Some Blundering About Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2×01: The Broken Circle

I am on vacation right now, but managed to cobble this together before I left. No idea if next week’s will come out in a timely manner.

The Broken Circle or The Roid Rage of Khan

See Also: Star Trek III, Most of Deep Space 9.
Contains Strange New Worlds?: Yep!
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Yep!

We’re off to a heck of a start. Weird decision to sideline Pike for the whole of the first episode, given how much Space Daddy Energy Anson Mount brings, but he’s off this week trying to find Una a lawyer. Man alive the cold open did some telegraphing. Pike thinks the admiralty is concerned about something, but he can’t be bothered, because Una needs a lawyer and there’s only one who could possibly save her, but she won’t return their calls and I guess that’s what the next couple of episodes are going to be about. The cliffhanger at the end at least explains that the Gorn are being more aggressive along the Federation border, enough that there’s talk of war, and that’s what’s got Bob April and the gang up-in-arms. Might end up dragging out the thing with Una for another week since there was no cliffhanger about Pike meeting the lawyer.

This episode is just packed with stuff. Uhura’s back, a full officer now. La’an is back too by the end. We get an adorable new transporter chief who kinda looks like Jett Reno’s mini-me. And the Klingons are back, and people are saying that these are “proper” Klingons with the TNG makeup, but, like, not even quite; they’re way smoother with less pronounced ridges, so somewhere in the middle? And we get an origin story for Spock playing the lyre? They look kind of crap, honestly – too smooth and too clean. I think there’s a Disco-style Klingon in one of the long shots.  (I kinda love this. The Klingons in this episode look stupid, but I am for anything that supports the reading of, “There’s just lots of ways for Klingons to look.”) And the fair folk are real I guess?

Yeah, wow, weird casual thing to just randomly drop there. Our new Chief Engineer (so far she’s an academy instructor who just stopped by for inspection, but she basically ends the episode saying she plans to stick around) Pelia is Lanthanite. I’m guessing the “lan-” part there is meant to be a derivative of Atlantis, because she’s actually an immortal near-human species from Earth, who went unnoticed by humanity until a century after First Contact. They’re out in the open now, but apparently still rare, as no one on the bridge had ever met one. Yeah. She’s a fairy. This kind of works, since Carol Kane is probably fey herself; I mean, when they first showed publicity shots of her, I thought, “I wonder where they found an actress who looks exactly like Carol Kane did thirty years ago?”. Accent is a bit dodgy though. But struggle through the weird voice and she’s a pretty wonderful character. She clearly draws a lot from Guinan – another nigh-immortal near-human who lived secretly among humans for centuries – but the tone of her character is completely different. I love that when she talks to Spock at the end about the downside of being an immortal among mortals, she rejects the Guinan answer – which is enough of an obvious cliche answer that even Spock guesses it. No, the hard thing about being immortal isn’t that you have to see the people you love die. She very wonderfully points out that seeing the people you love die is a thing that happens to everyone. No, what gets to her is boredom. Pelia is above mortal considerations by enough that the only thing that really gets to her is time itself. She’s unpredictable and weird and aloof enough that she immediately guesses that they’re faking a warp core problem in order to steal the Enterprise, and she just rolls with it and helps them out because it’s a lark. Also she’s friends with Spock’s mom, which is really fun. Also waiting for the chorus of people asking why no one mentions to Flint that it’s well-known that Earth has a small population of immortals.

We’re leaning in on Spock’s emotional turmoil, which just complicates the character’s timeline more and more. But I guess this does help play into building toward justifying Spock’s decision, in six years, to risk his career for Pike. Another thing I love is that M’Benga says that Vulcan emotions are stronger than human ones – something Spock alluded to in the original series, but it never really seemed to take with anyone. The next cool tweak to the mythos is that the way M’Benga talks about Vulcans suppressing their emotions via “cognitive blocks”, which hints at something more akin to a somatopsychic effect. I felt that they did a bad job last season with conveying the impact of Spock breaking through his emotional controls to go Beast Mode against the Gorn. And since they’ve decided that this is going to be part of the season’s through-line, that Spock is going to have some long-term damage from that, it’s good that they’re fleshing it out a little. In the moment, it just looked like him yelling a bit and then feeling shaken by it. Having now read half of van der Kolk’s book (Got to go slow with that book; it’s heavy stuff), I know that in the moment it might not look like much, but I am starting to believe that Spock’s experience with the Gorn has given him something which is distinct and alien, but akin in ways to PTSD. A traumatic experience forced his brain to rewire around cognitive blocks that Vulcans spend years building. And the effect of it is not the same as you’d expect on a human psyche, but it follows some of the same patterns.

Also, obviously, he’s hot for Christine. And I mean, who can blame him.

So Spock decides to steal the Enterprise to go rescue La’an after Uhura picks up a message from her, and everyone important decides to go along with it. Including Mitchell, a character who maybe we will learn more about this season, after her presence last season consisting of “And also Mitchell was there.”

Had I known Ortegas was planning to use “Vamoose!” as her “Make the ship go” thing, I definitely would’ve worked it into my fanfic. This whole, “Every captain has a cool thing they say to make the ship go,” idea… I like the idea of it; I like the idea of a Captain’s Catchphrase you can put on shirts and stuff. But… There are only so many cool and relevant phrases to come up with. Sure, Picard saying, “Engage!” was iconic, but there wasn’t really a “tradition”. I had to look it up to learn that Janeway fairly consistently said, “Do it.” I remember Kirk says, “Go, Sulu!” twice in the movies. But the idea of Every Captain Has A Thing emerged mostly in Discovery as a way to make a point of Saru’s difficulty adjusting. He never managed to stick a catchphrase, so when Michael takes over at the end of the season, they legitimize her command by having her immediately come up with the (frankly, just “okay”) “Let’s fly.” Shaw’s got his, “Ah fuck it, whatever.” They make a point of not revealing Seven’s “thing”. So we’re only at like 50% of these “Every Captain Has A Thing” things being something other than a joke. “I would like the ship to go now,” indeed.

