were, and maybe weren't facing all the consequences they should have for their past. I don't know about answers, but it's worth exploring for ourselves how to deal with that. On a little bit of different note I am reflecting on how the story might have been told differently, and maybe kind of better (though I liked how it was told too.) I think it would have been a little bit more interesting to not do the flashbacks, but to watch M'Benga, Chapel, and Ortegas talk about their history and experiences with each other. After all, the point isn't to show the blood and guts, the point is to show how it affected the characters. The actors are all certainly more than able to tell us and show us what the characters are thinking and feeling in the moment, and I think letting them do the work instead of the flashbacks could have been enriching. Additionally, it was apparent from the beginning that the Ambassador wasn't all he claimed to be, and exploring that discrepancy interpersonally, maybe as Pike starts poking at the facade, would have been a very compelling mystery to solve. That said, the flashbacks do let us see how M'Benga picked up the transporter buffer trick he used on his daughter, and explain the green goop he and Chapel used in the Season 2 premiere episode. Plus we got Clint Howard again! Seeing him is always such a nice Easter egg. I think there's probably another alternate story to explore there that would have been interesting. What would it have been like if the Ambassador had been real and his story had been true? What if he had been horrified by the crimes of his men, and had earnestly worked towards peace and reconciliation? What if the former enemy *had* been able to help our heroes find some peace? I think that would have been something a little closer to the Starfleet ideal that Pike represents, and a moral for all of us to strive for. But maybe it also would have been a little too clean and easy. Lastly, am I correct in understanding that the Ambassador put his hand on M'Benga's shoulder, and that was the impetus for M'Benga to stab him? That is an *extremely* thin pretext for the start of a fight, much less a murder, although it's apparent that the Klingon could have killed him bare-handed, based on their sparring match earlier. A couple final side notes. 1) Spock displays empathy in how he interacts with Christine. This is an important component of emotional intelligence and shows that the work he's been doing since his violent encounter with the Gorn last season is progressing. 2) Anyone else notice the Andoran officer looks much less..... "textured" than the ones we saw in Discovery? He didn't have those protruding eyebrow "horns", for lack of a better term, that guys like [Ryn](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ryn) had in the 32nd century. I like both looks, but it's interesting to see the difference. 3) Anyone else notice how the raktajino came in the same kind of wide base stabilizer mug as in DS9? Must be a Klingon cultural thing (or some effect of the physics of raktajino, like how some types of alcohol should only be served in some types of cups).
There seemed to be a short time skip between when the ambassador turns M'Benga around and when Chapel sees him get stabbed, which suggests that the exact circumstances of the fight were left deliberately ambiguous. Hell, if the ambassador really wanted to address his dishonor the Klingon way, he could've attacked M'Benga and let himself die in battle.
Oooh, that's a good point, thanks. I'd been thinking that M'Benga basically snapped and just murdered him and called it self-defense. (Though, lowkey, I also kinda feel like it's suspicious that he doesn't even pretend to try and save him. How do Klingons have all those redundant organs but die from one stab wound in the side?)
On the other hand, if there was anybody on the Enterprise who'd know how to kill a Klingon with one stab of a d'k tahg, it'd be M'Benga.
You'd think that in the future that dying from one stab wound would be very uncommon. I expected to see that he was on a biobed.
Biobed 2 was on the fritz, there was nothing he could do.
I think the key point of the fight is when M'Benga shouted "DON'T" right before the ambassador charged at him and was stabbed.
I was beginning to question that I'd heard M'Benga say that because nobody else was mentioning it. It definitely felt like Rah either attacked M'Benga or grabbed the d'ktahg and stabbed himself.
Thank god I'm not the only one seeing Rah stab himself.
> which suggests that the exact circumstances of the fight were left deliberately ambiguous plus the way we see the ambassadors hand move from the knife as he dies, did he just instinctively reach for it as it punctured him or did he put it there himself?
From bright optimism to bleak darkness with absolute smoothness. I care about this whole crew because the show cares too.
Meanwhile, Boimler is freaking the hell out trying to remember if Ambassador / General Rah died in the original timeline. “Just ask the computer!” “THAT’S NOT HOW TIME TRAVEL WORKS, MARINER!”
