It’s not awful. In fact it has a lot of great high points. On balance, I would say that if you compared it objectively to the first 65 episodes of TNG, it would compare rather favorably.

No joke: actual screenshots from Star Trek have been used to promote these medbed scams.

That was not uncommon for big expensive movies back then. It was the franchise attempting to appear legitimate and grown up in its first entry into theaters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_with_overtures

Yes, BUT a Federation starship can travel at the equivalent of many, many times the speed of light, such that it could cross our solar system from the Sun to Pluto’s orbit in half a minute without breaking a sweat.

Sure, at that speed it still takes a few days to reach the next nearest star system, but most of these incidents take place in or near the Sol system, where you would think Starfleet would have a number of ships stationed at any given moment. Even if they’re hobbled, they should be able to respond to a threat to the solar system within a couple of hours at most.

No, silly. He has an inertial damping field around him that essentially transfers his own indestructibility to any object or person he is holding, at will. It’s the same principle that keeps his cape and tights from getting shredded when he walks through explosions or gets shot. The sheer force of impact crumples the very front of the train, but the rest of it will be fine.

In this case, he is just respecting the child’s own personal space and choosing to risk the corporate-owned property of the train rather than potentially upsetting the child.

La’an saying “fascinating” makes me wonder if Spock is rubbing off on her.

Uh, phrasing

What do Data and Armus have in common?

They both ate Yar.

Goblins and orcs are the same thing.

It’s just modern cultural convention to linguistically differentiate them by their size. “Goblins” is a more archaic and folksy word for them.

The orcs referred to as Uruk-hai are members of that race that have been specially bred to be larger, more intelligent, and unphased by sunlight, but “Uruk-hai” just means “orc-folk” in the Black Speech.

I suspect Batel’s fate is foreshadowed in her mindmeld with Spock. The hybridization will give her a Gorn aspect that she can’t live with, but it will also grant her the ability to communicate with the Gorn, and she’ll wind up sacrificing herself.

They are definitely doing this without Starfleet approval. Pike’s ship prioritizes individuals over regulations, an ethos that carries forward when Kirk takes the chair.

When he started snapping to change things I was like oh, okay, I see what this is. I think Trelane did that too, but it became such a trademark of Q that it was hard to ignore the similarity. And then the voice was just delicious icing on the cake. They didn’t make a big deal of it or make some weird tortured commentary to try and tie it into continuity. They just let it be as a story on its own.

I was impressed with their restraint in not mentioning either Trelane or Q by name. I mean they dressed the entity in the same costume as Trelane, and his behavior and MO are identical, so we’re clearly meant to conclude they are one and the same. But they didn’t burden the story with continuity, and that’s smart.

One of the writers talked about it on Open Pike Night and said it was a deliberate choice to give La’an and Erica opposite trajectories from last season, where now La’an is finally able to move on from her trauma with the Gorn while Erica is dealing with it for the first time.

I like to think that wolkite is a predecessor or a component of the viridium patch that Spock tracks Kirk with in Undiscovered Country.

It would be a simple matter for Trelane to make them all forget about him in “The Squire of Gothos” so that he could have more fun with them. I also like the idea that the Q wore the raiment of “energy entities” at this point in history just as fashion.

So long as people are starving under the system while others have yachts, the system is unethical, and thus following its rules – insofar as they perpetuate this inequity – is unethical.

Theft from the wealthy is morally right, period.

I’m rewatching it now, and there’s a lot less of that decon chamber cheese than I remembered.

Nope, it’s canonical that Trip had nipples on his arm.

The design influence goes in the other direction.