The last five years have really been bizarre for screen entertainment. You start with the apocalypse of 2020, which messed everything up. Then, just as everyone was starting to come out of it and approach the possibility of normal, first the writers, then the actors went on strike.
For Strange New Worlds, the strikes happened right as the second season ended, and they delayed the third season, with the conclusion of “Hegemony” not showing up on Paramount+ until almost two years after the first part ended season two on a cliffhanger.
There has been a lot of expressed disappointment with this third season of SNW, and the quality certainly has been variable. I don’t think it’s been as bad as some of the haters have said, but it’s also definitely a step down from the first and second seasons. The show-runners themselves have admitted that coming back from the strike was difficult, and it happened only a couple of years after a global pandemic warped the entire damn world. It’s not always easy to do your best work under those conditions.
I don’t present these as excuses, simply as reasons why this season has been a disappointment.
Part of the problem is that there’s a line between genuinely setting up the show for which you’re a prequel and engaging in self-indulgent nonsense that goes for the nostalgia hit over story sense and/or continuity maintenance. And season three of SNW dances back and forth over that line, um, a lot.
The thing is, when it’s on the pure setting-up side, we get some absolutely great stuff. “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” does a magnificent job of showing the embryonic forms of the relationships that Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and Scotty will have with Jim Kirk and each other on the TV show that aired six decades ago (and its followup movies). For all that the episode is generally horrible, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” does do fine work in deepening the specific friendship between Kirk and Scotty, as does “New Life and New Civilizations” for Kirk and Spock. And several episodes this season lay the groundwork for the Chapel-Roger Korby romance that was the backstory of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”
On the other hand, there’s some self-indulgent nonsense, bits that are done as fannish references that hinder the storyline, some of which works better than others. There’s the use of the Metrons in “Terrarium,” which is an attempt to reconcile the Gorn’s appearance in “Arena” with the use of the Gorn in this show, at which it fails 100%, just like every other Gorn appearance on this show.
“Wedding Bell Blues” is a particularly tired offender, though there at least the script leaves things open enough that you can dance around it. Rhys Darby’s character isn’t explicitly referred to as Trelane, even though he acts very much like the character William Campbell played in “The Squire of Gothos,” and the parent who chides him isn’t explicitly referred to as Q, even though John deLancie voices him. I’m a bit more forgiving of the episode precisely because it’s not explicit, so you can just assume that we’re dealing with a different set of powerful beings (goodness knows the Trek universe is littered with them…). Because honestly—with all due respect to the late great Peter David, who built an entire novel, Q-Squared, around the notion—Trelane being a Q never made any sense. On top of that, having Spock and Uhura meet Trelane before “Squire” makes even less sense. (Another reason I’m willing to cut this episode some slack is that it is, in many ways, a tribute to Peter, and I have a soft spot for that.)
But so much of this feels like it’s being written by people who are basing their stories on half-remembered recollections about the original series that are demonstrably false. You saw this in a lot of tie-in fiction back in the day, when the only way to see the episodes was when they happened to be rerun, and even once they started showing up on various versions of home video (either recorded on blank VHS tapes or purchased on tape), people had seen the 79 episodes so many times that they wouldn’t bother to verify their faulty recollections.
So if all you remember is Kirk and the Gorn battling around Vasquez Rocks and you forget the part about how nobody on the ship had fucking even heard of the Gorn, you get SNW’s treatment of the Gorn. So if all you remember is Trelane being vaguely Q-like, you do “Wedding Bell Blues.” And if all you remember is that Vulcans are arrogant snots, and you have trouble telling the difference between biology and cultural mores (or just believe in species essentialism, and seriously read the linked article by Lily Osler, it’s superb), you get idiocy like “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” an episode I have no intention of ever forgiving the producers for inflicting on us.
Right on the line is “A Space Adventure Hour.” There are many who viewed it as an insult to the original series, others (including me) who viewed it as a loving tribute. I mean, look, the original series was absolutely magnificent, but it’s not holy writ, it’s not sacred, and it’s full of some of the most ridiculous nonsense. Making fun of the show’s excesses (Paul Wesley’s letter-perfect impersonation of the worst of William Shatner’s third-season performances) and limitations (trying to work around a minimal TV budget) is totally fair game. And the episode addressed the fact that we’re likely to have holodeck technology a lot sooner than the twenty-fourth century, acknowledged how insanely dangerous the holodeck has proven to be in many of its uses in the various twenty-fourth-century spinoffs, and makes fun of it while also explaining why we don’t see holodecks in mass use until the twenty-fourth century.