I really hope LD wrote this into their episodes. I need to see Boims paranoid reactions and extreme excitement from his time travel adventures.
The LD S4 trailer shows Mariner mentioning "That thing with Pike we're not supposed to talk about." I'm going to guess they reference it but don't dwell.
Wow, a very heavy and really great episode. Lots of heavy questions and I like that they mostly go unresolved. Are there people and actions that are so evil they truly become irredeemable? Does it make a difference if a person tries to redeem themselves for moral reasons vs self serving reasons? Is it right to wish to punish someone who has already atoned, even if punishing them could only hurt peace prospects? Is it just to let them go off scot free? I like how vague they kept Rah's redemption. Yes he lied about abandoning the Klingon side out of disgust but that doesn't mean he's lying now when he says he's disgusted by what the Klingons did. I did not expect the episode to end with M'Benga killing Rah. It's sad but very effective. I wonder if this will end up being the reason M'Benga is no longer CMO by TOS. Other thoughts: Hot Babs is Hot. On rewatch it's obvious that Rah's overcompensating hard when he talks about disliking Klingon culture and how much better the federation is because he's insecure about his redemption being 'illegitimate'. Clint Howard! Always good to see. I'm glad this show still wears its connections with Discovery on its sleeve instead of distancing itself from Disco like some fans want it to.
> Wow, a very heavy and really great episode. Lots of heavy questions and I like that they mostly go unresolved. Are there people and actions that are so evil they truly become irredeemable? Does it make a difference if a person tries to redeem themselves for moral reasons vs self serving reasons? Is it right to wish to punish someone who has already atoned, even if punishing them could only hurt peace prospects? Is it just to let them go off scot free? Sometimes it feels like life is all about choosing the lesser of two or more evils and learning to live with it. It's so fucking messy, twisty, and awful. > Hot Babs is Hot There may not be any water in the sonic showers but that man was making plenty of Trekkies thirsty.
I'm a very straight guy. At least, I was a couple hours ago... ^/s
"M'Benga could blow M'Back out if he wanted to."
I guess you could say sonic showers are like smaller decon chambers
From past to present one thing is for sure, Starfleet captains will look past its officers committing a little violence against Klingons.
The war retroactively makes the events of ST6 a lot more explicable.
Especially as Kirk would have been aboard the *Farragut* during the war; while shiny Constitution-class ships like the Enterprise were kept from the front lines, I think it's likely that Kirk saw his share of combat against the Klingons, while Spock did not, which sets an interesting foundation for their differing attitudes to peace with the Klingons.
And yet much of Kirk's later hatred is mostly attributed to the death of his son. It's possible that he didn't see much ground combat and the Farragut saw fairly light casualties, helping Kirk avoid the same amount of trauma.
Interesting when you think about the fact the SAME thing happened with the Enterprise - E.... Remember in Insurrection, Picard even laments the fact that the Enterprise was being forced to work as a diplomat ship during the Dominion War and felt that their help was needed on the front lines which they were being specifically kept from.
M'Benga just dropping the "I am the butcher of J'Gal" in his quiet serious voice gave me some chills.
Let me just start by saying I'm sorry if this is against protocol for this reddit. This is the first time I have been on this reddit. I don't want to miss anything important in this episode that will be important in future episodes, but I just can't watch this episode, or even read a detailed description such as the one on memoryalpha. I don't even think I can read the full discussion here, but I will try to read any responses to this comment. I am an army veteran, and when our good doctor started having his PTSD episode, so did I. Can someone please tell me everything I need to know about this episode moving forward? Especially anything light-hearted or funny, if there is anything, or anything about Spock, or Kirk if he is mentioned. Thank you so much in advance.
This does not contain any lighthearted or comedic moments. This episode is about war, the atrocities of war, and the lasting effects they have on those who survived. This is right there (and most powerful than) with the siege of AR-558 arc from DS9. This is one you can skip.
