This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Strange New Worlds 2x01 The Broken Circle.
Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.
I really appreciate that they’re starting to lean into the Klingon War as a major event that at least some of the characters lived through. The Discovery crew missed a lot of the worst of it due to their sojourn into the Mirror Universe, and when they returned, it was clear that things had gone very badly for the Federation.
Melissa Navia has talked about integrating what she knows of Ortegas’ experiences in the war even during season one, so I think there will be more of this to come.
I think it’s really fertile ground for storytelling. TNG’s The Wounded with Captain Maxwell and O’Brien was fantastic, but we’ve never really had any Starfleet main characters really grapple with the aftermath of a war. DS9 certainly showed us the toll it takes during a conflict, but not so much the years afterwards.
How far will Starfleet officers go to avert a war now that they’ve had to suffer through one?
We saw O’Brien’s anger and resentment towards the ‘Cardis’ in TNG, but that wa more to establish the Cardassians as a longer standing threat.
I am whelmed. I liked everything about it except for what was ostensibly the “main event.”
Putting Spock in command? Interesting choice, I continue to enjoy Peck’s portrayal as younger, less confident Spock. Love Pelia. Can’t wait to see more of her. Love that we’re back to a more traditional Klingon appearance. Love the updated D-7. Good use of La’an, interesting to see a planet which is firmly stuck in the wake of the Klingon war.
But then we get to the main event: Chapel and M’Benga are in a jam. And so they just… take drugs and fistfight Klingons. Yawn. This is the head doctor and the head nurse we’re talking about here, and you’re telling me there wasn’t a more scientific or medically oriented solution? I mean sure, I guess doing some stims counts as vaguely “medical,” but that’s not really what I mean. It would have been interesting to see them exploit Klingon biology or Federation medical tech in a more thoughtful fashion, rather than just go bonk heads.
But, eh, that’s a minor blemish on what was otherwise a solid hour of Trek. I do think it’s interesting that they’ve managed to draw out Una’s trial arc into three episodes now… hopefully it’s just three? There are Strange New Worlds out there to visit.
But, eh, that’s a minor blemish on what was otherwise a solid hour of Trek. I do think it’s interesting that they’ve managed to draw out Una’s trial arc into three episodes now… hopefully it’s just three? There are Strange New Worlds out there to visit.
This also stuck out to me, as it is the kind of thing that would have come in handy a lot in other shows after it. If it has consequences later in the season, I can deal with it, but I admit it might have been more on brand if they McGuyver their way a little further along into the escape before busting the drugs out at the end. It might have worked better if both the intensity of the fighting and the visual effects didn’t drag out for as long, and it could show the stakes a bit more.
Otherwise I had a few issues with the episode (mostly the convenience of getting Chapel and M’Benga on the ship) but honestly it made sense in world and as a thematic vibe, given this is set around TOS. Decent season opener, probably more interesting for what’s not in it (Pike and #1) as what is, that’s solid. The series opener wasn’t the best either, maybe they just need an episode to get rolling.
I think the premise is interesting. Klingons are interesting. Spock in command is interesting. M’benga and Chapel fist fighting Klingons? God save us all. And then to face no consequence. It’s a shame such an interesting premise is muddied with all of the nonsense.
From what I understand based on what they said in BTS stuff, the fight was partly inspired by the fact that Babs Olusanmokun is a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Why they had to have him be juiced-up fighting Klingons, I don’t know. Lord knows he could have been fighting humans without steroids.
I think the reason was simply that klingons (like vulcans) are usually depicted as significantly stronger than humans on a baseline, which is why we usually deal with them with weapons rather than fist fights. That being said, I think it was an answer looking for a question, and agree it wasn’t entirely necessary for the plot.
Why would they face consequences?
Given the history of dangerous substances radically changing a person’s physiology in Star Trek, they’ll be fine. People turn into completely different species and then return to normal without any scarring, or indeed even a hair out of place.
I wish there was some time given to recovery from such extreme bodily trauma, but the precedent has been long established that you just spend a minute in sickbay, maybe get a hypospray, and you’re back on duty in no time.
I mean, the way it was portrayed, it seems like M’Benga has done this before, and that it’s dangerous and/or has long-term effects. I assume this will be picked up again later in the season.
That was my thought exactly.
Chapel’s question to M’Benga whether he wanted to do that to himself again clearly implied there is a physiological or psychological cost to using the substance, perhaps even an addiction that he’s already struggled with.