And even if you’re one of the people who didn’t like “…Adventure Hour,” there’s other good stuff here. While the description of the Vezda as beings of pure evil were a little too histrionic and absurd (and goes back to that tiresome species essentialism), the actual portrayal of them in “Through the Lens of Time” and “New Life and New Civilizations” was pretty damned effective, mostly due to an excellent combination of Chris Myers’ strong performance (one that is a hundred and eighty degrees from how he played Gamble) and a very effective makeup/CGI choice in portraying the Vezda-possessed folks with their eyes gouged out.
Meantime, “Shuttle to Kenfori” was a very effective action/horror piece that also picked up nicely from “Under the Cloak of War,” “What is Starfleet?” uses the documentary format to excellent effect, and until the doofy-ass bit with the Metrons, “Terrarium” is a strong episode, Trek’s latest of many attempts to riff on Hell on the Pacific.
Still, there’s nothing here that hits the heights of “Ad Astra per Aspera” or “Children of the Comet” or “Strange New Worlds” or “Those Old Scientists.” And I find myself frustrated by what we didn’t see. “Wedding Bell Blues” ends with a scene that goes out of its way to show how delightful Kelzing, the three-armed bartender played by Kira Guloien, is, to the point where Pike and Number One ask her to join the Enterprise staff—and then we never see her again. La’an’s actions at the end of “Terrarium” are problematic to say the least, and also drive an obvious wedge between her and Ortegas, neither of which are actually dealt with or followed up on. We’re still waiting for the sequel to “The Serene Squall” that the final scene of that episode promised us. And Batel’s fate as a guardian of order is sledgehammered into the plot of “New Life and New Civilizations” with woefully insufficient setup, to the point where it feels like a writer’s trick to get Melanie Scrofano off the show because we have to break Pike and Batel up in order to make the plot of “The Menagerie” work.
Let’s hope that season four was able to, as the show-runners promised, proceed more smoothly without distractions and interference from real-world events. And when it does air, I’ll be back to talk with y’all about it…
Bring back Chris Myers (in a different role)! Bring back Kira Guloien (in the same role or some other)!
I have a mental image of two writing teams sitting across from each other, rolling dice (12-sided, of course) to see what percentage of each episode belonged to the nostalgists vs the new-story tellers. Probably not how it actually happened.
So I’ll save a lot of my thoughts (particularly on the Vezda) for an article I’m writing next week, but overall, if I had to summarize my feelings on this season in three words, they would be “jump the shark”. I hope that I’m wrong; I hope that they can get things back on track for the fourth season; but as it sits, it’s honestly kind of incredible to me that this was written largely by the same people who did seasons 1 and 2.
“Four and Half Vulcans” is probably the worst offender, not just in terms of its bioessentialism and absolutely atrocious comedy, but in terms of what it doesn’t do: actually develop its premise. There’s some pre-warp planet that the Vulcans interacted with way back in their pre-Federation past and now the crew of the Enterprise needs to go and fix their nuclear reactor by taking some potion to actually turn themselves into Vulcans. So okay. The science is nonsensical. Whatever. Plenty of great Star Trek episodes have had terrible science, particularly where genetics are concerned. But I maintain that this could be an interesting premise! We know that Vulcan emotions are overwhelmingly strong, that it takes years to build up the mental discipline to deal with them, and now we’ve got an entire team of newly minted Vulcans who need to deal with them while accomplishing a critical mission. I maintain this should make for a good episode, and that it might have done if it were made for seasons 1 or 2. You could use it as a vehicle for philosophical exploration of the mind/body divide; nature vs. nurture; Spock’s place amongst Vulcans; all with narrative tension imposed by the mission. But here in SNW season 3, we don’t get that, because the story’s premise is just an excuse for grindingly unfunny, mean-spirited sitcom hijinks.