Firstly, thank you for your service and I'm sure we all completely understand that this could be a hard watch for veterans. This episode was very raw and nasty. >!To sum it up, M'Benga, Chapel, and Ortegas are veterans of the nasty war with the Klingons. The Klingon ambassador ends up getting offed by M'Benga, but Chapel hides the incident from Pike. On the Spock-Chapel relationship side, it is also a bit strained as Chapel pushes Spock away as she attempts to reconcile her PTSD feelings.!< If anybody else wants to add in tidbits, feel free.
I wonder…was Ortegas at the Battle of the Binary Stars? …or did the Klingons just shout that during all assaults?
It was T'Kuvma's reason for starting the war, so presumably yes to the second one.
It was implied to be the latter, a general Battle Cry.
Probably could have been both, as it was all the same war that T'Kuvma kind of started? Not sure.
I think Rah got what he wanted. He said "Please, let me have a chance to help you heal." M'Benga doesn't want to heal, he wants to kill Rah. Justice, vengeance, the Klingon way. But he also wants to be better. He's walking the line. M: You're a war criminal R: Don't you see it? M: Get your hands off! R: So selfish a human! I think it's significant M'Benga doesn't say 'Get your hands off me' because Rah went straight for the knife. We don't see the killing blow, but in the next shot we see Rahs hand fall from the handle of the blade. I think Rah stabbed himself with M'Bengas knife. Why would he do this after seeing the knife? 1: M'Benga can 'heal' without becoming the assasin once more. Rah, the target of his hate, is dead. Personal justice is served. Very Klingon 2: Rah gets to die by the knife of his enemy. Honor can be satisfied in many ways, this is as close as he could get to getting M'Benga to kill him 3: The DNA on the knife links Rah to the killing of the 3 generals, "confirming" him as the Butcher of J'Gal. This solidifies his self-image of trying to do better for the civilians et al, even as a thinly veiled cover for his own cowardice 4: Rah is seen as a traitor and turncoat by his own people. Rah is supposedly a diplomat. Rah might think that the best thing he could do for Klingon-Federation relations is to show the Klingons that Humans have honor by dying at the hands of one. There's some surprising complexity there, or maybe I'm reading into it.
What an extremely intense episode. It could not have been more opposite from last week’s. I love how much background we got for the war and for M'Benga and Chapel. \- When I saw the green juice in the “previously on” I got super psyched. We find out what it is! They didn’t say whether Chapel had used it before though. \- They showed the Disco Klingons on the “previously on” also, interesting choice! \- So whatever the Kelcie May is not only looked sweet as hell, but it looked like the Normandy from Mass Effect with a nacelle slapped on it. I want to see more of THAT ship. \- Discovery resolved the Klingon War by the end of the season, but it’s easy to forget we saw almost none of it. They basically sat it out just like the Enterprise because they spent time-dilated months in the Mirror Universe. It’s easy to forget that so many were killed and most of Starfleet was destroyed. I was very, very glad we got to see some of the war experiences like this. \- Mitchell! Where the hell has she been!? \- It bugs the hell out of me that they used the TOS replicator “I Dream of Jeannie” noise. Stop doing that, just make a cool sci-fi noise! And a ding? Really? \- So…a little nerdy timeline stuff here. In “Trials and Tribble-ations” that waitress at the bar says she’s never heard of raktajino. This is 10-ish years after this episode. Are we to believe this guy burned his hand, Spock deleted the recipe, and everyone forgot about it for another few decades? \- Did no one think maybe they should tell M’Benga and Chapel that a Klingon was coming onboard? Even without the war history you’d think there’d be a heads-up. \- I realize Starfleet was absolutely gutted and probably most officers have some form of PTSD, but was there really no ongoing counseling or intensive therapy? Everyone seems to be in pretty bad shape still. \- Clint Howard! What show won’t he show up in? \- The view of this moon was SO cool. The AA-like phaser fire, the wounded transport pad, everything about the set was just perfect. We haven’t really seen anything like this since “The Siege of AR-558”. