It is unfortunately extremely accurate to the manga. In the manga has so many cliffnotes in the margins to explain things, and honestly it does not do that good of a job at it. You have to fill in the blanks a lot of the time. It’s also very fitting to cyberpunk media. Like Neuromancer is very obtuse and you have to fill in the blanks again.

Flag. It’s a real robot mecha set in modern times, the mecha is basically a tank. And its told as a documentary.

Well, this was a great episode.

The only downside is that the Badmeral didn’t get his comeuppance like is tradition, but I can excuse that because we get some justification why M’Benga gets a demotion.

We’ve seen this plot a few times, I don’t feel that’s a bad thing. I feel like some of the best of Star Trek, and especially SNW, is just recycling plots but doing them better, or at least something different.

Also, it was super nice to give Uhura the spotlight. It felt a bit over the top, but I kind of accept it… I kind of wish A’Sha had a bit more development to land her decision, but she was not having a good time on the Enterprise and she clearly almost died, and technically she’s seen enough times where the Enterprise was almost destroyed, it really does seem logical for her to nope out of Star Fleet. I cannot fault the Vulcan prioritizing self preservation over Uhura’s attempts to make her feel welcomed.

And a few continuity notes. The ship is obviously the same one from Balance of Terror. The other helms men next to Sulu says, everyone knows who attacked the Star Fleet Base. So this cloak ship has been a problem for a while and everyone knows of it, but there is likely political problems that make it impossible to deal with.

We also know cloaking tech is not new, as we also see it in ENT’s Minefield.

We also seen an alternate reality version of Balance of Terror in SNW’s A Quality of Mercy, which I feel this has some strange parallels with. Where in QoM Pike hesitates to attack the Romulan Ship, while we see in BoT Kirk is gungho. In this one Kirk is less gungho (but like, reasonably so). I just thought it was an interesting take.

Hot take. I liked this episode. I felt is landed better then most of the other gimmicks like the puppet episode.

I do believe this season has REALLY been stretching my suspension of disbelief, but I feel a Q episode works well enough as a way to make people perform out of character while also doing some character development.

I just feel like the character development feels a bit weird.

I feel like Ortegas is a simple premise for a character, but I feel like she has had the best, and most realistic character work.

M’Benga, I feel like his character is all over the place. He’s like a vengeful war veteran, a bit of PTSD, yet a caring healer. The tone of his character is wild.

But it was actually nice to give them both a bit of screen time together. If it wasn’t for the stuff around it being complete nonsense, it was honestly pretty heartwarming.

And I’ve been waiting for Sybok to get some screen time for so long, and then they take it away from me! I would have loved it if they had really had him, and have him played by Ethan Peck. Just play all of that complete nonsense straight! They foreshadowed he’d play a role, and you have no idea how insanely disappointed I am. Like he really could use some character development, so Star Trek V doesn’t feel like it just comes out of nowhere.

I also did find it interesting how they did weave Pike’s and Uhura’s shared drama of loosing their families. Its something I never thought they’d bother to deal with. And I thought they handled it pretty well.

Also, hilarious that Chapel had an entire adventure off screen. Honestly, kind of what seems like happens to Chapel all the time, like when everyone turned in to Vulcans.

So…I actually like this episode.

EDIT: Also stay tuned for the post credit scene for this episode.

Ghost is meant to be your soul. That unquantifiable part of you that makes you human. The shell is just meant to be a cybernetic body.

So a Ghost in the Shell is a person’s soul/spirit inside of a robot.

I liked this episode. Reminds me of TNG’s Disaster, obviously because they both meant to be disaster movies.

I liked that we had a lot of plots requiring everyone to work together to solve the problem of the week. Felt better then the last few episodes.

I’m also starting to feel like Roddenberry’s decree that there shouldn’t be any interpersonal conflict really does sell the competence porn aspect of Star Trek that I love. So because of Chapel’s and M’Benga’s fighting, it did take me out a bit. Also…I do find it slightly hard to believe that they don’t have dermal generators to heal a crushed pelvis. This conceptually, seems survivable to me. But then again, I guess there was a time Worf was going to be paralyzed but then Klingon anatomy saved the day, so I guess medical tech can fail if the plot needs it to.

Yeah, since it’s a dream, I really wish they had gone all in on the cartoon gags. That’s my only complaint.

I can excuse the premise and even the cop out, it’s all a dream, but they really need to just go all in on the concept. Like maybe some Kermit tilting his head back while his arms flail around or crumple his face with the puppeteer’s fist like when he’s mad. Like literally the lowest hanging fruit is using puppet hair whip to the face. Or maybe some cecoling, fourth wall breaking, a Pigs in Space reference which is a parody of Star Trek. Like, just go ape shit with the concept.

I feel really conflicted about this season. I like they’re experimenting and trying new stuff, but like, i don’t know if it’s landing.

