Hey everyone! Happy Friday! How's everyone's week been? Mine's actually been pretty good. We've come to the end of these episode reviews though as I'm going to be talking about this week's season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 1, episode 10, "A Quality of Mercy". As always with these reviews, there will be spoilers so if you haven't seen the episode yet, please do so before you read this review. Let's get into it.
As I mentioned in my pilot episode review, I was extremely skeptical about this show going in. Between how poorly season 1 of Discovery and season 1 of Picard were handled...mostly by fans...and the fact that the show was being run by Akiva Goldsman, whose film scripts have usually been rush jobs that were then botched during production, I did not have faith that Strange New Worlds was going to be anything but Paramount's attempts to pander to whiny online Star Trek fans. Luckily it wasn't that at all. But, I'll get into that a bit more when I do my full season review.
"A Quality of Mercy" is Star Trek's take on It's A Wonderful Life with Pike being shown a future where he escaped the accident that paralyzes him in time for season 1 of the original series, by showing him the events of the TOS episode, "Balance of Terror" from how it would go if he'd been in command of the Enterprise in 2266 instead Kirk. Spock and Uhura are still there, as are Angela Martine and Robert Tomlinson, though Spock, and Martine are killed instead of Tomlinson, and Scotty is also there though all we see is his arm as he hands tools to Spock in the Jefferies Tube. But M'Benga replaces McCoy, Jenna Mitchell replaces Sulu, and Ortegas replaces Lieutenant Stiles in this version. But the best part of all is Captain James T. Kirk, played by Paul Wesley.
The people working on this show are very sneaky. A few months ago, it was announced that Paul Wesley had been cast as Captain Kirk for season 2 of this show. However, what they did not announce is that he would be introduced as an alternate future version of the character in this episode. Just like with the show itself, I was skeptical about Wesley being cast as Kirk because he's most known for being the male lead on The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), and the only time I'd seen him in anything was in an early season 1 episode of The O.C. from 2003, though he was also in an episode of Smallville that same year. But I liked him in this episode. I do think that I need to see him a bit more before I can say anything else about that, but he wasn't terrible like I feared he would be.
I really enjoyed this episode. "Balance of Terror" is one of my favourite TOS episodes so to see it updated and with the SNW cast was fun. Ortegas wasn't as forceful in her distrust of Spock the way Stiles had been in the original episode, in fact, that was a really quick scene, mainly because they had alot to cover in this episode with Pike, introducing Kirk, and giving us that epic tease for next season when Captain Batel, Pike's girlfriend from the pilot (and the beginning of this episode) arrests Una for being an Illyrian as we were expecting to happen since that revelation in episode 3.
I also felt that this episode felt like a parallel with the pilot episode of Star Trek: Discovery where Burnham tried to prevent a war with the Klingons and then inadvertently started the war she'd tried to prevent. Same thing happened with Pike and the Romulans in the alternate future. And unlike Burnham on Discovery, the alternate version of Pike had to live with the consequences of his actions, which included the death of Spock and the destruction of the Farragut.
I also feel that anyone who says the writers weren't taking inspiration from the 1997 Marvel comics series, Star Trek: Early Voyages, for this show, particularly this episode, they're lying because they totally are. They have to be because this show is that comic book series, even with the crew being slightly different, this being the 2020s not the late '90s.
I actually thought that this was a bold move the writers made having this episode be set in an alternate version of the events which led the Federation to discover what the Romulans actually look like. That way they could actually show us the Romulans without having fans complain that they broke canon. Mostly because actually seeing the fans complaining is exhausting. And this is coming from a fan.
Like I said, I enjoyed this episode. It's not my favourite episode this season, that distinction goes to episode 5, "Spock Amok", but there are no bad episodes this season. Some are indeed weaker than others. If you go by my reviews of the season on this blog, you'll see that the ones I don't say as much about are the ones I didn't care for as much as others, but there aren't any bad episodes this whole season.
And that my friends is my review of the season 1 finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I don't know if I'm going to do episode by episode reviews of season 2 when they start airing next year, but something tells me that, yeah, I'll decide to do episode by episode reviews of season 2 in 2023.
That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow with my season 1 review of Strange New Worlds. So until then have a wonderful evening and I'll talk to you all later. Take care.
.jpg)
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment