source: Love Me Tender At Midnight

X-Men #41 - February 1968 3/10

This is a weird one. The X-Men are on a train that’s suddenly attacked by a weird lookin’ hulkin’ guy. They fight him but he easily shrugs off all their attacks, because that’s always how this comic works, the X-Men just get the shit kicked out of them constantly. They name this guy and he happily takes that as his new name.

He is “Grotesk the sub-human”, a prince of some ancient civilization that lived in caves below the surface. Everyone he loves died and he got mutated by I THINK atomic blasts from above? And now he wants revenge. Honestly, I’m on this guy’s side??

Actually he apparently wants nukes so he can blow up the Earth entirely. I dunno, that feels like going a LITTLE far. The X-Men show up again to stop him, aaaaand to be continued

We’re still doing really short issues causae we have the mini stories in the back. This one has Jack o’Diamonds, who met Scott and went “Hey you’re my minion now”, demanding Scott murder Xavier. Scott’s like “what the fuck? No?” so Jack goes and pushes himself into some radiation machine which turns him into pure diamond, and he calls himself The Living Diamond. This guy’s got like three names!

X-Men #42 - March 1968 3/10

This is such a funny cover. Anyways WOAH, SENSATIONALISM, PROFESSOR X IS GONNA DIE FOR THE FIRST TIME FOR REAL HE’S REALLY GONNA DIE HE’S GONNA DIE OMG HE’S GONNA DIE WOW

Anyways Xavier is being kinda weird. Scott and Beast are fighting Grotesk and getting his ass kicked and Xavier is refusing to let the rest of them go help. Jean is siding with him, everyone else is like “what the hell???”

Scott and Beast, of course, get beat up by Grotesk, who just… leaves.

Everyone wants to confront Xavier for being a dickhead, and Jean is holding them back. Did I mention the weird costume change btw? I dunno if I like it much. but then Xavier is like “actually no please help me” because he’s being murdered by Grotesk for some reason. Xavier led him there to try and lay a trap but uh, told no one about this.

They manage to defeat Grotesk, or really Xavier does, (actually the machine he’s trying to steal blows up and kills him) and then he admits that he was actually dying of a completely different disease, but set this all up to stop Grotesk. And then he just, dies.

Or so he claims. You already did this in like, issue 4, can I really trust you??

More backstory, Living Diamond is attacking Xavier now, and Scott sides with him cause he’s not a raging murderer made out of actual diamonds.

They use a radiation machine to make him EVEN MORE diamond, but he’s already pure diamond, so he just fucking explodes. Scott just killed a man. Scott then joins Xavier as his first X-Man and gets his outfit and visor.

X-Men #43 - April 1968 3.5/10

Another incredible Magneto face.

Magnetos back I guess. Apparently this happened in some other comics, maybe Avengers?

Quicksilver attends Xavier’s funeral, and everyone is bothered by it, because they hate him again. Apaprently Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch denounced humanity and joined with Magneto again? Man, they just… cannot make good decisions. He runs away.

Xavier left them a VHS tape with his last will, and it’s basically “yo, Magneto is back, take him out”.

….Man the incest vibes are REAL rough with these two. Anyways Scarlet Witch seems to be sick, her powers are gone, and Pietro WANTED to get Xavier to cure her, but now he’s dead, soooo. He calls Xavier “our only friend”, which is fucking wild, they were never on the same side or even really interracted. Anyways Magneto is claiming to create a device to cure Wanda but obviously he won’t, but they gotta stick around just incase.

Magneto steals a boat, and the X-Men show up aaaand get their asses kicked. To be continued???

Our bonus this issue is about Scott. Again. It’s about his powers, and goes into more depth. Apparently they are solar powered (I cannot WAIT for the punch dimension). It explains how he uses his visor without touching it (button in his glove), etc etc. It’s alright.

X-Men #44 - May 1968 4/10

Angel centric issue this time.

The X-Men are captured by Magneto, who continues to not kill anyone cause that’d be mean. Angel manages to break out and has to flee and look for help. Quicksilver, who can fly I guess, chases after but fails to catch him in time, somehow.

Angel goes off into the ocean and into a storm, as an island forms out of the ocean. He explores the ocean and finds some red flying guy who attacks Angel

This guy is Red Raven. They fight for a page before Raven goes “wait, why am I doing this I don’t want to hurt you” and stops. He explains he just wants to stop people from finding this island. Years ago, his people lived here, and they were going to invade the planet and conquer the Humans, but he was like “that’s rude >:(“ and gasses them all and puts them in cryo tubes. Now he must keep watch, as they will awake every 20 years as the island rises above the surface. Angel is like “hey isn’t it kinda bad to betray all your people?” “Maybe you’re right… ah, no, you’re not, bye” and then Raven kicks Angel out and the island sinks. The end.

This feels like a filler episode but it wasn’t… bad?

We get Bobby Backstory this time! Bobby is out with his girlfriend when those Roving Gangs Of Bullies that always exist in comics like this attack him and try to assault her. He freezes them, and then everyone is like “Holy shit, someone to be racist towards!” and hate him for ANOTHER reason now. Also his girlfriend says he’s a freak and runs away.

A mob comes and drags him away for using powers on someone, and not actually hurting them. Oh… no? Really they just want to be bigots. The comic is going harder into this now. Gosh, when did the X-Men get woke- oh wait. Anyways, Xavier and Scott read the news and go to save him, to be continued

X-Men #45 - June 1968 4.5/10

Angel continues to try and go get help, specifically the Avengers, as Cyclops manages to burst out of his jail. He finds Jean who’s unconscious and is like “welp she’s useless”, wandering around as he bumbles into, first Toad and secondly Quicksilver. Quicksilver is a weirdly complicated character for this era, as a villain who has no actual interest in doing evil things, and is like “hey we don’t gotta fight” but Cyclops punches at him anyway cause fuck you, Quicksilver!

Quicksilver thinks all mutants should be allied together to fight against the Homosapien menace. Man, THIS is where all that came from??? This is wild, this is Magneto’s whole fucking thing in the X-Men media I’ve actually seen. In this, Magneto couldn’t care less, he just wants to rule over other people. It’s actually really interesting the path this concept takes. It goes from being the character trait of a sympathetic anti-villain to the character trait of a straight up villain (Magneto) to the character trait of a sympathetic anti-villain (Magneto, again, but written better).

Anyways Cyclops knocks out Quicksilver and is worried he actually hurt him, wheeen the Avenger show up, see Cyclops beating up their friend, and turn on him. Ohhh boy, MORE OF MY FAVORITE, FORCED REASONS FOR HEROES TO FIGHT…. and it’s not even in the next X-Men issue!!! Weird. It’s actually in Avengers #53.

In the backstory, Cyclops comes to break Bobby out of jail, but he’s like “No, I trust the system to give me a fair trial” as the hicks outside his jail cell go “ohhh boy, can’t wait to do a good ol’ fashioned lynchin’!”

Cyclops tries to FORCE him to leave, which just makes shit look worse. Now they’re like “oh I guess now we’re JUSTIFIED in killing them”. Bobby beats up Cyclops as the mob turns on both of them.

Avengers #53 - June 1968 2.5/10

We’re doin’ this again. The Avengers see their friend being attacked by Cyclops, ignore the fact that Quicksilver literally denounced Humanity openly and is working with a villain very obviously, we need a reason to fight so we fight.

Cyclops thinks they might be… robots?? Okay, sure. We’re got Hawkeye, Goliath, Wasp, and the recently introduced Black Panther. They all gang up on Cyclops, who somehow holds them off even though he gets his ass kicked by villains of the week all the time and he JUST fought Quicksilver AND broke out of his bindings. Dude should be spent.

Angel shows back up and they start to split off. Meanwhile Megneto and his cronies watch happily, cause this is perfectly fine. Eventually of course they realize that this is all bullshit and fight Magneto instead. Toad betrays Magneto, sick of his bullshit, and sets the base to explode as he, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver dip. Once again, Magneto is defeated by his own Assholish behavior.

Magneto is blown up and seemingly dies. Quicksilver and Wanda don’t even talk to the Avengers ONCE in this. What the fuck?

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

I know literally nothing about Discovery, except for The Burn, and that it leads into Strange New Worlds. So uh… I’ve been dreading this one. But hey, who knows! Maybe it’ll surprise me!!

It has not so far. Y’all ready to see Michael save the universe again???

The Examples - DIS 1.5/10

Michael STILL is trying to get her war criminal boyfriend to stop doing warcrimes and sends him a message about how the DMA is just accidental collatoral damage. He’s like “Nope. Don’t care, off to do warcrimes, I still love you by the way <3” fire this man into the sun??

Anyways Commander Nhan is back to help out. I do love how this show keeps writing out characters and then bringing them back a few episodes later. Wait did I say like? I find it kinda stupid. Why can’t they write out the BAD characters… or well, character. Just Michael.

They keep doing stuff with Saru and the Vulcan president. It’s actually kinda cute. More of that, please.

“Lots of people agree with Book…” Lots of people are saying this. Many online are saying Genocide Good actually. If that’s you, keep that to your fucking self and get out of starfleet, dude. I’d be on the bridge, raising my hand, and going “actually genocide is bad actually and I think we should be doing more to stop Book instead of being halfassed about this?? Also Saru should be in charge.”

They send a shuttle to try and sneak to Book’s ship, and of course Warcrime Scientist is like “oh I set up an autonomous defense grid of nanomachines :)” and they’re KILLING a bunch of Discovery’s crew. Book’s like “UM, YOU DID THAT WITHOUT TELLING ME ALSO STOP KILLING MY FRIENDS?” oh, so NOW you care. Afterward they barely get them out Michael immediately calls him and he’s standoffish and doesn’t care again. I already know this is gonna end with Book back with the good guys but frankly I can’t stand that idea, he’s kinda ruined for me.

Michael has been TRYING to stay out of this because of her conflict of interest, but steps in and does some gambit to get ahead of Book in his race to do genocide.

I forget if I mentioned it but this scientist asshole reminds me of Elon Musk, he is immensely unlikable.

Nahn and this guy take on basically the same exact role on each other’s respective ships. “Why are you not KILLING these people already???” Michael eventually gets sick of this shit and literally goes “this isn’t black and white, there’s a middle ground here, and I can get Book to see it.” YOU HAVE BEEN TRYING FOR THE PAST THREE EPISODES AND FAILING. You literally gave an ultimatum last episode!!!!

Michael goes ALONE to talk to Book about this, and gives him the middle ground. Based on recent data, the DMA will not be in an area with any casualties for a week. Give us a week to make first contact, at least. Book agrees. Of COURSE Michael saying the same thing over and over eventually wins. Tarka of course just… releases the weapon anyway. BTW of course Tarka’s plan to use the power source here to power his way back to his universe fails, so this was all done for nothing.

Everyone fucking fails. The end.