And a lot of episodes were like that, and not just the comedies: “Hegemony part 2” offered a chance to really throw into question everything we know about the Gorn. Nope: “stop the bad guys” plot. Even “Terrarium” (which I liked) doesn’t really give us anything on them besides, hey, some of them are okay people, and they play board games. Or take “What is Starfleet?” Why is the Federation picking sides in this war? It’s not interested in telling us. We don’t even really get a satisfying answer to the question of whether Starfleet is an imperial military because the story seems more interested in Beto’s (frankly rather trite) motivations for making the documentary in the first place. And this goes all the way up to the season finale, “New Worlds, New Civilizations”. What does it even mean for ontological evil to exist? What does it mean for a civilization to worship gods who both definitely exist and are evil? It means we should blow up their temple I guess, lol. It all just suggests a lack of interest on the parts of writers in actual exploration of their premises beyond their potential for gimmick plots. And if you’re not interested in doing this sort of exploration…why are you writing Star Trek?
Looking forward to that article, Jaime!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think I must fall into the minority that feel that “What is Starfleet?” had an excellent premise that was poorly executed, and an ending that completely missed the point when they made it about Ortegas’ annoying brother and then papering over the legimate (but poorly phrased) questions he’d been asking. This is made all the more egregious by the rumour of self-censorship/deliberately leaving pieces on the floor that may have angered the administration…
Also, I feel both the good and evil versions of Gamble were terrible, and poorly acted – his writing as Ensign Gamble exemplifies the IFLS/shallow quirkiness of modern Trek, and he didn’t have the chops (or the writing, in fairness to him) to carry off the Vezda version.
The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, A Spacetime Adventure Hour and Terrarium were the standouts for me in an otherwise just ok season.
Agreed, both about the poor execution of “What is Starfleet?” and the badly acted (and written) versions of Ensign Gamble. The Vezda version of Gamble was a badly written and acted Marvel supervillain, and there was nothing of substance to the human version. The actor did what he could, I suppose, but there was nothing there.
You realize that Trelane can likely make himself change appearance?
What does that have to do with it? The fact that Rhys Darby doesn’t look like William Campbell is not even close to being the biggest problem with that episode.
Your line about the show feeling like it was written by people who sort of remember the show is exactly how I feel every episode. It rarely feels like Trek. I know actors, writers, pretty much everyone who worked on trek has complained at some point about how limiting and constrained it can be. “No one can have conflict with each other” “Utopia’s are boring”. And yes it has it limitations but those limitations are what made Star Trek what it was. I didn’t tune it to watch space aliens with jedi powers and magic columns that are super duper evil, I watched because I wanted to explore the universe with a bunch of people that I would like to be around on a ship or station that I would want to be on. If I wanted to watch Star Wars I would watch Star Wars. Trek was science and technobabble with a dash of space navy.
This show seems to just want to write gimmick episodes and back story to things they don’t want to take the time to research without any regard for what Star Trek was. Star Trek has a tone and language that people latched onto and has followed. People stuck around for years despite not necessarily liking a Star Trek show because it still felt like Star Trek. This show at first seemed to lean into things only for it to just go off the rails I would argue earlier than this season but I am far harsher than most. Can Star Trek do high concept action and comedy? Sure, usually by accident but the track record shows that when that is the priority Star Trek tends to fail because if you go to larger or goofy you break the tone that is Star Trek.
I watched Prodigy with daughter this year. I had no expectations. I didn’t like the art style. Wasn’t a big fan of Voyager (DS9 was peak for me) but she was interested and the surprising thing was how much we both enjoyed it. It had action adventure shlock but it was filtered through the language Star Trek and it FELT like a continuation of Star Trek for a more modern sensibility. Strange New Worlds could have been that but it would rather take on all the generic tropes of modern sci-fi which means pew pew and catch phrases and very little character other than snark. If I have to hear about Pikes hair again.. I get it, you read message boards and now you want to own the joke but you don’t have to do it all the time.
But anyways, I think you are dead on with a lot of the criticism but I also thank you are being nicer to it than your criticism seems to imply.
I’ve never had a problem with poking fun at TOS. My issue with the episode is Star Trek doing it at this point in time. After seeing so many parodies and riffs and skits and so forth across the decades, I just felt it seemed old and tired — much like the franchise itself.
Tell that to Star Wars.
Oh, I’ll gladly tell that to pretty much all these old franchises keeping the 20th century on life support. But Trek is one of the more egregious examples these days, I find, what with most episodes coming across as a lot of Memory-Alpha articles mashed together and spiced up with quips and ponderous stuff about destiny and whatnot. Bleh.
