Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x01 "Hegemony, Part II" & 3x02 "Wedding Bell Blues"

Let's be honest: Who else had forgotten about the Gorn cliffhanger?

I didn't like the first episode very much. The Enterprise saves the Universe from some overpowering enemy all by themselves is too much of a trope for me. Also too many characters on the edge of dying, but nobody dies. Some story arks even culminate in the decision to just do nothing…

(Also why has sickbay a "quarantine mode" instead of a proper quarantine?)

So, this makes 5 different Star Trek series where John De Lancie has appeared as Q (if we’re taking Akiva Goldsman’s offscreen confirmation).

Doesn’t that put him in a tie with Jonathan Frakes as Riker?

Why didn't they just put Batel in the medical transporter's pattern buffer, like M'Benga did with his daughter?

My theory - M'benga's daughter had a degenerative disease and her pattern was stable enough to put into the buffer.
But Batel's problem is she has loads of living Gorn inside her, and so has Gorn DNA in very close proximity to her own. At one point they even say they're co-dependent on each other. They probably didn't want to end up with a "The Fly"/Tuvix situation.
I'm sure it wouldn't work for
<insert technobabble reason here>
, but this is the unfortunate consequence of treating it so casually in season one...

Did they swap La'an's and Erica's characters? Now Erica has Gorn PTSD and La'an is the easygoing one? At least the latter seemed like a very abrupt character development.

And can the SNW costume designers finally get an Emmy Award please? Or all the awards for that matter? The costumes in this series have been amazing since day 1, and the second episode (particularly the wedding scene) is no exception.

Also, that cameo at the end was chef's kiss.

I do look forward to seeing Erika do more than just "Fly the ship," but I really wish it was literally anything other than the exact same thin La'an has been dealing with. She's talked about being on the Klingon front a lot, why not tie it into that. I do like seeing a slightly more chill La'an and really think her and Spock pair together well as friends, but I do hope they don't throw in more romance at spock with her.
One of the writers talked about it on Open Pike Night and said it was a deliberate choice to give La'an and Erica opposite trajectories from last season, where now La'an is finally able to move on from her trauma with the Gorn while Erica is dealing with it for the first time.

Hegemony, Part II

I appreciated the continued exploration of the Gorn as a truly alien alien species. All the stuff with their different sensory modes, and solar-associated life cycles, is a lot of fun to me.

It also seems like they've written the Gorn off as a going concern, which I think is fine. This is a good place to leave it until "Arena" - they even added some dialogue about the various Gorn stories being somewhat vague, so there's some wiggle room for them to seem a little different when they're encountered again in the future.

They managed to film the AR wall in a way that didn't just seem like a round room, which I appreciate.

Wedding Bell Blues

Give this show all the makeup and costuming awards immediately.

It was a fun romp, and I always like it when two opposing characters have to team up against the universe. I could have done with more dancing at the end - it seems like the actors put in a lot of work for a fairly brief scene.

I've never been a big fan of drawing a connection between Trelane and the Q, so I'm glad neither was mentioned by name (Edit: I think...?).

Please give me a Sam Kirk spinoff that runs for 50 years.

I was impressed with their restraint in not mentioning either Trelane or Q by name. I mean they dressed the entity in the same costume as Trelane, and his behavior and MO are identical, so we're clearly meant to conclude they are one and the same. But they didn't burden the story with continuity, and that's smart.
Those costumes were each and all absolutely amazing, from the start to the end of the episode.
And that barmaid!!
Nothing here has disprove my theory that Batel has died and Pike is hallucinating.
- The entire series is set in a snow globe on Sam Kirk's mantle, in the home where he lives to be 147.

S3E1

-Strangely flat ground in that one Gorn ship set where it looked like with all those biomechanical growths and wires it should be a little more textured.

-In the Climax, They were doing that slow frame thing that was popular in the early 2000s and has gone out of style. Was a bit jarring.

-Are they switching to a practical suit for this season's Gorn. The Gorn looked a little more "rubbery" this time around but I don't want to go back to compare.

-I liked the Gremlins 2 look of the Gorn Hatchlings on the back.

St3E2

-Sexy Spock is so back.

-When that training session was sbeing interrupted, I expected Uhura to flex with speaking some Spanish to the Ortegas, but she didn't. And then they just proceeded to tell "be careful around Uhura she knows ___ languages" which just made that expected moment stand out even more. Plus the whole Spanish speaking thing kind of took me out of it as I still think of Star Trek as having some universal translation convention, like with that one episode of Discovery.

