Thad wrote:Liked the time-travel episode a lot. I'm not so sure about this Kirk, but he was (again) playing an alternate-timeline version, so that works as an excuse, at least. He was a lot of fun, he just didn't seem very much like Kirk. (Well, Shatner Kirk. He definitely had a Pine Kirk thing going on.) I do kind of like the idea of only having Kirk show up in alternate timelines (notwithstanding his brief appearance in the Prime timeline at the end of the episode).
I don't have a whole lot of love for the "would you kill baby Hitler?" trope, but I love the explanation that there's a whole Time War constantly swirling around the Eugenics War with different factions constantly trying to kill Khan and other factions saving him to reset the timeline (and I also love that they explicitly use this to explain the frequent retcons on when the Eugenics War actually happens). And I like how it's the inverse of City on the Edge of Forever -- instead of "to preserve the timeline, a good person must die" it's "to preserve the timeline, a terrible person must live."
Got some bad news for Kirk about the whole "if I restore the timeline, my brother will live" thing, though.
I really liked "Among the Lotus Eaters", too. A very TOS-style "planet with a gimmick" setup, but I thought it was a good gimmick used for effective character work.
I liked the time-travel ep as well. It wisely focused on the Lifetime Original Movie romance plot and gave the full run of the ep's airtime to La'an and Kirk being cute together. Really made it an enjoyable one that earned the kiss.
It makes it all the more insane when they slam in "romulans did 9/11" into the infodump from the Rom time traveller in the eleventh hour, to say nothing of literally having child Khan there.
Overall, loved it for the romance, but I'm again amazed that the concept of this ep - like the concept for SWN in general - is incredibly lazy and dumb, but it happens to be written very well, acted well, and done in a way that makes it a joy to watch. The entire concept of La'an as a character, being the descendant of fucking Khan, is a terrible idea, as is the concept that we should BRING BACK the temporal cold war plot thread that killed Enterprise. But this show somehow does it and makes good Trek out of it! It's amazing.
Part of me is wondering if some Berman-style dipshit is cooking up these tired-ass ideas and dropping them onto the best writing team in modern Trek, and they're weaving garbage into gold.