In addition to the other issues raised, the writers are still forgetting to live up to the title of the show. The characters did encounter a few things that were new to them, but most of them were familiar to us, like MaybeTrelane and holodecks. (It wasn’t even an early-weirdness prototype of the holodeck, but one that worked exactly like the mature system from a century later and uses the exact same terminology.) Conversely, “Sehlat” introduced Scavengers that were new to us and seemed new to the crew, but turned out to be humans. “Four-and-a-Half” teased a new-ish world, but didn’t even let us see it.
So basically the only strange new worlds were in “Through the Lens of Time” (technically a newly discovered part of a known world, but close enough) and “Terrarium,” and the latter was just a hostile ball of rock. And “Lens” is undermined when the intriguing alien structure turns out to be just a prison for a cliched ultimate cosmic evil, and the finale further undermines anything to do with the Vezda. So for the second season in a row, those of us who want actual exploration stories are getting practically nothing.
I agree with Christopher about the lack of “strange new” in the worlds the Enterprise is visiting. Although, to be fair, that’s been an issue since TNG validated the fannish belief that the Enterprise was the flagship of Starfleet.
As I noted in comments for another article regarding this season, I think the writers and actors strikes are the chief culprit for the uneven nature of this season. With any luck, a return to relative normalcy will raise the quality level back to wheee it was in the first two seasons.
I do think that one major issue is that they’ve succumbed to the urge to tell us “how it all came to be” rather than the more interesting “here are some stories you didn’t know before.”
Yes, it seems to have become about the TOS characters as much or more than it’s about the actual characters on this series.
I think we should’ve gotten at least one more season with the status quo of season 1, just Pike and Una and their crew having episodic planet-of-the-week adventures, before they started weaving in Kirk and Scotty and so forth. But then, apparently they thought they might not even get a fourth season, so I guess that’s why they felt they had to rush it.
It’s interesting to me that this show seems to have slipped from “top of the Trek heap” to “barely getting out of its third season alive.” I do get that the Skydance merger is playing some kind of a part in all of this, but it still seems like the rug is being pulled pretty hard.
This has been a huge problem for me with the move of Trek to streaming: instead of a bunch of thematic tales, we get only a very few snippets. So when one episode is devoted to the characters, we lose the “exploration” part of what makes Trek, Trek.
That it took a full season for the fall and redemption of Michael Burnham, then another full season to place the series in its “intended all along” setting in Discovery, then leave us with only three stories (season arcs) in that setting (not to mention the resolution of “The Burn” being a stretch beyond credibility for me), feels like what they decided to do with the format short-changed the fans.
I thought Seasons one and two of SNW “felt” more like TOS (in that good, enjoyable, even nostalgic way) than any other Trek series since, maybe TNG.
“then another full season to place the series in its “intended all along” setting in Discovery”
I don’t think it was intended all along, given that DSC was on its third showrunner regime by the end of season 2. It’s where the show probably should have been set all along, but that doesn’t mean it was meant to be.
If anything, I suspect the decision was made in hopes of eventually dovetailing with the acclaimed Short Treks episode “Calypso,” set a thousand years in the future, given that the pirate character early in season 3 used the same dialect term “V’draysh” for “Federation” and thus was implicitly from the same era. But in the season 5 finale, they retconned it so that “Calypso” was actually another thousand years further ahead than we’d thought. So I don’t think any of this was planned in advance.
And I don’t quite agree that we were told only three stories. If you look at the structure of any DSC season except maybe season 1, the first half consists of standalone, episodic tales that just happen to be catalyzed by a common background element, which is a common enough format for episodic series (find the one-armed man, get off the island, find the shining planet known as Earth, etc.). It’s only in the latter half of the season that the episodes become chapters in a single continuous story.
” Trek’s latest of many attempts to riff on Hell on the Pacific.”
Pretty sure that’s Hell *In* the Pacific.
I’m likely in the minority when it comes to people who’ve been fans of this franchise for ~45 years in not really being too bothered about the lore, so those sorts of contradictions don’t really bother me (though I definitely notice them). In fact, some of the moments that worked least for me this season were where the show felt like it was trying too hard to make everything fit together with what came before, like the aforementioned conclusions of “Terrerium” and “New Life and New Civilizations.”
