Pike hands Spock the Enterprise for three days and tells him not to break anything, and the first thing Spock does with it is steal it. That’s the season two premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and I’m blown away. Then again, I’m always excited, but this is an excellent episode of an excellent show. A lot of the early reviews, from the folks who got screeners of the first couple of episodes, have borne that out, and I’m really thrilled with everything this show is doing.

It starts with an awesome looking shuttle dive. Remember, there’s no up or down in space, so it’s a treat to watch the shuttle moving and flying through and eventually coming back up. I genuinely enjoyed it.

Welcome to the Time

Then we’re in Pike’s office. I won’t say ready room, but it’s something along those lines. He’s talking to Una over a monitored channel about her situation, and if you don’t know what that situation is, where have you been? Go watch season one. At the end of last season she was arrested. And she didn’t just get arrested, she got arrested by Pike’s girlfriend, because she lied about being genetically modified.

So she’s telling him it’s her life and her problem, and he’s telling her she’s one of the best commanders he’s got and he’s not letting this go. She’s determined not to see him harm himself or put himself in jeopardy. But this is Number One. This is his Number One, and he’s not going to leave her out there hanging.

It’s the same thing he told her in the first season, when they found out she was Illyrian. She asked him what happens when Starfleet finds out, and he said he’d deal with that when the time comes. Welcome to the time. You’re there. I really like seeing that side of Pike’s character.

He opens the episode with his Captain’s Log, and then we don’t see him again, because Pike takes his leave. He has a thing he has to go do. The episode also starts heavily implying that there’s some kind of situation brewing out there. At the end you find out what it is, and I won’t spoil that part, but why are you reading a review if you don’t want some spoilers?

So Pike makes Lieutenant Spock the acting captain. Three days. Don’t break anything. The Enterprise is latched up at Starbase 1, the one with all the little biosphere domes, the one where they did the negotiating with that one species last season, getting its inspections done.

Spock Is Still Pre-TOS Spock

Spock is in sickbay, and M’Benga describes what’s going on with him in really super technical terms, and what it comes out to is stress. Brother’s stressed, man. He’s just been given command of the ship. And I guess he’s dealing with some other stuff emotionally too, because Chapel walks in and his heart rate jumps. M’Benga’s not stupid. He knows what time it is. He tells Spock he’s clearly got some things to sort out and he wants to help, and he comes back with the Vulcan lute, the stringed instrument Spock is known for playing.

That’s our first of what I call a solo moment. If you know Solo: A Star Wars Story, that movie decided it was necessary to give us the origin of every single thing Han Solo had. Where he got his vest, where he got his gun, where he met Chewie. Same thing here, and I don’t have a problem with it. Akiva Goldsman has already said they’re going to lean very heavily into the things that worked, so we get to see the early days of some of them.

At this point Spock is still pre-TOS Spock. There was an article about a month ago, from Den of Geek or something along those lines, where Akiva Goldsman was interviewed, and one thing he said was that they live in the space between the Spock who was chummy and happy and smiley in the original pilot, “The Cage,” and the Spock we eventually see.

Out of universe, we know the reason. Majel Barrett was originally supposed to play Number One, Una Chin-Riley now, and she was going to be the stoic, logical, straightforward one. Exactly who they’ve built Rebecca Romijn to be. The network didn’t want a female first officer, so when that got switched out and we ended up with Spock, a lot of those things got converted over to him.

In universe, we know for a fact that Spock hasn’t fully purged his emotions yet, the human-ish ones. He had training for it, which locked certain things away. But M’Benga points out that when Spock fought to protect his people at the end of last season, he unleashed something in himself, and he’s been wrestling with it this entire time. Now he’s in command. That’s a super stressful situation to put him in, but what else do you expect to happen?

The Message From La’an

On the bridge you get a really amazing shot of Uhura. Communications is her area, and one of the inspectors tells her he’s going to have to reboot the system. She tells him that puts everybody in danger. He can’t see what she’s worried about. So she sets up a second, emergency comm band, and that’s how they end up receiving the message from La’an.

