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Matt and Sean talk about avoiding a massive GORN invasion in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’, “Hegemony, Part II.”
Matt and Sean talk about avoiding a massive GORN invasion in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’, “Hegemony, Part II.”
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- (07:50) - - This Time in History
- (10:55) - - Episode Discussion
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Creators and Guests
What is Trek In Time?
Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.
In this episode of Trek In Time, we're jumping back or forward, back forward, back, back, back in stardate order forward in series order because we're jumping to Strange New World season three, which has just started being released on Paramount and. We're very excited to get into real time conversation season in as close to real time as we can manage.
So here we go. Season three. That's right. We're talking about hegemony part two from Star Trek Strange New Worlds, 21st overall in series order. This is the first of the third season, and we'll be talking about it within the context of today, the day we are recording this July 21st, 2025. Thank you everybody for joining us here at Trek In Time.
We like to revisit the series in chronological stardate order. And for anybody who's jumping into this brand new and doesn't know who we are, we have already. As you can see from the episode number had 193 other conversations about other episodes of Star Trek. That's right. We started with Enterprise.
We swam through Strange New Worlds and Discovery. We made ourselves comfortable in the original series and are partway through the second season of that, but in order to stay up to date and in the moment. Considering that any stories that are coming out in Strange New Worlds right now technically take place before the original series episodes.
Well, when we've got new episodes in hand, we're gonna visit them and jump back and talk about them. So we not only take a look at the series in stardate order, we also take a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So once again, for anybody who's interested in learning more about 1967, well.
I direct you to our Original Series episodes. If you're more interested in, oh, I don't know, the early two thousands, why, yes, Enterprise might be the episodes you'd wanna revisit, but here we are now taking a look in an episode and talking about its place in history as of today's date. We've never done that before, Matt, so no, this is a first. Should be interesting.
That's a lot of talking about what the podcast is, but I haven't talked about who we are. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids and with me as always is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and it's impact our lives.
So between the two of us, we've got the science, we've got the fiction, we've got the science fiction. That's right. We've got Star Trek. Matt, how are you doing today?
I'm doing really well. I'm very excited to talk about this. It's really kind of fun to be like talking about something that's currently airing, like right this minute.
Yeah, it's, it's a lot of fun.
The last time we did something close to this was when we talked about the Star Trek movie, Section 31. Yeah. We had visited that because it was a new production, it was available. We were like, let's visit that because it's supposed to take place. At a, at a point that is, it started off as a Discovery character, so we, we decided to revisit it.
And anybody who wasn't a, a visitor to this podcast at the time. Let me save you the clicks. Boy, did we not enjoy that movie, so no, it was bad. It was real bad. This is gonna feel different because we're gonna be revisiting a show that we are constantly talking about how it's impacting our rewatch of Older Star Trek, the original series, interpreting the original series, and a lot of the content that it provides in its storytelling has changed as a result of Strange New World. So we're very, very excited to be visiting this season in as close to real time as we possibly can.
Well, we have some comments from our last episode of the original series that we're pausing on for what, two and a half months?
Yes. During this run.
Thank you for your comments. Yeah. We'll get back to your show in two months.
Yeah. But when we talked about doing this switch, there's a bunch of comments around Strange New Worlds. So from the episode, return to tomorrow. We had a comment about that episode specifically from Paleghost 69 who wrote, there's so many questions that were waved away in this episode.
They, as the beings, they ascended past needing bodies, but have to remain in some vessel instead of living as energy, question mark. Are the aliens in a love triangle? Question mark? Wouldn't they know that before storing their essence in the spheres? Why are, why are all of them dead except the three beings in a very close relationship?
Does Kirk and Dr. Anne remember the makeout session? Surely the mind transfer shared the experience. How did Sargon know all of this, but let it play out anyway? Like WTF, who knows their plan is being missed with while getting poisoned and just going along with it? Yes. Yes. Paleghost. Yeah. So many questions.
Lot of Handwaving. A lot of handwaving in the sixties.
Yeah. Then we had one from Old Trekkie 23 who wrote of all the original series episodes, this one and immunity syndrome are the ones I have the most vivid memories of. Of course, February, 1968. I wasn't quite six years old yet, so take that from, take from that, what you will.
