Recap / Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S1E01 "Strange New Worlds"

With the Enterprise in Spacedock getting some repairs and refits, the crew has scattered. Spock is on Vulcan, celebrating his formal engagement to his fiancée T'Pring, while Captain Pike hides out in Montana with a Beard of Sorrow, unsure whether he wants to get back in the chair. He isn't given a choice: Admiral Robert April tracks him down and orders him back out. His Number Two, Number One, has gone missing during a First Contact mission gone wrong.

Pike boards the Enterprise and meets with his senior staff (some for the first time): Spock as Science Officer, Lt. Erica Ortegas as Ace Pilot, Dr. M'Benga in Sickbay with Nurse Christine Chapel at his side, Space Cadet Nyota Uhura at Communications, and Lt. La'an Noonien-Singh as Chief of Security and acting Number One. (Lt. Kirk, whom Pike requested specifically, has been delayed for a week, and so has the new Chief Engineer.) As they travel to the planet where Number One went missing, Kiley 279, he and Spock catch up with each other: Spock is still haunted by losing his adopted sister, Cmdr. Michael Burnham of the USS Discovery, and Pike with the visions he saw while captaining Discovery a year ago in which he learned of his fate (DSC: "Through The Valley of Shadows"). Pike is starting to second-guess himself, something a captain cannot allow themselves to do.

Enterprise arrives at Kiley 279 and discovers the USS Archer, a Hermes-class starship which Number One commanded. It's completely empty: only three people were aboard, and all of them beamed down. Those three lifesigns are still on the planet, along with a warp signature. Lt. Singh recommends raising shields, which Spock debates on grounds of proper First Contact procedure — instantly establishing that The Spock has brought the rest of the Power Trio dynamic with him from The Original Series. Pike plays Lt. Singh's hunch, protecting the ship from several low-damage but completely unprovoked torpedoes. Spock's sensors then reveal that the people down below have not created a matter-antimatter warp drive, but a warp bomb.

Nurse Chapel, a geneticist, injects Pike, Spock, and Singh with gene therapy treatments that will allow them to pass as locals. They observe that Kiley 279's Technology Levels are roughly on par with that of Earth's 21st century — they're still using the handheld kinetic weapons powered by chemical explosives that humans called "guns," for instance — and that there's no way they could have discovered warp drive on their own. The three bluff their way into the government building where the warp bomb, as well as Number One and her two crewmembers, are being held, and rescue them. Number One, when reminded that she is violating the Alien Non-Interference Clause known as "General Order 1," explains that it's already too late: Kiley 279 is near enough to Xahea that the Kileans were able to pick up warp signatures from the 50 or so Klingon, Ba'ul, and Federation ships that showed up to fight the final battle against Control (DSC: "Such Sweet Sorrow Pt II"). Number One declares the mission over and, as determined by General Order 1, Starfleet should withdraw... but Pike decides to Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!. He sends the other four back to Enterprise and remains with Spock, whose treatments have worn off and is now quite visibly Vulcan, to surrender to the Kileans with a resigned smile: "Take Me to Your Leader."

The President of Kiley is not interested in negotiating with La Résistance, which has been making trouble for centuries. Pike reminds her, "When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers," but the President is not looking for platitudes; she wants a big stick. Pike solves that dilemma by ordering Enterprise into the planet's atmosphere to hover over the capital city for all to see, helping her understand just how outmatched the Kileans are. This gets the President and the Rebel Leader to the negotiating table, united against the unparalleled threat of Actual Freaking Extraterrestrials... but the two won't stop arguing until Pike (as himself this time) beams down and shows them something: a YouTube video. It depicts Earth as it was in the early 21st century: much as Kiley is now. It then shows how strife on Earth led to a series of conflicts that became one global conflict: "The Second American Civil War," "The Eugenics Wars," and eventually "World War III" — which nearly pushed the planet to the brink of extinction. He draws on his own experiences: he knows what his fate will be, just like the Kileans are staring theirs in the face... But he believes that the greatest gift of life is that we can Screw Destiny. "So... go to war with each other," he shrugs, letting the YouTube video show precisely what that will entail. "Or... you can join our Federation of planets, and reach for the stars."