-The music being whimsical sounding felt so forced, like it was forcing the whimsy on the regular old scenes with the Bar Tender. I suppose that's half the point, and half an allusion to the original series, but it took me out of it. The LD crossover episode did something similar too.

-Spock punching instead of doing a Vulcan neck pinch felt so wrong, not quite in line with the less-violent TOS Spock, but that was an energy being induced punch so it checks out.

-Feels a bit weird hearing a modern song in Star Trek (even though it's from the 80s. Edit: forgot about two other modern songs in this episode too). Usually they refrain from it which helped some other shows like The Orville have more of an identity by referencing pop culture.

-I'm glad Ortegas is finally getting a subplot. In the previous seasons she's always felt like she was missing "her" focus episode which other members of the crew like M'Benga got. All she had was "I fly the ship" which was a bit lame. Though feels off, like maybe it's recycling some discarded script for La'an's PTSD, or they couldn't quite figure out what to do with Erica so they're trying something more generic. I'm interested to see where it goes.

I'm glad Ortegas is finally getting a subplot. In the previous seasons she's always felt like she was missing "her" focus episode which other members of the crew like M'Benga got. All she had was "I fly the ship" which was a bit lame.
Thank you. It felt to me like her entire character development arc has been her coming to terms with being a great pilot? But yet at the beginning of the series we didn't have any sense that she had self confidence issues or was anything less than outstanding.
She's always been an excellent pilot, but then we had a single episode where she briefly loses her memory and with it her sense of identity because now her entire thing is "I fly the ship."

This was a good mix to start with - a serious episode and a fun silly one.

The first acts as a really good introduction for Scotty, giving him a chance to build up his character with some insurmountable engineering problems that, with some coaching, he surmounts. The second is a nice way to round off Spock and Chapel's relationship, poking fun at the mess that following the canon has left us in, using Trelane as a stand-in for the fans.

various thoughts on the plot:

Ortegas seems to have been left with a bit of trauma, being part digested will do that to you I guess. Hopefully La'an will spot this and help out.
Una mentions a "couple of litres" of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because "a couple of litres" is a lot.
Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language. It gives me a headache and I have to close my eyes whenever they do this. There were quite a few instances of roll in the first episode that were a bit too much for me.
John de Lancie and Rhys Darby make the perfect duo for these characters.
Scotty mentions not drinking, but ends up having to take some when he eats something dodgy at the batchelor party. Previously (later?) Scotty has been shown to be a fan of drink, I guess now it's canon that had there not been alien interference, he may have always been teetotal.
While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars. Then, at the end of the episode when the ship has been suspended between the stars for a long time, no real mention is made of this. I guess the blood infusions and operations just kind of negated all that? Feels like Chekov's gun got loaded and then forgotten about.

Una mentions a "couple of litres" of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because "a couple of litres" is a lot.
This is months after the previous episode. I think the implication was that Una had been steadily donating blood so they can study it and/or have a stockpile for emergencies. It makes sense ~~as long as they avoid the "hey everyone, magic blood is the cure for death" crap from the second JJ movie.~~
While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars.
I think it was a CME that got the hatchlings agitated, not getting close to the stars.
Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language.
I was genuinely surprised that Olatunde Osunsanmi didn't direct.

So um, La’An teaching Spock to dance… 🥵

Also: John de Lancie is the voice of Trelane’s dad?! OMG!

I really like this slightly more chill La'an. John de Lancie was not expected. So If Trelane is now implied to be Q jr, is this episode supposed to take place before we see him in Voyagers Q2? He does come off as more of an immature teen in voyager, whereas in this and in TOS he's quite more childish, especially when he's challenged in both Trelane episodes.
- It has been confirmed. That was Q and Trelane. Trelane is Q’s son. Trelane is not Q Jr. https://blog.trekcore.com/2025/07/interview-star-trek-strange-new-worlds-s3-myers-goldsman-showrunners/
that’s what i recognized! I was asking if it was the Q for half of the episode
- When he started snapping to change things I was like oh, okay, I see what this is. I think Trelane did that too, but it became such a trademark of Q that it was hard to ignore the similarity. And then the voice was just delicious icing on the cake. They didn't make a big deal of it or make some weird tortured commentary to try and tie it into continuity. They just let it be as a story on its own.
- Unofficially in Beta canon: yes.
  Alpha canon: maybe? They haven’t so much as confirmed that Trelane is a Q.

Annotations for SNW 3x01 up at https://startrek.website/post/26221790 and 3x02 at https://startrek.website/post/26221896