I thought these were a pair of truly thought-provoking episodes.

I thought a lot about the complicit officers of the Equinox who were transferred to be lower deckers on Voyager, with restricted access to ships systems.

I’d really hoped there would be an episode that followed up on some of them. Some of them had experience and expertise that might have been valuable in some future situations. Instead they were effectively house-arrest passengers for the rest of the voyage in contrast to the Maquis officers. It was another opportunity to have some continuity that seemed to have been offside in the final seasons.

Not everyone in 1965 had a nice new big television, let alone a colour one.

Here’s a top of the line RCA model from 1954…

That was likely added to quell reactions to a woman as a first officer. But the Network had notes even so on how negatively test audiences reacted to Majel Barrett’s Number One.

Roddenberry tried another tack with blonde, beehived, Whitney in a miniskirt as Yeoman Janice Rand. She was supposed to be a woman main character but even that was too much for the executives and she was written out by the end of the first season.

This exactly. Using something closer to the xenomorphs of Alien, introduces a truly frightening species that is sufficiently different that their kind of intelligence and motivations are believably difficult for Federation humanoids to understand.

I know there are other older fans struggling with this, but I think it’s saving the Gorn and Arena from absurdity.

No matter how compelling the story, TOS Arena’s ridiculous rubber suit Gorn has become one of the most recognized images from the franchise in popular culture.

Even as a child watching the episode in its first run it seemed more like silly monster movie stuff. It didn’t have the quality of truly scary monsters of that era such as the Creature of the Black Lagoon. It wasn’t in any way reaching Roddenberry’s target high value sci-fi standard of Forbidden Planet or even The Cage.

More, with so many later stories of Kirk and other captains welcoming the strange and different, coming to terms with very alien species, we need to be shown why Kirk was so hostile to the Gorn by the time of TOS.

While they could have gone for some other kind of reptilian, I like SNW’s choice to go with a the biology of parasitic R-breeder. Roddenberry’s original concept for the Ferengi was closer to the parasitic bat people of Andromeda than what TNG and DS9 gave us. The updated Gorn can be viewed as incorporating that idea and making them as terrifying.

She’s a more seasoned pilot by far than early Tom Paris.

But she’s exactly what I expect and know experienced combat pilots to be like. Some are sober and subdued like Sulu or Detmer, but the in your face types are common and tolerated.

I’ve seen a great amount of curmudgeonly criticism of this episode in other places.

Can’t understand it really. There really seems to be a contingent of fans that just don’t want to have fun.

This FinPost article is very thin. Not exactly providing adequate information for their target financial market readers.

I appreciate the OP’s effort to bring a diversity of news sources here, but this isn’t a particularly useful article other than to flag the announcement.

The Ontario government news release itself has more contextual information despite being written to promote the decision to consider an expansion.

The CBC story weighs some of the risks and concerns.

I agree that it has a genuine TOS feel.

Especially as it gets back to the mid 20th century thought experiments around how the mind functions, but informed my more current understanding of memory, cognitive function and emotion.

I wasn’t quite sure the balance of the scenes was what it could have been, but it was good to see all of the main cast having their moments. I was nonetheless frustrated that Number One was quickly sidelined once again.

Also I was uncomfortable with how far Pike was willing to go in his aggression in order to get information from Zack. I believe we’re supposed to feel that, but it did feel that it was pushed just that moment longer to drive home the point that Pike’s deep ethics are what keeps him in check, not his emotions. It also tracks with his anger and how he even used it to break the thrall of the Talosians in The Cage.

But overall, I liked it. It’s a deeper and more challenging episode than it may seem on the surface, first watch. I suspect it will be one that stands up over a longer horizon.

Having Pelia say it, with the lens of historical perspective, is perfect.

The Federation may not use the word or describe its society that way, but someone who’d lived in the United States in the 20th and 21st century might.

I didn’t expect to like this episode as much as I did.

Wesley’s Kirk is growing on me, and I give the EPs credit for using the alternate timeline Kirk’s to let his performance coalesce. I also like the deft weaving of the crazy car driving, heartbreaker Kirk with the think five steps ahead genius that he also had to be.

The acknowledgement in-universe that the timeline and humanity’s development has been interfered with is entirely credible given the accretion of temporal incidents across every era of the franchise.

I’m not sure how I feel about it giving comfort to those who feel so strongly that this isn’t the same timeline as the original TOS one. (I see some chortling on this point elsewhere.) Likely the temporal physics of this is best left for a deep dive /c/Daystrom Institute discussion, but I prefer hold to a view that this is absolutely still the same Prime timeline but that the timeline itself has been perturbed repeatedly even if the key events have kept their integrity. In fact, the Romulan temporal agent, while not a reliable narrator, gave credence to the idea that the Prime timeline had proven unexpectedly robust against major intervention by humanity’s enemies.

I was delighted to see DTI show up and be named. It seems all of a piece of DTI’s rigidity that they would leave La’an alone to deal with the trauma. It does however mirror Pike’s own experience in sealing his future with the time crystal. One senses that there must be some kind of intersection or mutual revelation to come, leaving aside the Chekhov’s gun of the temporally dislocated watch.

Knowing that Anson Mount had to relocate to Toronto with his wife and newborn explains why episodes featuring others in the ensemble were front loaded for this season. He’d said before he committed to the show that creative conversations would be needed as he wasn’t wishing to repeat the production experience he had in Discovery season two. A creative conversation with the EPs that limits a principal character’s presence is fairly extraordinary, but Mount seems to have done it in a way that’s generous to the rest of the ensemble.

With an ensemble so strong, and as we didn’t see as much of Chapel or Una as we would have liked last season, I’m fine with waiting to see more Pike later in the season. It sounds as though we have a Spock focused and an Ortegas to come before some big ensemble pieces in the back half.

Affordability does not appear to be a consideration in this index.