At home, Adm. April reveals that he has managed to keep Pike from being drummed out of service via Loophole Abuse: since everything about Control is Classified Information, including the battle against it, Starfleet can't admit how the Kileans learned about warp drive in the first place, and therefore can't prosecute Pike for a mission that never happened. He asks Pike if he wants to stay in the chair, and Pike agrees. He then talks to Lt. Singh about her Dark and Troubled Past: she experienced First Contact with the Gorn, which involved her family being taken prisoner and slain one by one, with her the Sole Survivor. He offers her a berth on the Enterprise, and she accepts. Finally, he returns to the bridge, where Lt. George Samuel Kirk has finally arrived to join the Sciences team. (No one mentions his younger brother, a certain James Tiberius.) So staffed, Pike orders the ship out into the cosmos:

Ortegas: Course, captain? What's the mission?
Pike: Our mission? We explore. We seek out new life and new civilizations. We boldly go where no one has gone before.
Uhura: ...Cool! —Sir.

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Tropes Featured In This Episode:

• Adaptational Nice Girl: Downplayed example (she's pretty wry and sharp-tongued), but T'Pring seems to be a devoted girlfriend/fiancée with an understandable dislike for how Spock's duties keep calling him away.
• Alien Abduction: Inverted. Two Kileans are abducted by the Enterprise crew due to being Mugged for Disguise. One of them wakes up and goes on a terror-stricken dash through the Enterprise's corridors, pursued by Nurse Chapel, who has to admit that despite their best intentions, this is basically what's going on.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: The show starts with one of Star Trek's most classic tropes: the species that they can't interfere with because it isn't technologically advanced enough to possess Faster-Than-Light Travel. A major plot point is that the species nonetheless does have FTL technology — or rather, the elements required to achieve it — and the episode's Driving Question turns out to be figuring out how that even happened and how to stop them from destroying themselves. They discuss their protocol as General Order 1, and at the end of the episode Admiral April says they are looking to rename it the Prime Directive. Pike doubts that name will catch on.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: The complications with the Kiley stem from the Federation's assumption that warp signatures indicate a species has developed Faster-Than-Light Travel, and FTL usually indicates a species mature enough to handle First Contact. On investigation of the planet, they instead find the Kiley have a bizarre Schizo Tech where they have jumped straight from primitive rocket technology to warp reactors without the advancements in space colonization that usually go between. They come to realize that the Kileans were close enough to the big finale of Star Trek: Discovery season 2 that they were able to observe the battle, giving them a leap forward in matter/antimatter reactions without comprehending what they were looking at. They hadn't built a warp engine, they made a warp bomb. Spock compares it to making a nuclear bomb before having a firm grasp of particle physics; possible, but unlikely.
• Always a Bigger Fish: How Pike "solves" the planet's issues: he has the Enterprise reveal itself to the entire world, showing how advanced they are. Realizing how small they truly are in the galaxy, the two rival factions join in talks to, at the least, work out some of their issues.
  Pike: Just like you said, whoever has the bigger stick wins. And in this case, that is me.
• Ambiguous Situation: The never-before-mentioned "Second American Civil War". While some of the footage Pike showed the Kileans and their rebels comes from the January 6, 2021, insurrection in DC, it is framed as prior to the Eugenics Wars whenever mentioned. The Eugenics Wars in the Star Trek universe are consistently stated as happening in The '90s. On the other hand, DS9 did have a time travel episode that involved a period of unrest in the US in the mid-2020s. That was not characterized at the time as part of a war, though that could easily be retconned in. Picard also has references to the Eugenics Wars and a "Project Khan", with that whole era and its timelines being one big In-Universe Continuity Snarl.
• Animal Lover: When April drops in on Pike while horseback riding, Pike is quite annoyed at the invasion of his privacy, but he's much more annoyed that the admiral spooked his horse, and spends the ensuing argument with April cuddling the horse to help calm it down. April, for his part, gives a gruff apology and makes no comment on Pike cooing over his horse.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The Kiley observed the Battle of Xahea from their planet, which happened to be one light-year away (so essentially, a year after it happened), and reverse-engineered their matter-antimatter power sources. But what they ended up building wasn't a spacecraft drive, but a bomb which the Kilean government was intending to use against rebels to end a centuries-old ancient grudge.
• As You Know: During a meeting with La'an and Pike, Spock brings up a historical fact that every Starfleet officer would know.
