I disliked the episode visually. It was mostly short close up shots with blurry backgrounds in poorly illuminated areas, even the exterior scenes.

Then there was those weird shaky shots that felt so fake.

If someone tells me that it was made with AI I could believe it. Were they going for AI slop aesthetics?

This episode was what I was hoping for out of this show. The first episode was such whiplash that I’m glad it is settling down. This episode we got a cool character study that had actual impact. Cool lore that made sense. Characters had long one on one conversations. Parallel storytelling with the debate. Maybe even the hint of a natural progressing gay romance? All storylines mattered. Good job Modern Trek!

The Klingon Episode. Also the Jay-Den episode. We really haven’t gotten a lot of details about Jay-Den before this episode, just vague hints.

The Klingons are near and dear to my heart, I’ve not gotten around to watching the Discovery and DS9 and Enterprise eps, but I do so love some of the classic tales and not-canon stuff from John M. Ford.

I can totally see the Klingons being hit hard from the Burn specifically because of the martial society. Learn to run a ship’s reactor by running a nearly identical reactor on land, whereas less martial societies would look at the stack of antimatter containment chambers that would blow a sizable chunk out of an inhabited planet and decide that … maybe not.

Also, if you know your history of the Middle East, one way to view the extremists there is that, in centuries past, the Ottoman empire tried to be more cosmopolitan and eventually Europe and then the US went in and took advantage of them. Ergo, they tried being like the rest of the world and that didn’t work, let’s be more fundamentalist. So, whatever direction they were moving in the past, I can see how the Burn would cause them to be fundamentalist-Klingon in less than a century. It making less sense from an American perspective is probably a good thing – the US has caused so much damage to the Middle East and Africa while bumbling around lacking empathy.

They’ve clearly set up some thrown bricks here? When Jay-Den was a bit weird with how he spoke in the first ep, that was here to set up him really messing it up in the debate society not because he was having problems getting the character’s voice right or because they were having problems digitally altering it. When he freaks out in the first ep about healing Lora Thok that’s because he had just not healed his brother 18 months prior.

Poor Terry Farrell did a damn good job while being thrown through the wringer to represent being Dax, ancient joined Trill, but … Holly Hunter gets to show Capt Ake being similarly old without the benefit of swapping bodies. Including a complicated relationship with Obel and personnel files that took the dadmiral seven years to work through.

Also note that David Keeley is white and … they kept his skin light for Obel. Like, compare how he looks to how Gowron looked. Taking white people and darkening their skin to make them look black is … totally offensive these days. But Klingons are within the normal range of human melanin, which makes it somewhere less offensive than blackface but something that people have changed how they look at these days. A lot of people I know in the cosplay community are dead-set against the darkening or lightening of skin (not counting changing skin colors to something not on the human melanin skin color range) and this thread of discourse is fairly new.

I kinda figured out where the story was supposed to go the second that Faan Alpha was mentioned that it was going to be important for the Klingons to conquer their own new planet. Also, I had just lately watched reruns of “Heart of Glory” and “A Matter Of Honor” and there’s a lot of shared story beats. Presumably all parties knew that it was not a battle-battle but, like in “A Matter Of Honor” they needed to do the ritual and get punched in the face. Hence the USS Riker. What did come as a bit of a surprise was Lura Thok being the Klingon elder and re-interpreting Jay-Den’s father’s arrow missing.

It feels like maybe Capt Ake should have come up with the solution on her own. Riker did, while being distracted by the question “One … or both?” Then again, there’s a certain amount of Starfleet in a Klingon suggesting a course of action for his own culture vs a part-Lanthanite Human saying it and I don’t think it would have made Jay-Den’s path better for him to have gotten the idea that Capt Ake came up with it herself ahead of him.

I found the debate club the least interesting part of the story? I love that we’re returning to the Judge Aaron Satie quote and showing the kids trying to learn, but for me the more important notes was the other kids interacting with Jay-Den outside of the debate. But … there’s a thing there. The colonialist perspective is that we’ve got things to help the “lesser” people of the world so of course we should go in and fix things, but at the same time we’ve got a really really really bad history of really screwing things up. The kids will join the Academy with a perspective that they are there to fix the problems of the universe and will need to become Captains who can answer questions like Tuvix and part of how they get there is not just making good arguments but making bad ones. I dono, not the debate club type.

