Written by Kirsten Beyer & Davy Perez
Directed by Eduardo Sanchez
Logline
Returning to a planet that dredges up tragic memories, Captain Pike and his landing party find themselves forgetting everything, including their own identities as he confronts a ghost from his past.
Annotations up at https://startrek.website/post/282663.
This was a very TOS episode yet in terms of feel.
The dialogue could easily have come from the mouths of the TOS cast, and the situation on the planet reminiscent of officers violating the Prime Directive like in TOS: “The Omega Glory” or “Bread and Circuses”. Even Mount’s delivery when on the planet was Shatner-esque.
I can readily imagine Kirk, McCoy and a random redshirt or Chekov on the planet in Pike, M’Benga and La’An’s place, and Sulu pulling it together like Ortegas.
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.
I felt like they were trying to show Captain Pike as going a little far when beating up Zac, but I thought he was being totally reasonable given the situation of “this guy knows how to keep your memories and you really really need to force him to hand that information over.” There was no way for him to know all he had to do was wait around in the palace for a little while.
It’s an interesting insight into Pike’s character - the fact that he had to remember not to beat the crap out of Zac implies that innately he’s not a pacifist or a nice guy; that dark side is something he’s learned to keep in check.
@psychothumbs @khaosworks That *was* interesting. His instincts work overpowering Zac in the phaser battle but then we don’t actually know if he’ll “remember” he can’t just beat him senseless afterwards. Maybe we’ll see some Pike backstory at some point that shows him learning ethical lessons when he’s younger.
hmm. This makes me wonder. Is there a way to link to a specific message thread, that is universal across instances?
If not, it seems like it’s a feature that is sorely needed.
Yeah theres a sort of goofy way memory loss works and how it was still taken very seriously gave me a good old school trek vibe which I dug throughout the episode.
Wow, these SNW writers really bring it each week, don’t they? Not to say every episode is perfect but I’ve found every single one to be very entertaining and exactly what I want out of Star Trek in 2023. The combination of standalone stories mixed with underlying character development and arcs is perfect.
As for this week, the idea of encountering a planet that could make you forget everything was weirdly creepy, if not a bit implausible. Even if this wasn’t her showcase episode, I grinned at Ortega’s “I AM THE PILOT!” moment. Also enjoyed the away team being out of sorts on the planet which I thought was well done and not an action overdose like the season opener.
Wow, these SNW writers really bring it each week, don’t they?
Don’t they just! Genuinely excited whenever I fire up the episodes and watch the intro everytime (love the intro music!)
I know the feeling! SNW’s theme and opening credits definitely bring back memories of eagerly looking forward to TNG every week. It’s easily my favorite Trek theme since TNG.
SNW really is a masterclass in balancing episodic and narrative storytelling.
I’d love to attend a workshop/lecture with Goldsman, Myers, et al.
Nothing to add pertaining to this last FANTASTIC episode; I really just wanted to say I appreciate everyone posting here. After Reddit, I thought these kind of threads were done for, but here we are. So even if no one reads this, thank you and much love 🙏
Memory loss is one of the scariest things in the known universe. This is a horror episode to me.
Similar to how we refer to TOS episodes as “The Nazi Planet” and “The Gangster Planet” this one will be “The Alzheimer’s Planet.”
Was the high pitched ringing sound really necessary, especially for that long each time? That almost physically hurt and it scared the fsck out of my cat.
@BorgDrone @ValueSubtracted As a person with tinnitus, it seemed important to me. Let me know exactly what was going on. It’s also very common in video games, for example when someone is dazed by a nearby explosion. Again it conveyed a lot of meaning to me and helped explain what they were going through.
Sure, but there is a difference between having that sound at low volume for 2 seconds and blasting it through all 10 speakers for 20.
Ooh, look at this guy with ten speakers! Fancy pants over here! : P
It seemed a perfectly harmless and appropriate volume to me listening on headphones. Perhaps your bass needs adjustment.
It seemed a perfectly harmless
As someone with tinnitus, it not only hurt, but triggered my tinnitus to be worse for the rest of the day.
Far from harmless. I had a proper issue with the excessive ringing in this episode.
Well that definitely sucks. Sorry you had to deal with that.
It’s not the bass that was the problem, it was the high pitched sounds.
