Episode 2.10 "Hegemony" Discussion Thread

I thought the same thing as soon as I saw Pike singing to her. It feels like one of those old war movies where the new guy shows everyone a picture of his girlfriend and tells everyone, "We're gonna get married when I get back."

O.o So good and with the strikes ongoing we're not going to get more for a bit. I think there were so many lighter episodes this season just to prepare for this gut punch. So good. Some was a bit predictable, but I did love the introduction of another 'legacy' character.

Watching Ready Room and they used practical effects wherever possible. We had an adult Gorn costume with a guy in it!

Also, this seasons are way too short! We trekkers like long series. I know those kind of seasons are no longer part of the cultural zeitgeist, but cut us some slack P+ please. There seems to be budget available, the will and the appreciation of the fans. What about 15 episodes? 

Pike is also still thinking about that alternate future where he didn't die and picks diplomacy with the Romulans and is trying to be a little less diplomatic I think or at least toying with it. This is the first episode where we really see him dealing with that, probably because they gave Mount some time with his kid, but yeah you can see the wheels turning.

This was a really good episode and a nice cliffhanger like they used to do during the TNG/DS9/VOY era.

Sorry, but I am annoyed about the Gorn. No, I'm not saying I want the Gorn to be a guy in a rubber suit, but I always liked the way the TOS Gorn look. I loved their compound eyes. The Gorn in ENT/SNW all look like cheesy gecko monsters. They're so generic now. The only aspect I like is the "cycles" they seem to go through. I'm hoping the TOS Gorn is maybe like their "final" look ... where apparently their ten foot tail fell off? MEH.

SCOTTY! I am not familiar with the actor but he did do a good job of playing him for the most part. The only thing I wonder is why this actor and Simon Pegg were written to play such a jittery, nervous character. In TOS, I don't recall Scotty acting like a slightly more functional Barclay. I guess it's chalked up them playing his "younger" self. *shrugs*

I think they are pitching Scotty as sort-of comedy relief from a vague awareness of the movie Scotty. “I know this ship like the back of my hand.” That being said, I really like this actor as Scotty. 

Excellent episode. I was on the edge of my seat. I kept expecting them to meet a young girl named Rebecca and when they talk to her she says, "Newt, my name is Newt."


The writer acknowledged a few episodes back that this is Prime changed by the temporal wars. The people in the future just want to keep the big picture the same. Lots of details change. The Federation and the Gorn had conflicts in either version so the time cops didn't care. In prime1960, the Gorn attacked a colony. In Prime23, the Federation met the Gorn a few years earlier because they founded colonies close to the Gorn a few years earlier then in Prime1960s.


All that we've met in SNW are Gorn children. In my head cannon, Gorn lay hundreds of eggs every year. The children grow quickly in everything but intelligence. They are mindless, violent killing machines and only the toughest and luckiest survive. Only one Gorn in thousands lives to adulthood. To an adult Gorn, Gorn children are disposable shock troops until they metamorphosis into the adolescent form when they start to develop intelligence.

There are only a handful of adult Gorns on each ship surrounded by lots of obedient and terrified adolescent Gorns hoping to survive to adulthood along with tens of thousands of mindless violent children on the planet.

James T. Kirk met an adult Gorn because the super aliens beamed the captains of both ships to the planet to fight it out. That's why TOS Gorns and SNW Gorns look so different. The Gorn society is kill or be killed. They don't know any other way of life then endless combat. They assume that every one they've met so far are mindless children.

Fun thing about the Gorn in SNW

They're closer to the original script description for them in Arena than the suit made for TOS

From Memory Alpha:
"It is a lizard, who walks like a man… two-legged, two-armed, a thick glistening scaly hide, the size of a man with outstanding musculature… a wide mouth full of sharp teeth, a ridge of hard plate running down his back, even a prehensile, thick, strong tail."

Agreed. I rolled my eyes at this. This whole big globe but yet "North American". Why not something Asian or African? Latino wouldn't have been a big leap either. Same set. Change the signage to Spanish. Have some stereotypical Latin music blaring in the background and most importantly, a lot more diversity for the background characters. 

At the same time I understand the logistics of using whatever small town or set used in any average movie or tv show as a cost cutting measure. But it's still lame. It really wouldn't have taken a lot more to make it something different. To me it reflects who sits at the table to come up with these things. Or perhaps better said, who isn't. 

An  updated version. Just like the ship itself was updated.

Maybe the Metrons evened the odds by inhibiting the Gorn skipper. Not that that doesn’t open up another quantum pile of issues… 

Had a few issues with this one. (Sorry for the mega-post, if you can be bothered to read it.)

...It works well enough as a good rollercoaster season ending, but you have to overlook a few flaws, and it does throw into sharp relief the cavalier approach to “canon.” Look, I’m not sure care anything about canon (such as it is )anymore, not ever since the Kurtzman era threw all that to the high winds. But with SNW as a self-proclaimed “prequel” to TOS, it doesn’t seem to really obey its own edicts on this matter, which can get a bit confusing for the longtime viewer (i.e. me).