La’an is on Cajitar IV. I call it a communal space, but it’s really a disputed planet between the Federation and the Klingons, a dilithium mining planet. The way they handle it is they swap month to month. One month is yours, the next month is the other side’s, and never the twain shall meet. Starfleet has had its month. The Klingons are having theirs. That’s where La’an’s message is coming from, and according to the message it’s dire and it’s important.

Internal comms have been reset, so Uhura has to run the message down to Spock in person. Spock calls Admiral April. And April’s answer is, didn’t she go on an extended time away? Sounds like a sabbatical, bro. She’s not even part of Starfleet right now, and if she’s there, we’ll help her next month. He lays out how delicate it is. If they mess around out there, they could legitimately cause an incident.

So what are you going to do? Spock gathers everybody and tells them they’ve got to figure this thing out. They ask him for what. And he says, because we’re going to steal the Enterprise.

Here we go. The time-honored tradition of stealing the Enterprise begins right here.

Carol Kane Walks In

The plan starts with fooling the sensors into reading a warp core breach. Everybody’s playing along, oh my gosh, the warp core, we have to evacuate. And in walks Carol Kane.

Carol Kane plays an amazing character. She’s Commander Pelia, and she’s a Lanthanite, a very long-lived species that, we find out later from Spock, lived among humans, observing them. Very similar to the El-Aurians. I guess we’re just a happening species to be watching in this galaxy. We’ve got Guinan’s El-Aurians watching us, now we’ve got the Lanthanites watching us. Bro, I don’t know how special everybody thinks we are.

She walks onto the bridge and starts walking them through their own plan, which is actually pretty brilliant, before she finally gets to Spock and asks if they’re trying to steal the Enterprise. Because if they are, they should do this, this and this. And she totally helps them steal it.

Come to find out, she’s bored. She teaches engineering at Starfleet and she pretty much hates life, so her whole thing is, can we please just go do anything? And that’s what they do.

Klingons, and a Different Flavor of Them

The first thing we see when we cut to Cajitar IV is Klingons. Yay. I loved it. Klingons are near and dear to my heart.

This is a really nice bridge between the classic Klingons, the Motion Picture Klingons, and the ones we got in Star Trek: Discovery, which were startling, to say the least. I’m a big fan of the concept that says Klingons are like every other species. We’ve got tall, short, fat, skinny, long necks, long arms, all these variations on people. Klingons have varying types of Klingons. There are canonical reasons why they look different, but landing on “this is just a different flavor of Klingon” is something I can deal with.

There’s always been a homogeneity to Star Trek species that I’ve understood but never been really keen on. It made sense back when you were doing allegories, Russia and the Cold War and all of that. Having species with different types of people in them is a smart move.

They tell La’an they got her message, and she tells them there’s a plot by a group called the Broken Circle. Roll credits. Former Klingon officers and former Federation officers have come together because they want to restart the war. Very much like Star Trek VI, and by the way, did anybody else catch those musical notes that sounded very Star Trek VI? I liked it. It’s a wonderful note any time they can take musical cues from the past, especially the ones we’re familiar with. That rough, Khitomer-esque peace treaty scenario really worked for me.

The Green Stuff

M’Benga and Chapel see a way in, because there’s a shortage of medical people on the planet. Come to find out, the young girl La’an took to find her parents did find them there, and one of them got sick. So the two of them go to help, and while they’re helping, Klingons show up and tell them they need to come along.

The Broken Circle has a Federation ship. Funny enough, it looks like an old predecessor to the Cerritos. It’s got the dual nacelle section, a little bit of the Reliant in it, but they’re set back further. It looks like a gutted Strange New Worlds version of a California class starship, which I hope plays into the rest of the season at some point. I’m looking at you, Lower Decks crossover. They realize immediately what the plan is: take that ship out, attack the Klingons with it, and start the war.

They need to get an emergency signal out, and their best bet is the transponder on Deck 13. And they have this green fluid.

One of my good buddies over on the Best of Trek channel, home of Buffer Time, the podcast I will eventually return to one day, I promise, said he didn’t know if he liked the super soldier serum. It’s an excellent show with a really good panel, by the way, go give it a listen. And he’s right, it really does feel super soldier serum-y. But it’s green, and that makes me want to lean toward it being some extracted derivative of, say, Spock’s blood. It makes them stronger and they can fight through everything. Vulcans are genetically stronger. Klingons are built tougher, with redundant systems top to bottom, and there’s a callback to that in the episode, which is awesome. I love that continuity.