  Spock: As you know, the Vulcans invented first contact.
  Pike: As they never fail to remind us.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Chapel wants to try a genome resequencing trick to temporarily alter the DNA of the away team to make them resemble the residents of the planet. The problem is that the procedure is quite painful to initiate and reverse, requiring a painkiller to be paired with it, and Spock's mixed race biology made it fade far too quickly to be of realistic, functional use. Traditional makeup or cosmetic surgery (used in other Star Trek works both past and future) would have been less of a hassle, and simple contacts would have dealt with the retinal scanners.
• Back in the Saddle: Invoked by Admiral April when he cuts Pike's leave short to send Enterprise on a First Contact mission. Pike is riding a horse at the time, so April makes the reference on purpose.
  April: You can quit when you get home, but right now, I need you back on that horse, Captain.
• Badass in Distress: The main incident of the episode, as Una finds herself caught after a First Contact goes wrong.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The episode opens on a woman in military garb entering a command center as the staff discuss a UFO, the narration speaking of First Contact. We are led to believe this is humanity having an early encounter with alien life. Then the camera pans around the woman and we see these are aliens, and then the image of the UFO is cleaned up and revealed to be a Starfleet vessel.
    • A bait-and-switch within that bait-and-switch, as the UFO image is becoming more comprehensible, it looks like it could be the Enterprise, but is then revealed to be a much smaller ship with a single warp nacelle where Enterprise's engineering hull would be.
  • The following scene in Montana appears to be implying that Pike and Number One are involved in an intimate relationship... until we see her face and Pike calls her Captain Batel.
  • When Pike and Spock first meet on the Enterprise, we find out that a Lieutenant Kirk was requested by Pike but missed the flight due to the launch date being bumped up. After a lot of back and forth, we find out that this is actually Lieutenant Sam Kirk, James T. Kirk's brother from the TOS episode "Operation - Annihiliate!".
• Beard of Sorrow: Pike is initially shown wearing one of these, still very obviously rattled by the events of Star Trek: Discovery season 2. He shaves it off after being called back into service by Admiral April.
• Brick Joke: Before beaming down to Kiley 279, Pike jokingly advises Transporter Chief Kyle not to lose his socks during beaming, as the beaming is supposed to swap their clothes to more appropriate Kilean disguises. When they beam down, Spock is perturbed that he ended up in shorts. This came after Spock was called by Pike during a liaison with T'Pring, and answered the call while almost naked.
• Broken Masquerade:
  • There's a very fun but completely inconsequential subplot where part of Singh's infiltration plan involves incapacitating two Kileans and then beaming them up to the Enterprise, where they're held in Sickbay under Instant Sedation so that they never know what happened to them. Well, the problem with Instant Sedation is that it wears off just as instantly, and Chapel and Uhura have to think on their feet to catch one of the Kileans when he has a Freak Out and flees through the ship. The consequences of this situation, though presumably rendered moot when Pike breaks the Alien Non-Interference Clause on purpose, are nonetheless left unresolved.
  • Spock's genetic modifications wear off first, exposing him as a Vulcan/human to the Kileans.
  • Played straight when Captain Pike, recognizing the Kilean government isn't going to see reason, orders Enterprise to hover over the city. Not only does this make clear he could easily destroy them all, it reveals to the population at large that aliens exist and have come to their world.
• Call-Forward: On the map showcasing warp-capable worlds, we see iconic planets such as Cardassia Prime, Bajor, Trill, Tzenketh and more, many we wouldn't see until The Next Generation era.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: When constant communicator calls go unanswered, Admiral April personally flies a shuttle to Pike to get him back in the saddle of the Enterprise.
• Call to Agriculture: Pike spends his downtime at a cabin in Montana, preferring to ride his horse in the snow and debating if he wants to go back to the Enterprise.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • The U.S.S. Archer is a Hermes-class, first seen in the Starfleet Technical Manual and used as picture fodder in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. This is the first time an actual Hermes-class is seen on screen.
  • The non-canon novel Star Trek: Federation discussed the notion of a warp bomb, which (in the book) Cochrane, Scotty, and Geordi all regarded as impractical. We hear about an actual warp bomb in this episode.
• Captain's Log: Showing that Pike has regained the self-confidence he needs to command.