Do we know what this substance is?
Not yet - Memory Alpha is referring to it as “a stimulant.”
Yeah I think there are probabllllyy consequences to taking that substance, maybe the show won’t deliver on them but I would be a bit surprised if it didn’t. I don’t feel like they are just not going to mention that again.
I have a feeling the go juice will resurface in later episodes with consequences, it did seem to have ominous introduction so don’t think it will be forgotten…hopfully.
It’s not a bad episode, but it’s not going to go down as one of SNW’s strongest, and it’s an oddly dour note to set as a tone for the upcoming season. The first season premier was full of optimism and hope even when circumstances seemed dire, and this episode at times almost seems to be the reverse. We are now reminded that so many characters are carrying the trauma of the Klingon War: Ortega knowing how to hide among asteroids, Chapel with her medical knowledge, and M’Benga who has apparently been carrying Emergency Punching Juice on every single away mission. And to hammer the point home, April makes it clear that the Gorn are coming in force and Starfleet is not going to be at peace during season 2 of a show called Strange New Worlds. I could be wrong, and I’m not saying it can’t work as a season-long arc, but we’re very far from Pike giving an anti-war, aspirational speech to the 21st-century-equivalent aliens.
I’m also worried that the writers of SNW are building toward some Big Moment for Spock which will make him decide that he needs to shut down open expression of his emotions for all of TOS, and that’s how they will reconcile the two shows and two portrayals of the character.
Pelia is great, though. A fantastic twist on the old “alien observes humanity from the outside” Trek character, and clearly much more willing to get down and dirty with the technobabble than Guinean ever did. Here’s hoping this chief engineer actually gets an episode devoted to her…
The Pelia plotline was by far the most interesting part of the episode in my opinion, I think it is hilarious and fascinating that a nearly immortal creature stumbles into a heist in progress and is like “sure, I’ll help, I’m so boredddddd”
As with many other posters here, I was not a fan of the “get juiced up and fight Klingons” scenes, from basically any angle. I didn’t really care for the fight scene in general, and the stimulant stuff just seems whacky.
However, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here, because this sort of thing is not totally foreign to Star Trek: in Amok Time, McCoy gives Kirk an injection of something which allows him to temporarily match Spock’s strength and fighting ability. It’s one of the many, many “well why don’t they always do that?” Things that pops up in Trek and in TOS especially, and my hope is that the long term plan here is to settle that question. Perhaps this thing has some truly nasty side effects, or it’s extremely addictive; in any case there’s plenty of reason not to make it standard or even permissible gear.
Branching slightly from there, it’s remarkable how much sketchy stuff doctor M’benga has already been involved in. First keeping his child in the transporter buffer and then releasing her to live in a cloud, now revealing that he keeps vials of hulk drugs about his person at all times. There’s plenty of grounds here for us to surmise why he is no longer a CMO when he shows up in TOS.
Which leads to the third point that’s beginning to worry me about this show: we’re seeing a number of character arcs which we already know the ultimate resolution to, and it’s not the resolution that I find myself rooting for as I watch these characters. Spock and Chapel definitely don’t wind up together; Spock and Chapel both become much more emotionally withdrawn; M’benga gets himself demoted; T’Pring finds a flagrantly sociopathic way out of her relationship with Spock. And,obviously, Pike suffers his horrific accident. It’s a pretty depressing slate of events inevitable occurring to a number of characters who I didn’t care about all that much before this show (excepting Spock, obviously) and have come to really enjoy watching here.
The “well we know they won’t die” is an often cited rebuke for why prequels with classic characters aren’t always a great idea, but “we know the general arc of their lives” is arguably more impactful. Most characters don’t die during their shows, and if the writing and acting is good enough I won’t care that an outcome is preordained while I’m watching. But knowing that storylines I am emotionally invested in are doomed to end badly hits me at times when I can and will actually think about it, and It’s really not a good mix with what should fundamentally be an optimistic show.
I’m personally okay with knowing the destination, as long as the journey is worthwhile.
M’Benga was a blank slate on TOS, so I’m enjoying the character that they’ve pretty much invented wholecloth for this series (I certainly find this current direction more interesting than the story with his daughter in season one).
Chapel is another big departure from the TOS portrayal, but I’m enjoying the trajectory as she, I don’t know, “flirts with destiny”.