The whole idea that they inject themselves, though. I don’t want to say MacGuffin, because a MacGuffin is something you go looking for, but it’s kind of hand wavy. We’ve got to do something, so now we’re super strong. And I mean Chapel is whooping up on Klingons.

M’Benga is another story. Apparently the last war with the Klingons was rough on him, and you can tell he’s working out some ghosts. He’s hardcore. At one point they’ve got Chapel, and he walks down this gauntlet of Klingons and just goes through them mercilessly. It’s unreal. They end up locked in a little area with EV suits as they feel the ship start to take off.

A D7, and the Order Spock Has to Give

Back up at the Enterprise: a D7 Klingon ship, our first look at one in this universe, and it’s gorgeous. This is dope.

There’s a shot where it’s about to fire that I’ve never seen before, and I don’t know if they’ve done it anywhere else. I don’t mean the disruptor at the front. The regular blasters on the sides kick like a giant gun. I don’t care that it’s in space. I thought it looked cool as can be.

That’s the thing about the models back in the day. They were gorgeous and wonderful and very tactile, but you could never get fine detail into functioning parts. There was no way to engineer that so it made sense. With CG you totally can, and it looks amazing.

The transponder signal comes out of the other ship and the Enterprise reads it. Uhura is awesome here. There’s Morse code embedded in it, and it says: Enterprise, destroy this ship.

Spock knows what that means, and you can tell. Ethan Peck, bro. He’s doing such a great job playing a pained Spock trying to keep it all together.

Here’s my prediction. Before the season’s out, Spock is going to end up broken and they’re going to have to fix him. To stop whatever’s happening with him, he’s going to have to purge his emotions as much as possible, put all his locks back in place, and get to a much stronger, sterner place. He’s going to get closer to TOS Spock.

One EV Suit Between Them

Meanwhile M’Benga and Chapel have one EV suit between them. They take as much of a breath as they can before they go. They’re going to freeze, but the suit starts sending out a signal as soon as it’s clear of the ship, and they’re hoping the Enterprise picks it up. M’Benga tells her how long they’ll have to live, and that they’ll be unconscious way before that.

Spock gives the order and they blow the thing up. The Enterprise transports them right away, and you get this really interesting view from inside the transporter. It’s rocky. They’ve just been in space, so it’s all tumult and chaos, and then Chapel starts coming to and Spock is all over her, doing CPR. She wakes up, touches his face, and asks him why so rough.

It’s a very touching moment, and I can see the trouble those two are headed toward. I kind of like that they’ve re-evaluated this relationship. In the original series you had Majel Barrett playing this role where she’s constantly seeking an unrequited love from Spock. Funny enough, as much as they’re playing with the relationship right now, I think we’re going to get to that place where it is unrequited. I’m telling you, he’s going to end up having to purge himself of a lot of his emotions. It’s the only logical place for it to go.

They make it back. They save the Federation from war. Spock ends up enjoying some bloodwine with the Klingons, and it’s awesome.

And Carol Kane shows back up to say she thinks she’ll stick around on this ship if they’ll let her, because she’s bored over there. The problem with living forever is that it’s boring. She has the same disruptor feel Hemmer had, meaning she disrupts the environment, but in a different way. I love that they’ve given her a character. My good friend Al, over on that same Trek channel, said it while a bunch of us were watching together on Discord: he loves that Carol Kane gets a character she can really chew on. He’s right on it.

The Verdict

Strange New Worlds “The Broken Circle” lands at an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. A solid eight. I love it. Welcome to Strange New Worlds season two.

A little housekeeping. There’s no green screen on this one because I had to give up the room I was filming in. The show goes on. We’re narrowing down a new space of our very own, and as soon as we have it, Mrs. Know-It-All is going to join me on these.

And when the crossover happens, it’s going to be a family affair. The Know-It-Alls will be here in force, because I know Baby Know-It-All has some things to say about the Lower Decks crossover, and Mrs. Know-It-All absolutely will as well.

Drop a comment on the video above and let me know what you thought of the premiere. I’d absolutely love to talk more with you about this one.