  Pike: Captain's log, Stardate 2259.42. Earth— the dust and sky— is my hearth. But Enterprise is my home. We can go forward together, knowing that whatever shadows we bring with us, they make the light all the brighter. I am... a lucky man.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Director Robert Wise directed both The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) (on the television as Pike makes a Morning After breakfast for Captain Batel) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
  • Number One served aboard the U.S.S. Martin Luther King Jr. as an ensign when the ship rescued La'an years ago. Dr. King is famous in Star Trek franchise history for convincing Nichelle Nichols to continue portraying Lieutenant Uhura for the racial symbolism her role held when she was having second thoughts about continuing with it.
• Colonized Solar System: In this case, the lack of colonies near a planet with warp technology is a major red flag.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The shuttle that Pike is flown in on is the Stamets.
  • This episode is basically a coda of sorts for Discovery Season 2, showing the ramifications of the Battle of Xahea and the classifying of everything surrounding Control going rogue and the fate of the Discovery.
  • We get to see the beginnings of Spock and T'Pring's relationship.
• Continuity Snarl: For about the third or fourth time, the episode retcons when, exactly, the Eugenics Wars took place, a result of Star Trek: The Original Series's Failed Future Forecast (they were originally supposed to happen in The '90s). This time, the episode mashes it up with civil unrest of the 2010s and 2020s (using, among other things, Stock Footage of the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine and the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol), saying it led to a "Second American Civil War" that metastasized across the globe, later becoming known as the Eugenics Wars before simply being renamed World War III.
• Dare to Be Badass:
  • Spock gives one of these to Pike, after the latter expresses doubts over how his knowledge of the future will affect him.
    Spock: Use it to be the person you most essentially are... The Captain.
  • Pike gives the different Kilean factions an overview of Earth's violent 21st Century history and how it nearly wiped them out. He invites them to put aside their arguments and instead dedicate themselves to develop their technology, reach to the stars and eventually join the United Federation of Planets.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Captain Pike starts the episode in a very bad place, emotionally and mentally. The episode features him coming to grips with the future he hasn't allowed himself to truly understand, at least enough to be The Captain.
• Didn't Think This Through: Una sheepishly admits to Pike that she and her crew should have used disguises to sneak around, preventing their capture. As Spock notes earlier, they likely didn't realize at the time what they were walking in to, as only the recently-upgraded sensors on the Enterprise detected the irregularities in the warp signature.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: Pike's speech to the Kiley is punctuated by having Enterprise hijack their public broadcast and use it to display images of Earth's past conflicts all over the planet, helping to show the Kiley exactly how they'll destroy themselves if they don't choose a better path.
• Doomsday Device: The Kiley's warp bomb is orders of magnitude more potent than a mere nuclear device on account of matter/antimatter reactions being an integral part of space warp science. It's probable that the Kileans would have blown themselves up even harder than pre-warp Humans did in World War III, and there wouldn't even be a remnant left to rise up from the rubble.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, there's an all-saucer starship in a drydock next to Enterprise. We'll be seeing her (or one of her sister ships) before the season ends.
• Eating the Eye Candy: A female Kilean sees Pike in disguise and smiles at him, clearly liking what she sees.
• The Elevator from Ipanema: The alien equivalent to muzak plays when Pike and his team are on the elevator.
• Entertainingly Wrong: A bit more dramatic example: in the history of known interstellar civilization, warp drive was always that — an engine for use in space exploration. Starfleet's entire litmus test of readiness for First Contact is built on that assumption. The Kiley instead got a jump-start on warp development thanks to witnessing the Battle of Xahea before any of that, so they turned it into a weapon.
• Establishing Series Moment: Pike's speech to the Kileans encouraging them to come together instead of destroying each other demonstrates the Lighter and Softer tone of the series.
• Fan of the Past: Captain Pike is introduced watching the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, which he describes as a classic.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Immediately after Enterprise drops out of warp, its impulse engines are visibly unpowered, and quickly turn on. While it's logical that sublight engines would not be active at warp, this is the first time it's been depicted on-screen.