Spock is full of surprises as they connect the dots between the smiling Spock of “The Cage” with the version seen on TOS proper.
Pike…well, Pike is probably the one I’m least happy about, because I thought they way they had him confront his fate on “Discovery” was perfect, and everything they’ve done since then has diluted it somewhat for me.
But for the most part, I’m enjoying the journey, even if I know where they’re going.
Yeah, I guess my problem isn’t knowing the destination, it’s knowing that the destination is going to be pretty rough in ways that run counter to this show’s general vibe. Which really is pretty similar to my broader frustrations with Discovery’s “the distant future includes 120 years of horrific geopolitical strife where basically everything your heroes fought for falls apart”. I really want to believe in the happy ending, you know? Even when the concept of an ending doesn’t actually make real-world sense.
A lot of it does have happy endings, or at least not overtly tragic ones. Spock do goes thru it, but ends up in a very good and important place, and is deeply at peace with himself for decades after all this stuff wraps. We don’t really see how Chapel wraps up, but she gets her MD and clearly stays in Starfleet, and so far as we can tell gets over Spock. And Pike gets “the illusion,” of course, which is about as happy as any person could be, given his circumstances.
Trek isn’t all happy events with clear closings; there were a lot of tragic endings in TOS, for example. Even TWOK is pretty much a tragedy, taken in isolation – Kirk’s hubris in deciding to exile Khan causes a lot of death and pain. Hell, even the resurrection of Spock comes at the loss of both the Enterprise and Kirk’s only son.
As long as the pain and tough times have narrative and character meaning, I’m more than OK with them happening because we know so much about how things do work out. Trek reminds, on the whole, a positive and uplifting look at how we can live.
And of course we know Uhura’s gonna turn out just fine.
Nothing ever ends, Adrian.
This is a nitpick but it kind of annoys me that they had Ortegas reverse the pitch and yaw of the ship instead of the roll and yaw.
On an atmospheric aircraft, you normally turn by rolling right or left, and then possibly pulling upward to tighten the turn. These controls do not make sense in space, but they are so ingrained to pilots that there are lots of debates on Space Sim forums about if your joystick should be mapped to roll or yaw.
And then Ortegas dodges the incoming array of torpedoes by rolling the Enterprise. She seems able to do so quickly. One of the only other times we see a ship engage in a deliberate roll and we get to see the pilot input controls is when the Enterprise-D is escaping the Dyson Sphere. Ensign Sariel Rager quietly and without orders taps in a command and the Enterprise-D (a much flatter ship than the Constitution class) rolls sideways to fit.
Whatever, the setup is that she’s a hot hand who wants custom controls, and the payoff is that she flies the Enterprise carefully and well. But it would have been nice to see the maneuver we saw on screen be the one that was set up.
As an aside, the ability to dodge a torpedo is also relatively rare in the show’s history, I am willing to assume that their adversaries didn’t really understand the ship or how to properly lock on weapons. The Enterprise’s current close-body shield configuration was likely instrumental in allowing the dodge, and probably a necessity to navigate an asteroid field.
l am happy that La’an seems to have some sort of characterization other than “hates the gorn and is angry”. There is potential for her to be interesting but she was downright forgettable to me in season 1.
I am confused by the choice to have the Klingons look like the redesign. This is TOS era so surely they should look like TOS era Klingons, no?
It goes without saying I agree with others about M’Benga and Chapel just taking drugs and fighting Klingons. We can find ways to justify it and make it make sense but it feels out of place.
I also just… don’t like Chapels character. It doesn’t really make sense to me that half the time the Nurse is doing the things the doctor would normally be doing but also is a kick ass bad ass action star. If anything the way they’re portraying Chapel should be how La’an is portrayed.
Honestly now that I type that out, I’m thinking about how in TOS Chapel is just a small quiet side character. If you’re gonna have Chapel in SNW maybe it would make more sense for HER to be the one emotionally scarred by the Gorn, and her character arc over the course of the show being a lot about her mental and emotional recovery. Going from being totally reclusive but accepted into starfleet medical for being competent to coming into her own and finding her strengths.
I am confused by the choice to have the Klingons look like the redesign. This is TOS era so surely they should look like TOS era Klingons, no?
Is the consensus that the Klingons “changed”? I assume it’s taken as a design characteristic. The same way this Enterprise feels very different and more futuristic/advanced than the one in TOS, but it is the same Enterprise. At least that’s how I take it.