I know time has been rearranged and there’s been all sorts of jiggery-pokery to the prime timeline. But when is a Gorn not a Gorn, and what the hell was that lizard TOS Kirk faced in Arena? ‘Cause it sure as hell wasn’t these boyz. Arena is effectively no longer a concern, because here the Gorn are just a pestilence, an alien menace to be wiped out, as interchangeable a threat as, say, the Klingon foe of Under the Cloak of War, except there’s more body horror based on old SF/horror movies. I mean, they’re cool, but they’re just ALIEN-style BEMs, not Gorn. Look, we even have special phasers now that will kill them, just like we did with the unstoppable Borg sometime in the future.

On a pure storytelling level, the idea that Christine Chapel is the sole survivor on the Cayuga is ludicrous. Everyone else aboard died; no-one else is stranded inside a handy life-supported air pocket? Okay. The coincidence that she wakes up, looks out of an observation port and sees Spock in a spacesuit going about his mission at exactly the right instant is also ludicrous. Space is big. Incomprehensibly big, and there are so many variables overlooked in this whole sequence to make it all work, I had real difficulty buying it. It might work as written, but as filmed, there are so many coincidences and handy happenstances (Oh look, there’s an intact spacesuit right when I need one; Spock is real close, oh he’s making for the Bridge etc.) that it all felt very manipulative. All drama is manipulation, but the moment you feel it, that’s when you’re zapped out of your immersion in the story and the characters’ predicament. It all felt as if Myers wanted to get to the adult Gorn showdown and then have Spock and Chapel hold hands in space - which I admit, was a lovely image - but c’mon. Make it harder. Make it more believable. This should’ve felt like an impossible-to-navigate centerpiece for both characters, the kind of jeopardy that you wonder if the show’s makers really will subvert canon and do away with a major legacy character, but it didn’t. It just played out as expected with zero suspense. Although I guess, we did get to see an adult Gorn without backup who was there for reasons.

Star Trek, to a degree, has often maintained a reasonable and healthy respect with its pseudo-science for actual science, but this whole sequence felt like it bent everything logical (sorry) and plausible for the needs of the story without respecting the innate impossibilities of the situation. It was soap-operatic, not dramatic. SNW does always foreground character over drama, but on this occasion it just all felt super-contrived.

The cliffhanger also bugged the hell out of me. Pike freezes? What, he just freezes as he weighs up the situation? Not our Pike! It’s impossible not to make this comparison: in BoBW 1, Will Riker gives the order to fire upon on his former Borgified captain. We know the resultant showdown will be a collision of titans; it’s one of the best cliffhangers ever in all Trek. Here we haven’t seen Pike struggle at all with the ramifications of treating the Gorn as a cosmic pestilence rather than an intelligent species, it’s just that his hands are tied by Starfleet orders and morally, he wants to go after his people. Pike is the most human of captains; we know this, his ability to “do the right thing” and his loyalties are among his most admirable and oft-demonstrated traits. Dangling a choice like this as a cliffhanger feels ridiculously clumsy and almost (potentially) revisionist. It’s not really a moral dilemma, not in the classic sense of trad Star Trek. Unless we are glimpsing some new, foreshadowed angle on Pike that will make us like him less? That would be the weirdest character development Star Trek has ever attempted. If there’s a surprise next season as to how this is resolved; well, I’ll be surprised. It’s either Pike chooses people over orders or someone else/another problem swoops in to save the day so Pike doesn’t have to immediately take the decision.

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest; there was a lot of great stuff too. I really liked the new Scotty. Yes, he’s a little young. Eh, who cares, he feels right and how refreshing to have an actual Scot play him. He nailed Scotty in a heartbeat; I knew who he was before he declared it and it was actually a lovely intro.

The midwest colony town was both hilarious and a fun callback to TOS’ budget-saving use of studio backlots and that theory of Earth-a-likes TOS Kirk mentions in Miri, but as others have said upthread, why are these places always (north) American? At least it wasn’t TNG-style Irish or Scottish with fiddle music. Or that awful pseudo-African planet in Code of Honor. I like it when Trek takes the piss out of itself, and there was actually a lot of humor in this episode.

Another good season overall, I felt, although for my tastes, they haven’t quite nailed finalés yet, both of which feel amongst the weaker entries. But when you have episodes of the quality of Ad Astra and Tomorrow and Tomorrow… and all the fun experiments and overall consistent quality character work, I’m happy for the most part. (Well, apart maybe from this ep.) I feel like, of all the Kurtzman era, the shows I’ll be revisiting are Prodigy and SNW. I genuinely love SNW. I must do, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the time to write all this down. The rest of ‘em - well, life’s too short.