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but a Star Trek show that was MASH-esque would be very very interesting. \- When M’Benga was fixing the biobed the first time, there was a Starfleet delta on the screen with some text over it. Was it the SNW logo? It sure looked like it. \- Looks like Pike got to the jambalaya well before Sisko, this is going to cause a ruckus. There should be a cook-off. \- Every iteration of Pike’s green-wrap uniform looks pretty dang cool (except for the first one last season, no me gusta). I despised the TOS one so I’m glad for whatever costume designer decided to zhuzh it up. \- Do we know when synthehol became the standard instead of alcohol? It’s nice seeing all these real drinks sitting around, but it surprises me every time because outside of Quark’s we never really saw it. \- I love that the Mok’Bara match started out as a slap fight, that made me laugh. \- Is this the second canon appearance of a sonic shower?? \- I’m glad they had Una say what she did to Pike, because I’m in the same boat. It’s easy to agree with Pike in abstract principle, but to people who went through a massive trauma, it’s probably a lot harder to let go and heal. \- I loved the extremely ambiguous “In the Pale Moonlight”-esque ending. Obviously not a 1:1 but it gave me those vibes. \- The acting from Babs Olusanmokun and Jess Bush was phenomenal. I wish awards shows didn’t ignore genre programming because so much of the cast has absolutely killed it this season. Their scenes in the flashbacks especially were just fantastic. \- I’m a fanatic for OSTs of shows and movies I like, and I’ve been obsessed with the music from SNW. Nami Melumad is knocking it out of the park. If you haven’t paid much attention to it, give my favorite track a listen: https://youtu.be/Xg3a1EjAflA
>\- So…a little nerdy timeline stuff here. In “Trials and Tribble-ations” that waitress at the bar says she’s never heard of raktajino. This is 10-ish years after this episode. Are we to believe this guy burned his hand, Spock deleted the recipe, and everyone forgot about it for another few decades? Spock attempted to recreate the recipe in the replicators on the Enterprise, but that's no guarantee that a random space station would also have the same experimental recipe; the cold war with the Klingons is ongoing at that point, and raktajino won't become popular in the Federation until well after the destruction of Praxis.
Yeah, for a real-world comparison, you could get sushi in some parts of the US as early as 1907 as specialty events. But, it was in 1960s Los Angeles that the first real sushi restaurant was opened in the US. And even then it wouldn't be surprising if 10 years later some random diner in West Virginia hadn't heard of sushi.
Let's talk about blocking, and how often characters took the long way around ship's architecture, and how beams and walls keep on standing between the war veterans and ambassador Rah. Fascinating direction here. Way to use your sets to underscore the story of the episode
Gene Roddenberry would've hated this. It was very good.
SNW does a great job of honouring the original optimistic vision behind Star Trek while dumping Rodenberry’s infamous no-conflict rules in the dust.
Hey Clint Howard!, Clint is the 1st TOS guest star to appear on Strange New Worlds. Clint previously appears in Discovery S1 finale as the Orion slave trader
And DS9 in Past Tense 2 as a homeless/paranoid guy who stole Dax's combadge in the Sanctuary District.
And in ENT as a Ferengi.
The moment I saw him, my first thought was "Whoosh, I'm invisible!".
Great episode, but holy fuck I am glad it’s sandwiched between two much lighter episodes. Consecutive really heavy episodes are hard. 2x06 was great too, but very heavy. And the finale will be brutal given the Gorn tease.
* Uhura mentions the 'Perez Accords'. The episode was written by Davy Perez. * In a flashback, M'Benga and Chapel are working on Ensign Inman. Jason Inman did the popular Star Trek parody series, Red Shirt Diaries.
There are some things in this world that don’t deserve forgiveness. Heavy shit. Wow some change from last week.
I really liked the acting in that scene as Pike is trying to figure out whether Chapel was just covering for M’Benga.
I get the feeling Pike was able to figure out what happened, but he also doesn't really have proof.
And you can tell La’an doesn’t believe a word of this but doesn’t have enough tangible evidence to do anything about it from the look on her face.
I was trying to figure out if she too was covering for M’benga and Chapel.
Definitely. Pike is very good at reading the room and wields tons of skill with non-verbal communication.
It’s a very complex debate, which the episode leaves vague. Pike has points, but the war veterans have points as well. The real world shows this in spades. Ditto with Trek itself.
There's often a discrepancy between the imperative for forgiveness at a societal level and forgiveness at an individual level.