But the main thing this episode is about is M’Benga and Chapel. Again, cool, fine. Chapel is probably the most compelling character after Pike, and M’Benga is delightful. It’s weird; I know Babs Olusanmokun looks nothing like Booker Bradshaw, but whenever I try to imagine TOS M’Benga, my brain just shows me a dude who looks like Babs Olusanmokun, but with bigger, more 60s hair. There’s a mention that Chapel applied to go study archaeological medicine on Vulcan for a few months. Don’t know if they will follow that up (A chance for a story where Chapel and T’Pring interact and sow the seeds for their respective future paths?), but I like that they’re leaning in on Chapel being an academic. A good way to redeem the somewhat shallow version of the character from TOS is to present her as this brilliant research scientist, who got a nursing degree mostly so she’d be qualified to do human experimentation, and then did a career pivot for personal reasons, so that during TOS she’s basically slumming it to pay her dues as she takes on the practice of medicine as a dual-class.

The Enterprise crew weren’t involved in the Klingon war. That was a big part of Pike’s Discovery arc, that he had serious survivor’s guilt because of it. That doesn’t factor into anyone particular’s story this week, but M’Benga and Chapel weren’t on the Enterprise during that period, and the did serve, and it comes up here. The titular circle are trying to restart the war in a shockingly cynical gambit to drive up dilithium prices. You almost expect Ferengi (or maybe Orions) to be unseen agents provocateurs in this. They’re building a Starfleet ship out of salvage inside a dilithium mine in order to launch a false flag against the Klingons, because it was really Antifa who stormed the Capitol and jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and it was a perfect phone call and vaccines contain microchips and Hunter Biden’s Laptop. I don’t know. Mitchell identifies the ersatz ship as Crossfield class, but it looks… Nothing like that. It’s got a Crossfield-style saucer, but the rest of the ship is very similar to Riker’s Luna-Class Titan. Even more to the Ares class from the Axanar fan-film. I see some people suggesting that the Discovery and the Glenn are non-standard refits, and possibly a “stock” Crossfield would look like that, but it’s just as likely that the ship is a total kit-bash not conforming to any actual Starfleet design, and Mitchell is just giving the closest approximation possible based on the saucer.

So La’an left last season to reunite Newt with her two moms (Kudos Strange New Worlds for just them be quietly there as the entirely normal thing it is rather than awkwardly hanging a lantern on it just to make sure you got credit) but one of them is radiation-sick from a mining accident which is really due to the starship the bad guys are building. The rest of the gang goes off with La’an to investigate but honestly turns up nothing; M’Benga and Chapel stay to treat Newt’s mom, and get captured by the Klingons and taken directly to their secret lair. Here’s where we learn that ever since a horrific wartime incident, M’Benga carried a bottle of Super Soldier Serum in his medical kit, and him and Chapel shoot themselves up, hulk out and go on a murder spree. It’s pretty intense. They just murder the absolute fuck out of a ton of Klingons, and the whole time, they look sort of horrified at what they’re doing. The show doesn’t have time to deal with the fallout of this, but I assume it will be a deal moving forward. There’s nothing like this with any of the other doctors in Star Trek. Sure, we have Action Bev in Picard Season 3, but even that is sort of slow-moving and methodical, with time for contemplation of the moral complexity. Also, she fights with a phaser, and the only time she actually tries to kill someone who isn’t actively trying to kill her back, it’s when they try to execute Vadic. This is two of our heroes murdering their way through a ship not for their own defense, but to complete a mission, and doing it with their bare hands.

And at one point they turn the camera upside down for absolutely no reason. What the hell. I find a lot of the shots in this episode to be sort of muddy and hard to follow, especially with the amount going on on the screen during the asteroid belt sequence. CGI has made it possible for all sorts of shit to be on the screen, and modern Trek has not been super great about restraint when it comes to that.

And then to my mind, they were very brave about how they handled the climax. In most Treks, after Spock finally destroyed the renegade ship, there would have been a scene revealing that he had logic’d out that if they simply destroyed the ship undetected, the Broken Circle would have tried again. And worse, it was likely that firing on the ship would have alerted the Klingons to their presence. But by waiting until the ship had shown itself to the Klingons, then blowing it up, they created a narrative where the Federation was taking proactive steps to hunt down a rogue ship and had done the Klingons a solid by saving them from these rebels. Then maybe right at the end there would be a little “Or is it?” hinting that maybe that was just an excuse, but they’d leave it open-ended.

But they don’t do that. They leave us with the inescapable conclusion that Spock got lucky that he could sell that narrative to the Klingons; his real reason was quite straightforwardly that he didn’t want to sacrifice Christine. They showed us him abandoning the bridge to go to her, even. I like the bravery there, the willingness to commit, without a wink, to Spock having taken a big risk because his feelings got in the way.

I hope they tie this in to Spock’s larger arc. Back in Spock’s “Origin story”, in Q&A, they tell us that Spock wants his own command. But we know Spock ends up not wanting that. So it would be nice if Spock’s journey in Strange New Worlds shows him reversing on this, and “Spock eventually comes to realize that he is not suited for command because he can’t handle the idea of sending those he leads to their deaths” would be a very poignant way to do that.