But, yah, there’s that Problematic Masculinity point with Jay-Den, amplified with Klingon-ness about how one deals with their own trauma… by bristling and being angry instead of by being open.

Lesee, so things keep moving quickly so while a it would be nice to have a little more time to “breathe” and let Caleb and Reymi be bigger assholes to each other, there’s only so many episodes in the season? Lura Thok was all mentor no drill sergeant.

Oh, and the musical callbacks. One thing that I noticed with the Trek movies is that they’d work their own themes in while preserving the big core TMP theme within the larger suite. Klingon music, the TMP theme, the TOS theme … one thing that was I guess less fun about all of the Trek after mid-series TNG was that they did not really preserve the musical language. The soundtrack here was just grand and I’m realizing that I’ve been mad about post-mid-TNG soundtracks for decades now.

I’m not the person to suggest the what, but I’d love to see someone taking the non-white perspective in the writer’s room figure out how to return to Klingons in this timeline in a later piece of Trek. Klingons are brash storytellers. The truth of the American Revolution is far less grand and much more nuanced if you study it in college but the not-quite-as-brash American storytellers turned into it’s own cultural mythology. A follow-up could show, on one hand, the grand mythos of New Qonos. On the other hand, a way of honor and warrior culture that is … a little more Jay-Den and a lot less corrupt.

I like to think that the pepperoni pizza was a tribute to the 30th anniversary of “Threshold” on the same day, but the true tribute to “Threshold” was depicting parents stranding their offspring on a planet and then justifying that it was fine.

I really didn’t care for this one.

The premise of the debate was flawed from the start. The Federation has an obligation to offer help, but there’s no requirement anywhere that it must compel another race to accept that help. Indeed many, many episodes have gone out of their way to point this out. So the whole idea of a “debate” was pointless. Of course they should offer the help, but that’s the end of any moral or legal responsibility. Doing anything more would itself be unethical.

Interestingly as an aside, I found this whole prospect very American at its root. Not only should we accept that we must offer help, but of course we must compel these people to accept our idea of help. It stinks of regime change from without and I find the idea that the Federation would ever work this way ridiculous.

On top of that, we’re somehow supposed to pretend we didn’t all watch Esri Dax’s excellent critique of the Klingon Empire back on DS9 and instead accept that this lie of “conquest” is supposed to prop up the Klingon culture. Are we to believe that it’s been hundreds of years and the Empire is still built in lies they tell each other about honour and battle? Instead of showing any hint of evolution (and potentially stoking internal conflict at the idea of accepting charity from an enemy), we just had a 5 minute “battle” and it’s all ok now.

This wasn’t even a respectful battle. No blood was spilt by either side, no sacrifices made. Where is the honour in that? It was a mock battle to preserve a lie. Esri would not be amused.

This episode’s ending was very soulist. Battle is a social construct, and if everyone agrees, then it can be used however people want it to be used.

Thok moving of the piece of clothing to the side had me really chuckling.

I see they decided to address the more foul Language in this show compared to other Star Treks. I would have liked if it was addressed as a cultural shift regarding the evolution of language over centuries but instead they “Effed it up.”

I never really took debate in school, but is that really how it goes? One student winner debating everyone for practice until they “lose?” Constant citations of things like they were called out anime punches? It seemed more like it school debate as written by someone who never did a debate club/class, but I never took one neither so I felt I should ask.

I wonder how much do the Klingons know that Starfleet pulled its punches?

I very much enjoyed this one. I’ve always loved Klingon culture and Worf was always my favourite main cast member. In TNG/DS9 we often saw a juxtaposition between Klingon honour and victory/power at any cost that often took over. I really found it heartening that Klingons post burn are willing to risk extinction for their culture when 800 years ago many wouldn’t think twice to using dishonourable means to get a seat on the council.

That was a fantastic episode altogether. Loved it.

I agree that the resolution should be obvious, and after the Betazed episode, it is again ridiculous that political problems are solved at a school, but then again, it was ridiculous that Picard solved all problems in the galaxy.

I also like how this episode resolves why Klingons played no role in Discovery after the time jump.

I’m enjoying the show so far, my only gripe is that there is too much lens flare.

Removed by mod

I haven’t laughed this much in months, I don’t know who writes these humorous bits, but thank you!!

Loved the episode, no notes.

🥹 Yes, I am crying.

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