What does appeal to me about the franchise is, for lack of a better word, the vibe, and this is the first season of Strange New Worlds where the vibe felt off. Not terribly off—this isn’t season two of Discovery or Picard—but off enough to leave me feeling unsatisfied.
However, if Discovery and, to a lesser extent, Picard, are proof of anything, it’s that you can always get the vibe back. I agree with Christopher L. Bennett that a good start would be to return to the premise. Stop worrying so much about setting up a show that aired in the 1960s and get back to exploring those strange new worlds the excellent opening credits talk about.
I think with me, you can do whatever you want with lore if you improve on it but with this show when it comes to continuity they don’t seem to care if meshes at all or improves just that they get the easy score for nostalgia. This Kirk/Spock relationship doesn’t feel to me like what Kirk and Spock would have been like before TOS (and creates contradictions for later on) but is it an improvement? I don’t think so because instead of being an organic story its just stupid reasons for Kirk to always be around then they mind meld because they want to rush to the good part of the story when they are friends. And that’s the problem with this prequel- they want to have the tos crew be the endgame instead of doing the show we all thought that this was. It is like at some point the show got desperate and lost confidence in what they were making and started falling back on safe choices. No more SNW just member berries and doing whatever gimmick they can do to trend on social media. What? Everyone talked about the singing episode? Hey everyone, puppets! Puppets are clever and viral worthy. Pikes hair is a running gag on forums? Now look at Pikes hair. He’s a funny vulcan who acts like a conehead with even funnier hair. Share us on your apps. Please.
I think it was clear that Kirk and Spock were already friends in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” They were introduced playing chess and trading amiable banter, and it was clear from dialogue (“Have I ever mentioned you play a very irritating game of chess, Mister Spock?”) that they’d been playing together for a significant amount of time. Their conflict over Gary Mitchell mattered more because it tested their existing friendship, and at the end, Spock mended the friendship by saying “I felt for him too, Jim.”
After all, while some shows back then started with origin stories to set up a distinct situation (e.g. being lost in space or stranded on an uncharted desert isle), shows about people just doing their job week after week tended to start out with the status quo already well-established, so that the first episode could be easily interchanged with any other (and indeed “Where No Man” was aired third). So we were never shown the beginning of Kirk and Spock’s friendship; their relationship, like everything else about the show’s status quo, was already in place at the start.
I was referencing the fact that they shared memories through the mind meld and yet Kirk is shocked at things like Sybok later in life. I don’t think I would forget my best friend had a brother AND a sister. Using the mind meld to speed run to friendship wasn’t necessary. Using the mind meld period on this show isn’t necessary. Vulcan’s can do other things. It”s not like you can’t just have Spock not use it on the show at all. Using the mind meld was just another instance of baiting people for social media trends. Look at how homoerotic this is like all that slash fiction.
They have done a better job making a convincing growing relationship with Scotty so we know they can do it when they want to. We see a growing respect between them that is going slower and more organic. I just think they go about a lot of this show backwards. They have an ending and specific moments for episodes in mind and work backwards from there. They want to get Kirk and Spock to be more in line with the popular version but didn’t want to lay down the tracks for it. Which would I guess be fine I don’t have to see to the interesting story of two very different co workers become friends but if you jettison character building what are you replacing it with? What are you giving us to hold our interest instead? I would rather they balance out the fun sci fi stories. Show the crew interact with each other during the missions so I can get to know who they are and why they are friends or whatever but this show doesn’t seem to want to do that very often. You have Pike 3 seasons in talk to Mbenga on the shuttlecraft like they have been besties for years. That is great stuff BUT they did no t act that way any other time before or after that episode.
I get nervous thinking about next season now because this season seems to have taken the wrong lessons from the previous seasons and they have been in production on season 4 before this whole time before they have realized the problems. Doing interviews everywhere blaming the problems on the strike comes across disingenuous now since they are doing damage control after there has been a piling on of complaints. The strike made production issues hard on them but it’s not like a months before people got vocal they weren’t going to those same site hyping up all these same things – so they either really thought these gimmicks were good or they were puffing and if that’s the case then we get more lame gimmicks or I guess you can’t trust them and they could be puffing now.
