[Petrarch]

Episode Discussion

"Lost in Translation"

US Airdate: 20/07/2023 (Paramount+)
International: 20/07/2023 (Only in countries with access to Paramount+)

This thread is for the pre and post discussion of the sixth episode "Lost in Translation" - this will be a spoiler filled discussion so if you've found your way past the warnings in the activity stream and the spoiler tag on the thread, this is your last chance to turn back, or at least it will be at the end of this first post. You have been warned!

Uhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source..

You can find a preview of the episode details here.

Lost in Translation is episode 6 of 10. Second half of the series kicks off and this episode sees the return of Wesley as James T. Kirk, a Lt. at this point in time. We've only seen alternative versions of him so far so will this finally be the "prime" version of the character?

Written by: Onitra Johnson & David Reed
Directed by: Dan Li

[Heyallo]

Best scene a couple minutes in. made me cry a little!

[Brunocsf]

Interesting episode. No canon violation grave or minor so I enjoyed it. Although it's not the best ever it's a decent story and seeing Kirk and Spock meet for the first time was also nice.

[Morris]

I wasn't a fan of Pike handing over all authority to a mentally questionable Ensign Uhura, especially considering that she was conveying unverified information. That went a little far for me. I understand trusting your crew. I don't understand trusting someone who has been loosing their grip on reality, without a verified cause. Then destroying Federation property, just because they could not turn it off. They fire shots to disable ships all the time! Why couldn't they fire a shot to disable the collector/ refinery, while they worked to find scientific evidence that Uhura was in communication with an unknown species, and not just loosing her mind.

Also:

Is the ship's computer not capable of locating personnel? 'Computer, locate Saul Ramon....beam Saul Ramon directly to Sick Bay.' Instead, it's hide and go seek time...and why is Uhura even a part of this search? She should have remained confined to Sick Bay. There is no discipline or structure on this ship.
When Uhura suggests that she should be confined to quarters, Pike's like, 'Nah, it'll be fine.' He shouldn't have even needed her to suggest it. It should have been the first thing that was done, especially considering what Saul Ramon did to the Collector/ Refinery.

The writing on this show is...I'll be nice...not very well thought out. It makes me a bit angry, because they have, for the most part, an excellent cast, and they have a decent enough budget to put on a very good Star Trek show. It's almost always the writing that's letting them down. It's very frustrating!

The story wasn't bad...the execution of it was.

[Stormy]

The episode was definitely flawed as stated above... and of course I had to suffer through FakeKirk as a main character... Even so, I give this one 7.5 out of 10.

[darthnovawave]

I kept getting vibes of "The Fight" from VOY where Chakotay goes mad with the boxing stuff because aliens were messing with his head. This episode of SNW was an ok episode (maybe better than Voyager's take on the plotline even), but not one of the more memorable ones. They maybe leaned on the fan service button too hard trying to make all these "first prime universe on screen meetings" happen, but none of them really had much meat to them to make them enduring. The meatiest one was Uhura and Kirk, but we don't really see that one pan out too deeply in the TOS stuff so it was a bit odd feeling. Looking forward to the Lower Decks crossover next week though.

[Soral]

I admit I'm a bit over seeing a lot of Kirk and want the stories to be more Pike centric than they've been. But at the same time a lot of season 1 had Pike's future woven throughout almost every episode. So to take a break from that makes some sense. I just hope we don't see the Farragut coming in every week from here on out.

That being said, I had a different take than most on the Kirk/Uhura pairing for this week. I liked the showing of Kirk offering Uhura support and "reading the room" so to speak. Everyone was dismissing her hallucinations as deuterium poisoning, but she made a very clear statement that she was experiencing symptoms long before any exposure. Spock and Chapel just dismissed it when she brought it up. So Kirk relying on his instinct was very reminiscent of TOS Kirk in terms of his "going with his gut" on a situation. It also gave us something new that it was a Uhura/Kirk pairing where we never really saw that in TOS. It was always Kirk/Spock/McCoy in most of those cases. Here we had a first officer who is supposed to be very in tune with the crew recognizing something is off and investigating it further. Something I would have expected from Una, but she was struck on the "gas station." So from that aspect, I really enjoyed having Kirk in the story.

But what I took away most from the episode was that it was about empathy and recognizing that things aren't always as we should expect them to be. Communication isn't always straightforward. There was also some unfinished connections to Uhura's loss of her family and almost leaving Starfleet that I thought were nicely placed in this episode. Her friendship with Hemmer being the connection that helped her to understand what was going on I thought was well written. Were there some questionable moments with Pike and his acceptance of what was going on with Uhura? Yeah, perhaps handled too quickly for what would have been reality. At the same time, I thought it spoke more to Pike's style of trust in his officers and recognizing that what she was saying made sense.

Sometimes I feel like its too easy to get caught up in the "canon" debate and miss the meaning behind the episodes. What drew me to Star Trek was the moral of the story being told. I grew up watching TNG and later DS9 when it came out. DS9 being my favorite of all the series. It was the storytelling and messages about how we should treat ourselves and each other that continue to draw me back to them. It's why I'm introducing all of these series to my wife and eventually our kids. Are there inconsistencies from one series to the next? Sure. But the idea of what a better future should look like and seeing stories depicting real life scenarios play out on screen that we can relate to and inspire us to be or do better...I'll take that over things being exactly right according to "canon." And this episode had a great underlying story that I really thought was well done.

[JCarrill0]

Great episode, starting to see the TOS crew come together