“wait several months for new episodes of Trek to cross the Atlantic”
I remember well
I may have seen the first 3 episodes of Voyager in Wynns Hotel in Dublin,in the mid nineties about 6 months before it was picked up by a local Station thanks to a star trek club , someone’s cousin in New York and a NTSC compatible VCR.
I was in that same room! Went to a couple of those day-long mini-cons in my late teens to watch new episodes of DS9 or the start of Voyager before they’d hit TV over here. And then the Trek society in my college was clued-in to the bootleg network, a guy would come up every two weeks with a tape of episodes we hadn’t seen yet and a box of merch he was selling. I managed to get the first four episodes of Babylon 5 series 4 from him before the show started back on Channel 4.
SNW series 2, episode 3 was a delight. Really fun story, great character work and some fine performances from the main characters and guest cast. Spoilers:
Well, I didn’t expect a La’an/Kirk buddy adventure and romance story but it was a lot of fun. The way they played off each other was effortlessly charming and their banter was amusing. The plot was well-constructed and I love how much early stuff in the episode seemed throwaway worked out later - especially Pellia’s bit about having a bunker in Montana in case the moneyless socialist utopia not working out actually pays off. And the bit where Kirk doesn’t recognise La’an’s surname hinting at the ultimate divergence in the timeline was fantastic.
Lots of fun moments for Kirk especially - him making money by winning Chess matches and the “I grew up on the USS Iowa” line amused me.
Just one thing really bugged me. Did La’an actually leave a loaded gun on the table in Khan’s room? I saw her put it down and comfort him, but expected her to pick it back up before she left. She just walked out. Gotta rewatch, but if so, that was one hell of an oversight from a person responsible for security. I spent a couple of minutes expecting some Temporal officer to show up and say, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to go back again, because that kid should not have had a gun in his room.”
To be fair, she wasn’t exactly thinking too rationally at that point. Realizing the guy she’d fallen for (alternate Kirk) had died in her arms while she’d just saved the person who would grow up to be responsible for World War III and the deaths of probably billions of people isn’t the kind of thing you walk off after a moment or two.
I was cackling with glee at the scenes with Pelia. Strangely she reminds me a bit of Lwaxana Troi in that kind of “reality may think one thing’s going to happen, but I know better” type of attitude. She’s definitely a wild card.
I can’t wait for her to make an off-hand remark about some “young El-Aurian bartender” whose bar she got thrown out of years ago or the like. And I definitely want to see Pelia share some stories of Spock’s youth that she learned from his mom. Maybe we hear a retelling of Yesteryear from The Animated Series? Or she’ll have some knowledge about Sybok that the crew will need to know.
And - responding to the above- SNW could definitely use some queer representation. Odd as many of the cast are very diverse in that way & very easily read as such.
Agreed about SNW… they certainly hinted that Nurse Chapel is bi, but I’d love to see more of representation along those lines… I hope that they do more with Ortegas (no spoilers if they’re doing that in the current season), and that ends up being more queer representation. It seems like the character could be read as non-binary, but I’d love that to be canon…