Then he also wrote. I'm glad you'll be jumping over to Strange New Worlds as the new season begins. I look forward to your analysis having just watched the first two episodes. I'm curious to see what you have to say about the second one. Well, I have to wait a week to hear that, but we're only doing episode one this today.
That's right. We will get there. Yeah. And then finally from Dan Sims. Oh, snap. Strange. New World is coming back. Oh, hell's. Hell's to the, yeah.
I'm with you, Dan.
I'm with you.
Glad to be a part of the excitement of getting back to this series. That, of course, leads to noises in the background and flashing lights upon your screen.
What could that be? It is, of course, the read alert. It's time for Matt to read the, it's not a Wikipedia description as much as it is it summary found online, so I think it's kind of okay. We'll see.
We'll, we'll see about this. The episode Hegemony part two is the first episode of the third season of Star Trek, Strange New Worlds and features, Captain Pike leading a daring rescue mission behind enemy lines while the landing party attempts to escape from a deadly enemy.
The episode continues the story from the previous season's cliffhanger, where the Gorn threat is real, and Captain Pike needs to think and asks for his crew for potential solutions. The Gorn are en encroaching further towards Federation space and Pike intends to stop them. The episode also includes a segment where Chapel and Spock work together to stop the Gorn Hatchling, forming from Batel's body and going after the crew.
Eh, eh, it's kind of a, eh, eh? Yeah. Hand weaving. Okay.
Yeah. This episode, the 21st over overall of the series originally dropped for streaming on July 17th, 2025, but we're gonna talk about it in the context of today's date, which is July 21st, 2025, directed by Chris Fisher, teleplay by Davy Perez, story by Davy Perez and Henry Alonzo Myers.
The series of course, is created by Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet. It's based on Star Trek, by Gene Roddenberry. It Stars Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Jess Bush, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, Bruce Horak, Rebecca Romijn, and Martin Quinn. At the time of this recording, July 21st, 2025.
We always like to try to contextualize the program. We do that by visiting number one. Songs, shows, movies, some headlines from the day. So it's a little strange for me to be talking about Ordinary by Alex Warren, which according to the latest iTunes top 100 songs chart has been downloaded more than any other song as of today.
So as we always like to do, we like to share a little bit of that music magic with you in the form of Matt singing the first few bars of the song. Take It away, Matt.
As always terrific stuff and in the movies, well, no surprise to anybody who's actually walking around awake the past couple of weeks, the number one movie in the US this week. Well, it's been Superman as it was the week before. It's earned in its second week, another 125 million, so it's on its way to recouping the costs that went into it in a very strong fashion. And having seen this movie, I give it a thumbs up. I saw too, and I strongly encourage people who are a fan of, believe it or not, the 1979 Superman film. This feels like it is a sequel to that as opposed to being a sequel to anything having to do with the darker take of the past couple of decades.
And on this day. July 21st, 2025. The most streamed program recently has been Eric Banya in Untamed on Netflix. It is the story of a death in Yosemite National Park that draws a federal agent into a questionably lawless terrain. Where according to the tagline of the show where nature obeys no rules but its own, I'm curious to find out where nature obeys other rules.
We found a part of Yosemite Park where the rain falls down. Sounds like it's obeying no rules, but its own. Unlike those areas where we have the rain that falls up and here we are. Headlines of the day from the New York Times today, July 21st, 2025, how Trump deflected his base's wrath over Jeffrey Epstein at least for now. This is of course the ongoing story revolving around the Epstein files potential lists of people who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein and the fact that Donald Trump promised in his election run that he would reveal names and everything would be exposed. And then they got into office and they said, there's nothing to see here.
So it's been causing a bit of a backlash, if you will. Now to our discussion about this episode, which as we've mentioned is our first return to Strange New Worlds since the closing of the second season. We started off with a reintroduction of, oh yeah, there's a major battle about to happen. Yeah, I found myself thinking like, oh, I didn't remember where we were when we last signed off.
This is pretty big and bombastic and exciting. So we get in this one. This really, this follows a trend that I know to anticipate. Your season beginning and your season ending episodes are gonna be chock full of big effects, and this one does not disappoint. It is space battles with multiple returns to space conflict during the episode so that you get lots of exterior shots, you get lots of cool sci-fi special effects.
