Another one of the excuses for why I didn't write yesterday, I had a whole day migraine that was so bad that I had to wear sunnies at indoor, because it was too bright otherwise. Sorry, again.
I've been itching for space action that is not TT related. Let's see how they deliver...
Straight from the beginning, a beautiful rendition of binary stars, and their feeding mechanism. It might be hard to believe that, according to the astroboffins, the binaries are more numerous than the single stars. I still doubt that they have counted each one, because there's at least a billion galaxies in our observable universe. But for the ST it's more often drama than doing the science part, just because the show is entertainment and not a documentary.
So it wasn't a surprise that drama came with Pike running with Captain Batel. The only difference with the Enterprise is that Pike wasn't straight away trying to shag Batel, while Kirk might have got away with it. Instead of doing it with former wife, Pike was left to offer sausage on a plate ... for dinner.
One thing though, I am not used to seeing Captain cooking all the time. They have freaking replicators to do that, but in a way Cpt Pike is a very old-fashioned person. So in that light Pike pulling back from even kissing Batel felt right and also painful.
Rigel VII. Today I still think Farscape, and its enigmatic little toad king in a floating chair first before I even associate the name with a planet to an episode called "Cage" in The Original Series or to its follow up in the NG called "Inheritance."
Batel explained that Rigel's people were a warrior culture called Kalar that had got away with a murder for the landing party at back in the day. So their mission was to go back and find out what was going on with them as their sensors couldn't penetrate the atmosphere. It's almost as if they had got wiser since they met UFO people in their bronze-age culture.
Unlike with our own culture, hiding away UAP evidence wasn't a thing for the Kalar people. Instead, it seems that they built a monument for the sky people and their 'visitation' that seemingly advanced them forward.
This time Batel and Pike's landing party was going in as infiltrators to take away "the culturally contaminating evidence", instead of opting to nuke the site from the orbit, as they'd have done in the Mirror Universe. After the brief, the captains didn't talk about the mission, instead Batel roasted Pike for not shagging her or developing a new love inside the Enterprise.
Women, eh?
Also, Pike is not Mr Kirk. So like I said, he's old-fashioned, yeah?
So the 'reason' for the thick atmosphere was given as celestial collision that keeps raining asteroids on Rigel VII. One sample that you can see left side on the screen with the impact crater that for some reason created snowy ridges and slops at the inside.
Why the director cocked this up in the digital arts department? I get that a nuclear winter would create a thick cloud cover for the snowballed planet, but it doesn't really explain why the Federation sensors cannot penetrate it.
It might be the case that I need to turn off my brain, but that is a very difficult task.
Landing party, Doc, because of his "combat skills," Lt Noonien-Singh for the same reason and Captain to lead the party. The surprise came with La'An hearing tinnitus as soon as they popped open the hatch and walked outside. It took her complete focus and made her ignorant to what was happening in the planet for six hours before it alleviated.
What surprised me was that Doc was able to tell La'an "pulse was normal" without touching or using a scanner. So it wasn't long before the party was captured by the warrior caste that were kitted with phase rifles of their own design.
The reason for it, not just left behind kit that a bronze-age genius somehow back-engineered and fabricated for their own design, but a left behind landing party member that weren't KIA after all. One who didn't feel that doing so were morally oblicated to follow the Prime Directive, but instead did it for the old reasons, for the survival by wielding most of the power.
Pike said, "Zac, they told me that you went down."
"But you never saw it for yourself." That's right, if there isn't a body, it's not dead. And he wasn't going back, because Rigel VII "changes people," through Tinnitus that leads to lost time and change in the personality. So the King wasn't going to give out his position for getting back the Star Fleet.
Only it wasn't just happening on the planet side, because Uhura was feeling it too so much so that she lost time. Soon it had expanded to six Engineering members as well. At the planet side "the forgetting" was getting bad, but Captain realized that they weren't living as slaves doing hard labour in a stone quarry.
At the orbit, the phenomenon had taken down a third of the crew, before Spock issued data pads with personnel files attached to them to the key personnel. Spock figured out that it was the orbital debris field that were affecting Rigel VII and its immediate space. So he ordered to break the orbit.
On the ground doc put wounded La'An in bed, and tried to treat her before he lost his memories. Then the leader of Kalar people told Cpt Pike that there was two types of people, the normals and the palace people, who retain their memories by having "a hidden casket inside the palace."
Sounds like King Kaz found a technological solution for the memory problem, and therefore Captain had a mission to get inside the place for getting their memories back. The wise old man explained to Captain that the forgetting cannot take away the feelings, like love. And thus Captain's mission was not only save Lieutenant from a painful death, but also get back to Cpt Batel and maybe shag her for one more time.
At the orbit, having driven through the debris field the memory loss was affecting whole crew. There was no rest for the wicked. Every one of them were walking around as if they were on a acid trip ... without using chemicals or excessive amounts of booze. And only problem was that they were at the heart of the field, with nobody driving them out.
Thanks to the computer reminding Mr Ortegas that she was the pilot, she was able to muster enough of courage to blindly accepting her muscle memories and fly the ship out from the danger zone.
At the ground, Pike engaged a very entertaining phaser fight with King Zac. Zac yeilded and Pike turned on his bad side for getting the information out of the king by kicking it out. The truth was that it wasn't the fleet technology, it was the palace made out of material that shielded the occupants from radiation.
Just at the moment Pike was about to execute the king, his memories returned and he explaing that Zac had done bad, bad things. And doc saved the sec officer with the fleet tech and his memories coming back because of the radiation blocking.
What Star Fleet should do, but I doubt they will, is doing orbital clearing to give Rigel's people a chance to become part of the Federation at some point in time. And because of it, Pike took the matter on his own hands and applied a solution by pulling meteorites from ground and slinging them back in the debris field.
So what about the captain's love problem? Well, let this speaks for it...
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, "Say no more!"
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Good episode that deserves talking on the Prime Directive and the Rigel's people could with "unknown" radioactive minerals once they get to orbit.