Obviously nobody’s going to say “The upcoming episode is bad” before it comes out, since the priority is to get ratings for at least the first run. So even if they know an episode is bad, they’re not going to sabotage it ahead of time. Nobody does that. After all, creators are often the worst judges of their own work, and sometimes audiences actually like something the creators didn’t. So they give every episode a chance to perform on its own terms. It’s not deception, it’s just discretion.
I don’t think you’re in the minority about that at all. It’s just that the minority of people who do feel really strongly about continuity or whatever tend to be so loud and unrelenting about it that it creates the illusion that they’re the majority. After all, the people who care less are less motivated to speak up, so the people who do speak up will tend to be the ones with stronger opinions, particularly stronger negative ones.
I also emphatically disagree about Picard getting the vibe back in season 3. Or if anything, that season was all vibe and no substance or coherence.
Well, I did say “to a lesser extent.”
“All vibe and no substance” is a very good description for that nostalgia-fest. It was certainly nothing like as interesting as Picard’s first season (or even the best episodes of its second season).
I am not buying into the showrunners’ excuses. The atrocities against storytelling that were Those Old Scientists and Subspace Rhapsody were in Season 2, and next season they are planning to inflict muppets on us.
There has always been bad trek among the episodes worth taking my attention from a good book, but I know that after this and (The Character Assassination of Jean-Luc) Picard my girlfriend has given up on Star Trek entirely.
Part of what upsets me is that they can do a good job when they put their minds to it. Now, if they could make a series up to the standards the Star Wars (a children’s show, let’s not forget) writers achieved with Andor, I would be much happier.
Personally, I feel the show is at a similar situation as the latter seasons of TNG, where given its episodic approach, you could get episodes reaching the highest highs while also getting the lowest lows, going from something like “Aquiel” to the superlative “Face of the Enemy”. Same here, where I consider “What is Starfleet?” to be SNW as its peak to immediately getting “Four-and-a-half Vulcans” the following week. It’s the nature of being episodic. Not that there aren’t other flaws worth addressing.
As brought up in the other SNW article, I certainly feel some of these issues could have been smoothed over, had the show been allowed more than 10 episodes a season. We do get some excellent character work this season, especially when it comes to Ortegas and Una. Meanwhile, we have gotten very little of M’Benga this year, and even Pike himself felt like a afterthought. The reason the Batel storyline didn’t land nearly as strongly as it should have is because – more than anything else – we’ve spent very little time with them. And of course, it’s telling that the writers weren’t expecting a fourth season and beyond. That finale was very much designed as a series ender. And with only 10 episodes a year, it’s hard to build momentum and flesh out everything that needs extra work and screentime. And just when you want more, it’s already over, and there isn’t enough time left to fix any story flaws that could have been rectified in a longer season.
But it’s good that Goldsman and Alonso Myers are mindful of audience reception. I’m not so sure they have time to implement any potential changes in season 4 though. As I understand, was mostly written before this year even debuted. So it’s season 5 that would presumably be recipient to deeper changes. I don’t know either way, We’ll find out next year when S4 arrives.
The authors comments about the writers not remembering the original series episodes is rich, SMH. First, TOS was always full of self contradictions. Apparently, he forgot that the Metrons basically erased memories of the Gorn. That Q or Trelaine erased the memories of everyone at the wedding. These actions firmly place everything back into the timeline. While the “Trelaine” episode wasn’t fantastic, it got at least a B grade from me. Not a single episode I didn’t enjoy.
Nobody’s memories were erased in “Wedding Bell Blues.” I just checked the transcript — Pike directly commented on the strange “shared delusion” right after the aliens left, and La’an remembered Spock’s wedding speech.
Of course, the alien was never actually identified as Trelane, so it’s not necessarily a contradiction on that point, but there are other problems. Everyone forgets that Trelane didn’t have Q-like powers; all his tricks were the result of his technology, and he was powerless without his machines. This is what Keith meant about the writers basing it on vague memories rather than checking the facts. Not to mention that building an entire episode around rehashing a character from one of TOS’s weaker episodes was just boring. It didn’t give us anything new and wasn’t worth spending an entire 10% of the season on, any more than “Four and a Half Vulcans” was.
I also wonder if the “Trelane is a Q,” thing just perpetuates itself–like if people are remembering “Q-Squared” more than “Squire of Gothos.”
