The void gnaws pretty tirelessly. A halfhearted sigh. Been watching some nu-trek in the past week. Decided to give it a shot after watching some youtube videos that talked some of it up. Apparently the third season of Picard gets good? I haven't watched any of Picard yet at all. Probably will soonish. Why not? It's not like wanting to do something more with myself will get me to do anything more with myself. Is it a waste of my time? Maybe? But what isn't? Genuinely I don't know... I only know that the world renders value in terms of dollars and I hate that notion. I started my journey of nu-trek with strange new worlds from the background of having watched all the mainline series at least once. I've never watched all of TOS in order start to finish, but I've watched probably 80% of all the episodes. I've watched TNG a couple times straight through. Enterprise once, Voyager a couple times, DS9 once or twice. Watched all the TOS movies except the whale one. My favorite is the one where they find god. I like most of the TNG movies, except nemesis, which I only watched once in the back of my dad's truck with my siblings on this tiny screen while my parents were in the apartment. Maybe the experience itself soured the viewing, but from what I remember of the plot I don't think it was made any worse for the method. Voyager was probably had my favorite moments, and most memorable story lines, but I think TNG is a better show, or at least it's the one I come back to the most. It's the one that speaks hope to my heart the most. It's the one I wish I could live in. I do admit that the DS9 cast is probably the most interesting to watch. O'Brien, Bashir, Garak, Kira, Dax all very fleshed out, people with fun chemistry. I don't like Worf in the show tho, and the whole Sisko being immaculately conceived by time traveling god beings was a bit weird. Not that I have problems with Star Trek being weird. I don't know if weird is really the right word. It was a bit too Jesus metaphor? It made Sisko change from being just a guy doing what he could in the situation to being a divinely blessed being which was at odds with his reluctance to be seen as blessed by the prophets. Like not only did he get to speak to the gods of the Bajorans, but his existence was seeded by their meddling. Just weird. I suppose if there was a TNG episode with a similar character as that, it wouldn't have been as weird. What's weird is that it is a main cast member, and the "captain" no less. But I guess that tinge of negativity regarding foreordination of Sisko, leads well into my feelings about Strange New World. My favorite episode in season one was Spock Amok. The ship was in space dock to undergo repairs after a battle and we are treated to a Vulcan body swap plot, with bridge officers doing a cadet game/ritual called Enterprise bingo in the B plot. Nothing serious happens, it's just these characters engaging in hijinks. The main plot of the show so far has to do with Pike however. I guess in season two of Discovery something happened to him to give him a vision of his death, and the show focuses on him finding resolve in himself to go about his present duties in the face of his supposed fate. He talks about how having that knowledge might effect his decision making, like being too cautious or not cautious enough because he 'knows' where and when he will die. But there doesn't really ever seem to be any moments where that really comes into play. In the heat of the moment he just acts. Which I suppose is the point. Even knowing his fate, when the chips are down at that moment when he would risk his life to save some cadets, he would do it with or without knowing because he wouldn't stop to have an existential crisis about it. The show echoes this theme of fate with the second episode where the crew is following and studying a comet, which they learn is on a collision course with a world inhabited by a preindustrial race who are unaware of their fate. The Enterprise decides to step in and redirect the comet but are thwarted when they learn it has a force field which prevents their efforts. Uhura with a landing party discover a way to communicate with some entity in the comet and are able to disable the forcefield and Spock uses a shuttle to heat a side of the comet to cause the comet to alter it's path at the last moment. The ice that breaks from the comet enters the planets atmosphere bringing enough water to that planet to change the biosphere permanently. While all this is happening there is another ship who tells the Enterprise not to interfere, That the comet isn't a comet and is instead some kind of super ancient being, one of many that were and few which remain, that brought both life and death across the galaxy as was predetermined. They say that if the comet wills it, then it will either bless the planet or destroy it, and that the Enterprise crew has no right to effect it's predetermined path. While the crew dismisses their claims as religious zealotry it turns out while they didn't know it at the time, the comet attempted to tell the Enterprise crew that it intended no harm to come to the planet, that a chunk of the ice would break off and it would then alter it's course the ice entering the atmosphere. After decoding the message some time after Spock's efforts they see that the exact size and shape of ice which he had broken off was what the comet had described some time before. The crew wonders at this situation, how could this ancient device know that Spock would do what he did down to the exact flight path he would take? In the last episode of the season Pike met one of the children who would be a cadet he would be unable to save. Seeing him prompts him to begin writing a letter to him which he intends to save the child some 7 years into the future. At this moment Pike is taking fate into his hands and shaping a destiny different from the one he saw before. However while doing this another older Pike interrupts him. He shows the younger Pike a vision of the future where he does save himself from his death, and the deaths of the cadets, but in that future his actions, noble and selfless though they may be directly result in a Romulan-Federation war, and that the future beyond even more terrible. Thus the show in it's last episode of the series doubles down on this fatalism. It even goes as far as to say the best hope for peace in any timeline is only preserved through Pike accepting his known fate. Star Trek has always done time travel plots. Voyager has no shortage of them. DS9 has a few. TNG has it's several. And while there is always this feeling that if the time line is so prone to being messed with, what point is there to any specific line? If Ensign Harry Kim dies in one and is replaced by himself from an alternate Voyager where everyone else dies, then what meaning is there in death? What meaning is there in life? Star Trek has always fallen back to the message in those moments - it is the journey that makes the meaning. Pushing forward anyway yields it's own reward. And perhaps even with this plot in Strange New Worlds that is the same message being stated. Even if Pike knows the road and how it ends, there is meaning in walking it anyway. But somehow it feels different. While there was always this idea that the timeline was going to play out one way or another, as we see visitors from some future, or the universe itself seems to conspire to find that single thread which allows for the chosen future to exist despite impossible odds, there was always this feeling that the future was unknown, that the here and now was being made, that free will played a role. That feeling has been replaced by a fatalistic view, the future is known. The record of reality has been made, we are just listening to the music..