Haha I kept worrying that my cats and baby would be disturbed by it but fortunately they didn’t seem to react much.
Definitely felt like classic trek this week. Fun episode. I was really hoping we would get a more in depth episode for Ortegas’ character. I did read something last year that she was getting her own episode, so im going to assume this wasn’t it.
I did let out a big guffaw when I realized their bait and switch. Started it out like it was going to be an Ortegas focused episode, and then Spock comes in and pops hers and everyone else’s bubble with his Vulcan science. Loved how she put the hat back on as she was walking away, as if to say “I’m gonna wear this for a while longer because I can, dammit.”
@ieightpi
She didn’t get her own episode but at least a cool hat.😉
Thoughts as I watch:
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So, I’m wondering: is Cayuga a reference to Rod Serling? He named his production company that in reference to the lake in New York.
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Relationships suck when you are a Starfleet captain who knows your destiny to one day be in a beepie chair.
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Rigel 7, a deep cut!
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We have gone (ZERO) days without some sort of Starfleet prime directive problem.
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Finally, some Ortegas action!
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“THE HAT IS SUPREME.” I’m going to have to use that in conversation.
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Oh man, at least she keeps the hat.
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“Subdermal universal translators” are the new translation microbes
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Oh boy, they have starfleet tech.
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Ah, we’ve got a good old-fashioned “Federation citizen takes over a world” episode!
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“This is a cage.” Heh.
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Forgetting is a scary side effect for a planet.
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I get that they were only on there for like four hours, but shouldn’t they have noticed stuff like this their last visit? Or maybe… THEY LOST
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“Welcome to Memento/50 First Dates Planet”
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Can still remember how to fight!
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So I’m guessing Spock is probably one of the more resistant to all of this due to his Vulcan-ness.
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Man, La’An is having a REALLY bad pair of weeks.
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Captain Pike even without his memories is still Captain Pike. Makes sense.
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Okay, I guess Spock isn’t immune.
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Glad to see the Connie class had GPS.
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I gotta admit, I feel like Pelia would be good in this episode given just how many memories she has to lose and how many skills she has.
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SHE FLIES THE SHIP
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The ship’s computer is great this week.
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Damn, that is some tough silverware, standing up to phaser blasts.
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Is it just me or is that a fresco or whatever of Alexander the Great… Zac-ized?
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Okay, that logic doesn’t quite seem sound, but whatever.
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So, uhm, be careful about telling her about the Beepy-chair, Chris.
“This is a cage.” Heh.
I hope that one day Captain Pike visits a zoo and says “this is a menagerie”.
I thought it was Cuyahoga? correct me if i’m wrong pls
It’s Cayuga, as per the closed captioning, and it’s likely no coincidence. As I noted in my annotations, the Cayuga first appeared in “A Quality of Mercy”, which shares a title with a 1961 Twilight Zone episode starring Leonard Nimoy. And TZ was produced by Serling’s production company, Cayuga Productions.
Thank you!
Yes, I noticed that in your annotations over at… the other place. Interestingly enough, Roddenberry spoke at a memorial for Serling in 1975
I post them as a stand-alone in c/DaystromInstitute every week now.
shares a title with a 1961 Twilight Zone episode starring Leonard Nimoy.
For better or worse, I’m not sure “starring” is quite the right description. Nimoy has like three lines and a couple minutes of screen time. I found it rather jarring to recognize Nimoy early in the episode and then see so little of him after.
Featuring, perhaps.
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This episode should have started in media res, with the away team already on planet and having lost their memories. Once we got the explainer as to what was happening, then we could return to the Enterprise to show the growing crisis there, and finally wrap everything up as the episode already did.
No… I juste have a hate for most of the Trek episodes starting with a catastrophic situation and a blackout with a “XX hours ago…” captions…
Top easy writing… At least, they build the tension here
I couldn’t agree more. It feels like lazy storytelling, and I actually appreciated this episode for not resorting to that kind of fakery. It’s setup was strong enough to be its own thing. I respect that a lot.
Yeah, the more I think about it, I think you’re right. It’s possible they didn’t because they wanted to bookend it with stuff about the pilot.
The episode as well was a decent one-episode-and-done thing, with a few threads they left open to explore later. But I agree that if they’d begun with the memory loss and cages, and worked backwards from there, it would have been “cooler” and more emotionally effective.