• Godzilla Threshold: Pike attempts to talk to the leader of the planetary faction that developed the warp bomb into seeking diplomacy instead of war. When she rejects his argument and orders him and Spock to be removed, Pike issues an order over the communicators to have the Enterprise drop into the planet's atmosphere so that everyone can get a look at her. It is the most overt violation of General Order 1 possible, but the Kiley needed something tangible like that to understand their place in the universe.
• Heroic BSoD: Pike is dealing with this, and Admiral April arrives to try to shake him out of it. It works.
• Hidden First Act Parallel: The scene Pike is watching in The Day The Earth Stood Still is not entirely unlike how he later resolves the conflict on Kiley.
• Horseback Heroism: One of Pike's early scenes has him riding a horse across the frozen Montana countryside, invoking this trope, but it's actually demonstrative of his indecision about getting Back in the Saddle as a starship captain.
• Inopportune Impersonation Failure: The Enterprise's medical staff use an injection to disguise Pike, Spock, and Singh as Rubber-Forehead Aliens to infiltrate the prison on Kiley 279 where Una Chin-Riley's First Contact team are being held. They have some trouble on the ship adapting the treatment to Spock's half-Vulcan physiology, and sure enough, on the ground he starts reverting back to his normal looks when they're trying to get past the last checkpoint, triggering a brief fight with a group of Kilean prison guards.
• Instant Sedation: The Kileans go down very quickly from an injection to the arm.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: The Kiley have developed primitive warp technology before ever managing to colonize space. Spock compares it to a civilization developing a nuclear bomb before figuring out particle physics; sure, it could happen, but it's not likely to. In this case, the Kiley were able to reverse-engineer warp technology from observing the Battle of Xahea.
• Internal Retcon: Exploited by Admiral April. He gets Pike out of a Court Martial for breaking the Prime Directive by pointing out Pike (and Una Chin-Riley's team before him) was only there in the first place because the Kileans observed the Over-the-Top Secret Battle of Xahea by telescope, and therefore Starfleet couldn't conduct a trial without breaking The Masquerade and revealing that the battle had happened, which could potentially let Control know where USS Discovery went.
• Interrupted Intimacy: Twice involving Spock and T'Pring.
  • As they start to kiss in the restaurant, the waiter asks them to take it elsewhere.
    Waiter: I'm going to have to ask you two to do that somewhere else. Please.
    T'Pring: What an excellent idea.
  • They're about to consummate their engagement when Spock gets the call to return to Enterprise. Pike asks Spock if he's naked, and after Spock says he's not, T'Pring pointedly notes that he was about to be.
    Spock: Matrimony and duty. The two will compliment each other.
    T'Pring: I remain skeptical.
• It Will Never Catch On: During the debriefing, Adm. April mentions that Pike's flouting of General Order 1 has given more ammunition to those who want to insist on it being common practice, and it's been renamed "The Prime Directive" just to stress that importance.
  Pike: Well, that'll never stick.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Pike's return to the Enterprise has him in this state, while simultaneously adopting a "Fake It Till You Make It" stance of being The Captain, until he can get back into practice and become his usual self again.
• Loophole Abuse: Double Subverted. Pike argues that the Prime Directive had already been broken accidentally, so interfering in Kilean internal affairs again to fix the damage should be allowed. Starfleet tries to Court Martial him anyway, but Admiral April manages to get him out of it because Starfleet couldn't conduct a trial without having to explain how the Kileans figured out matter-antimatter reactions by watching a battle that officially never happened: acknowledging that it did could have world-ending consequences, so Starfleet is forced to let Pike off with a warning.
• Man Hug: Pike and M'Benga warmly embrace in Sickbay.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Pike is not happy to learn that their battle to save the future had the side effect of negatively influencing the development of Kiley.
    Una: They weren't ready for warp. Not by a long shot.
    Pike: And now they're using our tech to build a weapon. I never considered...
    Una: Chris, no one could have. We were fighting for the very lives that are in jeopardy now.
  • The Klieans have a "My God, What Did We Almost Do" moment when Pike shows them footage of Earth's past nuclear war and makes them see that they're about to do the same to themselves (one woman even covers her mouth in silent horror), thus getting them to stand down and peacefully resolve their issues.
• Named After Somebody Famous:
  • The ship Number One served on that found and rescued a young La'an Noonien-Singh was the USS Martin Luther King Jr..
  • The ship Number One commanded in the ill-fated first contact mission to Kiley 279 was the USS Archer, likely named after Jonathan Archer, the commander of the original NX-01 Enterprise.