And the question always is, but does it add up to anything that feels visceral and connected to people. It's one thing to see a bunch of stuff exploding all over the place. It's another thing to say like, oh, you feel it in a way that feels connected to somebody somewhere in danger or overcoming impossible odds.
So Matt, your take on this episode. First, the introduction, but then also the multiple revisits through the episode to the. This is operating on an epic scale. They are concerned about a massive potential invasion. So they keep revisiting the exterior sci-fi, special effects world of showing all this stuff happening in space.
Yeah. How did you feel about all of that? Did you feel like it started off on a good foot and do you think it maintained that throughout the episode?
In a nutshell, yes. I, I, I. I was like a kid in the candy store just chucking up and like just shoving all the candy in my mouth. I was just loving this episode.
I don't wanna say it's a bias, but I love Strange New World. I love this series. Discovery I had fun with, but it was hit or miss. I did not like how they always hit the fast forward button on character development and they always were like, these two characters are like, it's the Bones and you know, Captain Kirk relationship here.
It's like, but we haven't seen it. We haven't earned it. Yeah, this show earns it. This show shows it. This show is doing, in my opinion, everything that Discovery didn't do, it's doing here. So it's for what you brought up, Anson Mounts, Captain Pikes, you know, from the opening shot of him being kind of like, you kind of shell shocked of like, God, what, what the hell do we do here?
Yeah. To turning to the, turning to his crew. And saying, what do we do? Ideas quick and going around the room and everybody's tossing out ideas and he goes, that's it. That's the one. Right. I loved seeing how he as a captain operates and how it's a, a team atmosphere. Yeah. And team ideas and seeing characters like on Discovery, a character got killed.
It's like we've heard them say one line, the entire series. Why are we supposed to care about this character? Well, every character in Strange New Worlds has a place and a purpose and they talk about things. One of the characters falling asleep, she's like yawning and trying to keep herself awake.
'cause she's been at her station for a long time. And Pike's like, you need to take take off. I'm not leaving here until we get them back. It's like, okay. You know, it's like, it's this wonderful dynamic that has been established on the show, especially with Spock and and Nurse Chapel. Yeah. And the crew that's in this, almost like this, a sequence out of the aliens movies, which Yeah.
Yeah. Dark and gritty. And it's like, it's like a, it's like a sci-fi action. Aliens climbing on ceilings coming out every direction, coming after them. Holy crap. And then you get the, the kind of mental debates and mental gymnastics that are happening aboard the ship, trying to debate what they should be doing and not doing with like the, you know, what was it, Admiral April?
Yeah. Yeah. It's like Sean, this to me is just like my jam for Star Trek and it's, it's, it reminds me of, it's like, it feels, felt to me like a modern take on Next Generation. Mm-hmm. Like for me, Next Generation is my jam. And this felt like if you were gonna reimagine how storytelling has evolved over the past 20 years, this still felt very true to Trek, still felt very trekky, but with a modern take to it.
A, a pacing that was very crisp. Yeah. Special effects that were very movie-like. Uh, really good pacing, really good character development. Everything about this episode I thought was firing all on all the cylinders. I was not bored at all, but I still felt like I got the, the brainy side of Trek as well as the action side of Trek.
I got both.
Yeah. One of the things that's on display in this, in this podcast of ours where we revisit Trek in star date chronological order is the flavor of television from specific eras. It's not enough to say, oh, that's from the sixties. It's from the sixties on a particular network. It's from a specific mindset of acting.
It's from a certain experience of acting and production. So we've seen this where it's, I like your comparison of like, this feels like a contemporary version of Next Generation, which is interesting because Next Generation for a long time was the most contemporaneous of the Star Trek programs for us.
So in my mind in particular, it stands up as modern, but suddenly it's looking dated. Yes. Because it's from the eighties and we're further from Next Generation than Next Generation was from the original series. And I think it's important to remember that. And the tone of Next Generation. Remember there were shows on the air in Star Trek up until, and including Enterprise.
Enterprise feels different than Next Generation. Yep. So it's interesting to think in terms of, okay, next generation's contemporaries, non Trek contemporaries, next Generation is a little bit like LA Law. It's not like ER, no. Enterprise is more like ER and NYPD, blue. It's got that kind of sensibility to it.