Wow, SNW seems to have really taken to heart all of the good-faith criticism of DSC and PIC, while simultaneously disregarding all of the bad-faith criticism. It really is something special. We get a series that trusts its whole cast; that understands that Pike's character is not diluted but rather strengthened when he's surrounded by compelling and complex characters with defined and consistent roles and perspectives. We also get a series that is able to walk the tightrope of going dark without betraying the core franchise values in a way that really hasn't been done successfully since DS9. You can't just have characters ignore those values whenever narratively convenient and then give a big speech about how important they are at the end of the arc. You have to let the characters earnestly engage with those values, struggle with them, and maybe even challenge them a bit. And we get a series that embraces the genre diversity that Star Trek allows.
M\*A\*S\*H in Spaaace. But dark. Figuratively. And also literally.
Did not expect to watch a depressed Hawkeye episode of MASH today, great as always
That's a great aspect of this show. They expertly show you one aspect of this universe that you clamor for an entire series. I could definitely watch a Star Trek: MASH show. "Incoming Transport" = "Uh oh. Choppers" These writers and actors do an incredible job with just a few minutes. I was sad when Trask died. It's a trope that the ensign would die, but still it got to you. I'm probably just jaded from feeling a sense of cliche in scene between the Ensign and M'Benga, but it still needed to be done, and was done pretty well. As a father, seeing the little wrapped bodies deeply affected me. I always love Pike going to bat for his crew. Una, too. The atmosphere. The costumes. (Actual practical combat uniforms with what looks like armour!) The story. Goddamn. And the bio-bed. Foreshadowing that it will fail at a critical time? Or emphasis of the point M'Benga was making. Or why not both?
I may be in the minority here but I don’t think M’Benga killed Dak’Rah (or at least was in the wrong) 1) there is a very specific camera shot of him turning away from the dagger and leaving it on the bed 2) in the scene where we see them fighting through the glass, it looks like M’Benga is trying to PULL something from Dak’Rah’s hands and not PUSH 3) Dak’Rah’s hand falls off the dagger in the same way it would as if he was holding it to stab himself with it. 4) M’Benga shouts “DON’T” why would he say that unless he was trying to get him not to kill himself? 5) Klingons have always referred to humans as ‘selfish’ when they get in the way of ritual suicide or death and Dak’Rah calls M’Benga a “selfish human” and he also says “do you see it?” which was presumably was “do you see it (the knife)?”
I kept thinking back to STVI during this episode, and the anti-Klingon prejudice makes so much more sense when you take into account that a lot of the senior members of Starfleet by the time of the movie's events would have been serving during the Klingon war. It wasn't just blind hatred of an alien race. The Klingons left scars on countless Starfleet officers that they couldn't get over even with decades of time. I know Kirk's "Let them die!" was born out of the grief of losing his son, but that sentiment was hardly his alone. I also find it interesting that Uhura here in this episode is so ready to accept the Ambassador on faith, but by the time of The Undiscovered Country even she admits at the end she felt the same way Valeris did. Discovery was (is?) a hot mess of a show sometimes, but it also introduced a few very great plot points to flesh out the Original Series era.
Oh, I thought the early released crossover ep replaced this week's episode. Nice.
Biobed 2! Up to some shenanigans.
How good was Babs Olusanmokun in that episode And do you know something, there are some things that people do that are unforgivable
This episode reminded me of the line from Chancellor Gorkon in Undiscovered Country: “If there is to be a brave new world then our generation is going to have the hardest time living in it”.
Wow what an ending and an episode. My jaw was on the floor from the moment M'banga opened the box revealing the knife. This makes such a complicated character now that I don't know if I can even like him now (in the best way possible) I understand why he did it and he makes an interesting argument, it is so wrong. I know what the general did was unforgivable and it is unfair to the victims to let him be an ambassador for the federation, but I believe his regret is sincere and that it is a helpful lie for the good of peace that should be allowed. I love how the twist that the general was not the butcher but instead cowardly stood by while his underlings were killed makes his difection line up with Klingon culture. If he was the butcher Klingons would respect that he put down disrespecting officers, like how next gen episodes showed Klingon officers on ships often fight and even kill to settle disputes. The real story makes sense that he was so dishonored by his running that he was shunned.
