I've grown more fond of this Kirk the more we see of him. The actor has settled into the role pretty quickly and manages to show the action Kirk and the brains Kirk well. The best moment of Kirkism I saw in this episode was the moment of shock when he found out in the original timeline his brother was alive, and that after that moment he is totally on board with restoring the original timeline.
@@dm121984This is definitely gonna sound heretical, but I wouldnt mind seeing Paul Wesley's Kirk take the reins of another show with Ethan Peck's Spock, Celia Rose-Gooding's Uhura, and Martin Quinn's Scotty. I wont be surprised if SNW S3 or the like will introduce a new McCoy, Sulu and Chekov.
@@myriadmediamusings it could work, effectively a remake of TOS. I personally would have liked to have seen more of the time after TNG/DS9/VOY, though tbf, Discovery did jump to that future's far future. Picard did the future after TNG but I gather season 2 was bad and season 3 was good but overly nostalgic.
@@myriadmediamusings No thanks. We already have TOS, TAS, 6 movies (and the beginning of the 7th), hundreds of comics and counting, hundreds of novels and counting, and untold fan series and video games and everything else, plus a whole alternate timeline with 3 more movies and related multimedia adventures. I love Kirk and crew dearly, but TNG proved you can do Star Trek without them. New characters, ships, times, settings et al please.
"Like if every ship were to suddenly explode" Well that sounds like raeally stupid and unimaginative plot point that should be prevented by the Federations established future people with not only supremely advanced tech, but time travel.
Or, if all else fails, have an mechanism that ejects the warp core and tanks in the event of an emergency. Have emergency shields that can contain an explosion until it can vent. Mmm. Nah, who would ever need to do that?
@@myriadmediamusingsTop tier Star Trek moment for sure, it has a bit of everything. Payoff for a long running gag, an establishing moment for Boimler and Shax, and a badass move in a final fight against a superior foe.
Glad your take on this one is similar to mine in that it's logically flawed but despite that it's pretty dang enjoyable. I love Tick Tock Tomalok especially. She's just great both before and after the reveal. Her annoyance and being so very done with temporal civil war bullshit is just brilliant.
@@ptonpc This makes me want a comedy short about a Trek crewman stuck in the past and somehow missing all the major time travel events that have happened over the series lifetime.
This episode made Kirk being born in Riverside, Iowa canon. No other series or movies stated that before now. Shatner-Kirk said he was from Iowa, but he didn’t say Riverside. Kelvin-Kirk grew up in Riverside, but was born on the Kelvin It’s been accepted as soft-canon for a long time, but it was never hard canon until this episode.
Amongst Torontonians, the joke wasn't that the bridge went over budget, it's that it was built at all. We are currently being gaslit by the company hired to create a streetcar line across Eglinton, with them saying, "Progress takes time." and parodies of them going, "It's been THIRTEEN YEARS, Deborah!"
"it's okay, my wife laughed." Lol is it dumb that you saying that actually did make me feel better? I was worried for a second! Loved this episode, loved this season, it's the first time since I was a teenager that a live action Trek thing really made me fall in love with the show again. Great review too!
This one is the best of the season for me. La'an full on breaking down ugly crying at the end hits so hard. And I'm a sucker for a good time travel story, and this one was. And it places SNW (and DSC) into an alternate timeline, so... no more canon issues! Under the Cloak of War (208) is the second best episode for me.
Thanks, Chuck. I think that either the time traveler La'an meets at the beginning or the one who visits her at the end should have been Crewman Daniels from ENT.
I really liked this one too. It bet big kn La'an's actress selling the relationship with Kirk's actor and won big. And i think this was a case where the relationship wasn't necessarily doomed. With time fuckery, there was a real chance the Kirk of United Earth could have ended up in the original timeline or the Kirks would merge memories or something. After all, we're led to believe in TOS that kirk had several important relationships in the past, it would be consistent with the existing lore if La'an was one of them that just never came up in TOS. When Kirk was shoot, i was hoping against hope he'd survive, but knew at that point he was dead.
