If I had a nickel for every time Uhura solved a problem by singing at it, I'd have two nickels. That's not a lot, but it's the same number as how many times Chakotay's been lost in the Delta Quadrant.

This was a fun episode. Some bangers, though I agree with some of the people who think some songs could have been shortened. The unexpected Klingon boy band was an amazing gag that didn't overstay its welcome. Overall, I think it's great to have Trek embrace the old-school campiness from time to time.

Anyone else convinced Captain Batel is kinda doomed? Pike got off the relationship trauma fairly easily in this episode.

I liked that this episode and Quality of Mercy fleshed out (prime) Pike's weakness-- he's very much a diplomat, not a warrior. He avoids conflict to a fault, and this distinguishes him from other "diplomat" captains like Picard, who's more willing to show his teeth when necessary.

It really contextualizes why Starfleet Command told Pike to stay on his Five Year Mission during Discovery s1--ya just know he would have gotten the Enterprise banged up while trying to make nice withsome T'kuvma fanatics.

I thought it was weird and a touch sleazier than we normally see from Ransom, but out of universe that is very sweet!

I was gearing up for a Gorn episode and they faked us all out!

I liked it thy gave most of the cast (sorry Ortegas) screentime and moved a lot of side plots a small amount.

Moderately bummed they retroactively made Thor (George Kirk) seem like a less good father, though.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you have two pairs of the same person and that more than half of these examples (Solkar, Spock, Sarek) are sourced from a single family.

Best attempt:

The story is mainly about Kelvin Kirk learning to be less of the cocky dipshit he still is at the end of '09. He's still riding high from his victory over the future Romulans, so he really doesn't respect the seriousness the Chair should command. You see this in the completely unforced error at the start of the film--Spock is (for some reason) dead to rights, and Kirk decides that the power of friendship is more important than the Prime Directive. Pike rightly reams him out for this, but the character thread really comes to a head when the USS Vengeance catches up to Enterprise and prepares to utterly destroy her. Much as I complain about the movie, I do like this little moment of helplessness from Chris Pine's Kirk. Staring down the larger ship's guns, Kirk can only watch helplessly and apologize for leading his crew to their deaths. It has the same vibes as Kirk from Generations--he didn't believe he was dying until he actually did. Obviously, the general thread of Kirk actually taking responsibility for his crew culminates in him doing percussive maintenance inside of the Warp Core and dying for Enterprise's sins. He gets better, but honestly I can accept this as the transition between cadet Kirk of the 09 and the actually quite competent Captain Kirk in Beyond.

Spock is the other big character in this movie. Sad as it is, this is the only real time we get to see Kelvin Kirk and Kelvin Spock's friendship explored in depth. They were at each other's throats for most of '09 and Beyond focused more on McCoy + Spock's relationship. Spock's friendship with Kirk is the main avenue through which they explore Spock's classic dilemma of his Human vs. Vulcan sides. As cynical as I am about them recreating the end of WoK in reverse here, I will at least concede that Pine and Quinto did well with what they were given.

Main complaint, besides Cumberbatch being Khan: they totally wasted Bruce Greenwood's Admiral Pike here. I'm of the opinion that Kelvin Pike was the best version we'd seen prior to Discovery, and probably did more than a little bit in reviving interest in the character. Here he gets stuffed in the fridge like half an hour in to make Kirk mad/sad. What a shame.

Even if they didn't add more episodes, I will complain that it was an incredible waste of time that Endgame spent so much focus on Future Janeway's shenanigans. They could've done a cold open establishing her motivations and then taken the time used by the future scenes to unpack the weight of the crew we actually care about getting home.

To be fair, Sybok was the original spontaneous Spock sibling, even though Star Trek V was chronologically later.

Are Orions now the designated species for calling out how essentialized Star Trek aliens tend to be? Because we have D'vana Tendi, the somewhat obscure Ensign Harral from Discovery, and now the crew of the D'var. You can argue the last one's just an extension of Tendi's character arc, but still, that's three series that have touched on this.

My mental justification is that the Tardigrades were either extinct at that point (which is stated to have happened at some point prior to the end of DISCO S3), or what few post-Message in a Bottle admirals might know about the classified project couldn't justify making them suffer-- because, y'know, that is a thing that happens with the spore drive.

Hell, even if it was an option, would Janeway go for it? We saw her get rightly pissed at the equinox crew for running their ship off space aliens' suffering. and I feel like the next-closest alternative known at the time (genemodding someone with Tardigrade DNA and also making them suffer through the jump) might also fly in the face of her highly principled stance.

Not a bad start, although the episode felt somewhat lackluster. The character writing felt a little wooden, too much stuff is explicitly said instead of letting it hang in the subtext. Also there had better be a good explanation in future episodes as to why the hell Dr. M'benga keeps a couple of vials of punching serum handy at all times.

The visuals were great. The Klingon makeup was toned back a bit more towards a TNG-era look, but you can still see the more distinct Discovery skull shape. Overall a good mix between the two I'd say. The visuals from Spacedock feel very Discovery as well-- nice to see those starfleet drones being used outside of Control trying to kill everyone.

I would have liked M'benga's ending monologue to be less final. Instead of "things break, we fix them, but they'll break again," even just leaving it as a question-- "can we ever truly fix these things?" would feel like it leaves more room for hope and redemption in the future.

Prodigy memes? Neat.

Maybe a less popular one, but all the stuff Admiral Vance had to do to keep the Federation together prior to Discovery's arrival. He's pragmatic and you can tell from how he treats Stamets in the s3 finale he's no stranger to sacrifice. From his discussion with Osyraa, though, you can see he's still committed to the high-minded ideals of Starfleet and the UFP.

In fairness, they did that on Voyager first.

Kinda sad we didn't get James Frain back as Sarek for this episode. I could kinda see him bumping into Chapel and reminiscing about how the Vulcan Science Academy was absolutely awful to his 1.5 human kids.

it has been said that they're all from SNW so here's a list of names for looking them up, left to right, top to bottom:

1. Lt. Cmdr. Una "Number One" Chin-Riley & Lt. Spock
2. Ens. Nyota Uhura
3. Lt. Erica Ortegas
4. Dr./Cmdr. Joseph M'benga
5. Lt. Hemmer
6. Lt. La'an Noonien-Singh
7. Cpt. Angel (non-Starfleet)
8. F Cpt. Christopher Pike
9. Nurse/Lt. Cmdr Christine Chapel

(edit for minor pedantry, both Pike and Uhura got promoted over the course of the current show so it's entirely possible that the ranks I listed don't quite line up with the pictures at the time but that's too much damn work for me so you're getting current ranks as of SNW ep 20)

sorry, it's the future, these are apparently mandatory now.

Vader at the peak of his power is pretty crazy. IMO it'd take a lot of drones to overwhelm him in a direct confrontation, but a cube has drones in the tens of thousands, so that's at least in the realm of plausbility.

Most interesting cross-universe interaction is if the Force can be used to resist transporters, because spacing Vader is probably the best way to get rid of the threat. I think that's a moot point though since the borg can (and do) blow up their own ships to eliminate even minor threats (see: the Borg Queen blowing up a cube of 64k drones for a couple deviants in Unimatrix Zero). So, their best chance is to transwarp to the middle of nowhere and self destruct the cube he's on. If the ship's detonation doesn't take him out, just count on the cold equations of space to do the rest.

Conclusion: Darth Vader would pose a grave threat to any Borg facility he should choose to board, but the Collective is resilient enough to not really care about any damage he could do.