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4thofelevenSo I said at the end of last season that Strange New Worlds had lost me as a viewer, and that was true. I didn't bother with season two at all, and nothing I've heard made me regret that choice.
But then I heard that the season finale was a cliffhanger, and, well, it drew me back in. By the time I got into Star Trek, the TNG two-parters had all long since been spoiled for me, and even in the late 90s, by the time new episodes of DS9 or Voyager aired in Australia, American viewers were already a season ahead. So I wanted to have the cliffhanger experience for once, to be on the same page as everyone else. So, yeah, I watched “Hegemony”. And...
...yeah, I don't think I'll bother with part two. Why? Well, here's a bit of dialogue from early in the episode:
“I'd appreciate another chance to study them [the Gorn] up close.”
“With a phaser?”
“How else would we determine how best to kill them?”
“I would like to aid in that study.”
This is, for the record, the ship's exobiologist and the ship's doctor sounding like characters from Warhammer 40,000's Imperium. There is a token moment later in the episode, where Pike says that there should be a way to communicate with the Gorn, but no effort is actually made to do so. Instead, we get a rehash of the monster movie cliches that turned me off the show last season, with the Gorn compared to 'locusts', instinctively swarming, communicating only through snarls, and the crew picking off their children – disconcertingly referred to as 'younglings' throughout. I would suggest that the script writer consider whether or not they really intended the protagonists to be written as analogous to Anakin Skywalker...
Now, you can argue that perhaps there's meant to be a bit of dramatic irony here – that we, the audience, know the Gorn aren't just savage monsters. Except there's a point where you need to have a payoff for that irony, and Strange New Worlds has now spent multiple episodes not doing that. If the conclusion to this story arc is meant to be Pike and the crew realising they were wrong about the Gorn, they're taking a very long time to get there, and even if they are, that's a story that was done in forty-five minutes sixty years ago, and in the meantime, the entire cast is being written as all too eager to write off a sapient species as something to be exterminated.
On top of that... it's not even very good as a monster movie. “All Those Who Wander” had issues, but it at least kept the tension up. It was a shallow pastiche of Aliens, but at least it understood what made Aliens work as a horror film. “Hegemony” just makes inexplicable decisions, like trying to built tension over whether Nurse Chapel had survived the Gorn attack, or having the crew stranded on the planet spend time trying to solve the problem of disabling the Gorn interference, even as we already know the crew on the Enterprise are already dealing with that issue.
There's lazy writing, like how once we finally establish Chapel is alive, the script and characters lose all interest in finding any other survivors on the wreck of the Cayuga. Or the peculiar choice to spell out in dialogue that the Parnassus colony is specifically designed to resemble a mid-western small town in the United States, which seems unnecessary – almost all of the shots of the colony are at night, with much of it in ruins, so I doubt most viewers would even have noticed that they're reusing sets from a contemporary television show. But by making it explicitly small-town Americana, it adds another unfortunate metaphor to the concept of it coming under siege by 'savages' from the 'frontier'.
And then there's the cliffhanger itself – Pike is ordered to withdraw by Starfleet just after discovering the Gorn have kidnapped hundreds of colonists and crew. The music swells, the camera zooms in... and Pike looks lost and confused, even as Una and other characters ask him for orders.
That's what's meant to draw us back in? The question of whether Pike is going to get his shit together and take control of the situation?
No, I do not understand the creative choices being made here, and outside of a sort of morbid curiosity, I don't think I'll be dipping my toes back into this corner of the franchise.
But then I heard that the season finale was a cliffhanger, and, well, it drew me back in. By the time I got into Star Trek, the TNG two-parters had all long since been spoiled for me, and even in the late 90s, by the time new episodes of DS9 or Voyager aired in Australia, American viewers were already a season ahead. So I wanted to have the cliffhanger experience for once, to be on the same page as everyone else. So, yeah, I watched “Hegemony”. And...
...yeah, I don't think I'll bother with part two. Why? Well, here's a bit of dialogue from early in the episode:
“I'd appreciate another chance to study them [the Gorn] up close.”
“With a phaser?”
“How else would we determine how best to kill them?”
“I would like to aid in that study.”
This is, for the record, the ship's exobiologist and the ship's doctor sounding like characters from Warhammer 40,000's Imperium. There is a token moment later in the episode, where Pike says that there should be a way to communicate with the Gorn, but no effort is actually made to do so. Instead, we get a rehash of the monster movie cliches that turned me off the show last season, with the Gorn compared to 'locusts', instinctively swarming, communicating only through snarls, and the crew picking off their children – disconcertingly referred to as 'younglings' throughout. I would suggest that the script writer consider whether or not they really intended the protagonists to be written as analogous to Anakin Skywalker...
Now, you can argue that perhaps there's meant to be a bit of dramatic irony here – that we, the audience, know the Gorn aren't just savage monsters. Except there's a point where you need to have a payoff for that irony, and Strange New Worlds has now spent multiple episodes not doing that. If the conclusion to this story arc is meant to be Pike and the crew realising they were wrong about the Gorn, they're taking a very long time to get there, and even if they are, that's a story that was done in forty-five minutes sixty years ago, and in the meantime, the entire cast is being written as all too eager to write off a sapient species as something to be exterminated.
On top of that... it's not even very good as a monster movie. “All Those Who Wander” had issues, but it at least kept the tension up. It was a shallow pastiche of Aliens, but at least it understood what made Aliens work as a horror film. “Hegemony” just makes inexplicable decisions, like trying to built tension over whether Nurse Chapel had survived the Gorn attack, or having the crew stranded on the planet spend time trying to solve the problem of disabling the Gorn interference, even as we already know the crew on the Enterprise are already dealing with that issue.
There's lazy writing, like how once we finally establish Chapel is alive, the script and characters lose all interest in finding any other survivors on the wreck of the Cayuga. Or the peculiar choice to spell out in dialogue that the Parnassus colony is specifically designed to resemble a mid-western small town in the United States, which seems unnecessary – almost all of the shots of the colony are at night, with much of it in ruins, so I doubt most viewers would even have noticed that they're reusing sets from a contemporary television show. But by making it explicitly small-town Americana, it adds another unfortunate metaphor to the concept of it coming under siege by 'savages' from the 'frontier'.
And then there's the cliffhanger itself – Pike is ordered to withdraw by Starfleet just after discovering the Gorn have kidnapped hundreds of colonists and crew. The music swells, the camera zooms in... and Pike looks lost and confused, even as Una and other characters ask him for orders.
That's what's meant to draw us back in? The question of whether Pike is going to get his shit together and take control of the situation?
No, I do not understand the creative choices being made here, and outside of a sort of morbid curiosity, I don't think I'll be dipping my toes back into this corner of the franchise.
no subject
on 2023-08-19 02:37 pm (UTC)Sounds like a good time to rewatch "The Devil in the Dark," but when isn't it. I can't believe we have to turn to the 1960s for the "maybe let's not kill kids" message.