…And then Saru goes to Culber and is like “so it seems the president is interested in me and asked me to dinner. What the fuck do I do”. DUDE. WE JUST DECLARED WAR ON GOD ALIENS. I actually LIKE this plotline but this is not the time??? Culber calls him an idiot.

Then they see that another DMA appeared in the exact same place and Michael goes “It seems…. we just made first contact…” like it’s a deep line. This shit sucked.

The Galactic Barrier - DIS 2/10

Everyone is recovering and needs a new plan. Basically, the Federation has to rush to make it outside the Galactic Barrier so they can make first contact, and Book needs to make it through the Galactic Barrier so he can kill them at THEIR home instead. Book and Tarka are on very unfriendly terms right now after the last episode.

Adira is back, helping them find a way through the barrier. You know, a thing no one is known to have EVER done. The barrier is a weird Trek thing btw, but it’s been there since season 2 of TOS.

We learn some more Tarka backstory, which is wild cause I care about this guy less than the fucking Xindi scientist from season 3 of Enterprise, and that guy was dumb as hell. Basically he was in an Emerald Chain prison with another scientist, who was secretly building a dimensional teleporter to take him to the heaven of his people, which he beleived was an alternate universe. So now that’s where Tarka wants to go, to be with his boyfriend.

Zora has basically stopped being a character out of nowhere and they just go “the computer” again.

Ticking clock time, the DMA is now targetting Earth and Vulcan. Gee, maybe blowing up their shit was A Bad Idea. And then Michael’s like “I NEED TO TELL EVERYONE ON BOARD THAT AS WE GO OUT OF THE GALAXY THEIR FAMILY MIGHT BE DYING” dude no, that is a Very Bad Idea.

They make it through the galactic barrier, yaaay, of course this crew would be the one to finally make it out. Just that easy. Anyways this episode ends with yet another Michael oneliner cause they gotta make her seem cool. They are failing.

Rosetta - DIS 2/10

They arrive at a planet that used to be the home planet of the DMA aliens. It was apparently at one point a gas giant but then the gas disappeared and now it’s a rocky planet. Thats not how that works. Everyone walks slowmo down the hallway cause again they are trying to make this cool. They are failing.

Also Book and Tarka are just here now. IT REALLY WAS JUST THAT EASY.

Also why are we sending both the captain and the XO? Even the fucking president calls this out. She’s right. But Michael says something that is barely related and she’s like “oh I see, understood”. Michael is always correct. The leader of Earth ALSO goes “why are we going to these aliens’ old home planet instead of just talking to them? My planet might be about to explode.” and Michael goes “I hear you.” with an implied “but I don’t give a fuck what you think” after that.

As soon as they reach the surface, Saru starts freaking the hell out, using his super senses to sense something horrible. Um…. that was removed? He doesn’t have that anymore? That happened like, in season 2.

It’s delayed, but it eventually effects everyone else too. Except Detmer, for some reason. I think this is the first time Detmer is even out on an away mission. We then get a scene with Adina going “I wish I could be more like Detmer. Confident, able to go on away missions…” WE’VE NEVER SEEN HER DO ANY OF THAT.

We also get Book and Tarka sneaking onboard the ship. They’re trying to sneak to talk to the Earth Leader cause she’s also interested in stopping the aliens at any cost so maybe she can help us do warcrimes!! Also what the fuck? They’re just sneaking around, once people leave they skulk out. Do we not have any… scanners? Sensors? Security cameras??? I know we LITERALLY do not have a security officer, she left the show and they never replaced her.

Book talks to the Earth Leader and she goes “You have to promise to let us try diplomacy first, and if that doesn’t work, then I’ll back you doing warcrimes”. “You have my word.” THAT DIDN’T WORK LAST TIME, WHY THE FUCK DO WE BELIEVE FOR A SECOND TARKA WILL ALLOW THIS THIS time

We are getting Detmer backstory and character. This happens so extremely infrequently… she’s LITERALLY been here since episode one. She’s in 50 episodes out 65. And we are FINALLY learning ANYTHING about her at ALL. Anyways they learn that the aliens are scared and anxious, and had their home destroyed at one point, so mayb ethat’s a way to communicate? Fair enough. They also discover these chemicals they use to communicate, kinda like pheromones, so let’s use that to talk to them.

The story ends with a dun dun, Tarka kidnapped Reno and is holding her hostage. She’s nonplussed about it because she’s the best character in this show. God I wish she had more to do.

Species C-10 - DIS 3/10

Everyone is preparing for first content. Did no one realize Jett Reno has disappeared? She’s very loud, and has her fingers in everything, she’s pretty unignorable. She quickly gets to work trying to get Book to realize he’s being an idiot, but Book is an idiot so he ignores her.

They go to see the C-10, and are immediately attacked and dragged into the bubble. The Earth despot is like “welp, we failed. A soldier needs to realize when they’ve hit a wall, time to change tactics.” WE ARE NOT SOLDIERS. WE ARE STAR FLEET.

We don’t get to SEE the alien but we see its shape in the cloud. It spits out some complex pheromones showing 6 different emotions. It also blinks some lights at them. It’s trying to communicate! They spent like 2 minutes trying to explain that to me, when Spock woulda explained it in two sentences, but that’s fine.

Uuuunfortunately, the despot of Earth is like “welp, we can’t just talk to them normally and it’ll take time, so it’s time to kill.”

I hate all of these people. They are so stupid. At least we have Jett Reno who goes from “you’re hurting so you’re blind.” to “YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING KILL US ALL. LOOK AT THE GOD DAMN MATH”.

Normally I’d love this episode. They’re trying to sus out a language so they can communicate with an alien which is threatening them, possibly without realizing it. That is so Trek. It’s so Trek and could be so good. BUT THE WRITING IS BORING AND BAD AND WE HAVE ALL THIS EXTRA SHIT TO ADD A CLOCK ON TOP.

Okay so NOW Book says “I won’t do to the 10-C what they did to Kweijan”. NOW YOU’RE AGAINST GENOCIDE?! YOU’VE BEEN FOR IT FOR FOUR EPISODES. You’re only upset cause now it might actually hurt Discovery too, you fucking idiot. Anyways OBVIOUSLY the omnicidal gay Elon Musk betrays him so he can kill everyone cause he doesn’t actually care about anyone but his boyfriend.

Communication is going well as they send a breathable atmosphere bubble covered in peacefulness. But since Tarka is gonna fuck it all up I can’t be as invested in this cause it’s all gonna go to shit before they fix it further.

The president, president of Nivar, Saru, and of course Michael go into the bubble and it’s a replica of the Discovery bridge. Eh, why bother building a set? Also why is Saru here? They have a linguist who’s been doing ALL of the progress in this episode.

They do, in fact, communicate “you are hurting us” and they go “oh fuck we didn’t mean to, we’re sorry” aaaaand then of course Tarka starts killing them. At least Reno gets a message out of “FUCKING BLOW US UP.”

Coming Home - DIS 2/10

Assuming someone betrayed them, they start go and start asking around and immediately find out it was the fascist Earth despot who is like “I did it cause Booker told me it’d be fine and you were gone for 5 seconds, I got scared!” “BOOKER IS HOSTAGE AND YOU WERE LIED TO. COMMUNICATION WAS WORKING. YOU JUST KILLED EVERYONE.” “Whoops. My bad :) Pobody’s nerfect!”

Shoot every fascist into the sun.

The Nivarian president mind melds with the 10-C through a WINDOW, AND THE VACUUM OF SPACE. SHE COULD JUST DO THAT?! Maybe you shoulda done that earlier?! She explains after this, while in the sick bay cause it knocked her on her ass, that they’re a hive mind, confused and scared, and we’re running out of time to explain that those are not with us and we need to stop Booker’s ship.

Book manages to break him and Reno out and then sends Reno to Discovery as he tries to take back over his ship. Reno delivers the message that he loves Michael. That makes all of it worth it. :)

Also it looks like in order to win we’ll need the fascist’s help after all, I hate that. Oh apaprently she’s NOT the leader of earth, just like, their head general? Either way, her vibes are Bad. At least she’s gonna go do a suicide mission to try and stop them. “I’m with you captain, all the way.” - someone who gave up after they disappeared for 5 seconds earlier.

Book FINALLY gets through to Tarka who does a complete 180 when Book just flat out says “would your boyfriend want you to do galactic suicide”. That’s what it takes. He ends up sacrificing himself to stop it. And MAYBE his teleporter will send him to the afterlife with his boyfriend, who knows. The show tries to do this thing where it’s all sad about him doing this. Look, I don’t care HOW gay he is, genocide is decidedly ungroovy.

Wow, an ACTUALLY kinda good scene! The admiral and Tilly are staying behind on the Federation HQ as it’s exploding from the gravitational waves of the DMA, they stayed behind to evacuate as many as they could. They have a drink of Whisky as they talk about having few regrets. It’s good! Also Admiral Vance continues to be the only good admiral.

They try to communicate once again with the 10-c. They are, at least, kinda cool.

It’s so close to being good and Trekian buuuuut it’s so filled with stuff I don’t care about at all. Namely the stuff with Book and Tarka. They think Book might be dead btw, he’s missing, and Michael starts crying durring communications. Again, like one of the three emotions she’s allowed to show. She LITERALLY PIKACHU TEARS HIM BACK TO LIFE, because they see how sad she is and just RECONSTITUTES HIM BACK FROM HIS ATOMS AFTER HE WAS BLOWN TO FUCK.

THIS IS SO STUPID.

A major theme of this season was Michael learning to deal with loss AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN COMMIT TO THAT.

…Apparently they just intercepted his transporter signal and was holding him because they assumed it was important, but it’s still just, so dumb.

Book tells them that they don’t NEED the wall keeping them safe that they power with Boronite and they’re like “oh I see our bad” and they stop! That’s it! Success, victory, we win, Book and Michael are happy and we’ll just ignore the fact that Book was going to do a genocide until he wasn’t because he stopped in time.

At least Saru and the Nivarian President are hooking up now. They’re cute. AND uncensored handholding!

The Federation president says “I said you weren’t ready for a Voyager captaincy, but you are now”. I love hearing about character growth rather than seeing it :) And she also kind of commutes Book’s sentencing because “reasons matter”. Um, not when it comes to attempted genocide. He’s just gonna do community service.

Aaaand the season ends with more Michael Slam Poetry.

I hated this. This was the worst Trek season, I think, out of all of them. Yes, even Enterprise season 3 or Picard season 1. Really, really bad. In a different way. It’s not offensive, it’s just very bad and boring. Those seasons are at least fun to complain about, I had SOME enjoyment ranting about them. I didn’t even feel any enjoyment ranting about this. I just didn’t care. There was a SINGLE episode above… 3/10 I think???? Which is fucking BAD.

source: Nevermore

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

I know literally nothing about Discovery, except for The Burn, and that it leads into Strange New Worlds. So uh… I’ve been dreading this one. But hey, who knows! Maybe it’ll surprise me!!

