Tension is the grand theme of this episode. The writers creatively and competently seeded the menace and relentlessness of the Gorn. It may be the Gorn have taken the spot of the arch-enemy of this franchise, much like the Borg are for The Next Generation.
And they managed to accomplish this without them even making an appearance. The way the Gorn ship spins in as it traverses space imparts a threat and is difficult to pin down why exactly. It just is. Then, with the introduction to the bigger Gorn ship, the danger only intensifies.
Synopsis of “Memento Mori”
While on a routine supply mission to a colony planet, the U.S.S. Enterprise comes under an attack from an unknown malevolent force. Pike brings all his heart and experience to bear in facing the crisis, but the security officer warns him that the enemy cannot be dealt with by conventional Starfleet means.
One landmark of good Star Trek for these podcasters is the ingenuity demonstrated by the characters. Picard lacked this feature entirely in all of its main cast. Strange New Worlds appears to have this in spades, though the writers aren’t indiscriminately dumping a bunch of nonsense on the audience all at once. They craftily space out the smarts of the crew when it’s necessary and relevant. For example, Spock concocts a way to detect the Gorn ship in the brown giant (or was it a brown dwarf?).
Then we even got a Star Trek wink in the long-established custom of one character technobabble through a problem and solution, and then another character summing it up in an easily digestible phrase. What’s so refreshing is the producers didn’t feel the need to make an event out of it with a music swell and all the other present characters staring in awe (I’m looking at you, Picard).
There is one Nerd Nitpick worth mentioning. It’s awe-inspiring that the show has managed to include visuals of our most recent discoveries of black holes. It certainly adds to the visual stunningness of the show. But they seem to have the scale all wrong, portraying the black hole to be roughly the size of a planet. The accretion disc orbiting the black hole should be lightyears wide, certainly a distance the Enterprise would have trouble traversing in such a short amount of time.
It’s understandable they needed the black holes to be a particular size for the sake of the narrative, but since their calculations had the scale off by several orders of magnitude, it might’ve been nice to have an explanation. And what about time dilation? Anybody who’s seen Interstellar knows time gets pretty wonky as your spaceship approaches a black hole.