And then Discovery is of course, post Game of Thrones, post Strange New, you know, Stranger Things. It's like the look and the feel of a show is different, and I completely agree. This show feels. Like you're watching the, okay. I am reliant upon my crew in a way that other shows haven't demonstrated. When you see Kirk respond to things, it's very often in the Spock or McCoy, or Scotty gives him a thing, but he's not going around the room hunting for options.
And I did in particular, like. It felt like a way of building in the kind of emotional component that I'm talking about. It's one thing to have these giant ships exploding in space. It's another thing to see the captain of the ship turn around to everybody and say, we need options immediately. And to have the people throwing out like we get them back and we can't.
We have to flee. It's, it's immediately contextualizing all the tensions that they're dealing with in a way that feels like a very organic way of providing reminders to the audience, here's what you're supposed to care about. Yeah. Without spoonfeeding it to us and having somebody like a voice oversight.
Don't forget there are people on the planet, like this does a great job. And, and I like what you said about the, the crewmen who are a part of the effectively trapped in the digestive tract of the gorn vessel, and they all have wounds that look like they've been exposed to some sort of acid. They show the hand of Ortegas who's missing fingers.
So she is like permanently. And
then she gets, she gets impaled
and then she gets impaled pretty badly. Wow. In a way that's really, really, um, brutal. Brutal. And you get her saying, you know, repeating again and again. Again, I'm Ortegas, I pilot the ship and she. Is bleeding out while she's flying an escape vehicle?
Yeah, go ahead. Just to pause you there. This is what I'm talking about. Like in the episode, Ortega her hand, part of her hand's missing and immediately I'm like, oh God. I'm like already feeling like bad for her. 'cause I know this character. We know her. Yeah. It's not like, oh, a faceless. I, I mean a, a soulless character on the bridge.
She actually has meaning to us as viewers and then. Not to get into spoilers. She does get impaled very badly by something. And when it happened, both my wife and I actually audibly went, oh my God. Yeah. When it happened. And then when she keeps saying, I'm Ortega, you know, I, I fly things, . And she saying, I was getting choked up, Sean.
I was getting choked up watching what she was doing. Yeah. With the wound. She had all that stuff. It was, it was hitting me in ways. Yeah. Never hit me in Discovery, even though they tried to make it happen. Yeah. They were forcing with dramatic music and shots. It's like, but we don't know these people. We haven't seen their, how they relate to each other, what they mean to themselves and others.
And this show has giving us that, it's given us the foundation so that you can do that to a character and you care. Yeah. And it's, it's better you.
Effectively in this series, it doesn't feel like they have red shirts. There are no, no, no. There are no people who show up and it's just like, oh, there's a person in the background who's probably gonna die.
It's, you end up with a moment where Ortegas looks like she's gonna die, and like you said, we have this connection to her. You get like, I don't disagree. It was a very emotional moment where she's trying to fly that vessel. Um. Managed to get them out, bleeding out. I liked another aspect of it was that it didn't rely in that, in that digestive tract set piece, it wasn't just the CGI scares.
It wasn't just a repeated use of CGI monsters coming down the hallways. They gave you one shot of that and the rest of it was. It's like the pause, the person who's gotta find the other people. You get La'an being like, I gotta go find people, I'm gonna start with the doctor. And so you like, but that's have the slow, slow development of like we're trying to survive.
Very obvious from a production perspective. They're like, we're gonna keep costs low by only having principle actors as the rescued. Mm-hmm. All of the colonists who've disappeared are gonna remain in their digestion bubbles. And we're not gonna rescue them right now, but we will get to them later. They promise and they do.
And that's all very clearly for TV production costs. They didn't wanna have a room probably with 30 people following those four, but it still works beautifully. It creates it. It's
perfect tension. It's like Jaws, the shark kept breaking down when they were filming that movie. So they filmed around it and then that creative storytelling made the sharks scarier.
'cause you weren't seeing it. Yeah, and it's the same thing here. It's like we know what the go are. We've seen them before in previous episodes of Strange New Worlds. We know they're scary and they're big lizard creatures, so it's like we already know that. So you don't have to, it's just the boogeyman of them.