It has not so far. Y’all ready to see Michael save the universe again???

The Examples - DIS 2.5/10

This title sounds like a TV show about super heroes from the 2000s. It has “Smallville” energy.

Michael posits that because there’s no historical record in the Sphere Data of the DMA anomaly having happened before, it’s not natural, and thus is manmade. Everyone is like “WOAH TRUTH BOMB” as if somehow no one thought of that possibility yet.

They need to evacuate a planet, which they’ll do in 4 hours, no problems. Hey, remember when the Federation failed at an evacuation of Romulus and they had WEEKS? Anyway. Oh apparently it’s not a planet, it’s a bunch of chained together asteroids. Kind of a neat set piece. Is this a left over thing from the Halo TV show??

The magistrate is like “oh goodie, come save us. Oh, those 6 isolated signatures? Those are the prisoners in our jails. We just left them there to die :)” holy shit fuck them what the hell. Now they have to bust in and save them and get out before the DMA hits. Pumpkin describes this as “a tabletop adventure”. Hey I don’t think the captain should be the one who- okay.

Also Michael keeps announcing everything to her crew over the intercom? And Culber literally goes “everyone is a little on edge about it all” YEAH THAT’S WHY YOU KEEP SOME THINGS SECRET WHEN YOU’RE IN CHARGE

They bring a commander with them, one of the ones on the bridge, Rhys I think??? He starts talking about his life and oh god I’m getting flash backs to Airaim, they’re just gonna kill him aren’t they

Some Risian scientist is here to help them figure out what the DMA is and he’s like, OVERLY an asshole, like very clearly. Y’all gotta at least make it have SOME level of suspense, y’know.

The prisoners are like “WE WANT A GUARANTEE THAT WE’LL BE RELEASED IF WE GO WITH YOU” “I mean, we’ll work with diplomats to-“ “A GUARANTEE, NOW, OR WE DON’T GO” then you fucking die, dude. What do you want???

Michael is the worst captain ohhhh my god, how did she not know the process of asylum

The asshole scientist forces them to do some dangerous experiment that uses a lot of extra power. While the evacuation is happening right now. They’re transporting people onto the ship and destabalizing shit at the same time. Dude, just wait AN HOUR. OR A DAY. WHY DO YOU NEED TO DO THIS RIGHT THE FUCK NOW? They get angry at STAMETS of all people for enabling this guy to do this.

One of the prisoners refuses to go with them, not cause of any weird bullshit from earlier but instead it was like… he feels such guilt over killing someone and thinks he should just die. He killed someone and stole a girl’s future, in order to survive because he had nothing cause he was in a slave trader’s empire. Like, okay, I’m not gonna say he SHOULD have killed people? But I will say uh, he doesn’t need to just sit there and let himself die. That helps literally no one and he’s CLEARLY repentant of his crimes??

The episode ends with Michael returning a holographic family tree the prisoner stole, and somehow kept hidden while in jail for 30 years

Stormy Weather - DIS 3.5/10

They’re still occasionally talking about Zora being a sapient AI and that it’s kinda weird, but is it… really that weird??

Anyways they’re scanning a subspace rift caused by the DMA and then get sucked into it. They’re now in like, an energy-less zone. No scans, no data, nothing. Drones they send out disintigrate, so clearly something is bad.

Michael caves literally 4 minutes after going “ALRIGHT, WE’RE GOING TO RISK OUR LIVES TO GET ANSWERS TO SAVE OTHERS”. “Okay, that’s it, this is scary, reverse course”. Then they find out they can’t leave. This is literally just “The Immunity Syndrome” from TOS. It’s like, the same thing. There’s nothing WRONG with doing the same topic or concept again, but I don’t trust them to do it better than that episode, and that episode wasn’t even like, amzing.

They try to go to warp with Book guiding the warp, aaand it just blows the fuck up on him. Now he’s seeing his dead dad being a dickhead to him. His dad has a weird cadence in the way he speaks, it almost screams John de Lancie.

We get some ACTUALLY good scenes between and Gray. Stuff about gender, identity, and self. Unfortunately this is kinda… dropped out of nowhere, because suddenly things are breaking down the ship on the outside.

They use Sonar to determine the way to get out of the void, but their shields are going to break down and life support will fail before they get there. So Michael determines a way to keep them all alive. Just… put them all in the pattern buffer. Man, Trek loved doing that around this time huh

Book has some talk with his Ghost Dad where he’s like “all those I lost aren’t gone, not really, they live on through me” and then Michael has a weird slow mo walk through the sparking breaking ship. She’s in a pressure suit and trying to help get Zora through it. The AI is having a panic attack at having to save everyone. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have sapient ship AI actually. You know, ship AI is a thing that I WANT Trek to explore cause I really like it as a concept and there’s some really cool stuff you can do with it, but I do not trust modern Trek to handle it well enough.

Michael is burning up. Why is she here? Why does she HAVE to be here? Like yes, the computer needs someone to hold her hand, but no one can have a character moment without Michael, huh??? Not even the fucking computer.

Anyways, they make it out, the end. What good did this do? Well, it determines that whatever force is doing this is from outside the galaxy. We haven’t had much intergalactic lore in Trek, actually. Off the top of my head it’s… the aliens from Conspiracy, and the Kelvans from “By Any Other Name” in TOS. I think thats it?? So like, interesting space to explore in tbh. I just don’t expect them to do it in an interesting way.

This is the least I’ve cared about Star Trek.

Stormy Weather - DIS 3.5/10

They call the species they’re trying to find “Species 10-C”. Zora uses the data they gathered to determine where this species is. She also decides that if they know where the data is, they’ll go and get themselves killed, so she refuses to give them the coordinates. Well then. This also makes Starfleet look at them and go “hey, you shouldn’t have a sentient ship, that is Bad”.

While they’re trying to figure that out, they also visit for a symposium on the DMA. We meet some Earth representatives, who now also reincorporated Titan into their jurisdiction, “inspired by Michael’s methods”. Of course they were.

Cronenberg has a meeting with Saru that everyone just starts randomly crashing, to talk about Zora. First Stamets crashes it like “SHE SCARES ME, WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING SO SHE DOESN’T FREAK OUT AND KILL EVERYONE” then Gray comes in like “WE CAN’T LET THEM KILL HER” and Cronenberg is like “what the fuck everyone I was just going to put her in another body of her choice so she doesn’t have power over so many people”. And then Zora just… makes a fucking kill switch and gives it to them?? Instead??? Actually I liked Cronenberg’s plan Zora, we can just do that one?

Ruon Tarka, the Risan scientist from that other episode who was a weird asshole, hijacks the symposium and goes “Hey, I made a super weapon to kill the aliens who are in control of this anomaly ;D Let’s do a genocide <3” And everyone is like “Hell yea let’s do that” while Michael goes “NO YOU CAN’T JUST KILL PEOPLE”. I mean, the super weapon he’s suggesting is an Isolytic weapon, something banned for literally 800 fucking years, because it highly damages subspace. It’s the Trek equivelent of nuclear weapons, you do not use them.

This is the first season of Discovery. This is literally just the plot of season 1 of discovery.

Tarka enlists Book’s help in convincing them to let him nuke reality, and tells him he’s from another reality or something? And that… convinces book??? I’mma be real I’m super checked out. Anyways I think Book basically betrays Michael by going “yeah let ‘em burn”

They decide that Zora isn’t actually AI, she’s “an entirely new form of life”. It’s kind of them TRYING to do a Measure of a Man and failing.

Then we get Michael doing one of her fucking weepy eyed speeches to change everyone’s mind. Except it’s harder to follow this time because it’s weirdly interrutped by Stamets going “maybe I was wrong to want to kill Zora”

The vote happens and it’s like 60% first contact 40% genocide. Book gets pissy and walks away without even talking to his girlfriend about it. What the fuck?

The only real takeaway I have about all this episode is that Cronenberg is based.

Oh let’s write out MORE interesting characters! Gray is leaving. THankfully Adira is NOT being written out just yet. But Gray is retiring to Trill. Ah well.

Aaaaand Book and his new obviously evil scientist friend steal the prototype Spore Drive, install it in his ship, and blast off to genocide some aliens with nukes. Book leaves his cat behind, which leaves ONE good joke, as Michael enters her room and finds Grudge.

“Zora, can you please find- Grudge?!” “Grudge is 5 meters from your current location.”

Anyways the Zora stuff was…. ok. Everything else I don’t really care. Why are they writing out all the good characters btw?

Stormy Weather - DIS 6.5/10

Hey, at least Owo is super hot

The president is how “how the FUCK did you not know Book would do this” and like, I didn’t know. I don’t know why he did!! He was struggling yeah, but he was getting better literally every episode. Going from “my loved ones who died still live through me, and it gets better every day” and then suddenly going “yeah let’s do genocide that might damage all of subspace” like an episode later is a bit of a fucking jump!!

YOU ARE THE VERY SPECIAL BOY, MICHAEL.

Michael gets the go ahead that she can do literally whatever she wants to get this taken care of. She assumes she knows where Book is gonna go to get the elements needed to make a bomb, literally Isolinium.

Where he’s going is to a broker. This super alien lookin’ mother fucker who no deals Book about nukes, turns out they areExpensive To Make, but agrees when Book basically offers to break some people betting heavy handed in his casino. Michael gets a bit late and finds out Book is already there, and now she has to outbid him in order to get the Isolinium before him. She TRIES talking to Book to tells her to go away. So they need to get like, 3x the latinum. How are they gonna do that?

Sexy fighter Owo.

She immediately gets her ass handed to her. Then fights again… loses again. So is she sandbagging? Yes, hardcore sandbagging. The people who got hustled get angry and and try to kill them, and then Book and Michael team up and help each other with their problems for some reason? The broker decides it’s a draw and they’re gonna decide who gets the nukes through a game of poker.

Michael and Book are still kind of working together here, because the other two people who could get the Isolynium are Emerald Chain warmongers and yeah they should not get a nuke. They work to knock the two out, and then are playing poker against each other. I do wish this was like, hardcore poker episode like something like Akagi but instead it’s a bit of a montage.

“If you take that Isolynium, you’ll burn every bridge you have.” “Does that include between you and me?” Yes, Book. Committing genocide does mean we’re breaking up. Obviously.

Booker wins, and leaves. Well done Book, I guess. Fuck you. But Michael knew she was probably going to lose, Book is good at Poker and she isn’t. So instead, she snuck a tracker into the isolynium. Also from the data we got about where the aliens are from, which we ALSO got from the Broker (it was the on the books reason we went). At the coordinates is some kind of weird thing that must be upkept with a LOT of energy, which Michael takes one look at and determines it runs on Boronite, and they realize they’re mining Boronite with the DMA.

Okay so I’ve obviously really not liked any episode in this season… except for this one. Finally, a good one. It was actualyl good! Not GREAT! But entertaining, I wasn’t BORED.

