8.2/10
92%
64%
77%
78%
The senior staff of the Enterprise are looking forward to a lovely weekend off, getting drunk in the bar whilst listening to piano music.
Pike, Ortegas and Uhuru’s plans are put on hold when an alert appears telling them that the ship has been pulled slightly off course. Before they can figure out what’s happening and put the ship back where it’s supposed to be, the Enterprise is grabbed by an almighty force, hurling crew around the bridge, bar, sickbay and engineering. Structural integrity begins to fail, shields drop, the warp core pumps out radiation and the consoles become electrified, injuring anyone near them.
With the limited sensor capabilities they have, they figure out that the Enterprise has been sucked into a slipstream and it’s dragging them along with it at warp speed, and they’re getting faster and faster by the second.
In a desperate bid to raise shields, Pike manages to get to a console to activate them but is rendered unconscious in the process leaving Ortegas in control of the ship. She is able to move remaining power to the structural integrity field and right the ship.
With the engines offline and power and communication lost across Enterprise, Scotty and Cadet A’Sha manage to get to a transporter room where they start rerouting power, but with limited sources they have to shut down life support in non-essential areas which includes the ship’s corridors. All of them.
Meanwhile, many crew are trapped in the ship’s bar which begins to suffer a gravity plating failure and if it continues, everyone will end up flattened like a pancake. Attempting to reach a panel to reset it, which is obviously located right where the gravity is densest on the other side of the room because of course it is, Una suffers a horrific injury which we really didn’t need to see — it could have been left to our imaginations thank you.
And in sickbay, a seriously injured M’Benga hovers between life and death having been crushed by a medical table. It’s up to Nurse Chapel to come up with a way to save her friend, and maybe the ship along with him.
But the clock is literally ticking as the crew have under an hour to get the ship out of the slipstream or they will hit the warp threshold, the maximum speed that the Enterprise can travel before her structure starts to fail.
We Need A Miracle Worker
I love disaster films, they’re my favourite feel-good type of movie, but we’ll ignore the fact that both Earthquake (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974) gave me a phobia of lifts, which wasn’t helped by the Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Season 5 episode Disaster.
Sticking with the theme of “we can’t just make an episode of Star Trek, we need to rip off a genre” that every episode of season 4 has followed so far we now have The Poseidon Adventure.
For those of you not familiar with the iconic 1972 film (and if you haven’t seen it, you must, it’s a classic), The Poseidon Adventure follows the final voyage of the titular Poseidon who is on her way to be decommissioned. Just after midnight, an underwater earthquake sets off a tsunami which overwhelms the ship and capsizes it.
The majority of the passengers were in the ship’s lounge celebrating New Year’s Eve when disaster strikes and they must try to find a way out of the ship before the remaining air pockets fill with water and she sinks.
Now, obviously the Enterprise isn’t at sea, but they are in a vaccuum and in place of the rushing water, we have the cold of space in the corridors of the ship. There are also other nods to The Poseidon Adventure too with the way the crew slide all over the place and are launched around the ship.
Here’s a comparison:
At least the Enterprise crew forgot to load the rocks into the consoles I guess!
As well as the rip-off homage to The Poseidon Adventure we also have a rip-off homage to 24. The episode runs pretty much in real time and to keep you up-to-speed with the timeline they put a clock on screen as well as using the panelled view when events are happening simultaneously.
Once again, I’d like to say that this is in order to pay tribute to another show and genre but the amount of direct comparisons between multiple different properties across the 6 aired episodes is too glaring.
Some have posited on social media that the writer’s and crew were just having fun as they knew the show was cancelled, but with Discovery and Lower Decks only running to 5 seasons, I think they knew what was happening.
In reality, sadly, I think that the writers are just lacking in the idea department and instead of taking an idea and adapting it to fit in with the Star Trek universe, they’re just taking ideas and using them full stop.
Not only that, the writers are still leaning in to gore and body horror. We did NOT have to see Una’s leg snap the way it was portrayed. It was gore for gore’s sake and I have to ask the same question of the writers and producers once again:
Have they ever watched Star Trek before? Do they even know who their audience is. Or perhaps, most importantly, do they even care?
Because season 4 is telling me, and showing me, that they haven’t and they don’t.
Not only that, we had very little tension in this episode as we know that Spock and Scotty, who were in the most danger, must survive as they’re onboard when Kirk takes over and because of that the stakes are relatively low.
Put La’An and Pelia in those situations and it’s a whole different ball game and it was an obvious choice that somehow was missed by the writing staff (and, again, I ask “Have they seen Star Trek before?”)
Did I hate the episode? No. It was nice to get back to a slightly more “Star Trek” feel for the show, although the technobabble science kind of went off the rails a bit, and the on screen countdown gimmick got old quite quickly. Overall though it was a solid episode and it was nice to see the interaction between Chapel and M’Benga and we got some good character growth for both.
However, with very few episodes left of this season, and a shortened fifth and final season, the series really does need a Miracle Worker to turn it around.
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