Strange New Worlds
season 2, episode 10
Season Finale
The USS Cayuga is visiting the colony world of Parnassus Beta, where Chapel is giving them a hand. Captain Batel has a chat with Pike when the comm line suddenly goes down. A shuttle crashes nearby, and a Gorn warship looms in the sky. The Enterprise receives a garbled distress call and, on the way to help, Admiral April advises Pike that Starfleet wants to avoid a war with the Gorn (why isn't attacking a Federation colony automatically considered an act of war? For some reason, it's not considered to be a Federation colony, despite being a human colony clearly getting support from the Federation... I dunno, this makes no sense). The Enterprise discovers the wreckage of the Cayuga, but are unable to use their sensors, transporters or comms. They're still able to receive signals from outside whatever is blocking them however, with Starfleet sending them a message from the Gorn, showing a border line going through the middle of the solar system. No idea how this works, considering the orbit of the planets will take them to the other side of the border at some point. The Enterprise cannot cross the line, but they decide to sneak a shuttle through the debris field of the Cayuga to look for survivors on the planet.
The crew seem oddly gung ho about killing the Gorn, breaking out new weapons and scanners designed specifically to fight them. I get their last encounter was traumatic, but it's odd for Starfleet officers to be so... out for blood. They eventually locate survivors, after running into a trap set by Montgomery Scott, the survivor of the shuttle that crashed at the start of the episode. Scotty reveals he he'd come from the USS Stardiver, which was surveying a nearby red supergiant, and was destroyed by the Gorn after some unusual solar mass ejections. Scotty survived by jury-rigging the shuttle for more range, and built a device that allowed him to fool the Gorn sensors. Pike, Scotty and Batel go to recover this device. Meanwhile, the Enterprise crew comes up with a plan to use the remains of the Cayuga saucer section to destroy the Gorn jamming device. Spock sets a few rockets, and Chapel, who somehow is the only person shown to have survived on the Cayuga (the Enterprise crew never properly checks for survivors on the saucer, so who knows how many people they inadvertently killed with this maneuver), helps him fight off an adult Gorn, who is trying to gain access to the computer.
With the Gorn jamming device destroyed (which... the plan was to make it look like the saucer's orbit naturally decayed, but it clearly just makes a quick bee-line to the Gorn device on the planet, so I dunno who the crew thinks they're fooling), the Enterprise is able to beam up Spock and Chapel, as well as Scotty, Pike and Batel (whom Chapel immediately puts into stasis, because she's been infected by Gorn embryos) but the rest of the survivors and away team have been beamed up by the Gorn. As the Enterprise comes under attack by the Gorn ships, Pike is faced with a decision to either fight back and save their crewmates, or leave... TO BE CONTINUED.
For the most part, I felt this episode was slow. They spent a great deal of time explaining things, which slowed down the story. Some of which seems unnecessary with the unnecessary changes they've made to the Gorn. I'm still not a fan of what they're doing with the Gorn in this series. It just doesn't work with what we know of the Gorn established in previous series, and I'm not sure how this is supposed to work with TOS, since Starfleet shouldn't even know about the Gorn yet. Unless they plan on explaining more changes to the timeline thanks to the temporal wars, like they've done with the Eugenics War earlier in this season.
I did enjoy seeing
Scotty. I felt the actor, Martin Quinn, did a pretty good job of it (and is actually from Scotland). Although it's making feel like we're going to see TOS characters altogether at some point (they're only missing Sulu, Bones and Chekov), which has me somewhat concerned. This is supposed to be a series about Pike's era as Captain of the Enterprise, not TOS crew. We don't need to see TOS crew besides Spock in this series.
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For the season overall... Pretty disappointed in it honestly. I felt the first season was much stronger in terms of story telling. This season felt like a bunch of gimmicks. Which, in terms of the Lower Decks crossover was pretty good, but the rest I didn't really feel landed. And it also caused some tonal whiplash from one episode to the next... dark, comedy, dark, silly musical... I think they could have done a much better job with this season.