• Noodle Incident: "Delta Scorpii Seven" sounds like it refers to a location, but seems to be a code phrase of some sort to indicate "Person from Pre-First-Contact race came out of sedation and is now running loose". This may not be the first time such an incident occurred while Ortegas had the conn, or it may be one of a variety of absurd incidents on her watch.
  Ortegas: Always when I'm in the Captain's chair...
• "Not So Different" Remark: Pike steps in on a contentious talk between the two main factions of Kiley 279 and offers the perspective that Earth suffered numerous internal wars, much like the Kiley are experiencing now, but adds that those wars culminated in World War III and 30% of the population being wiped out. Though Earth recovered and prospered, he contends that it's a lesson that doesn't need to be learned at so high a price if it can be avoided.
• Patrick Stewart Speech: Captain Pike beams into the Kilean peace conference to give it a nudge after it fails to make headway, and warns the Kileans that if they don't make peace, they're liable to end up just like Earth did. But they have an opportunity now to just skip over the part where they murder a third of their own population, and instead come together as a people and join the United Federation of Planets.
• Pressure Point: La'an improvises a plan to get inside the Kiley base by targeting employees coming out to take their credentials, and after faking a medical issue to get their attention alerts Spock to use the nerve pinch on them. Spock had no trouble subduing them, but points out it was a gamble assuming they would be vulnerable.
• Properly Paranoid: La'an recommends raising shields based on the anomalous warp signature and the total lack of any orbital presence around Kiley 279. Pike trusts her gut over Spock's insistence on First Contact protocol ordering against such overtly defensive posture and narrowly avoids three plasma torpedoes redecorating the saucer. Moments later, Spock changes his tune upon analyzing the anomalous warp signature and recommends going to Red Alert, having determined it's not a warp drive they're detecting, but a warp bomb.
• Pulled from Your Day Off: Pike and most of his crew are on leave when April calls them back to rescue Una.
• Race Lift:
  • Robert April was depicted as Caucasian in The Animated Series (the Star Trek Encyclopedia used a photoshopped picture of Gene Roddenberry as a joke reference). Here he is black.
  • Transporter Chief Kyle was played by blond English actor John Winston in TOS. He is now played by Korean-Canadian actor André Dae Kim. Assuming this is the same character and not a relative or an in-universe coincidence. Memory Alpha currently treats them as the same character.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Pike's video displaying the run-up to World War III shows Real Life footage of the January 6, 2021 US Capitol riot— the first time the Star Trek franchise has ever explicitly referenced current events. However, it is only a brief snip of footage, and also folded together with footage from the 2014 Maidan protest in Ukraine.
• Romantic False Lead: The aftermath of the Interrupted Intimacy incident with Spock and T'Pring could be the apple of discord that led to the ultimate end of their relationship in the TOS era.
• A Rotten Time to Revert: The Enterprise's medical staff use an injection to disguise Pike, Spock, and Singh as Rubber-Forehead Aliens to infiltrate the prison on Kiley 279 where Una Chin-Riley's First Contact team are being held. They have some trouble on the ship adapting the treatment to Spock's half-Vulcan physiology, and sure enough, on the ground he starts reverting back to his normal appearance when they're trying to get past the last checkpoint, triggering a brief fight with a group of Kilean prison guards.
• Scare 'Em Straight: Pike uses Earth's own near-destruction in World War III to let the people of Kiley 279 see the future awaiting them if they continue their conflicts with weapons even more powerful than nukes based on a science they barely understand.
  Pike: (beams down directly between the opposing leaders) Hi. Sorry to interrupt. I'm Christopher Pike. [...] Our conflict also started with a fight for freedoms. We called it the Second Civil War, then the Eugenics War, and finally just World War III. This was our last day. The day the Earth we knew ceased to exist. (shows videos of super-bombs exploding) What began as an eruption in one nation, ended in the eradication of 600,000 species of animals and plants and 30% of Earth's population. Global suicide. What we gave you is the means to exterminate yourselves. And from the looks of you, you're gonna do it. You'll use competing ideas of liberty to bomb each other to rubble, just like we did, and then your last day will look just like this. [...] So... go to war with each other. Or... join our Federation of Planets... and reach for the stars. The choice is yours.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Kiley 279 is stated to be less than 1 light-year from the Xahea system, allowing the Kileans to have observed the battle in "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2" without faster-than-light technology. While this isn't as bad an example as some in Star Trek (the math at least works this time), it's still practically spitting distance by astronomical standards: some of the two stars' outer satellites would probably be orbiting inside the other star's heliosphere, and theoretically they could even be a binary pair.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: The people of this planet have developed a weapon of mass destruction inspired by witnessing the Battle of Xahea. When Pike decides to stop them from destroying themselves in a civil war, the subject of General Order 1 comes up— and Pike argues that, since their development has already been altered, the order no longer applies.
