Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 4, "Among the Lotus Eaters" Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay for a Friday. Today I'm here to talk about this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Among the Lotus Eaters". I don't have a whole lot to say about this episode, simply because there wasn't as much weight to it as there had been for the first three episodes of the season. And, as usual, with these less heavy episodes, there won't be very many spoilers for it. So let's get into it.

I really enjoyed this episode. Mainly because it deals with things that we can all relate to. Loss, deciding whether it's worth it to keep the memories that are painful to you, and the choice to make a romantic relationship work inspite of the careers you and your partner have chosen for yourselves. I find it interesting to have an episode bookended by scenes between Pike and Batel, where it opens with them trying to have a quiet dinner together, but their work getting in the way, and Pike, discouraged, calling it off, and then the episode ending with him apologizing to her after the ordeal that him, La'an, and M'Benga went through over the course of the episode made him realize that Batel was too important to him for him to let the relationship go.

I think one of the reasons that this works so well is because they see their problems stemming from the outcome of Una's trial, as Batel was the arresting officer, and part of the prosecution, which lost, due to the loophole discovered by Neera Ketoul at the end of "Ad Astra per Aspera". Batel even names Pasalk, that nasty Vulcan admiral that seems to have it out for Spock and Pike, by name when she's talking to Pike after her conversation with Pasalk. Making things personal for the characters, is one of the things I love about fiction. SNW has done a really good job so far of making things personal for the crew, without overdoing to the point that it becomes unnatural, as it's happened on most of the CW comic book based shows.

What I find the most interesting is that the episode expanded upon an event only mentioned in the very first pilot of TOS, "The Cage", which starred Jeffrey Hunter as Pike, Majel Barrett as Una (then only referred to as Number One), and Leonard Nimoy as Spock. We never saw the event spoken of on screen, though it was depicted in issue #3 of the comic book series, Star Trek: Early Voyages in 1997. So it was interesting to find out more about stuff that happened before "The Cage".

Overall this was another great episode. That's one of the things that I love about SNW. The show comes out with consistently solid episodes, even if they're ones that I personally don't enjoy as much, there isn't a bad episode of this series so far. 

That's going to be it for me for this week my friends. I'll be back next week with more reviews and posts. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.