Yeah. Hearing them. Lots of sound effects, like we know they're nearby. The tension is ratcheted up so you can do the TV production, save some money, but you still have that tension dialed up. I don't know if you had a, a plan for how you wanna talk about this, but in those moments, uh, Kirk's brother, yeah, he was great.
He was awesome. It was like great to see him being like. He's usually kind of scared and he's usually kind of like on the fringe and a little bit of comic relief. And on this one he was jumping in with scientific explanations of everything. Yeah. And I was like, this is why I was getting at the Trek aspect.
The brainy side of it was still there. So here's this aliens, shoot 'em up, thrilling moment, but you still have the science aspect of him explaining of like, oh, that means things that aren't organic are gonna get rejected. And he reaches into this goop and pulls out a gun 'cause it couldn't get digested.
So it's like he's figuring out all the stuff they need to do to get through this horrible situation. So the scientist is helping everybody kind of figure the way out. Yeah, I loved that for this entire sequence. It was a nice balance that they did there.
Yeah, I thought that was great too. And I liked the, the PTSD coaching. Yeah, that is evident in this one too. With La'an having her moment of she is, she's doing a great job without anybody helping her. But she has these moments where she freezes a bit and you end up with the doctor able to say like, you're here. Like, like he's probably going through something similar.
We know from his backstory that they introduced in the last season that he is more than just a doctor. So his coaching in that moment is a nice relationship builder between the two of them, and it also touches into their deeper backstories that they've revealed about both of those characters. I also wanted to talk about the conversation with Admiral April, which you mentioned recently.
I really would, I really wanna talk about this, like go ahead and like take us into that terrain.
Remember whenever we've talked about this, I'm like, I love episodes like Drumhead, I love episodes where it's like there's some kind of ethical dilemma that they're discussing. Yeah. And guess what? Trek in time baby.
All about where we are right now. We're in this very politically charged state right now around the world, but particularly here in the United States, and there's a isolationist viewpoint. Get outta wars everywhere. Stop mucking around everywhere else. Just worry about us. Don't worry about others. Just worry about us.
That debate happens with April and Pike, and I'm watching this going. I don't think Sean and I are gonna struggle to how to tie this to the current time that this mo, this show has made. Because holy cow, it's like this. They set this up before Trump was in office because this isolationist point of view has been like through everything that in our politics for the past, I dunno, decade.
Yeah. And it's just getting worse. And so this debate of Pike making the argument for why you shouldn't be isolationist. It doesn't matter that the Gorn are invading these planets outside of our sphere of influence. What they're doing is wrong and it's killing people and it's, it's only going to end up affecting us eventually, and by ignoring it, we're only gonna be damning ourselves down the road.
He makes such a great argument for that. And April, you can tell he kind of agrees with Pike, but he is also coming at it from the point of view of, but we have to.
Yeah,
we can't be the police of the galaxy. Correct. We can't be the police of the galaxy. We only have so many resources ourselves. We have to be very cautious about how we use ourselves and where we put ourselves because we have treaties with the gorn, and if we push this, it could instigate a whole war.
So he's making all these great cases that you have on the other side of the argument. Yeah. And so it never felt like either side got shortchanged and it didn't feel like the writers. We're kind of coming at this like anti maga, anti-Trump point of view. It was a very honest, open debate I wish we could have in our politics, right?
But we, we seem ca we seem incapable of doing it. But here's sci-fi having that argument for us in that debate in front of us in a way that's very, I don't know, palatable. Yeah. Like it felt very open that it doesn't matter what your point of view on this issue is. You could sit there and listen to this argument between these two men.
Pick pieces of like, oh yeah, I get that. Oh, I get that. Oh, I, no, I get that part of this. And like you could see both sides. And I thought that was a really, really well done discussion between the two of them.
That's the power of speculative fiction and sci-fi in particular. Being able to talk about the now in a way that people now can't, don't like talking about it. And it's always played that role of being able to throw things like, oh, we're not talking about current issues. This is 200 years in the future. It just happens to have parallels that perhaps the audience and digesting it maybe process some of their thinking around what's going on around them.
And I agree with you. This one does a nice job of laying out, it's like, like you said, defendable. Defendable positions and needing to find a cooperative response. That serves both sides, and in this case it is April effectively saying, all right, you've got super secret orders. Don't tell anybody. Yeah, our official position is, and then if you could do anything to slow them down, we know what's coming and it is.