@@Azure_Fire No, in "The Void" video SFDebris said "You've basically redone Voyager without incompetence". Sorry if I mislead you, English is not my first language. Maybe "to parody" or "to pay homage" would be better. I don't know his thoughts on Picard's second season, but I doubt he liked it considering his view on Discovery and dumb plot points in general. I wonder if he will make a reference to "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" about how similar stories can be done. But we'll just have to wait and see when we'll get to it. I'm sure the queue of requested reviews and just stuff we wants to do first is only a mile long by now)
Yes, the modern military does have plans like this. It's part of the coursework for officers at West Point that they have to draw up plans for some eventuality. But they have to be UNIQUE plans, so they can't double-up on what someone else already did. Of course, students over time quickly exhausted the more probable situations like Canada invades the United States via the Texas coastline so they had to go to more extreme situations in order to find a unique strategy. And the military keeps all these plans, so we have tons of strategies for different types of alien, zombie, plant people, mermen, time travel, the entire army gets cloned and but they're evil, etc. attacks sitting around just in case.
When I saw Little Miss Romulan, that thing happened where I recognized the actor (Adelaide Kane, she of 'Power Rangers RPM' and 'Reign') and concluded from her first scene that she must be the villain they're looking for.
While I don't know if the government has prepared what to do in case of temporal disturbances, there IS an official U.S. military contingency plan on what to do in case a zombie apocalypse happens.
Ah yes, good ol' "Geneva Suggestions" Canada & their human genetic modification program. . . . I've been watching too many ex-military RU-vidrs lately.
Definitely one of those episodes that I know I shouldnt like because of how it changes up things again, but at the same time, I dunno, I enjoyed it. I always liked the beta canon explanation of the eugenics wars actually being fought clandestinely, so this explanation here of things being pushed back because of temporal hijinks and justifying things not lining up in real life feels like overcompensating. Next thing we'll see is the Bell Riots changing because its already 2024 and things havent happened...yet anyway. On another minor note, the Romulan agent here is played by Adeliane Kane, who some may know as Tenaya 7 from Power Rangers RPM. This makes her the 2nd PR alum to be in Star Trek, first being Hilary Shepherd Turner who played one of the mutants in DS9. She was in Power Rangers Turbo as Divatox.
I initially groaned at the premise, but greatly enjoyed the episode. But yeah, the shuffling timeline thing is... so unnecessary. Just accept that all of Trek is an alternate history from our own; no need to over-complicate the setting to make it "fit."
I have no particular feeling about the retcon either way, but I think using time travel to retcon the timeline's incongruity with ours (or to correct or explain its internal inconsistencies) is the most useful purpose of time travel in Trek that I've seen so far. I hate time travel.
She is actually the third or alumni in Star Trek as the actor who played Sky Tate in power rangers spd played an officer aboard the uss shenzhou and it’s mirror counterpart in season one of Star Trek discovery
Meh. With all the homelessness and protests and general unrest in America these days, it'd be frighteningly easy for something like the Bell riots to not get a spotlight. A war between genetically engineered super people that had one man ruling a quarter of the Earth in 1996 going unnoticed is much harder to suspend disbelief on.
Star Trek: Prodigy head writer and executive producer Aaron Waltke has previously offered a similar explanation for the confusing placement of the Eugenics Wars, saying that "the ripples of the Temporal Cold War shifted the Prime Timeline in Enterprise."
Overall a good episode. Probably its biggest feat was winning me over on Paul Wesley. Even if he doesn't exactly have Kirk's physique he certainly has his charm and that's more important. My one major complaint is the rewrites to the timeline. I don't like the idea of Star Trek becoming Doctor Who where established lore is changed at the drop of a hat. I can accept the Enterprise looking different, but just because the 90s have passed us by that doesn't mean you have to treat the Eugenics Wars like some near-future event. I've since decided to headcanon that this episode was part of a much larger Temporal War operation that ultimately resulted in the timeline being restored to what we learned in TOS. After all, if we look at this chronologically, the only logical reason for Spock to say the war still happened in the 90s, with this episode as a part of his established past, was if they did indeed restore the timeline.
Yes, there is a plan for everything. Unfortunately, no plan survives contact with the enemy, metaphorically speaking. After that, you have to make it up as you go.
Hurray, the timeline is saved! Now we're back in the peaceful utopia of the Federation and we can look forwards to oops here's a thousand years of fear, xenophobia and isolationism. Thanks Discovery!
