Again, two wildly different tones for these episodes.
Shuttle to Kenfori
In order to cure Batel, Pike and M’Benga travel to Klingon space, where M’Benga’s past resurfaces on a dangerous planet.
A Space Adventure Hour
When La’An tests a prototype holodeck with a fictional case only she can solve, the consequences of failure get greater and greater, with the Enterprise hanging in the balance.
Next week: “Through the Lens of Time”
I’ve mostly enjoyed this season, but I have to just say, “the producers are wrong, and this is an alternate timeline, NOT the original timeline.” It’s great to have consistency with “A Private Little War” in the sense that Vulcans need to be hit hard to come out of their healing trance, but frustrating to see the inconsistency of Chapel learning about that now and still being utterly clueless when it came up in TOS.
I still think Ortegas’ increased aggression and “Gorn in the mirror” moment are because she was infected through her open stomach wound during the escape.
Maybe it’s because I’ve binged a season of “Murder She Wrote” and 3.5 seasons of the original “Matlock” so far this summer, but I had the holodeck mystery solved as soon as we learned Scotty couldn’t contact La’An. I was already watchful after she used phrasing a little too similar to the phrasing that created Moriarty when giving the computer the assignment. Then Scotty was saying [spoiler]I can’t contact “her” instead of “them”[/spoiler] and it just fell into place. In retrospect, [spoiler]the absence of Spock in any scenes outside the Holodeck seems contrived given the ship’s peril.[/spoiler]
Also, that last scene before the end credits was a “really? You’re going there?” moment, but the final credits themselves were pure gold.
For the record, the exact half way point for the series is between these two episodes, since we know the series will last 46 episodes total and these are episodes 23 and 24.
I enjoyed both episodes. For the second one, I agree with Blaine; “Contrived” is a good word for it. The meta-story of Trek was a bit heavy handed, but it wasn’t lost on us that it was the Nichelle Nichols stand in delivering a (very good) monologue on how important the representation was and how it was going to get people to take science seriously and go into space.