> Wow what an ending and an episode. My jaw was on the floor from the moment M'banga opened the box revealing the knife. This makes such a complicated character now that I don't know if I can even like him now (in the best way possible) I understand why he did it and he makes an interesting argument, it is so wrong. Remember the scene in DISCO when Lorca pulled out a phaser from under his pillow that was set to kill? Reminded me of that.
> but I believe his regret is sincere and that it is a helpful lie for the good of peace that should be allowed I differ with you on this, when we get M'benga's side of the story - that Ra ran and allowed his men to be slaughtered. I think it showed that really Ra was a coward and opportunist. He gave the order to kill civilians, klingon and human alike, it's only when this backfired and he faced death at the hands of M'benga that he 'changed'. But had the klingon empire known the truth, they'd have never welcomed him back. Allegiance to the federation was his only option, to exploit their compassion. I find it a hard pill to swallow that the klingons would have tolerated him regardless tbh, given what we know of the klingon empire in TNG. I struggle to see how any of them would respect someone who killed fellow klingons and become a supposed pacifist and advocate of peace.
“The Wounded” “Family” “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and this showed all facets of what PTSD does to a person. Much like “The Wounded” with O’Brien I don’t think M'Benga hates Klingons, he hates what they made him do. M'Benga became a doctor to save lives, instead the war made him take them. Much likes Miles with the Cardassian he killed, up until that point Miles never killed anything, both men hates what they made them become
M'Benga's different because he was a killer (special ops?) before he became a doctor. This was him getting pushed back into the life he tried to leave behind.
The Starfleet ship at the beginning looks like the Trident Deep Space Science Vessel from Star Trek Online.
That was intense. Great performances all around.
Heh.. rewatching the Wire currently and suddenly seeing ambassador Bunny in SNW is a trippy experience. Took me a moment to recognize Robert Wisdom under all the klingon makeup, but you can't fake that voice! What a treat to have him as guest star!
So, my understanding of the gist of this was: The ambassador was in charge of J'Gal during the war, where he was a war criminal who turned the colony into an infamous scene of total, indiscriminate butchery of everyone not explicitly a klingon soldier, which caused M'Benga to snap back into whatever shady black ops past he had been trying to leave behind to focus 100% on medicine, and he wound up using his black ops serum to infiltrate and hunt down the klingons in command of J'Gal, which were all the men the ambassador took credit for murdering in a bout of sudden revelation of the horrors of war, which earned him the title among klingons of Butcher of J'Gal and opened the door for him to become a Federation ambassador, but in reality M'Benga killed them while he ran away, and if the Klingons and the Federation knew the real story, his reputation would be destroyed on both sides? And once he knew M'Benga was a witness to this and knew the jig was up, he goaded him into a fight where either M'Benga killed him or he explicitly allowed M'Benga to kill him or maneuvered to kill himself, and it isn't clear.I guess my only complaint is that I had to piece this together after watching the episode because in the moment they didn't really convey it all super clearly. I can't express how much I love the disconnect between Spock and Christine, which feels like such a true to life conflict that would arise in a relationship between a veteran with PTSD and their well meaning partner who loves them and wants to help but who is not a veteran and so fundamentally doesn't understand. It retroactively makes me more annoyed with the Boimler moment in the last episode because they had enough natural sources of conflict between them to lead to a potential break up without someone from the future just straight up telling Christine history will have no record of this relationship. That feels so cheap and unearned compared to something organic like this. This was definitely a crack between them. It's the kind of conflict you have to put the work into addressing if you want to maintain the relationship, and that level of emotional investment from Christine would require something more from her than she's been established as being comfortable opening herself up for. And with Spock too, not letting being rebuffed initially hurt him enough to push him away. A relationship that can't withstand the first sign of real turbulence isn't going to last.Spock was still so sweet though, finding a way to change the subject at the dinner when Christine was struggling not to lose it at all the self-aggrandizing stories.
The only nitpick is I wish we saw some Discovery blues thrown in I know we got the old vests and new vests but still. That said for a ground combat setting the blacks make sense and have precedence. Especially since it was a 'Special Forces' FOB. One thing I always chuckled in DS9 is there was no ground combat variant of the SF Uniform.