However, I do believe in like 10 years I’m going to look back and think, this is good Star Trek. But similar to…honestly all Star Trek, I find it hard to really enjoy it in the moment for some reason.

I guess Star Trek is a fine wine. You got to let it age a bit first.

On retrospective, I really like the development of Ortega. We’ve seen her rebuild a motorcycle in her quarters. We’ve seen her jury rig a universal translator in Terrarium. So her revealing she’s mad that she didn’t become an engineer makes a lot of sense, and taking it out on Scotty.

That’s solid character development that has been building over multiple episodes. I appreciate the slow burn and foreshadowing.

We got horror last week, now we got stoner comedy this week. And kicked us off with a Jurassic Park episode. They really are running the gambit with film genres.

I love that they’re experimenting, but I also would really appreciate some traditional Star Trek of seeing professionals being professional. I just want some of that Andy Weir style competence porn!

After reading some of the comments, I’m now going to watch the Hangover. As I had compared this episode to Dude, Where’s my Car, but that movie jumps the shark and goes in to absurdity. Which, to be fair, is very appropriate for the genre. They didn’t get that extreme with this episode, but I also wouldn’t have been surprised if they did.

I don’t know if I liked this episode, which makes me believe I’ll like it a lot more later after I let it sink in a bit and think about what they were trying to do.

Ironically this is very much how the manga was. There were a lot of cliff notes in the margins to explain things, or a few times to explain what Shirow intended but was too lazy to draw.

It was good horror, but I don’t think I liked this episode very much.

I feel my biggest problem is the lack of resolution. I know that’s kind of the hallmark of horror, the “The End…?” but I actually kind of like the technobabble explanations.

I don’t want them to not take risks with Star Trek, so I welcome experimental episodes, but I still feel a bit let down.

I think this is suppose to reset Spock back to status quo for when the series ends next season. I don’t think we’re suppose to see him align his human/vulcan self.

I love me a good causality loop, but I don’t feel like this was good example of one.

The diplomacy stuff on the Enterprise was fun. But oddly the dinosaur planet plot actually didn’t feel as impactful.

Like it honestly feels like not a lot happened on planet. Which is a shame, because there were dinosaurs!

I feel like more of the dinosaurs should have had feathers, to keep up with contemporary understanding of dinosaurs. But I understand the pop culture short hand to help establish the cliche and not confuse the audience.

If this is FTL but Star Trek Voyager, I’m going to be in heaven.

You might be right. I just took a look at the sales, and last year did see a 12% drop. Apple’s Vision Pro is over priced and lacks software, and the Meta Quest 3 saw high initial sales but has dropped a lot since then.

It is definitely a very niche product with a high price point that prevents it from making broader market appeal.

But oddly, Meta is reporting increase in VR game revenue, so I guess games are still selling on its platform at the least.

Survival horror and Star Trek is not something that instantly seem like it goes together to me. But this does look interesting. Being able to Vulcan death grip and mind meld with people in VR looks interesting and sounds like cool mechanic combined with Star Trek lore.

This looks pretty fun for some reason, and I do own a Valve Index, so happy to see this not locked behind the Meta store, like so many other VR games.

I don’t like the implications that there is a device that can absorb phaser fire.

I also find it weird that the “intruders” who I assume know English, are not able to pick up on Federation Standard, I assume it is still not that different from English, considering Starfleet did start in North America. You think when you see on the hall of a ship, “U.S.S. Enterprise” or when you enter and take a look around and see the service panels that, they might think for a second that this ship might have hailed from Earth.

Also a bit weird how they haven’t encountered Federation ships with humans with their couple of hundred year space travels. But I assume maybe they went through the same wormhole as V’ger or something. And who knows what kind of trauma they have to live through.

Despite these logical inconsistencies, I think I still enjoyed this mess of an episode.

The spectacle was over the top. I like seeing the TOS crew interacting with each other. And I enjoyed the Enterprise crew coming up with a solution to save themselves, though their escape and timing with the Farragut’s attack did seem awfully convenient. Would have felt a little less contrived if they had coordinated with each other a bit sooner to match up the plans, but we don’t always have so much screen time to explain things and the plot sometimes needs to get moving, so I can forgive it.

I also like the Pike to Kirk talk talking about empathizing with your enemy. Feelsl ike foreshadowing to Arena.

Anyway, I currently like this episode.

I literally thought this might be a prequel to that. I was disappointed.

Yeah, it is a bit weird to introduce zombies but then to only use it as window dressing instead of dealing with the scientific ramifications of creating the walking dead that are invisible to tricorders. They’re a distraction to M’Benga’s more personal story of him needing to confront the consequences of his actions.

Not to like completely say the episode was bad, it’s just with a bit more thought it could have been better and more impactful to the meta narrative.