The beginning of a presentation of the Gorn, and this goes into retcon territory now, of the, the, the first time that we see the Gorn in Star Trek is a loving, lovingly depicted, enthusiastically created, but very dated episode of the original series, which we've already discussed in this podcast, in which you get the high tension fight sequences that are filmed in real, real time, but are done as if they're in slowmo. So you get the weirdness of like, we're fighting these reptilian creatures who are super dangerous, but they move really, really slowly. Of course it's been retconned and it was retcon in Enterprise when they first introduced a Gorn who was a CGI creation that was in the vein of something like an alien monster as opposed to something from Star Trek that's continued through to this day so that they now, right down to they are body popping. They are born through an egg that is put implanted into a humanoid and then they explode from that creature and feed upon it upon being birthed, monstrous stuff done in away that is making me curious, particularly with the manipulation of. I mean, it's Gorn, but it's almost Borg like the solution to the problem in this one.
Oh, we figured out a way to activate their hibernation cycle. Sleep. Sleep Data. Sleep. Yeah. Uh, yes. He's exhausted. I don't mind that. I didn't have a problem with that. But I wonder if they, I, I'm curious about upcoming episodes and storytelling around the Gorn. If we are going to see an evolution around building some sort of connective thread to why are the Gorn when Kirk encounters them so different from this?
Yeah. I wonder if they're planting something in that vein of like, oh, the Gorn are manipulated by the Federation in this way. Does the Federation do something that effectively makes them sleepy, makes them sluggish, makes them like, yeah, does it affect them in some particular way? And I wonder if we're headed to a direction in that way.
So, uh, for viewers who may actually be in our future and have seen episodes, I won't tell you not to put it in the comments, but try to keep the comments spoiler free if you're watching ahead of us, we'd appreciate that. So there is the return to Gorn space. There's the use of, here's where we get to the Scotty of it all.
Oh yeah. Yeah. A what is effectively a cloaking technology that is one of the members of the bridge crew mentions it will work as long as they don't have windows. And it is a nice joke. Yeah. That is there to dispel the simple Yes. Cloaking devices can only work if there are no windows and. It's one of those gimmicks of Star Trek that has been used in the past where they're like, oh, the ship can cloak.
Well, does that make it legitimately invisible, or is it just invisible to sensors? Because those aren't the same thing. And if somebody could be like flying the Enterprise and lean out a window and be like, the Klingons are over there, that's not so helpful. Yeah. So here we have them using what they call a kind of cloaking technology, which the sequence is showing Scotty building the thing.
Yeah. I can't believe that they found a Scottish actor. That makes me think, I think that James Doohan would've given this guy a really big thumbs up of approval for his definition. He's so James Doohan, he's So, James Doohan a character. He is doing such a great job at the kind of, well, I don't know how I did it.
I just do it like, and he seems to be getting tips on how to talk to a captain from his teacher. Oh yeah. Yes. Which I love the relationship they're playing out there where she is reprimanding him for not writing things down. This is why we take notes. You need to be able to recreate a solution and he, and she recognizes his brilliance, his genius at thinking outside the box spontaneously to the point where she gets him to solve the problem by scaring him and thinking that the attack is eminent.
So he's got to move quickly, so he quickly throws it together and fixes the questionable technology that he's putting together. All of that is clearly there for a comedic relief to the episode to relieve some of the stress of the episode, but I was there for it. I thought all of that was perfect. But it builds character.
Yeah. It's like it doesn't, it doesn't matter that it was comic relief because it still plays into, like, we're watching, we are watching the original series like right now, and so it's, we're seeing how Scotty behaves and he's not behaving completely like the Scotty we know, like when Pike comes in, he's about to like, just like.
This can't be done and like give it all like very negative about it. Yeah. And the way she shuts him down and goes, we will do it and we'll have it ready by the time you get there. And she's like, what she's saying to him sounds a little bit like the Scotty from Yeah. The future. Yeah. And it's like we're seeing how he got there.