The episode wasn’t a bad one. It wasn’t a great one. It was solid. Given how many fans have said they want Trek like this, it’s probably serviceable and “good enough” for the season.
I’m looking forward to some cooler episodes, though. The first 3 spoiled me, I liked them a lot.
Ok, at the risk of sounding like a filthy casual, it’s only now when I’m digging into Memory Alpha that I realized we’re finally getting visualization of what Pike was so miserable about in TOS the Cage. I was like, why does Rigel VII sound so familiar…
This is the kind of retcon I live for!!
I’ve been watching Trek since I was basically a baby but don’t have anywhere near the depth of knowledge of most people posting here. We are still valid!
I like that the original away mission failing wasn’t some weird magical thing - it was just a mission that went bad in a fairly mundane way.
I’ve been waiting for the crew explore a new planet. Hoping there’s more of these episodes than less
Really enjoyed this episode, it didn’t make the most sense at times but made up for it with an extremely disturbing core concept. And there is comfort in the idea that even without a significant portion of our memories, we’re still “us”.
I’m confused about one thing though and maybe I just missed something so someone can enlighten me. If the palace is so well-protected that just literally being inside it for ten minutes is enough to completely reverse the memory loss, why was Pike first affected by it while standing in the palace? Is it just that they weren’t in there for very long during their first encounter with Zac, and the symptoms caught up with him, or did I miss something about how that worked?
Yeah this episode didn’t make much sense. Outside of the disturbing concept and well directed drama, this episode felt pretty weak
It didn’t really bother me, still thought it was a very good episode, but I am glad it’s not just me being stupid!
That’s probably one of my favorite episodes of the series as a viewing experience, it was pretty entertaining. I don’t think I quite track…the message, though? In the span of about three minutes we get explicitly told that for Pike and Ortegas the memory loss could be revealing experience that identified the core of the self, while for their friend on the planet it was an obscuring experience that robbed him of things he didn’t know were important. You can explain away the difference with plot logic pretty easily, but thematically it’s a bit weird to juxtapose them right next to each other
I think it makes sense that a brief bout of amnesia like that could be revealing of your underlying traits and feelings, but that in the normal course of things it’s very important to have your memories.
It’s a common trope that the away teams really shouldn’t be landing in these planets without any idea what’s down there without an alien style hazmat suit and here we go, another example :) I GUESS they get a pass because they were here before and the effects didn’t happen because they were not here long enough
also really strange they don’t confirm that people were dead? Or try and go back and get their bodies which might have equipment/ com badges /might even be alien (Spock was there and he bleeds green), maybe starfleet shouldn’t be so careless about what they leave behind…
No EV suit would have protected them, either - the Enterprise was affected as well.
They handled that subtly - I was wondering why they didn’t raise shields against the radiation, but the shimmering impact of the debris field seen when Ortegas was in her quarters showed that shields were indeed up, so that mean the radiation could get through shields. Then it was mentioned that Spock tweaked the shield harmonics at the end - I guess he didn’t earlier because he was already affected.
I think at the time they lacked sufficient information to modulate the shields, which is why moving the ship into the astroids seemed logical.
I’m a bit undecided about this episode.
Stuff that I liked:
- a strange new(-ish) world
- everyone got something to do, unlike last week
- once again some funny Spock moments
- the visuals on this show are stunning once again. The planet looked nice, the external VFX in the debris field of two celestial bodies that orbited Rigel VII several centuries ago looked nice, the Enterprise interiors look so nice.
Stuff that I didn’t like:
- I’m not a fan of forced relationship dramas. Plus, from the pilot episode I got the feeling that Pike and Batel (does she even have a first name yet?) are only friends with benefits, but now Batel storms off after Pike says he wants to take it easy? Weird.
- how can a society or any sort of structure be maintained if you can’t remember anything? The whole premise felt a bit off.
- the writing for Ortegas was weak. Her personal log at the beginning of the episode sounded like it was written by ChatGPT. And the stuff towards the end of the episode wasn’t great either. The actor did the best she could with what she was given but the writing really didn’t do her any favors.
how can a society or any sort of structure be maintained if you can’t remember anything? The whole premise felt a bit off.
The rulers in the palace could remember, though (because of the shielding provided by some metal). And the workers/slaves remembered enough to perform their tasks.
