Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x05 "Charades"
LoglineA shuttle accident leads to Spock’s Vulcan DNA being removed by aliens, making him fully human and completely unprepared to face T’Pring’s family during an important ceremonial dinner.
That’s exactly what it is. They have an extremely narrow and boring definition of what Star Trek is “supposed” to be, and revolt against anything that steps outside that, be it comedy, action, whatever.
Some of the criticisms fall in another category of beating on SNW’s alleged canon ‘violations’.
These include assertions that Chapel ‘isn’t the same person’ as she doesn’t have the same temperament/personality as in TOS, Uhura not having met or known of T’Pring before Amok Time, etc., Spock would have been ashamed to have eaten animal products (bacon), T’Pring’s ears have the wrong shape
While I can be quite critical of incoherence in plot threads or characters within a single show, especially in a single season (say in Discovery season two or every season of Picard), to me that’s a problem in how a set of writers are telling a specific story.
I’ve come to realize that the fans who just can’t get past continuity changes they can’t resolve immediately across the entire history of the franchise just aren’t going to enjoy SNW as much as I am.
I classify these inflexibilities as:
— not being open to the possibility that the characters may grow and change,
— not being open to the possibility of characters being unreliable narrators or saying things ironically in later shows (e.g., in TOS Uhura might tweak Spock about T’Pring to press him to identify who she is, even if she personally knew exactly who she was),
— refusing to accept that minor changes in timing, visual design, technology and characters are possible due to intertemporal interference as long as the Prime continuity maintains key/essential events.
In the end, hanging out here to have conversations with folks who are a bit more flexible is a better choice for me.
Identifying potentially unreliable narrators is such an underrated strategy! So a character says “The Federation has never encountered this race/phenomenon before.” Off to Memory Alpha to state this as fact! But of course, people state beliefs as facts, incorrectly, all the time in real life!
I find the implicit assumption that everything onscreen is ‘fact’ exasperating.
More episodes than not depend on guest or recurring characters providing inaccurate, incomplete or outright deceptive information. In many cases, the plot hangs on whether the hero crew can deduce or find more evidence about what’s actually going on.
To assume that everything not directly contradicted in an episode is true is boggling.
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