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

I know literally nothing about Discovery, except for The Burn, and that it leads into Strange New Worlds. So uh… I’ve been dreading this one. But hey, who knows! Maybe it’ll surprise me!!

It has not so far. Y’all ready to see Michael save the universe again???

Kobayashi Maru - DIS 1.5/10

The title serves two purposes. One: Clap, nerds. Two: We already know we’re gonna be put in an unwinnable scenario, so it’s also a spoiler!

Captain Burnham and her boyfriend are now leading first contact re-communication with old Federation worlds. Why Burnham brought her boyfriend on away missions like this I do not know. Why she’s doing it herself, I also do not know. Why they are dressed in evil black leather instead of Federation outfits, I ESPECIALLY do not know. Seriously, what in the fuck? Anyways they were incompetent, of course. They piss off the people they’re there to offer help and services to and then have to run after the natives open fire. The two of them are now on the service, stranded, and trying to escape. We then have the people back on the ship trying to come up with some way to extract them and keep them safe. This is the most JJ Trek scene in this entire series, despite it being born of JJ Trek.

The people shooting at them only stop because their giant ship uncloaks in front of them. Then they give the natives some dilithium and leave. Uh, mission… accomplished??? This is already not looking good.

We get a scene with Saru on Kaminar saying it’s the start of a new era. Wow, I actually expected them to fully write him out of the show, I’m stunned he’s still here.

We’re just jumping around to a dozen scenes, aren’t we? Book is leaving for a while, and I guess Michael is now speaking to a bunch of ensigns. She is not happy to introduce the next Federation president, who appears to be part Cardassian. Michael appears to hate her, and I’m certain its NOT because she’s part Cardassian, you fucking racist, WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THE CARDASSIANS THAT WELL WHEN YOU WERE BORN. She claims it’s cause she hates politics and she thinks she’s just promoting herself or something, I dunno. It’s kinda boring. Anyways she’s joining them for a new mission that immediately goes wrong. They go to visit a space station and it’s careening around like it got punched out of orbit

For some reason when they go to black alert and jump it now makes as squeaky little noise. It feels like something a Youtube Poop would do. Someone in my chat described it as the noise a teletubby in a blender would make.

Book goes to his nephew’s bar mitzvah and this kid is like “I sure do love being alive!” Then he runs forward and it turns to slow motion. This kid is fucking dead.

Things start exploding cause some ice hits the ship or something and Michael immediately volunteers herself to go out and do some dangerous stunt to save the day. The president is like “what the fuck are you doing” while everyone on the bridge awkwardly looks at each other like the kids at the dinner table while the parents are fighting and getting divorced in front of them.

Why are we building these worker bees out of glass? Shit immediately breaks and she has to dip out of the worker bee. Why would you build it like that? The president actually uses her political knowhow and communication skills to talk down someone who’s about to shoot Tilly, which I guess gives her a reason to be here. All the while fires keep popping up behind them. Can we stop the hibachi grills back there please??

Wow, Kweijan fucking explodes and only Booker survives because he had bad vibes and was flying in his ship above the planet scanning it as it explodes. Meanwhile everyone they went to rescue and extract die except for the guys we know. We get them all sadly looking at the corpses while Michael talks over the intercom like “Yo is everything okay”

The president explains why she’s actually here. There’s a new ship they’re working on with a new spore drive and she was actually evaluating the captaincy shortlist. Michael is no longer on it cause she’s “Not ready” because she can’t accept loss. Michael then proceeds to be a fucking pissbaby and argue about it. “DEFINE READY.” “DEBATE ME.”

She is…. a TERRIBLE captain, good lord. Also they keep comparing this to the Kobayashi Maru. This is NOT A Kobayashi Maru scenario. They lost 3 people, and 7 others were wounded. That’s super good!! The ship didn’t fucking die. Anyways Book shows back up and they find out Kweijan got Alderan’d.

I hated basically everything about this episode.

Anomaly - DIS 2/10

Book is not having a good time. Come on dog, your planet blew up, it’s not a big- oh wait yeah no that’s a realistic reaction. He’s just sat quietly staring at it for two days.

Saru shows up. He was offered captaincy of the new ship mentioned last episode but he turned it down…. to instead by Michael’s XO. I…. what the fuck??? Like I still want Saru on the show, I like him, but why are we doing this to him, HE SHOULD BE THE CAPTAIN. He basically got demoted for no reason. Also poor Tilly is even MORE demoted.

They have a security briefing where they determine it was a spacial anomaly possibly cause of two black holes colliding and they need to go look at it. Book walks in on this top priority meeting at Starfleet HQ. “Um, sir, you can’t go in there, that’s classified-“ “My planet blew up.” “Oh, well my apologies, go right ahead.”

We cannot let this series happen without a galactic threat.

We get a scene where Book wants to go risk his life flying into the black holes to study why they killed his family. Michael refuses to let him go and he throws a hissy fit and is like “YOU AREN’T THE BOSS OF ME DAD, I’M NOT EVEN STARFLEET, I’LL DO WHAT I WANT”

And then we get a scene with Gray seeing his new body he’s going to be put into. This series has a tone problem.

Book goes out on this mission but they get Stamets to hologram himself there so he can scan for the anomaly. Book is a shitty asshole about all of this. He’s grumpy and mean to Stamets who is awkward but trying his best. Book look I know you’re unhappy, understandably, but it’s not Stamets fault???

Some anomalies cause the ship to break and they need to release the tether holding Books ship. He has no sensors and is flying blind but they need that data, or whatever. Man I have Big Problem fatigue with this series. Stamets and Book have a talk. Apparently they’ve not been talking, because Stamets has been obviously avoiding him, cause Book reminds Stamets of how he couldn’t save his family at the end of season 3 and he doesn’t wanna be reminded of that. Understandable. But he’s at least TRYING now, So

Book: “No one is here for me. I am alone on this ship”

No, your cat is still on that ship for some fucking reason. Why you didn’t put her on the Discovery I will never know.

Michael has a heart to heart with Book about how their decks aren’t his fault. They do this by casting Cone of Silence around the captain’s chair, bringing up a fucking force field so she can talk to him without anyone overhearing. What the fuck?

Anyways they Use The Force and make it out with the data, and all is good and happy again. Until we study the anomaly and find out that it changes direction seemingly randomly and they cannot depict where it’s coming from or where it’s going, and can hit at any time. Then they zoom out with a scary choral song playing. I mean… this is basically on the same level as the Chrystalline Entity, I dunno if we really need that.

Choose to Live - DIS 2/10

We open with Starfleet delivering some dilithium to some planet. Suddenly they’re under attack by some people in cloaks who attack with swords and kill the captain. She also says “Choose to live” so we know what she is. Gotta have MORE Qowat Milat.

They need to work with Nivar and the Qowat Milat to bring this murderer to justice, because she’s rogue. And also because they need Nivar to rejoin the Federation and so they need to do this without any problems. And they choose BURNHAM TO BE THE FEDERATION’S LIAZON IN THIS SITUATION. OF COURSE.

There’s been some mild hints at a plot line with Tilly suffering from PTSD and not being able to feel joy like she used to. She’s trying to get help for it, but the way the actress is, still so bubbly, it makes it even MORE sad, cause it’s clear she’s faking it.

Meanwhile, we still have the plot point that Gray is going to be put in a new body. It might go poorly but if it succeeds, he’ll be in a new robot body. They also cite Picard in this btw.

They go to find this Qiwot Milot, and find out that she was the one who saved Burnham’s mom, so she has… ulterior motives. As SOON as they show up, this girl’s ninjas start a bit fight scene. It is kinda neat how we just have jedi in Star Trek now. That’s what they were trying to do with the Qiwot Milot, right? That’s it? Anyways they kill one of the other Qiwot Milot they have, and then go “do not follow or I will kill the rest of you”. Michael then Marvel Quips about it because we live in a Hell.

They find out that the moon she’s been hiding on IS NO MOON and it’s actually a ship she’s been powering up with the Dilithium. It has a nearly dead species in cryogenics. Their biomatter apparently is made of Latinum, and graverobbers have been predating on them for ages. This nun took up their cause and is getting dilithium so that she can wake it up and deliver them to their new home. She didn’t want anyone finding out they existed so she did it all secretly. Um…. literally everything would have been solved immediately if you actually went to the Federation. You were being unneccesarily secretive and violent for no reason. Congratulations. Way too many people died because of this. Michael fixes this problem by talking to her and she agrees to stop, the end. Another win for Michael. Fuck this. Those deaths could have been an email.

The president of Nivar mind melds with Book to get information for the scientists. While she’s in there I guess she cures his PTSD???

Anyways they arrest the murderer then extradite her to Nivar. Burnham is like “WHA? BUT SHE SHOULD FACE JUSTICE!” Yeah. They’re not letting her go. That’s what extradition is. Why are you being a fucking baby about this. You’re a captain, you know how this shit works. “His family deserves justice!!!” They’re getting it! You just want to kill someone?

They also succeed in transferring Gray to a new body, he’s in a robo-body now, yay!

All of these are bad so far, god damn. The Stamets and Book stuff was okay?

All Is Possible - DIS 3/10

Tilly and Adira need to go to Starfleet Acadamy to help teach some cadets. Tilly is still looking for something new, she feels like this whole “be in charge of saving the galaxy every season” thing isn’t for her, and maybe it’ll be teaching at Starfleet. The cadets she’s teaching are all the best and brightest from their people but are unfriendly and bad with others. They’re all gifted kids, basically. While going on a routine trip they get hit by a random thing and then fall to the planet. Of course. Also the 32nd century shuttles look like the soap mouse from those old macs.

Nivar is still a Star Wars planet. Anyways there’s some diplomatic problems with the talks about Nivar rejoining the Federation, but don’t worry!!! Michael stands up to give a speech and fix the problem again! Why is this still a thing. Though it actually doesn’t work, finally.

The cadets are ALREADY freaking out about this. “WE ONLY HAVE THREE DAYS OF RATIONS!” your power is working. Where is your replicators?? Also I feel we should have emergency replicators by this point. Anyways this entire problem is moot anyways cause there are alien monsters who see power and will try and eat them if they use anything with power.

They try and get the Nivar talks back on the table. Saru has vulcan mind sex with the president while Michael is like “you need a third party to make a suggestion so y’all can use that. I’ll be that third party.” YOU’RE STILL FEDERATION, MICHAEL.

They have an emergency kit that can ONLY MAKE ROPES. How were they more prepared for shuttle crashes a thousand years ago?! Anyways they save Adira from some fucking Quicksand Ice. This ALMOST makes the cadets work together but one of them is a huge racist. Actually two of them are, the last one is an Orion but it’s okay, they find out he’s One Of The Good Ones.

I want to fucking vomit.