@@dupersuper1938 I don't like Discovery but obviously the Federation will be restored fully before the show ends. There's no harm in accepting it as part of canon.
SNW keeps presenting Romulans as this overwhelming physical threat that the Federation can barely hold off. It's a big shift from the chess masters they were in TNG. I wonder if its because the studio doesn't believe audiences can see cunning foes as dangerous.
@@GrandArchPriestOfTheAlgorithm But every villain in nuTrek is an over-powering threat. Takuva's order, Control, the Admonition, and the Jade Syndicate. The threats are so powerful that the only way the Federation wins is either a cop-out or dues ex machina.
Thé Khan timeline never made any sense to me, even in the original series. Khan was supposedly the product of selective breeding, not test tube genetic manipulation, so to have his powers would have required multiple generations. However the Botany Bay left in 1996 and Montalban was in his 40s during space seed, so that eugenics program must have been going on for decades, even if we assume it started in the sixties and that the sleeper ship obeys thunder cats rules and they kept aging, Khan should only be the second generation of this program and thus not likely to be as super smart/strong as the character is.
Khan in _TOS_ doesn't have super blood or anything; he just believes he's superior to run of the mill people. And, in part because of selective breeding, he hit the jackpot in the genetic lottery, and had a background that intentionally maximized his opportunities to fulfill those genetic legacies. Maybe something besides the silly movie retconned him into something superhuman, but I've never seen the character that way.
The Temporal Cold War seems like a gift that keeps on giving when it comes to explaining events and missing characters. Explained what happened with the Eugenics War and presumably WW3 and explained what happened with the Guardian of Forever. That said kinda annoys me the "floating timeline" sort of thing Trek is doing similar to Terminator was doing until they hit the reboot button (that was the same anyway, just different names), important events like the Eugenics War and Judgement Day are inevitable but can be delayed. I feel they just need to acknowledge Trek is an alternate timeline to ours rather then trying to insist its our future.
I wonder, are there perhaps any Star Trek novels or comics where the crew time-travels back to the 90's to see the actual Eugenics Wars as it's happening?
This episode continues the tradition of NuTrek of having the (pre-established) side characters be more interesting than the main ones. It's almost as if the writers are ashamed of their own original characters. One thing that bothered me was the duo somehow managing to cross the US-Canadian border not once, but twice, right after a major terror bombing happened, with the only handwave given being "they bribed the border guards", which... sorry, it's utter bullshit. They could have just have Pelia's "doomsday bunker" be in Canada instead of Vermont, and it won't have affected the plot in any way, since them crossing the border has no effect on the story.
Despite my criticism of the show as a whole, this is very much a favourite of mine. I think Christina Chong and Paul Wesley really knocked it out of the park and think any logical flaws pale next to the strength of their acting. Chong can *really* sell ugly crying, too.
Your summation at the end is spot on. There are a lot of logic issues, like the chess money or how they get to and from the US so fast. But the character stuff is gold. La'an's always been a bit meh for me. Decent, but not great. And while I still like most of the other characters a bit more, she's far closer now than she was, as S2, especially this episode, help to grow her character and make some cracks in the hard shell she's put up. It's great.
I watched both seasons recently and was pleasantly surprised. Unlike the venereal disease, this actually seems to be trying to be Star Trek. I do hope the engineer stays for a while. EDIT: Typos
I just don't know why they couldn't have the Eugenics Wars stay in the 90s. _Star Trek_ is an alternate history and future to our own, it isn't our _actual_ history, after all. It's just such a dumb precedent to set. Imagine if a new _Trek_ show is made in 2064, and someone says "whelp, the Vulcans didn't come and make first contact with us IRL, so now first contact happens in 2100!" It just feels like one of those slimy corporate moves because they wanted to shoehorn young Khan into a story, but didn't want to spend, or didn't have the budget to make it look like a period piece, because Khan would have realistically been a child in the 50s/60s. Is it really necessary to have La'an literally face-to-face with Khan to have her confront her heritage? I know the story is really about La'an and Kirk, but when they go out of their way to shine such a light on this point, it's jarring and stands out.
It's part of the conceit of the show that it's our future. It was never meant to have an alternate history, the writers of the show in the 60s just never imagined it would keep going into the 90s and beyond.
