Written by: Onitra Johnson & Bill Wolkoff
Directed by: Dan Liu
I am glad the crew didn’t just go on a zombie shooting spree, but all that did was make the Klingons do it instead. Wish we could have seen them save the zombies or at least tell us they’ll work with the Klingons to do something about the planet or put a new warning message, etc. if they are made of moss why do they explode with blood when shot?
The flowers were cool.
I think what I’m missing was some depth, all this stuff happened but not really full explanations for things that aren’t intended to be mysteries.
Let the doctor be a doctor without him having to also be a superhero imo
I’m not trying to pick the whole episode apart but it was also confusing we didn’t know where they were in the building fully, it was hard to follow. They were in what felt like basement then suddenly on the roof of a tall building.
Best thing in the ep is the slap on Spocks face by nurse Chapel.
She tooks impulse to execute, very solid slap.
This season the relation between Chapel and Spock has taken a 180, and was so sudden and so bad executed that Im not enjoying this season as much for now
in TOS, so several years after this episode, M’Benga knows to repeatedly slap Spock in the face to get him out that week’s Vulcan bullshit.
it’s a reliable treatment!
I was happy that Nurse Gamble made it out of that scene alive. I had a bad feeling that Spock was going to mess him up.
Eugenics and genetic engineering is bad, but exotic material to hybrid a human with an alien species might be ok? Seems odd after they gave shit to Stamets for getting tardigrade DNA. I guess Starfleet does play pretty loose with what is and is not consider legal for genetic modification, so I shouldn’t be too worried about that, but I am…
They are definitely doing this without Starfleet approval. Pike’s ship prioritizes individuals over regulations, an ethos that carries forward when Kirk takes the chair.
I think the general policy is that genetic augmentation to grant superpowers is bad, while genetic treatment of disease or other medical conditions is generally okay.
ehh, that doesn’t fit with Julian Bashir, the treatment to relieve his learning impairments was illegal, so his father went for the enhancement package because that wasn’t extra illegal on top.
Funnily enough, that episode provides supporting evidence:
BASHIR: Starfleet Medical won’t see it that way. DNA resequencing for any reason other than repairing serious birth defects is illegal. Any genetically enhanced human being is barred from serving in Starfleet or practising medicine.
One has to conclude that the procedure Bashir underwent is considered an enhancement, not a “repair” - like they tried to overcome his undefined disability through brute force, rather than address the underlying cause.
This one won’t be going down in history as my favourite episode.
Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on.
This might just be reflective of where my headspace has been at lately, but it bugged me that the crew showed absolute contempt for a treaty. There was absolutely no discussion of whether it was moral or just to violate it - they just wanted something, so they went ahead and took it. This isn’t exactly new ground for Star Trek, but it wasn’t something that I enjoyed watching in 2025.
I can’t decide if this was a bad Pike episode, or a good Pike episode that happened to reveal things about the character that I don’t appreciate. It’s telling that Batel didn’t tell him about her treatment because she knew that he would react in exactly the way that he did.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about clearing up the ambiguity of what happened with M’Benga last season, but I think it was handled pretty well - the strongest part of the episode by far. It seems like he might have a…different career path ahead of him when he leaves the Enterprise.
The Ortegas/Una story wasn’t bad, either. I do find it interesting that Pike will not be filing a report on this mission because it was off-the-books, but Ortegas gets reprimanded and sent for remedial training. I’m not sure how that works when there’s no mission to log.
I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.
Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on. I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.
This could have been a bottle episode and might have been better for it. The plant was a macguffin that could have been anything. A molecule on some random asteroid could have served the same purpose and allowed the plot to continue mostly unchanged.
Maybe without the zombies that would have given more time for focusing on discussion around what the characters are feeling - More of ortega’s struggle; something better than spock’s mind meld which seems to serve as nothing more than foreshadowing for something that’s going to be said out loud a few minutes later anyway.
If the writers were going to use zombies in a story, then they should actually use them as part of the plot.
This was an ok episode. Very character focused rather than sci-fi.
Everyone should recognise what is happening with ortegas, they really shouldn’t be letting her do anything until its figured out, nevermind chain of command training. There must be something seriously wrong with starfleet’s psych evals if she had one and they didn’t spot this.
Last week I did wonder if the Gorn DNA was going to cause problems, and here we are going to get a… hybridisation of some sort. I wonder where this is going to go - hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went. We know Pike must suffer, and I wonder if he is going to have to deal with losing Batel altogether on top of everything else. I wonder if she is going to have to deal with heightened violent emotions, as the mind meld suggested, and end up having to be “dealt with” in a permanent way.
Zombies. M’benga’s “don’t call them that” was hilarious - Zombies in Star Trek just feels kind of wrong. They were alright, but, it’s zombies. The fact that it came from genetic modification with plants reminds me a bit of Cordyceps which has featured in many other zombie stories. Something that did bug me is M’benga is a medical doctor, and the best mask he could bring was some sort of fabric wrap? Do they not have surgical masks or M95 masks in the future? I wondered if the story could have been about saving the infected, maybe a “do I have to make the choice of cutting off this limb to save someone” moral quandry. The closest we got to that was the klingon that got bit and immediately vaporised. Zombies were kind of just set dressing / a mechanic to keep the characters moving forwards.
A running theme in this episode seems to be the characters falling out of their comfort zones. For all but Scotty, this seems to leave them worse off than when they started. It’s good to see him slowly making progress after being thrown in the deep end.
Misc notes:
- The gravity loss shot was very nicely done.
- For all that I didn’t like the zombies I did like their design. There was one bit where one got stepped on the head and it slowly deflated, like it was made of plant material.
- With all the AR wall stuff, I liked the actors having some set they could really interact with.
- The viewscreen has a “rear view mirror” display :) why isn’t that always visible in the corner?
I suspect Batel’s fate is foreshadowed in her mindmeld with Spock. The hybridization will give her a Gorn aspect that she can’t live with, but it will also grant her the ability to communicate with the Gorn, and she’ll wind up sacrificing herself.
hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went.
Nah, there’s a flower involved. That can only mean one thing.
i guess Scotty’s comment while transporting about not wanting to jumble up Pike and M’Benga was a nod to this.
perhaps that Delta quadrant flower is a distant cousin of the Chimera blossom.
Annotations for 3x03 up at: https://startrek.website/post/26533137
Are the photos of The Phoenix and NX-01 in the briefing room new?
I don’t remember seeing them before.
I also don’t remember any previous shots that establish that the conference room is off the bridge…
Was it shown as connected Ent-D style? That makes sense for the D, we can see the room and windows from the outside, but the SNW conference room is huge, much bigger than the D’s, where could it fit in the 1701 dash nothing’s saucer-top dome?
I guess they have TARDIS-like “bigger on the inside” tech now, given Pike’s half-acre quarters and the ludicrous outside-the-turbolift scene in the Q&A Short Trek.
(not a grumpy old trekkie, honest, i generally love SNW)
Yeah, it looked directly connected - if you squint, you’d probably be able to work out where on the bridge the door is.