Anyways Michael solves the problem because she speaks as both Federation AND a citizen of Nivar. “It is an elegant solution” No, it is stupid. You are stupid. This is stupid! STOP BEING STUPID!

Tilly also solved a problem by herself, which is nice. She saves the day and gets an offer from Cronenberg to teach at the Acadamy if she ever wants to. She immediately takes this offer and leaves the show. :) Wow we’re just basically writing out ALL the good characters, huh? Okay.

source: Strawberry Shake

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

Time to finish Lower Decks! I’ll genuinely be sad when its gone.

Dos Cerritos - LD 8/10

We start with watching Tendi be badass. She’s VERY good at being a pirate! Oh except for one thing: She doesn’t like killing people! She’s fine with robbing rich assholes, who cares, maybe even roughing them up a little. But killing them is a no go.

Back on the Cerritos, everyone is feeling a little stressed out by their current problems. Oh except Rutherford, he’s distracting himself by putting in more and more work. G-good for him. He’s doing… VERY well.

They go to check out an anomaly and get sucked through to a parallel reality and find another Cerritos with a bunch of parallel versions of themselves. T’Lyn is the same except one says remarkable and one says fascinating. Boimler has a beard. Stuff like that. Oh and the captains dead. whoops. Beckett is now the captain. Things are… slowly unraveling, as it’s clear that Captain Beckett is Kinda Evil.

Meanwhile, T’Lyn gets a chance to pay off her debt and return home by salvaging some old ancient warpship.

lol blue Orions from TAS.

Things are collapsing quite quickly in both storylines. The alternate versions are fighting each other, and the pirates turn on Tendi cause she doesn’t let them stab them. Captain Beckett also tries to swap places because she’s like “wow I used to have fun okay gonna steal your life”.

Tendi and the pirates come around with each other cause they have hobbies they want to persue to, like her. Like dancing and baking. That’s cute.

Alternate Mariner is stopped, and Alternate Boimler takes over as acting captain, doing the Riker Chair Thing. That’s so good. I think you unlock that move once you get a beard.

Tendi earns her freedom but sticks around cause the Orions and the Blue Orions are at war now because of “un-pirate-like methods”.

Good start!

Shades of Green - LD 6.5/10

Tendi’s sister seems to be Off and refuses to be scanned. Tendi thinks she’s pretty sus. After some digging, she finds out she’s pregnant. So she’s really excited, buuuuut her sister just isn’t ready to spill.

Meanwhile, Boimler is trying to be the Cool Lieutenant. I dunno if he’s succeeding. The Federation is at a new member of the federation and trying to help them ease into their new post-scarcity lifestyle. They’re burning money and going ham with parties. Fuck yeah, fuck capitalism.

The Pirate Queen tells them to knock it the fuck off and do an old school race through a dangerous nebula to determine which house will be the victor. Tendi doesn’t want her racing cause she’s pregante, which she’s really annoyed by. Tendi is being REALLY heavy handed about this.

Boimler’s away crew is kidnapped by Capitalism Terrorists, and they have to rescue them. “I HAVE TO TAKE YOUR HOVERBIKE!” “Yeah go ahead, I’ll just replicate a new one” “Oh yeah. Good for them!”

I find the Boimler and Beckett storyline really funny, but the Orion one is annoying. I don’t need Tendi to hold the idiot ball just cause she’s the kind and sweet one. Yes your sister just got pregnant. But you didn’t stop her from doing dangerous stuff before, why is it SUDDENLY so different now that she has a 3 week fetus inside of her. Also it turns out her sister was trying to protect TENDI about it cause if she knew it’d mean she’d need to stay for another 14 years or something. I thought she WANTED her to stay? She fucked her over in the last season? Whatever.

She loses cause she acts like Starfleet, anyways. Whoops. They take all of her house’s wealth.

Boimler’s ensigns handle the situation by using his uncool advice, and all is handled. Tendi is sent back to Starfleet, and finds out they were just tasked with hauling away “treasure trash”, jewels and stuff they were throwing away. Soooo they hire Tendi’s family to “dispose” of the jewels. Cute. TENDI’S BACK, YAAAY

The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel - LD 7.5/10

The lower deckers (minus Boimler, who’s doing big boy stuff with Ransom) have to clean up a space hotel overwhelmed with nanites. They call it The Glumpus. Meanwhile, THIS happens!

Hey, remember Jennifer? I once cited Beckett and her being gay as being the best fucking thing. But then Jennifer betrayed Beckett at the end of season 3 and never apologized so I was like “damn, fuck her I guess”. She’s FINALLY back and acting like nothing has changed. At first I was like “If Beckett doesn’t want her I’ll take her” but actually no, I can find another hot Andorian wife. Beckett quickly realizes they never technically broke up and they need to talk about it, buuuuut it’s Jennifer’s final mission so she sees the EASY way out (not communicating) and decides to roll with it. Jennifer VERY quickly catches on that she seems super eager to be out of their final mission together.

Meanwhile, Boimler thinks Ransom is just using him for the dangerous scary shit and it’s getting in his head.

T’Lyn is SUPER into “vibe rock” music, that’s super cute. “I am finding it hard to focus while thinking of Krog performing.” She’s great.

Boimler is working with Ransom to capture an AWOL Starfleet captain who’s there because she’s unsatisfied by how the higher ups treat him. He offers Boimler to join him, cause Boimler is just as mistreated as he is. He of course, doesn’t crack, using the opportunity to break the others out.

Jennifer and Beckett finally have that talk. Jennifer explains that Beckett didn’t even give her a chance to open up and apologize for being shitty, she was just phased out. Neither of them handled the breakup well, but now they could ACTUALLY breakup. Also it turns out the nanite swarm was actually an alternate universe starfleet ship from a universe on a much smaller scale. I’m sure alternate universe stuff won’t keep being important.

A Farewell to Farms - LD 9/10

We start with a long interesting opening with Ma’ah at his family bloodworm farm. He was stripped of his captaincy for letting his crew mutiny. He’s trying to avoid Mariner who finds him and ruins a sexy time he’s about to have. Bad bro move, Mariner.

THE BIRD PEOPLE ARE CALLED KLOHWAKANS??? NO. Some dramatic Klohwakans are on the ship are Migleemo has to make them happy, but they’re shitty fuckheads. Oh boy, uh, a Migleemo episode???

THEY REFERENCED BIJ!!!!!!

To get Ma’ah his captaincy back, they need to do an ancient Klingon rite. Boimler is SUPER into Klingon stuff right now so he’s on board. Beckett is of courseo n board. And they also drag Ma’ah’s country bumpkin brother.

Everything goes well but Ma’ah is really annoyed by all of it. It’s clear he doesn’t actually want this.

Boimler keeps going “Ohhh, this is SO Klingon!” I’d be the same tbh, I love Klingon stuff. Also I haven’t commented on his “beard” he’s trying to grow but its very funny.

Turns out Ma’ah is annoyed cause he doesn’t ACTUALLY want to be a captain in this shitty guy’s fleet. “Then just transfer to a new fleet”. They end up fighting this guy who’s being a shithead to Ma’ah, through a really fun Klingon loophole. He doesn’t accept it and stabs Ma’ah in the back, so Ma’ah kills him. There’s also a big awesome Klingon fight. Hey, remember how there was a Klingon civil war and we never really saw any cool Klingon fights??? This is exactly what I always wanted.

Migleemo’s story ends with him defeating the shitty hoity toity food critics by proving they can’t actually taste anything. “Is this ethical?” asks Tendi. “THese guys are punks, let Migleemo has his win.” - the Captain. That’s very funny.

The migleemo plot was whatever but the Klingon plot was PEAK.

Starbase 80?! - LD 8.5/10

Nice interrobang!

Beckett is feeling weirdly happy and optimistic. But then… the ship breaks down and needs repairs. And the closest starbase is… STARBASE 80?!

Mariner is NOT happy about this. She’s sure SB80 is cursed.

Their transporters are not good for organic use soooo we have an Enterprise gel wipe down. The people here also are wearing Enterprise outfits, which is interesting. It’s VERY old fashioned here. The story splits. Ransom and hte captain need to get to the head engineer, and are struggling to get there.

Meanwhile, the Lower Deckers are exploring around as some kind of zombie virus takes hold. Mariner is SURE it’s cause of the curse, buuuut it turns out to be from the Cerritos!

They FINALLY find the engineer at the arcade, he’s been sneakily trying to get them to fix problems in the station. He’s also voiced by Gideon’s dad from Gravity Falls and its very distracting.

This makes Starbase 80 something that doesn’t bother me. It kinda lowkey annoyed me before this episode, because it was an evil shitty place that no one wanted to go to, it was basically Bad Person Jail for people. I was like “why would Starfleet HAVE something like this?”

This explains what Starbase 80’s deal actually is. It’s not cursed, it’s not intentionally shitty. It’s a place where a bunch of weirdos go and people who need second chances. They’re kinda lost in the lurch cause of a diplomatic mess up, giving half the starbase to the control of a “knife gang” who are actually perfectly pleasant people, but it makes things weird. Like there’s still the problem with Starfleet ignoring and forgetting them cause they’re at the bottom of the priority list, Starfleet incompetence, but this is still SO much better.

They solve the problem and help fix all the problems they can at SB80, which is sweet. I really liked this one. ‘

Of Gods and Angles - LD 7/10

Ransom is having some problem with a new ensign, Ensign Olly. She’s the granddaughter of Zeus. Holy shit, you remember how the Greek Gods were in TOS? Olly is a nice person who means well but she keeps causing problems, and there’s a big diplomatic peace talk here between the Cubes and the Orbs. Mariner sees herself in her and offers to take over helping her.

MEanwhile, Boimler keeps trying to pretend to be his alternate universe cool self. He decides he needs to become besties with T’ana like his alt self. I’m sure that’ll go well. He VERY quickly fucks it up and gets drugged by experiemental drugs. Whoops!

One of the cubes got murdered, or is missing and it SEEMS like a murder. Now they need to figure out what’s going on. Olly is CERTAIN it’s a murder and is super gung ho on pinning it on a random orb. Mariner looks into it and it turns out Olly found the crime scene first, freaked out, and accidentally broke a computer with her lightening powers.

Mariner convinces Olly to use her power aaand it makes shit worse. But she realizes that the reason she ALWAYS wanted to be in Starfleet is cause she wanted to Engineer so she uses her engineering expertise to fix the problem.

Also turns out no one was murdered, they were just sneaking off to fuck. That wasn’t a murder scene, it was “their kink”. Oh no.

Also T’ana likes Boimler now cause he got horribly injured and she develops a new procedure to fix him.

This was an alright one.

Fully Dilated - LD 7/10

This title was a choice.

More alternate universe nonsense. They need to go undercover on a pre-warp planet to take back some stuff left by an alternate universe that’ll fuck up their evolution. Meanwhile, T’Lyn and Tendi are competing to become the new head science officer. Tendi REALLY wants it and wants to be normal about it, but she is not normal about it.