@@dupersuper1938: I was mostly joking, I think that you are taking those things too seriously. At the time of writing those dates were still in the future by a couple of decades. They just wanted to use a future date that doesn't seem to distant. The main issue with this approach is that time travel episodes typically go to close to the present day of writing (makes shooting easier). I can forgive the writers in the 60's that they were not expecting that Star Trek is still a thing more than half a century later. At least with most of the later references (Irish unifications, Bell riots, ...) they are focusing on local not global events, which are easier to get around. Star Trek has many different writers and show runners and not all of them consider canon as that important as there is no overall direction/lore bible that puts constraints on them. They have an idea for a story so they try to tell it (and then attempt to fit it in the rest of the world of Star Trek).
She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. - To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. - Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
Man, the watch being set off by radiation was so dumb. If a power plant radiates so badly up multiple concrete floors a watch starts glowing you know you're having a Chernobyl situation on hand... The Eugenics War being slowly pushed forward and forward until it essentially will get erased from being anything important in Trek just because the showrunners want to skimp out on sets and want to put things in the modern day on the cheap is something that makes me sad. It would've been so much more interesting if we got that war actually happening when it was originally supposed to and any skip to the present day would be in an inter-war period where things are turning really dark before we get our optimistic Trek future. Like heck, when are we supposed to start dressing like Q from that vision of the past from the start of TNG? I'd love to see more of that time rather than "modern day looking normal so we don't have to make a set or pay for CGI"... Otherwise, a pretty neat episode...
Bro that's the first thing I asked myself when watching this episode. 💀 I mean did he hustle the contents of Fort Knox out of that guy? They ended up in this gorgeous penthouse apartment .... Magically! and he got that from hustling poor old dudes in the park? I mean wow what am I doing wrong I need to become smart and learn chess real fast I'm over here slumming like it's going outta style! I mean what the f is this somebody's idea of a joke? 💀 Now if they had gotten a cheap motel room I could see that but this? And by the way usually apartment applications take more than one day to go through, even if he claims no previous rental history, and what about his source of income? but we'll just forget about all those inconvenient little details. Actually they could have made it a little bit more believable had they cared if they simply said they rented an air BNB room, but no way would it have been as grand as the one they showed. That seemed threw me out so hard at first I thought I missed something. I was asking myself if they won the lottery when I wasn't looking or something... ☠️
Hey, I got a question. Where the fuck does that bridge go? If it's going to the states then all it's doing is taking a direct rout to Niagara Falls. I mean it's nice to cut out an hours drive but I just don't see how that benefits anyone. It's not like you can ship goods as you're arriving right in to Downtown core and will make sure that any trucks headed in will be stuck in traffic hell.
This seems another of those things that they didn't really think about when they moved it from NYC. As long as it wasn't an international bridge there. But a bridge from Toronto to the south is going to take an hour or more to cross... and that's assuming you're going around 100 kph _and_ that straight shot south will land you in Ontario, west of the Niagara River. Straight across the lake gets you a little bit further east, but still not to the US side of the border... and as you move the south end further and further east, you start crossing deeper and deeper water while making the bridge longer and longer.
I admit that I actually came from a different direction. It was something that popped up with Harlan Ellison doing B5, I don't remember how but I had "Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktockman," and I wanted to call G'kar Ticktock-Tomalak, but I couldn't quite stick the landing. But when I get these jokes I can't make work, they stick in my head, so when trying to come up with a name for a Romulan influencer, it now popped up as Tiktoc Tomalak. Sometimes I guess a gag is like a fine wine that needs time. :-)
The problem with this episode and much of modern Trek is that you don't have to make the Trek timeline into our timeline. So, in 20 years when Khan and the Eugenics Wars don't happen again, you kick it down the road again? That doesn't work; and, it doesn't here. Leave the Trek timeline, the Trek timeline. Don't make it our timeline. And how does Khan become Canadian?
I think Khan was just living in Toronto, not born there. But more importantly, for your consideration: This is a main timeline show so that means Space Seed happens with the events of this episode officially in its past. However Spock still says the Eugenics Wars still happened during the 90s, which contradicts what this episode changed. The only way to keep things consistent is if something else happened that restored the timeline to what it should be. My headcanon is that there's a larger temporal operation going on in the background of this episode that's going to do that. But I fully agree, don't turn Trek into Doctor Who.