She's basically pushing him to realize there's what's in your head. There's how you communicate to your captain, right? And she's basically training him on how to communicate to your captain, right? And that's the Scotty we know from the original series. I just love that little, little Easter egg little, just one-off moment that was funny on its own right, but it was like, oh, you're adding more depth to the Scotty that I already love and know from the original series, just like you did with Chapel.
Just like you've done with Spock, just like you've done with Kirk and Kirk's brother. I love everything the show is doing to kind of flesh out. Yeah, the backstory of characters we thought we already knew.
And to make the seamless jump to the characters you just mentioned. We also get quite a bit of Chapel and Spock in this one where they are going to perform a kind of surgery on the captain who has been infected with the Gorn eggs.
And so they have taken the approach of, we need to extract them and will do so through a process of cryofreeze. Remove the eggs from the person's body only to discover that this captain is in fact allergic to the medication that's required for healthy cryofreeze. That is no longer an option. And then the two of them work out a means of effectively allowing the human body's immune system to reabsorb the tissue.
Yep. By simply satiating the Gorn eggs that will hatch in order to feed. But if they're fed, they will not hatch. So they will then be reabsorbed. They manage to make this work. All of that is effectively background to what the scenes are really about, which is giving the two of them a couple of awkward conversations around their relationship, or lack thereof.
We just, in the original series, re watched, visited the show where Spock and Nurse Chapel shared a consciousness as a result of aliens having body swapped with Spock and Kirk and Spock ends up in Chapel's body before being returned to his own. And the two of them give each other a knowing look of, yes, we shared a consciousness and, Matt in our conversation around that last week. You were like, I love that because it it's nuance of Strange New Worlds that's embedded in that old episode now. Yes, it is. This, I feel like further deepens that moment because I am watching this and I'm like, she is trying very hard to say I can't have a long distance relationship.
Because I'm gonna go to, what is it, Roger Corby. What? What's his name? Roger Corby, who is from the original series, the Scientist who's a part of the original series. He is in the episode Little girls are made of, he's building Androids because he himself is an Android, because Roger Corby the organic individual ended up finding his way into a cave and before he died, replicated himself in a machine of alien origin. So we, from the original series, see a Roger Corby. We know that Nurse Chapel was engaged to Roger Corby, that they had been a couple and that he had disappeared and was believed dead. And that is why she had returned to the enterprise.
Here now we are getting pre Nurse Chapel going to the fellowship. She hasn't even met Roger Corby yet, or has only met him briefly. Mm-hmm. No relationship on the horizon. Talking to Spock about the fact that they had tried a relationship. It was awkward. It was rocky, it was uncomfortable. Spock is betrothed.
Like all the backstory that the original series gave us, has been explored in nice ways in this, this sequence of scenes was the one part of this episode that I was just like, this feels like you're watching a TV show. Yeah. It's doing, it's doing TV show stuff in a way that I didn't particularly think was handled as deftly as so many of the other moments.
Like all the Scotty stuff with his former professor getting guidance on how to talk to a captain. We've seen that in shows before. In the moment. I wasn't thinking about that. I was just enjoying seeing Scotty be a young Scotty. And we've seen other moments that are in this episode before, but in those moments while I was watching it, I wasn't thinking about that.
I was just in the moment. This was the one series of conversations where I was like. I hate it when people are like, there's a ticking clock and we gotta move fast. But first, yes. I'm gonna take a couple of moments and say, I think I still love you. Like, yeah. Okay. Exactly. Like, all right. And I understand why the bombs about to go on,
but let's take two minutes to talk about our relationship first.
Yeah. It's like, but I can't believe you went prom
with Gary instead of me. Like, can we take care of this bomb first? Gary's about to burst out of this woman's chest. Yeah. Yes, that's right. We've gotta stop Gary. Gotta feed him and then she'll reabsorb him. Poor Gary. Anyway, I felt like it was a little clunky, but I also felt like, I think they tried their damnedest to make it fit in somewhere and it wasn't gonna fit in unclunkly regardless.
So they let it have a couple of clunks and I was like, it's okay. It's fine. It's like it was the one part of the show. I was like, that's fine. I thought it was a little too, it felt a little cliche to have her at the end looking at Spock in the hallway and then get distracted by something, then turn back as Spock is gone.