The other thing I thought was weird–and I may be misremembering as well–is that the reason Trelane dressed as he did and had all the trappings of his setting is that he was observing Earth as it was in the distant past, due to light-based instruments. So to have this character here acting like a flamboyant 20th-century wedding planner seems anachronistic. It also implies simply having a Q-like knowledge of all of Earth history, rather than simply having observed Earth.
The novel-reading audience is a tiny fraction of the TV- or movie-viewing audience, so the writers of “Wedding Bell Blues” may not even have been aware of Q-Squared. It’s more likely that the writers of the book and the episode independently arrived at the same assumption based on the superficial similarities between Trelane and Q (even though the many contradictions between them should have ruled it out).
And yes, the implication that the Wedding Planner is Trelane is irreconcilable with “The Squire of Gothos”‘s depiction of Trelane’s lack of knowledge of Earth — just one of the many reasons the episode was ill-conceived. Although, again, they didn’t explicitly say he was Trelane, so he could have been a different individual of the same species or a similar one.
My assumption is that THIS Trelane is actually “older” than the one we met in “Squire of Gothos.” I base this on a single line of dialogue that he gives to Spock that heavily implies that he has met him before. If time isn’t linear for the Q, wouldn’t it stand to reason that it isn’t for Trelane either? I can handwave by pointing out that THIS Trelane wasn’t reliant on machinery, while the “Squire” one was, implying that his powers have grown since his “first” encounter with the Enterprise crew.
It seems simpler to assume it’s just another individual of the same species. Officially the character isn’t Trelane, he’s just the Wedding Planner. (Memory Alpha has gone all-in with the assumption that they’re the same character and are also a Q, which I emphatically disagree with, since it’s based on behind-the-scenes statements of the producers rather than anything actually appearing onscreen, and thus is non-canonical conjecture that has no place on Memory Alpha.)
And no, it doesn’t even remotely stand to reason that Trelane’s species has anywhere near the same power level as the Q. I’ll never understand that tendency of both audience and writers alike to assume that every species significantly more advanced than humanity has to be on an identical godlike level. It seems clear to me that there’s more of a hierarchy, with some more advanced than others. The Q are at the peak, the Douwd are close to that level, then the Organians, and so on. There’s nothing in “The Squire of Gothos” to suggest that Trelane’s species is particularly high on the list, since they explicitly depend on advanced technology to achieve their feats. Yes, they’re incorporeal, but we’ve seen a number of incorporeal species that don’t have magical or godlike abilities, such as Medusans or the Wisps from ENT: “The Crossing.”
But then, SNW’s writers did the same thing with the Metrons. There’s not one thing to suggest that the Metrons in “Arena” are incorporeal or godlike; they’re just advanced. The sparkly effect around the Metron in “Arena” was just the shiny costume reflecting sunlight into the dang camera lens. But a lot of fans and a tie-in writer or two have lumped them in with the godlike incorporeal species, and now SNW has made that absolutely unsubstantiated assumption canonical. People just assume every super-advanced civilization is exactly alike, which is a profound failure of imagination and worldbuilding.
Heck, while we’re at it, this even happened with the Q. In “Encounter at Farpoint,” the Q were implicitly limited to the region of space the Enterprise-D was entering, which is why they hadn’t taken an interest in the Federation until then, and they needed a forcefield-globe “spaceship” to pursue the Enterprise, rather than just being able to teleport anywhere at will. They were extremely advanced, but there were limits defined in the pilot that were subsequently ignored, because of the lazy tendency to assume that every powerful being is infinitely powerful.
Given that the writers have lamented not having enough episodes in the past, it’s kind of weird to me what stories did make the cut; thinking also of the zombie episode.
I guess I’m just a flat out weirdo. I’m enjoying the season like I’ve enjoyed all the episodes. Are they good? Some of them. Are they great? A couple here and there. Honestly I appreciate them and they’re touchstones back to the original series. I actually wish they wouldn’t be so hamstrung by TOS. I think this could be an amazing show but we are stuck with the concept that Pike is going to die and turn into a head on a cabinet (I mean seriously how messed up is he that he has to roll around in a cabinet). That caused one of the greatest losses to the series in my opinion and that was Melanie Scrofano because yes they did have to get her the hell out of the way so that Pike can vegetate the rest of his days.
I wish people could separate some things from other things and just enjoy them for what they’re worth. And since there’s someone that always wants to know my bona fides, Yes I watch the OG series on repeat in the 70’s