  Spock: We cannot further influence the destiny of this world.
  Pike: Meant to or not, Spock, we already have. Our only option now is to influence it well.
  Una: Chris, General Order 1 clearly states we cannot in—
  Pike: Screw General Order 1.
• Series Continuity Error: A possible one. After the Enterprise is shot at with plasma torpedoes from the planet's surface, Pike notes that such weapons were "21st century technology", then wonders how a culture with technology two-hundred years out of date by Federation standards could build a warp drive. He seems to have forgotten that humans developed warp capability in 2063 at a similar level of technological development, using a nuclear missile, no less. Downplayed in that Earth was more advanced than the Kiley prior to World War III, possessing the very qualifiers of space exploration the Kiley lack, and Zephram Cochrane had to make due with the limited resources of a post-war Earth.
• Shirtless Scene: Spock is bare-chested when he's about to make love to T'Pring.
• Shout-Out: Pike is watching The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was directed by Robert Wise, who directed Star Trek: The Motion Picture in real life.
• Skip the Anesthetic: Despite Chapel's warning about how painful the genetic alterations are, La'an refuses any painkillers.
• Stunned Silence: When Pike shows the Kileans footage of World War III, the crowds are visibly horror-struck at seeing the devastation that Earth endured and realizing that they're about to go down the same path.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As it turns out, Starfleet was not able to completely cover up a massive battle involving multiple different spacefaring powers. Even over interstellar distances, someone is going to notice a light show of that magnitude.
  Una: We're less than one light-year out from zero point.
  Pike: Zero point?
  Una: Where we and the crew of Discovery opened up a wormhole to the future. Between Kelpien and Klingon ships, there must have been a hundred warp signs. We lit up the sky.
  Pike: And their various telescopes were just good enough to see us.
• Take Me to Your Leader: Pike goes with the classic line for his first open contact with the Kileans, with a tone hinting that he's aware of the contextual irony of his saying it. He is, indeed, taken to the leader of the government (a change of approach on their part, as the previous team were simply imprisoned).
• Tempting Fate: When Pike's team are rescuing Una's team.
  Spock: It is fortunate our route is empty.
  Una: Can you not jinx it?
  Spock: It is illogical to believe—
  (the elevator opens and several Kileans enter the corridor)
• Took a Shortcut: Chapel is chasing down the scared Kliey scientist when he enters a turbolift with Uhura, forcing Chapel to take the emergency medical transporter directly to the bridge. Uhura and the scientist have a short chat, they exit on the bridge, and Chapel is ready and waiting to sedate him.
• Velvet Revolution: The Kileans seem to take Pike's worldwide broadcast admonishment to heart and abandon the martial application of the next-level sciences they're just starting to dabble in and turn around to apply it to the development of Warp Drive.
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: Una's crew on the USS Archer went to make First Contact with a civilization they thought was testing its first warp drive, and were immediately taken prisoner because the Kileans were actually testing a warp bomb for use in internal wars. Fortunately nobody dies and it all works out once Pike scares the Kileans straight.
• We Will Not Use Stage Make-Up in the Future: Chapel uses a gene therapy treatment to disguise Pike, Spock, and La'an as Kileys. It works fine for Pike and La'an, but unfortunately it wears off far too quickly on Spock because of his half-human/half-vulcan nature.
• Wham Line: "These people have not built a warp drive. Based on these readings, they have built a warp bomb."
• With All Due Respect: When April comes to get Pike, Pike grumbles out “With all due respect, what the hell do you want?”
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: La'an fakes an injury to get a pair of scientists to help her, leading them over to Spock so he can nerve pinch them.

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