The reason why I say the Klingons “changed” and it’s not just a design characteristic is when the crew of DS9 goes back in time to the tribble incidence on board the enteprise, a character (I believe Odo) asks Worf to explain why the Klingons then look so different from him. He gets agitated and refuses to talk about it. If I recall as well, Afflication, the ENT episode has a story indicating that something regarding Augment experimentation resulted in different looking Klingons.
Oh I had no idea! I’m not well versed outside of TOS, TGN (not much) and STN :) Thanks for sharing!
Absolutely! Highly recommend watching DS9 :)
I once proposed on the sub that the different Chapel we see in TOS is because she was traumatised by “What Are Little Girls Made Of” but people preferred this retcon so felt such an explanation was both tragic and unnecessary.
I am confused by the choice to have the Klingons look like the redesign. This is TOS era so surely they should look like TOS era Klingons, no?
Gene always said that TOS Klingons would have had ridges the whole time if they’d had the budget for more elaborate makeup. Kor, Kang, and Koloth had the redesign. There’s no proof that anyone outside of a handful in that Enterprise arc ever lost their ridges-- and would you really put it past the Klingons to lethally enforce a quarantine?
Good point about the Klingons enforcing a quarantine with force.
I’m pretty okay with just accepting it as a design change, I only bring it up because they previously tried to explain it.
I am confused by the choice to have the Klingons look like the redesign. This is TOS era so surely they should look like TOS era Klingons, no?
In the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” some of the cast time travel into the (legendary) TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” and when asked why the Klingons from that era look different Worf only says “we don’t talk about it”
SNW takes place a number of years before that TOS episode, so perhaps we will learn what happens sometime in the future as SNW gets closer and closer to the start of TOS
There is a S4 Enterprise arc which was clearly intended to explain the smooth headed Klingons (it’s a disease brought on by attempted genetic engineering, basically). If one wishes to find a visual literalist explanation beyond that, it would simply be that there are lots of Klingons out there and some of them look very different.
The other approach would be to accept that aesthetics change with budget and technology, and just shrug it off. I’ve grown increasingly supportive of that position as new material has come out, but it’s hardly a new take: Roddenberry himself, asked about the Klingons in TMP, said that they were always supposed to look like that, but the show never had the budget to make it happen.
Strange New Worlds continues to fit the Trek mold for me, and I am into it!
There were some elements of the story I found a little odd. I appreciate the nod to Star Trek III with Spock stealing the Enterprise, but it felt a little out of character for him
I think the new Klingon design is quite good, and holy cow the practical effects for them are incredible! Very reminiscent of 90s Trek Klingons with a hint of the look of Discovery Klingons. I wonder if we’ll see a canon explanation for why the TOS klingons largely don’t have the ridges beyond Worf’s “we don’t talk about it”
Pelia! Oh man I am so stoked to see more of her. What a cool character. I wish they had introduced her a little earlier, so we would already know she’s the chief inspector when she saunters onto the bridge, but I loved how she saw through their ruse instantly, and then invited herself to join their mission. Such a badass
I was disappointed in the season opener. The story was silly and incoherent, and to be honest it reminds me of the worst elements of Discovery.
I don’t begrudge them deferring dealing with the Una situation as that is likely (hopefully) going to be strongly character driven episode.
But the Embenga/Chapel subplot was by far the worst part of the whole episode. Exploring the trauma of the Klingon War is actually an intriguing idea, and even the idea of Starfleet medical being weaponised is intriguing but instead we got Embenga and Chapel injecting up and becoming rediculous super soldiers which has zero link to anything we’ve ever had from their backstories. Then we had 10 minutes of tedious kung fu fighting which is a common trope of Discovery; it’s lazy writing and just fills screen time with pointless violence. It is exactly the opposite of what makes SNW so refreshing. I hope to god this stupidity is a one off. If you are going to shoehorn in a pointless action sequence, why on earth would you pick Embenga and Chapel for that? And then the crazy space walk? It was ludicrous.
Other elements were ok but the overall episode felt out of place with what SNW did in series 1. I really hope they have not decided the show needs more “action” because they will be making the same mistakes as Discovery if they do that. SNW series 1 was extremely well recieved because it was character and plot driven; each episode was stand alone but the characters plots extended across the season.
I’d give this episode 5/10 to be honest.
*M’benga.
Ah thanks! I didn’t seem to clock the spelling!