I haven't been watching this show, and it doesn't look like I'm missing much. I wonder who came up with the brilliant idea of casting a stunt double for Jim Carrey as Captain Kirk?
I'm greatly torn between liking this episode and knowing it's probably someone's fanfic to ship these characters and they slipped in the script pile. Guess I can't dump on this show evert week.
I mean look this is all fantasy why do fans and writers even care about it matching up with our actual history because like- obviously that's not going to happen? Lol. I mean let's not confuse the line between fantasy and reality here. We have a fantasy history set up that certain future events are going to happen in this fictional universe. It doesn't really matter when they are said to happen (in this fiction) because again this is all in our heads. Lol. So let's leave them alone or change them as necessary to fit the various fictional "facts" as we know them. So let's just rewrite these timelines in our headcanon and be happy! Lol Why do the eugenics wars have to be secret? Why don't we just reset this to be something that happens in the 2080s lol??? (I mean who cares when it actually happens none of this is real 😂 lol) Since nothing like this is ever going to happen in reality other than possibly WW3 we can set it for any time we want in our fictional mental timeline. 2060s to 2090s sounds good to me!
Not a whole lot of people seem to be that worried about it meshing with real life. The complaint is that it doesn't mesh with itself. And if it doesn't take itself seriously, if continuity doesn't matter, it's suddenly difficult to have stakes because next episode or after the ad break or whatever may have nothing to do with what they just showed us.
@@boobah5643 I understand. Internal consistency matters. I haven't watched enough SNW yet to see if I feel it meshes up enough with the previous series established canon or not. I take your point tho.
something changed on earth and somehow the Romulans are a super power instead of similarly primitive to humanity when they first encountered each other. this is why I despise "alt-history". it's always that spaghetti from The Flash.
Well in this case, I'd assume that given how there is no Federation and Earth is still covered in Cinders, The Vulcans alone weren't strong enough to check Romulan expansion, having fewer resources and allies, especially with a weakened humanity. Though to really sell this, they'd need a much more primitive enterprise to highlight that humans were set back further than the original WW3 timeline.
The rom-com is stupid. More importantly, the whole falling in love plotline doesn't have much to do with La'an saving Khan. And it really doesn't have anything to do with the procedural of finding out about the evil Romulan. It's three separate storylines. And each one has its own stupidity. The idea that someone would be prejudiced against la'an because of her last name would be like people not liking me because my name was Napoleon. Also, our last common ancestor is only a thousand years ago. That is, all 9 billion of us are related to someone who lived a thousand years ago. There must be hundreds and hundreds of people on earth who have DNA from God knows how many genetic Superman and experiments there were. Lastly, she could just change her name. Also, even if this was a big thing for her then why does she just give it in a line of exposition that is nowhere shown to us? So not only is it a plot hole or a "character hole" it's also just badly written. The procedural is also flawed because Sarah shows them a picture of the Romulan war bird. Clearly her character was two different characters that they merged together for contrived drama. And then we can talk about her leaving the gun with a child and why Sarah didn't shoot her in the beginning. Lastly, aside from ripping a city on the forever or Star Trek 4, It is not possible to think that this episode is consistent with what we know about Khan and the eugenics Wars and the state of the country at that time. That is simply not how it happened. They didn't get together a con noonian Sing institute and have 12 children raised there. There was lots of genetic experimentation and it occurred across the planet and these men all fought each other for dominance. That is the picture you got from real Star Trek. But I realize that's kind of a minor criticism for those who don't really care about old Star Trek. And remember we're already asked to suspend our disbelief that a little watch can show us anything, and time travel and everything else.
God I hate this episode. Focusing on legacy characters instead of exploring new ones and new worlds, the "best of all possible worlds" narrative about Khan's necessary existence (as a genocidal maniac) in order for the Federation to exist, the discourse about the timeline we know being the """best""" timeline, EVERYTHING I HATE about stories with time travel. Kirk was OK for letting his version be erased of existence, but La'an has issues being erased from existence by a "grandparent-paradox" ? If killing Hitler prevents my birth, I'd still go for that paradox because I don't FUCKING believe I'm the Alpha and the Omega of the Universe !!!