@exscape @ValueSubtracted @UESPA_Sputnik Spoiler alert, please!
This is one of the earliest Sci-Fi themes. See: Nightfall by Asimov (1941).
I thought they covered it well in the ep. (Write things down, write things on YOURSELF, etc).
Hm, considering your instance name, are you reading this on Mastodon? I’ve not gotten the hang of how federation with Mastodon works, but I’m reading/writing this on Kbin, and the post is on Lemmy, in the discussion thread for the latest episode, where spoilers for that episode are assumed to exist without warning.
In any case I apologize if you were spoiled by my post, but I’m not sure how to improve things in the future TBH.@exscape @ValueSubtracted @UESPA_Sputnik Yes, I’m reading on Mastodon. Interesting, I may have to stop following the lemmy hashtag. Federation is a fun idea but apparently doesn’t work quite right.
Trying to avoid particular pieces of information is a tough problem for a federated network to solve.
Just among the ‘field Kalar’, how are there relationships enough to maintain a population? Unless they’re just used to reading a piece of paper “this is my spouse, this is my child” and I guess the deep emotions they talked about as persisting fill in the rest. Still, I think it would be hard to build the relationships without those deep emotions in place. Sorta sounds like “50 First Date” (never saw it but the premise).
I like the Pike/Batel relationship dynamic. I like that they’re both captains with their own responsibilities, which is new and different from what we’ve seen in previous iterations of Trek where one is an officer and the other is left at home or something. It doesn’t feel forced to me, although the question of weren’t they just FWB’s is an interesting one, I’d have to go back and look at the pilot. But I’m ok with buying that they’re closer than that but just can’t make it work because they both have ships to captain.
I would like to see more of her being a captain. Hopefully there’s an episode in the future where we get to see her on her bridge doing her thing.
I’m also in the camp that liked it, Pike since his reintroduction in Disco S2 has been one of the franchises’ most emotionally open captains. Most of the time we see this as this self-assured dad energy he uses when talking to his subordinates, but I think it was good to see how he can be vulnerable but still that genuine, emotionally mature guy with someone who’s on the same level as him.
I mean, we had Ben Sisko and Kassidy Yates who both were captains. But I agree with you that Pike and Batel really seem to be equals, and I really like that relationship dynamic.
As I said, from the pilot episode I got the impression that they are friends with benefits who like to hook up when they happen to be in the same sector – no strings attached. (underlined by the fact that Pike had a fling with that lady from the child-killing planet) I think that could be an interesting relationship dynamic to explore because unlike Kirk who had a chick on every planet (with rather unequal dynamics), Pike and Batel both have found someone equal with all the limitations that the jobs brings with it.
I just hope the writing for Batel was an exception in this week’s episode because it didn’t make her look good – being overly emotional and storming off after Pike just stated some facts. I don’t think that’s the type of female character they should be aiming for nowadays.
Only the workers outside the castle lost their memories. The guards had helmets made of a material that protected them from the worst effects, and the palace shielded those inside.
The end result is a caste system, where you have people who remember and give orders and people who forget and have no choice but to follow.
Hey fellow Jammer reader!
👋
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Still somewhat annoyed that there is no seat belt on the shuttle, even if it is to maintain continuity with TOS. M’Benga looked like he was going to bang his head and get a concussion when they were landing.
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La’an: They won’t see us coming.
Zac: We totally saw you from the other side of the planet a hemisphere away. -
What was Zac trying to accomplish? He lured them there with the Starfleet Delta, but he was not going to hitch a ride home. He expected whatever ship that comes to inspect to… forget and go away, or suffer some disastrous result when the crew become unable to function? Why not just stay low and be king if he wasn’t planning to leave?
It wasn’t intentional. The Starfleet Delta was something Zac’s followers had done to honour him, it wasn’t intended as a lure.
Zac didn’t intend for Starfleet to notice the delta. He was content to just stay on Rigel VII as High Lord Zacarias, thinking that Starfleet would never return to the planet because of the debris field and the radiation. But then the Kalar used the delta as a symbol and it got spotted.
PIKE: Zac. We saw your message, the, um… the Delta in the garden. It’s why we came. Isn’t that why you did it?
ZAC: The people here adopted it as my symbol. I should have known better. It’s all getting torn out tomorrow.
Thanks. I tried to watch with subtitles off and predictably missed some of the conversation.
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