The planet they’re beaming to has some issues with time dilation. So a week down there is a second up there. Aaaaand just after beaming them down the teleporter breaks cause of Boimler’s nonsense. Whoops!

The alternate universe thing that crashed is… Purple Data’s Head! Oh boy! Tendi is getting more and more jealous…. and it gets worse when they’re there for over four months.

Mariner is bored, so she decides to turn this into a Inner Light episode. She needs to go get a partner fast! She IMMEDIATELY gets arrested. Whoops.

Tendi fixes up Data’s head and gets advice from him how to be a better science officer. Tendi starts… unravelling. T’Lyn seems to want to hang out for companionship and she keeps being aggressively friendly.

It also doesn’t help that T’Lyn keeps one upping her. After they’re kidnapped by some creepy guy who’s been stalking them for four months, they finally talk. T’Lyn didn’t even REALIZE they’ve been fighting. She wants to rescind the application, but Tendi wants to as well. They break free, fix the situation, and they FINALLY get beamed out.

Mariner meets Data and she’s as nerdy about it as I would be.

Data suggests to the captain who he thinks should be promoted… both of them. They are co-leads. That’s cute.

Upper Decks - LD 6.5/10

Beckett and Boimler comment on how it feels like they’re the main characters and the bridge crew never seem to do anything. Aaaand then we get an episode entirely about the bridge crew.

It’s the Lower Decks episode of Lower Decks, thats cute.

Everyone gets their times to shine. Ransom’s part is about trying to get some lower deckers to work together by being an example and get them motivated.

Shax’s is about an evil inner self that’s trying to get him to fight him…. He instead meditates and uses his inner self to fight him instead. That’s cute.

Billups is having the TIME OF HIS LIFE fixing some dangerous stuff. The Ensign with him is happy about it.

T’Ana gets her catty nurse to “rearrange her insides” so she can actually feel pain and they can update the pain chart.

Aaaand the captain is doing lots of menial bullshit all over the ship like watching horn concerts and poetry slams.

Shaxs is the fucking best.

Anyways an alien fleet, the Clicketts, shows up to take over the ship. They’re all basically fully stopped by the lower deckers working with them. Even WITH THE UPPER DECKERS EPISODE, they still need to be saved by lower deckers. Well, not all of them. Doctor T’Ana handles a phaser set to kill because she’s immune to pain.

Everything is handled, aaaand Captain Freeman gets enough time off to have an anniversary date with her husband.

This one was alright, it was cute.

The New Next Generation - LD 8.5/10

BOIMLER FINALLY HAS HIS BEARD! Boimler is getting sad about his dead clone. Remember him? He wonders what he could have gotten up to if he survived…

But we know he did. So here he is. What is he up to? He’s exploring alternate realities in a Defiant class as captain, and his crew is entirely alternate universe main characters. T’Pol, Curzon Dax, Elim Garak and his husband EMH Bashir (YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. I AM NORMAL ABOUT THIS.) and about a dozen Harry Kims.

William Boimler is… unhappy. He hates the multiverse. After being out here all year trying to fix and find whoever is ripping holes in the multiverse, he thinks its basically just slightly different weird versions of everyone he already knows, and he’s SICK of it. “IT’S PROBABLY BORG’D PICARD OR HUMAN WORF.”

I love silly fun references like this.

The next person they rescue is… alternate universe Mariner! Boimler is EXCITED to see his best friend, he’s seen no one for years cause he has to pretend to be dead. This Mariner is an engineer and is afraid of conflict.

Using Mariner’s suggestions, they sneak through after whoever is doing the damages, and they take damage while knocking the ship into a planet. They get locked up by the locals and meet the “villains” who are unstablizing realities.

This is Lily Sloan, who built the first warp engine with Zefram Cochrane. In her reality, they built a dimensional drive instead. They overcome their differences and become friends, and she tries to help Boimler see the beauty of the multiverse.

The dimension hopping ship is stolen by a Harry Kim before they can fix it fully. “Two Pip Kim”, the only one who got a promotion, is going to take all the other kims to his universe, where they can be promoted. None of the other Kims are happy about this. They try to mutiny and are beamed back.

There’s a little story here with Garak and Bashir arguing. They eventually realize there’s no reason for the arguing at all. “Why are we even doign this?!” “Because arguing is fun :)” “NO IT’S NOT?!” this is the most Garak thing.

Two Pip Kim succeeds and his ship explodes, reaching all realities. They can fix it, barely. By directing the problem to a SINGLE reality…. so Boimler choses the prime reality, his, because he trusts his friends and himself to fix it. He piggybacked a message to his duplicate, as long as he doesn’t freak out- oh, he freaked out.

That was good and I was very happy to see Garak and Bashir again.

Fissure Quest - LD 7/10

Here it is. Season finale. Series finale. Can it cleanly end it all?

A rift opens and hits some Klingons. They turn into Discovery Klingons, that’s funny. And horrifying! One asshole Klingon Captain, Relga, who’s brothers Ma’ah killed, intends to use this to further her career. They find Ma’ah and try to kill him, but his brother forces them to sneak out.

Meanwhile, Boimler gets the news and tries to get help from the upper command. The captain agrees and tries, and they’re like “Yes, this is real. Here, it’s up to you, good luck.” Also everyone hates Boimler for his clone sending the problem HERE.

Also for some reason Rutherford is being a grumpy pants.

Ma’ah and his brother show up, requesting asylum. Only Ma’ah’s brother actually, he’s annoyed by all of this. Relga tries to force them to give it over by pretending to be the admiral, it seems, aaaand then just attacks them anyway. She, like her brothers, is not a very good Klingon. Why is anyone following this person?

They run, cause y’know, theys till need to solve a universal collapse, while Ma’ah’s brother disappears. They get close to the field, which will turn people into weird versions of themselves…

The ships keep turning into other versions of their ship. One of the Klingon ships is now an old sailing barge and they all die :) Yay. Spacing quota met!

Ma’ah gets angry and thinks where his brother is hiding is hidden in Boimler’s padd. Boimler breaks the Padd. It was working for him sure, and he was cool and hot, buuuut it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have his friends’ backs. Cute.

They manage to defeat Relga by having Olly use her thunder blasts to break their shields. They change and explode, GG.

One final ship change for the Ceritos, aaand it becomes a Galaxy class, sweet. Only for a bit though, it goes back to a shitty Cali-class. Rutherford rips out his implant for some reason and supes up the ship. There’s something about how he thinks he Cali class is the best, I dunno.

Okay it’s moving so fucking fast and every sub plot is concluding that it’s really hard to explain. Whatever, everuything happens. Rutherford falls back in love with the ship, Tendi and T’lyn work together as Science Besties to stop quantum collapse.

The rift isn’t closed, but is stablized. Now Stafleet can go explore the multiverse as a new frontier. To help the mission, they move Starbase 80 to act as the stop gap between the new rift and Starfleet, cause its old systems aren’t effected by the rift’s effects.

Captain Freeman is assigned as the new person in charge of this. She’s leaving the Cerritos.

Rutherford is fully human! It’s also a tease towards Tendi x Rutherford, which is cute.

The episode ends with a big cute thing where Mariner talks about how special the crew is and how they’re explorers, and not perfect, but a family, etc, etc.

Captain Ransom…. oh no, I’m worried about that. But the adventure continues, etc etc. Boimler and Mariner are also promoted as provisional first officers. They are VERY anxious about this, but everyone seems proud of them.

I felt like they set up too many things and then knocked em all down well, but it was still paced a little off. I feel it was a little overloaded. And sad it’s the ending. But still, mostly good, mostly cute.

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

Two of One - PIC 4/10

We get another in media res thing where we see Picard dying. Okay, we keep doing that. In media res isn’t just a cheat code, it needs to be good, too.

They’re continuing the heist that was set up last episode. Everyone is in a fancy party trying to… somehow make sure that Picard’s ancestor is still on the space mission. Dunno how they’ll do that off the cuff but alright. Meanwhile, Jirati has a new headmate and it is going Very Poorly.

Soong comes up and tells Picard to leave. Nothing really comes from this at all. Then Jirati is taken over by the Borg Queen entirely and she takes this time to do a big musical number, so Picard can sneak time alone with Mama Picard. They have a heart to heart and then Soong just fucking runs him over. In a Tesla. Well, at least it was the correct person who did that. An asshole tech billionaire. They take him to the doctor who saved Rios that one time, and its solved immediately. Uh, okay. See, when I said In Media Res needs to be good, I meant it means to MEAN SOMETHING. Not be something solved immediately with no reprecusions. You could at least draw attention to the fact he’s A FUCKING ROBOT. She’s not bothered by that, at all.

Soong is Sephiroth Posting around his house so his daughter googles him… or sorry, BINGS him for the first time and finds out that he is a mad scientist who cloned her, and in fact, she’s like clone #6, all the others died.

Picard is stuck in his mind due to being hit by a car, sure. They can maybe wake him up, using the Watcher’s mind probe. Meanwhile, Jirati is walking around as the Big Borg Bitch now, I’m sure that won’t be a problem.

Monsters - PIC 3.5/10

We get a scene of Picard talking to some guy. He’s some Federation guy, and they’re doing a basic psych evaluation. He makes her tell him a story. It’s making both of them uncomfortable.

He tells him a story that seems to be a retelling of a children’s fairy tale, told to him as a kid by his mother, and re-enacted out by child picard and his mother. Young picard gets to watch his mother be dragged away into the darkness by a monster yay :)

Meanwhile, Picard is still suffering and dying. Seven and Raffi head out to find Jirati, who has gone MIA. But they’re locked out of the ship by the Borg.

The Watcher uses some weird tech to mind meld with Picard so she can lead him out of his mind. So now the Watcher has to travel through the fantasy world in his mind and save child Picard’s mother, because he refuses to leave without her. All while we ALSO continue to get the framing device of Picard getting increasingly annoyed at his psychiatrist.

Meanwhile Picard and the Watcher appear to be having strokes so Rios has to rope the doctor into the whole space thing. “Are you from… outer space?” “Mmm? No, no, I’m from Chile. I just…. work in space.” A good line.

Turns out this is all daddy issues. The psychiatrist is actually his dad, who looks like an older Bashir tbh. We get some backstory that explains Picard’s parents. She got locked in a dark room for a while and went fucking nuts. He blamed his dad because he was a little kid. She clearly had some kind of disorder that y’know, could be easily treated cause it’s 2300. The way it’s all framed makes it seem like it’s the 1800s, but my man’s from the 2300s.

Now awake, Picard decides he needs to talk to Q. Like, actually talk, maybe he can figure something out. So he asks Guinan. Turns out she DOES have a way to summon Q. She has THE TRUCE BOTTLE, a magical bottle of wine that was used during the truce between the El-Aurians and the Q. I guess she just HAS that. Well, okay, she SAYS she can do it but when she tries it just doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, Seven discovers what exactly Jurati is doing. Well, the Queen in Jurati’s body. She’s forcing endorphins so that the assimilation process speeds up. I guess that happens.

