Logline
Commander Una Chin-Riley faces court-martial along with possible imprisonment and dishonorable dismissal from Starfleet, and her defense is in the hands of a lawyer who’s also a childhood friend with whom she had a terrible falling out.
Written by Dana Horgan
Directed by Valerie Weiss
I largely quite like SNW, but this episode had some extremely questionable eugenics apologia laced into the narrative.
I think the broadest problem with nu-trek (though it’s strongly reined in in SNW) is the heavily maudlin over-scoring and the bathos-laden dialogue. When almost every exchange between two characters sounds “perfectly written” and is dripping in score, it’s hard to take seriously.
If SNW employed like, 20% more restraint in that regard, it would sing.
I’m currently watching both SNW and Voyager (season 5) in parallel. So far, I’m enjoying Voyager way more, but I cannot pinpoint why. Could it be the longer camera shots? The more stoic personalities? The nostalgia effect? I don’t know, but I will keep watching SNW and see how it turns out. I wasn’t too impressed with Picard, but the season 3 ending was pretty good event though the show didn’t feel like TNG to me.
Sorry about the grammar mistakes. I’m not a native English speaker.
I was definitely missing those pregnant pauses that they had in Measure of a Man. I figure they had a lot of dialog to pack in there, but it did come off pretty “perfect”.
We’re in a different era.
I for one am very glad we’re not in the melody-free scoring that was imposed by Berman in the 90s. I recall being at a con in the 90s where Rick Sternbach was presenting. There were several questions from fans asking why TNG and DS9 didn’t use the melodic motifs and themes in the way they had been in TOS. Sternbach laughed, noted that the norms of television scoring had changed but that someone ‘must have played really bad Vivaldi to Berman at some point in the past.’ He also talked about how happy they were to get the theme composed and recorded for DS9.
So, we have to expect each era to reflect the more general trends on use of music.
I find Nami Melumad’s episode scoring on SNW and Prodigy much more restrained than Jeff Russo’s on Discovery and Picard seasons one and two. In particular, I found some of his use of splatting horns overwhelmed some of Discovery’s more dramatic moments. Russo is however award-winning and an in-demand composer on top streaming shows beyond Star Trek.