I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.

I was convinced up until the reveal that the “alien” was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I’m not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they’re all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn’t go down well for me. It’s a generational ship, none of the original “good guys” were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they’ve killed.

The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn’t need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They’re all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk’s captain literally is not a human.

The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut’s perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.

Random other thoughts:

• Getting to see more of Scotty is really nice, especially his acerbic dialogue.
• Doctor M’benga, head medical officer, warzone survivor, having little screentime other than running phone cables and joysticks around is funny.
• Ortegas getting a light scolding for being a wee bit suicidal is all we got for her ongoing sub-plot.
• La’an has shown a previous liking for Kirk, but we didn’t really have a chance to explore what her new thing with Spock means for that.
• I hope the transporter buffer wasn’t affected by all this now that it’s holding a literal horror from beyond in it

Writers’ Room: “We need a name for a mineral these scavengers could be looking for.”

“Uh… (glances at Italian takeout) aldentium!”

Is anybody else curious about the fact that you can manually engage port or starboard thrusters via a conveniently located joystick in the hallway?

I can’t be the only one with goosebumps when they say to Kirk that now he was now the captain? He looked at the chair with a little fear. That was good

I’ve enjoyed the season well enough so far but this to me was a bit off script-wise.

Nothing wrong with the concept – a forgotten spaceship from Earth* but there was no explanation or speculation on how they survived and why their spaceship had that (atrocious) cyberpunk pirates of the caribbean aesthetic.

So many questions that even the characters themselves should have asked but didn’t. The takeaway seemed to be about human nature, the darkness within us etc. but it wasn’t really explored rather than haphazardly touched upon like it was an afterthought. And maybe it was, maybe the idea that the “dangerous aliens” were human was a late edit.

*Although a bit hard to integrate to the canon but whatever.

I don’t like the implications that there is a device that can absorb phaser fire.

I also find it weird that the “intruders” who I assume know English, are not able to pick up on Federation Standard, I assume it is still not that different from English, considering Starfleet did start in North America. You think when you see on the hall of a ship, “U.S.S. Enterprise” or when you enter and take a look around and see the service panels that, they might think for a second that this ship might have hailed from Earth.

Also a bit weird how they haven’t encountered Federation ships with humans with their couple of hundred year space travels. But I assume maybe they went through the same wormhole as V’ger or something. And who knows what kind of trauma they have to live through.

Despite these logical inconsistencies, I think I still enjoyed this mess of an episode.

The spectacle was over the top. I like seeing the TOS crew interacting with each other. And I enjoyed the Enterprise crew coming up with a solution to save themselves, though their escape and timing with the Farragut’s attack did seem awfully convenient. Would have felt a little less contrived if they had coordinated with each other a bit sooner to match up the plans, but we don’t always have so much screen time to explain things and the plot sometimes needs to get moving, so I can forgive it.

I also like the Pike to Kirk talk talking about empathizing with your enemy. Feelsl ike foreshadowing to Arena.

Anyway, I currently like this episode.

The first time in a decade where the sci-fi protagonists were wearing visored helmets that weren’t transparent and lighting up their faces – at least until the visor magically folded away.

Minor pet peeve to have, I know. I imagine the choice wasn’t director induced and more something regarding stunt coordination but I wouldn’t rule out thematically mirroring the faceless unempathic enemy.

This episode is giving me some Firefly vibes.

I agree with your comment that this episode was a tonal mess, yet for all that still enjoyed it. Life isn’t neatly packaged into times of only deadly seriousness, lighthearted nonsense and character growth, sometimes they all happen at the same time.

In that sense, each of them clearly had a distinct tone to me

You clearly saw the seeds of the lead up to TOS in the Farragut storyline, which was ultimately it’s purpose.

Off-topic but holy hell are spoilers so difficult to use on Lemmy

I thought this one was a tonal mess - so much so that I was convinced the whole thing was going to turn out to be a training simulation or something.

This show is usually so good at setting a clear mood, but this one was so all over the place, I didn’t know how seriously to take the situations the crew(s) found themselves in.

This reminded me of “The Doomsday Machine” at times.

Annotations for 3x06 up at: https://startrek.website/post/27570531