The episode ends with an FBI agent arresting Picard after showing that they saw him teleport. Man, they just CAN’T not fuck up the timeline, can they??? God knows whats going on in the future right now.

Mercy - PIC 6/10

The FBI agent is not fucking around and threatens to just kill them if they don’t explain why they’re trying to sabatoge the Europa Missions. Which is really funny, considering that they’re trying to do the opposite. After a bit of faffing about he decides that’s fine and leaves.

We’re getting a fight between Seven and Raffi. Seven decides Raffi is abusive and manipulative because everyone has to be what Raffi wants them to be. I think this is just setting it up so they can be cute and make up later. I hope it is.

Agnes does a fucking Legolas across some cars to beat the shit out of them before leaving.

Rios and the doctor kiss, and it’s cute. This is a good plot line.

The other person doing the interrogation to Guinan is… Q! Who is NOT happy to see her. He explains he is dying and this is basically all a way to give his life meaning. Or at least that’s how Guinan sees it, Q doesn’t properly explain himself It’s a good scene but Q is really out there right now, what the fuck is he doing.

Kore, Soong’s daughter, walks out on him after letting him have it for being a weird incel fucker who cares more about his work and legacy than the actual living beings he was creating. While he’s sad about this, Jurati shows up. Uh oh.

Picard starts to psychiatrize Picard. We get the FBI agent’s backstory, where he explains that he saw a scary monster alien as a kid who pushed his hands into him and then disappeared before he could. Picard explains what that was. And also who and what he is. And he’s like “Now, to save the future, I need YOUR help”. Which hey, if he just told the FBI agent earlier when he was being an asshole, it wouldn’t work. But now he believes him 100%. Well done.

…The FBI agent is IMMEDIATELY fired, by the way, which is VERY funny. “The boy who cried alien was wrong once again”. So he can’t really do anything to help.

Soong summons some special forces mercenaries, and Jurati assimilates them. I dunno how she started assimilating people and then didn’t get shot up by the others. Well, they ARE paramilitary, they probably go “Wait, can we still kill people? Okay I’m good, let’s go.”

Hide and Seek - PIC 6/10

Jurati beams her new army to the ship, and Rios has to run the fuck away with his new girlfriend. Everyone beams in using the Watcher’s tech has to storm the ship, which now has an army of soldiers, who also for some reason changed the lasers on their assault rifles to green cause uh, Borg Branding?

Jurati FINALLY speaks up and starts stopping the Queen. Why it took her THIS long, I don’t even know. She stops her from taking the ship, declares that the only reason she even does the Borg thing is because she’s lonely, and then reveals she had made a COMBAT HOLOGRAM SHAPED LIKE ELNOR. Who can also hear her in the Borg Queen’s mind somehow.

Anyways there’s a big battle. Rios is injured immediately and they send him and the civilians back to the Watcher’s apartment. Let’s just write him out, poor guy. Soong mocks them for a bit, and they tell him to go fuck himself.

This is an image of Raffi and Seven working together to murder a guy by stabbing a knife into his eye. This, too, is yuri.

Anyways this was right after we went “you know this season hasn’t had nearly as much violence as the others recently”. Whoopsies!!!

We’re also STILL getting flashbacks to Picard’s childhood. I guess it IS in his childhood home. Now it seems like his mother was maybe trying to… kill him??? I don’t even know. Also where the fuck is Robert Picard in any of this? Y’know, Picard’s brother? His mother is like “You are my light, Jean Luc, the only reason for me to exist”. Fuck her other son I guess. No WONDER Robert fucking hated Jean Luc.

Seven and Raffi charge across the battlefield and meet with Elnor. Well, Elnor’s hologram. Raffi has a heart to heart with him, and he explains that he recorded Elnor’s last moments and knows he does not blame her. They all work together and have the Queen on the rungs, and theeeeeen nope, she’s all powerful and defeats them so it can be suspensful. She takes out Elnor, stabs Seven, and then does the fucking thing the Borg Queen ALWAYS does, gloat and monologue. She fucking loooooves the sound of her own voice.

Eventually, somehow, Jurati convinces her… NOT to be a weird murderous asshole. It’s easier to be nice and help people. And make a world where people could CHOOSE to be Borg and then would work hard because its what they wanted. It actually works somehow. Maybe cause this is the Borg Queen from a universe where she got her ass fucking handed to her.

The two fusion dance into a new being, save Seven, which makes her… look like she normally looks, with the borg implants. STATUS QUO! And then Rios comes back, saves Picard, aaaand he continues to hyper focus on his dead mother. And how he saw her hang herself. Okay. So yes, she was mentally unwell, and he let her out after she was locked in her room for her own safety, and she ended up killing herself, and he’s been trying to block it out.

….

So uh, the weakest part of Picard season 2 is… Picard himself? I didn’t need any of this, and neither did Jean Luc. Though again, no wonder Robert hated him.

Jurati flies off with the ship, and all’s well that- WAIT NO, RENEE PICARD. Also Soong is still out there. We’re not quite done yet.

We then see the ship blast off into space. A MILLION PEOPLE SAW THAT. A MILLION SATELLITES.

Farewell - PIC 7.5/10

The Watcher decides she’s gonna sacrifice herself to save Renee Picard… Uh, somehow. I dunno how that’d work? Picard tries to stop her and she legit gets offended about it. “It’s not up to you to decide? It’s my life and my duty, fuck off. I don’t need saving”.

Meanwhile, Soong’s backup plan appears to be launch drones to blow up the rocket, so the rest of the party is trying to stop that. I uh…. what is he gonna do? Blame it on the Russians??? How is this gonna result in the same ending??

The Watcher tries to talk to Renee to tell her she’s in danger. It doesn’t work, and she runs out freaked out and runs into… Soong, who is like “oh don’t worry I’ll help you :) Here, have some neurotoxin!” and poisons her, killing her. How is this guy justifying ANYTHING he’s doing?

Psych, it was the Watcher pretending to be her. She dies in Picard’s arm, seeing the rocket blast off into space. I think the weirdest part of this is that a human neurotoxin works on a romulan. Must have gotten lucky. Anyways, she dies. This is why they didn’t bring Talyn, I guess. So they can have consequences without having consequences.

Soong has lost, and then he sees his daughter delete all his files. I guess he doesn’t have backups. But he calms himself by looking pleased at a book about the Khan Project. What the fuck??

New cameo! Wesley is here. He for some reason is talking to Kore now. He’s here to invite her to be a Supervisor, like the Watcher. Hey, remember the last time we saw this guy he started the Maquis war??? Fuck this guy.

HOLY SHIT

HOLY SHIT WE ACTUALLY GET A KISS BETWEEN THESE TWO! YEAHHHHH!

It’s like we’re at the fucking moon landing here in my chat, we are all cheering.

Picard has one last sit down with Q, who’s been weirdly noticably absent the past few episodes. He apparently just stopped trying to cause the bad future. And he’s like “maybe this has taught you to learn to trust to love” THIS REALLY WAS ALL JUST A BIG LESSON FROM Q TO TRY AND GET HIM TO FUCK HIS ROMULAN GIRLFRIEND. HOLY HELL.

Picard is like “why are you ALWAYS doing this to me?” and Q makes it VERY clear.

He’s his favorite and he likes him a lot. That’s it.

Q is gonna use the last of his power to send them all home. Well, most of them. Rios is staying. He says he never really fit in the future. Dude you were a Starfleet Captain. Anyways, bye Rios. Try not to change the timeline too much.

Anyways, it’s time for Q to die. But not alone. Picard hugs him, and then they’re sent back to the future. This scene would hit REALLY REALLY well in a story that is slightly better written, maybe a movie? I dunno, it’s a good scene, but I need to ignore all the other shit from the rest of season that Q did and said. It feels like it doesn’t fit.

They go back to the very start, the Stargazer. Everything is back to normal, though uh, Captain Rios doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does Doctor Jurati. She’s, instead, the Borg Queen. There’s a galactic event where that X-box-ass energy field from episode 1 is gonna explode and kill everyone. The only way to fix this is if the Borg Queen uses TWO fleets of shields to create a giant shield. Okay, sure.

It’s working! Though one ship needs to fix it, they call it, and… Elnor answers! Why? He’s a Cadet? I know we had to let us know that Elnor is here and alive after all, but still, that’s very weird.

The explosive event creates a strange transwarp conduit wormhole. The New Borg request to join the Federation and guard the gates.

Picard has a chat with Guinan, and it’s clear that all of the timeline already happened like this. She explains Rios lived a nice long life with his new wife and they basically made the Doctors Without Borders. And he died in a bar fight. Uh, okay, weird addendum Guinan, kinda undercuts the whole thing.

AND PICARD.

STILL.

DOES NOT KISS HIS ROMULAN GIRLFRIEND. FUCKING KISS HER YOU DUMBASS.

Q DIED FOR THIS, YOU FOOL.

….Anyways this season was WAY better than expected. It’s not GOOD. But like, if this was a movie, I’d rather watch it than Star Trek Nemesis, sure.

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this.

The Star Gazer - PIC 5.5/10

We get an in media res thing of Picard blowing up his own ship in front of the Borg Queen. Ohhhhh boyyy more BORG QUEEN STUFF, MY FAVORITE CHARACTER IN THIS SERIES! OHHH BOYYYYYYYYYY.

Anyways jump back 48 hours, Picard is hanging on his Chataeu with that one hot Romulan who wants to climb in his pants. Hey, remember how cool she is? How cool the idea of a reformed ex Tal Shiar being on our side is? And how they just put her on a bridge last time? I can’t wait for them to fix that problem this time. Picard ALMOST kisses her but stops for some reason. God dammit, Jean Luc.

Anyways we get some Picard childhood flashbacks of him as a… Dickensian whelp? And his mother who is like, tortured and killed in front of him or some shit. I dunno, it’s really hard to follow and it keeps jumping to Sir Patrick Stewart sitting there and staring forward, cause like, the dude was 82 when this was shot, we couldn’t let him do very much.

We then jump to Picard declaring time is the true final frontier in front of some graduating class or something? Look, this makes no sense and is jumping all over the place. The pacing is very bad. Picard for some reason calls out Elnor, the first Romulan in starfleet. Imagine you’re graduating and the dude giving the speech is like “shoutouts to my stepson in the audience!” I’d be annoyed.

Seven is flying around in a ship by herself and comes across the Burning Legion, I guess. Some kind of horrifying subspace tear. I’m sure that’s not important

Dr. Jurati (I could NEVER remember her name I swear I am trying) is with the android girl and they’re having some kind of fancy dinner. Jurati is… kinda unhappy to be here, it feels. The android is staying behind, not gonna be in the show anymore, bye bye. Okay, baiii. Jurati beams up to her ship, which is captain’d by… Rios! He’s back in Starfleet, and is a captain now. I guess he’s over all the trauma now, good for him. He still looks hot as hell.