Like I was like, uh, I, I would've appreciated a slightly different ending to that sequence in the form of maybe Spock. I almost felt like the, the moment deserved more of a Spock being kind. Yeah. Response like in the moment, him saying something along the lines of, if our paths are meant to reconnect, they will, and if they do, I am ready to be your friend.
Something in that vein, yeah, would've felt like it would have the appropriate tone in that moment as opposed to what felt a little soap opera of, yeah. Like, what's that noise? Where did he go? And I was just like, all right, all right. Tone it down. Like, you don't, don't need to pull those strings.
I, I agree.
I agree. It didn't matter to me though, like Yeah. Everything else about this episode was striking so well, those couple of clunks, as you put it, it didn't detract from the feeling I had when the show was over. I still thought it delivered on the goods.
It, it, I completely agree. I felt like it did a lot of things that were also unique.
We've never seen the, why don't we run our ship directly into the enemy vessel so that we can pretend to be shooting a weapon at it, but actually just be painting it with what is effectively like a glow in the dark paint so we can see where it goes. Like, I loved some of the like high impact, simplicity of their goal.
Like, oh, we need to get a tracking device on them. How do we do that without them knowing it? Oh, I know. We've just like, let's just fly through their shields and bump into them and they'll think we're shooting a dud and we don't. It's just actually leaving a tag. And I loved that. It was like very unique.
There's also, but there's also a lot of hard sci-fi that was happening in this episode that, yeah. Like crazy hard sci-fi Yeah. Binary stars and how the Gorn use it to kind of like warp themselves. Yeah. In a blink of an eye into their, into their home world, which nobody knows where it is. It's like, and the way that they use the Enterprise to kind of create a type of light emitting Yeah system that would trigger their, their hibernation cycle. So it's like, I just love the whole aspect of like the way that they're building. The Gorn was a dude in a lizard suit. Yeah. That's all he was throw away. And they've turned the Gorn into a really interesting truly alien species.
Yeah. Like it is truly alien of how they work. They're kinda like space cicadas, you know what I mean? Like they go, they probably go somewhere and go to sleep for 18 years and then they all come out at once and just go on a feeding frenzy. It's like that's basically what the cicadas do and here's the Gorn basically doing what the cicadas do, but they're horrifying and they're like the movie aliens.
And it was just the whole, all the hard sci-fi aspects of how truly alien species might exist, how they might utilize spatial anomalies to get around space in ways that, yeah, we as humans do not like it's completely novel to us. We're like, holy crap, what the hell is this picking up?
I thought that was great on cosmic events in a way that are part of their bio rhythms that are completely foreign and alien to the Federation.
Uh, yeah. Members I really liked in that same vein. How everybody in the ship is having to constantly remind themselves that the technology, the Gorn doesn't work the way that the Federation at a certain level instinctively responds to things like it's Uhura, having the moments of like, they don't treat sound the way we treat sound, and they don't respond to light the way we respond to light.
And she gets the idea of how to effectively use these things to their advantage and say like, oh, if we do this thing using light, it's gonna send them a signal and we can do these things with sound that they're never gonna pay attention to because they don't respond. Yeah, they don't. They don't communicate the way we do.
And it's, that leans heavily into what you're saying about the a truly alien take on this alien thing so that you can end up with new terrain for a show that's been on and off the air since 1967, which is pretty remarkable considering. Yeah. So you
don't end up with like, you don't end up with just another alien species with forehead ridges that is quoting Shakespeare at a captain.
It's like that. I love that. Don't get me wrong. But at the same time it's like, this is like is a species that doesn't have a language, anything close the way they operate, everything about them is completely alien, and that is really fun to see in a modern trek.
So viewers, listeners, what did you think about this episode?
Did you, do you agree with us that Hegemony part two lands in good solid terrain where Hegemony Part One left off, and what do you think that it points toward for the rest of this season? Next week we will be talking about Wedding Bell Blues, and as is part of our normal routine here, please jump to the comments and share wrong answers only.
What do you think Wedding Bell Blues will be about? We look forward to hearing what you think is not gonna happen.
In any event, please leave a comment. Did you like this episode? Did you not like this episode? Is there something about Strange New Worlds that rubs you the wrong way? Let us know in the comments. Don't forget to like and subscribe and share with your friends. Those are very easy ways for you to support this podcast.
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