The show is still good, though it feels foolish writing about it under the threat of jinxing it. It should be stated that after this many episodes of Picard Season 2 had aired, these podcasters were naively enthusiastic about the prospect of a new direction. In short, we’ve been burned before.
Uhura is the clear focus of this episode. An entire dinner scene at the top of the episode is almost entirely devoted to Uhura’s uncertainty about her future at Starfleet. This of course ruffles some feathers at the dinner table, given that most of the people there likely struggled to be placed on the Starfleet flagship. However, these podcasters’ issue with this scene is not with the content but the acting style.
This method employed by the actor playing Uhura is one that is common today, where she pauses between every other word to portray nervousness. To us, it comes off as annoying and frustrating. There are many ways to provoke a nervous feeling. Of course, this is a big nitpick and didn’t much detract from the experience of the show.
It is disappointing that the episode began informing the audience of the brilliance of Uhura but then squandered an opportunity to demonstrate it. The most we got was her intuiting the problem on the comet, but never using any ingenuity to solve a problem. It is the opinion of these podcasters that ingenuity is a big part of the milieu of Star Trek and is scarce in modern Trek, even in a great show like Strange New Worlds.
This episode included a demonstration of a Star Trek trope that we’ve heard thousands of times but never seen demonstrated. The evasion protocols are often invoked during an ongoing battle, but SNW actually showed us what that might look like. There were extended sequences of the Enterprise dodging laser fire and comet detritus.
There were times when the visuals felt like video game gameplay, but it was still exciting to see exterior shots of Enterprise in action not comprised of merely beauty shots.