Okay so uh, Remember Raffi? And how she held hands with Seven in that one scene? They’re dating now. But Raffi is kind of over it already, cause turns out Seven, having the unresistable urge to run off to the asscrack of space and beat up bad guys, is not a very good partner. Who could have known?? At least we KIND of get lesbianism

WE NEED OUR QUOTA OF GUEST STARS. Picard goes to Guinan for advice on his life and romance. JUST KISS HER, JEAN LUC, SHE’S VERY DOWN BAD. He also talks to her about his borg trauma. Okay, first, there’s no way he’s never talked to her about borg trauma, she was more his therapist than Troi was. Second, can we talk about OTHER things that happened to Picard? The only thing we ever hear is Locutus stuff. Can’t we have like… a season about Inner Light?

Anyways turns out the hole in space time has a message coming out of it. “Help us, Picard” and the entirety of article 15, the article about joining the Federation. So they send Picard to these guys to discuss joining the Federation. He teleports out without even saying goodbye to his Romulan Wife and it lingers on her sadly staring at where he just teleported out.

We get him going on Rios’ ship and saying hello into the wormhole. Okay, so, if we DIDN’T have the in media res, we’d be in suspense about this, but we already know it’s the Borg, and we already know it’s gonna go south. So when Picard is like “let’s talk to them :)” and Seven is like “It’s the fucking BORG? NO? BLOW THEM UP?” we already know Seven is right, so uh, why are we focusing on this

The Borg Queen is like, Doc Oc for some reason, and comes in and starts sucking energy reserves out of their ship. They try to shoot her and it doesn’t work at all. She gets command codes for all Starfleet ships for some reason, because Starfleet has fully Borg Upgraded all their ships. Picard blows the ship up to stop it, and the queen goes “look up” just as it blows up and everyone dies.

Picard wakes back up. Was that line about time being the last frontier really just a setup for a time loop or something? His home is… a little different.

HEY LOOK WHO IT IS! John Delancie shows up and is de-aged through tech stuff, and since he’s just standing still it actually looks good, then he snaps his fingers to make himself over to “make it fair” or whatever, which is a very Q thing to do. The trial never ends. He welcomes Picard to the “end of the road not taken”.

Over all, it was kinda hard to follow, but there’s some interesting setups.

Penance - PIC 6/10

Q is… not well. He’s sick. But he does his bullshit he always does, mocking Picard, who is not having it. But then Q SLAPS him. God damn.

Q shows Picard around this alternate universe, “of his own making”. He shows Picard his trophy room, which has Sarek, Martok, and Gul Dukat’s skulls on display. This is NOT the mirror universe. This is… like, ANOTHER mirror universe? Another evil fascist Federation alternate timeline? Weird. In this one, it’s The Confederation.

I find it strange how in this timeline, Earth has basically been alone by itself and has managed to fight against every single person in the Federation AND outside of it, like Romulans, Klingons, and the fucking Borg, and STILL managed to win. We struggled against the Borg as a federation, how did we do this??? I think this is, again, as usual, just pretending fascism is an actual effective government system, which it is not.

Even wakes up as herself. She’s the president of the Confederacy. She immediately sets off messaging the rest of the crew here to find out what the fuck is going on, liek Rios, who is under attack and is like “what the fuck is going on”. Elnor is ALSO here, waking up as he’s being fired at by the Confederation. He immediately runs into Raffi, lucky him. I do find it interesting how in this world, which seems to be born of a single time travel change, every person we know is still born.

Seven visits Dr. Jurati with her husband who is a good little fascist and is like “why are we not celebrating eradication day by killing aliens >:(“ and she’s like “shut up honey” and he’s a good pussy whipped boy and goes “yes dear” and then they go and find that Jurati has the Borg Queen in a jar and she’s like “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON”, so okay cool she’s in on it too.

Everyone meets up. They find out, through the Borg Queen’s Calculation Magic, that this is their universe, not an alternate one, just one that Q changed with time travel back in the past, in 2024. Man, what a year that was, huh? Wait shit. Is this the future that comes from Trump’s America?? Anyways they need her to calculate how to go back into the past, but not before the Borg Queen is carted off for ERADICATION DAY CELEBRATIONS, yaaaay

They have to pretend to be doing the execution of the Borg Queen while actually trying to sneak her onto Rios’ ship. While they’re doing their thing, Rios and Jurati have a falling out and break up. Is this the best time for that?

Okay so I hate the Borg Queen, but she’s the best she’s ever been here, because she’s silent and has no agency.

They are almost out but then nope, Seven’s shitty fascist husbando shows up ready to kill them, shoots Elnor, and then cliff hanger.

Assimilation - PIC 7/10

So, the episode ended with Elnor bleeding out and them at gun point, so it’ll be bad, right? Actually it’ll be super easy. Barely an inconvenience. They just… steal the fascist’s guns and kill them with them. Okay, why were their phasers on Dust when THEY get shot with them, but they shot Elnor with the Bleed Out feature?

The Queen assimilates the ship and easily blows up the people shooting at them. So uh… how did the fascists defeat the Borg again?

They go back in time, crash land in France. The Queen is knocked out, they want to kill her, but Picard refuses cause she’s the best connection to figure out whats going on. I mean, she told you to go see The Watcher in LA, we know who that is. Elnor dies. He COULD be brought back if they fix the timeline, but he’s dead for now.

Raffi is devestated, because he was like a child to her. Uh… he was? I dunno if they said two words to each other in season 1. So uh, this is a problem with this show. It basically pretends season 1 does not exist and did not happen. This is fine for some parts, but then they also are like “oh these characters have this connection” which was never seen. All of these connections are… good. They are good ideas. It would have been good if they had been built up. But they were not, and they are not. So it’s weird. Apparently fans thought Raffi x Seven was cute and the actors agreed so they put it in here. But it was never built up and it feels strange to just hit you at the end of that relationship. Elnor and Raffi son mother stuff is a great idea, but you can’t just act like thats always been a thing.

The plan is thus: They are gonna warp people to try and find The Watcher, while Jurati gets assimilated by the Queen, but “only half assimilated so it’s fine”. What does that mean?? There’s no WAY this will back fire.

Ohhh this is a butchered rendition of hte Mamas and the Papas.

We’ve got the group split up. Picard is trying to stop Agnes from being assimilated and failing badly. Rios got injured and is flirting with a really cute doctor. Raffi and Seven are trying to explore around and pretend to be a lesbian couple to get into places for free. That is funny. Also, wow? Seven and Raffi are getting scenes together??? So like, I knew they were gay in this season, but I expected that they’d in fact, not be in scenes together so they could SAY they were gay but not have to actually be gay. But no, they are uh, they’re gay. Like, they’re basically exes who are catty at each other, but that’s STILL YURI TO ME, BAYBEE.

THERE IS YURI EVERYWHERE FOR THOSE WITH EYES TO SEE. IF I COULD IMAGINE SEVEN AND JANEWAY AS GAY, I CAN GET WITH THIS.

Jurati: “Computer, open the folder titled ‘shit I stole from the Borg Queen”

VERY funny line

Rios is arrested by ICE who are EXACTLY how you’d expect ICE to be. Holy shit is IS 2024.

Watcher - PIC 6/10

Picard and Jurati hide in a delapitated version of Chateau Picard, which is in ruins but will be repaired in the future.

We get a cute reference! An older punk is playing music loudly on the bus, Seven tells him to turn that noise off, he looks angry then goes “Okay, sorry, sorry. My apologies, I just like that song.” See? Thats how you do a reference! It’s also the same actor. Thats cute.

ICE continues to be ICE. This is literally the best representation of ICE I’ve seen. Aggressive, hateful, bullying just for fun. Fascist as hell.

Picard goes to a bar called Ten Forward and talks to the barkeep, Guinan. Wait a minute… yep. It’s Guinan again. Played by another actress. Why? Well, we already said in a previous episode she can change her appearance at will, so like, sure. Neat.

Seven and Raffi need a teleport out but its not working. If Agnes works with the Borg Queen, she can get it up faster. The Borg Queen does that stupid smug smile she does that I fucking hate about this.

Guinan shows her disgust for the state of humanity by pointing at a street with a donation center. I think she was focusing on the homeless peoples, but uh… thats not where my eyes went to in that frame

The worst part of this is the Borg Queen trying to seduce Agnes into being part of the Borg. I didn’t need ANOTHER Star Trek First Contact.

Picard has to follow some being being mind controlled by The Watcher. It turns out to be… Laris! The hot Romulan? Weird. She also hates Guinan for some reason. Meanwhile Q is trying to do a thing to someone but can’t, he has no powers. Things are happening?

Fly Me To The Moon - PIC 4.5/10

The person who looks like Laris is not actually Laris. Laris being the hot Romulan btw. Her name is Tallinn, she’s a “Supervisor”, and her job is to protect a single person so the timelines don’t get fucked. Well she apparently does a bad job. Also that one person is Renee Picard, Jean Luc’s ancestor.

Meanwhile, the Borg Queen manages to call the police and get them to come to the Picard Vinyard.

THEY MENTION HIM BY NAME. GARY SEVEN. THEY FUCKING MENTION GARY SEVEN BY NAME. HOLY SHIT. I knew he was coming back in some way but I thought they wouldn’t even mention him. A bit ago I was developing a scale for “shit in Star Trek that will never ever be mentioned again” and it was GOING to be the Gary Seven scale, but then I found out they re-intigrated him into the timeline by making him a “supervisor”. But holy shit they named him.

They rescue the people detained by ICE. This is never mentioned again.

Renee is depressed and feels like she can’t do the space flight she needs to do for the future. Her therapist is trying to talk her out of it, and that therapist is…. Q. That mother fucker.

For some reason we are suddenly jumped to Brent Spiner. Brent Spiner is playing yet another Soong doctor. Is this the… third one? Fourth??? He’s a geneticist doing human cloning. He’s fired and disbarred from doing science for unethical nonsense, but then is contacted by someone who sends him a weird “Q” in his 3D printer. I wonder who that was. Q is here to make a deal. He gives Soong some thing to fix his clone daughter, in exchange for… something.

The Queen kidnaps the police officer who came here to help her. She’s doing morew of that stupid bullshit every Borg Queen does that I fucking hate. Agnes shoots her. Holy shit. Good on her.

They need to sneak everyone into a party Renee is in so they can convince her to do the mission in a couple days. They do this by doing a heist movie setup, the kind they usually do. This is WAY better than the one they did in season 1 where they made Picard a pirate. He looked so fucking stupid. This time it’s Agnes in a fancy dress, much better.

…Also before the Borg Queen died, she put herself into Agnes’ mind so now she’s an abusive alter stuck in her brain.

This one wasn’t quite as good. It felt mostly like filler.