adamkotsko

Like basically every current Star Trek fan, I love the character of Captain Pike as Anson Mount portrays him. I wonder, though, to what extent he is actually the same guy from "The Cage." If we had only that episode to work from (which the Discovery and SNW writers initially did), we would know that he is broody, that he struggles with the responsibility he bears for the lives of others, and that he is remarkably able to conjure up emotions like anger and hate on command. Does any of that fit with Pike as we know him now?

One way to answer this question would be to imagine a very literal remake of the original pilot recast with the current actors. Everyone else would basically make sense, but I think seeing the current Pike act out his scenes would be jarring and even a little upsetting.

I'm sure we can come up with in-universe explanations -- he was having a particularly bad day, he's grown as a person, etc., etc. -- but it does seem like the current-day writers are departing pretty abruptly from the ostensible basis for the character. What do you think?

One of the biggest difficulties of most episodic dramas, including the various Star Trek series, is that putting main characters in danger is seldom believable. It's such a common syndrome that it's even a pop culture trope: plot armor. Watching the early second-season episode "Unnatural Selection," in which Dr. Pulaski is infected with a rapid-aging syndrome, I wonder if the writers are counting on the viewers not believing Dr. Pulaski has plot armor.

After all, she is a recent addition and she is not even listed on the main credits, instead being designated as a "guest star." More fatally still, the episode supplies fresh background about the character and especially her desire to serve with Picard -- and every viewer of a reality TV show knows that once a contestant gets backstory and calls their family on camera, they're probably going home that episode. Perhaps they even expect viewers to remember that they did really kill a main character, Tasha Yar. Maybe this will just be the season of rotating-door Chief Medical Officers, much like season one had a different Chief Engineer every time it came up.

I'm especially interested to hear from people who remember watching it when it first aired, but everyone who watches an episode is watching it for the first time. Did you think Dr. Pulaski could really die?

Like most of us, I am greatly enjoying Strange New Worlds. One of the small benefits of the series, in my mind, is that it has finally broken one of the strangest of fan habits -- the insistence on literalism for TOS visuals, especially on things like ship designs and controls. Is there anyone still holding out for a "refit" of the beautiful SNW Enterprise so that it "really" looks like a set from the late 1960s? The updated look is a big part of what makes the TOS world seem relevant and alive for contemporary viewers, instead of just a nostalgia trip (as it was in the tribute episodes that showed TOS sets within a TNG/DS9 context).

Given that they have made the biggest remaining move of recasting Kirk, the idea of continuing past SNW into Kirk's Five-Year Mission seems unavoidable. Given that Paramount seems to be contracting their streaming footprint, it is admittedly unlikely that anything like this would ever get made. But something like the Kelvin Timeline tie-in comics where they redo TOS stories and intersperse them with new ones could actually be a good format -- reintroducing new viewers to classic stories while retrospectively granting more cohesion to TOS.

Obviously there would be drawbacks to redoing the old episodes. Fans would howl at any changes to the scripts, and of course there would be questions about whether any of this was worth anyone's time or talents. And maybe it wouldn't be! But redoing the most stone-cold classics of TOS in a more modern style could literally be the only way some new fans would engage with those stories. Young people are very intolerant of entertainment that seems old or outdated. Looking back at my childhood, I never liked TOS in large part simply because it looked too old and the acting style felt weird. If we really think that these stories are classics that deserve to endure for the long haul, a remake could be a way to inject new life into them.

What do you think? [UPDATE: You all have convinced me this is a bad idea. I will keep that in mind if I ever become head of Paramount.]

It's never made much sense that the entire multi-species Federation would be subject to a strict ban on genetic engineering due to events on Earth that happened centuries before the Federation was even founded. The way they doubled down on that rationale in Una's trial only highlighted the absurdity -- especially when Admiral April claimed he would exclude Una to prevent genocide.

On the one hand, the writers may be trying to create a straw man out of a weird part of Star Trek lore so they can have a civil rights issue in Starfleet. And that's fine. From an in-universe perspective, though, I think we can discern another reason for the ban on genetic engineering -- the Klingon Augment Virus.

There was a ban on genetic engineering on United Earth, which is understandable given that it was much closer to the time of the Eugenics Wars. Why would that remain unchanged when more time passed, more species joined, and more humans lived in places without living reminders of the war? [NOTE: I have updated the paragraph up to this point to reflect @Value Subtracted's correction in comments.] The answer is presumably that they needed to reassure the Klingons that something like the Augment Virus would never happen again. Hence they instituted a blanket ban around that time -- perhaps in 2155, the year after the Klingon Augment Virus crisis and also, according to Michael Burnham, the year the Geneva Protocols on Biological Weapons were updated.

That bought the Federation over a century of peace, but after war broke out due to a paranoid faction of Klingons who thought humans would dilute Klingon purity and after peace was only secured through the most improbable means, they doubled down on the ban. Una's revelation provided a perfect opportunity to signal to the Klingons that they were serious about the ban -- hence why they would add the charges of sedition, perhaps. Ultimately, an infinitely long speech and the prospect of losing one of their best captains combined to make them find a loophole -- but not to invalidate the ban or call it into question. This Klingon context is why April, who we know is caught up in war planning of various kinds, is so passionate that the ban exists "to prevent genocide" -- he's not thinking of people like Una, he's thinking of the near-genocide they suffered at the hands of the Klingons.

This theory still doesn't paint the Federation in a positive light, since they have effectively invented a false propaganda story to defend a policy that has led to demonstrable harm. But it makes a little more sense, at least to me. What do you think?