Crosspost of what I mentioned on Reddit:

Was this a sly deep cut prequel to ‘Wolf in the Fold’ ?

Given that both episodes cover the same terrain dealing with “monstrous, terrible evil” and " immortal, non-corporeal entities" possessing people?

‘Wolf In The Fold’ also ended with the entity jumping and taking over the ship.

(‘Wolf in the Fold’ in the fold was written by Robert Bloch who also wrote ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’, the episode that introduced Korby and Chapel)

Is that also the first 32nd Century Klingon we’ve seen?

‘Space Babies’ was a classic RTD dumpster fire. It felt like a first draft and the exposition dump at the beginning was very badly done. The script editor should have pushed back hard on this one.

‘The Devil’s Chord’ was better although hamstrung by the fact that they couldn’t afford the rights to any Beatles music.

Ncuti and Millie have quickly established themselves and I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the season brings.

Generally Doctor Who gets into a quagmire when it starts mining the backstory for story ideas. Too much of it and the show becomes unwatchable. Chibnall didn’t appear to have many plans for it beyond introducing Jo Martin’s Doctor so it’s hard to understand why it was brought up in the first place.

That said RTD seems to have found an interesting take on it with the orphan angle and seems to have used it as a soft continuity reset of the backstory. With the new “happy go lucky” Doctor that we have in the 15th and the fact that we are back to being the “last of the time lords” (at least for the moment) I think it’s going to hard to explore the abuse angle in any depth without bringing the angst back.

I think ‘The Devil in the Dark’ from the Original Series would be a good option. As would “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” from Strange New Worlds.

I would have it run until Kirk takes over as captain. Then jump forward to just after The Motion Picture.

This not only gives them about a decade of time before TWOK that’s barely been touched by the screen canon, they can do a design revamp to freshen the series up using TMP as a starting point, and they handle the fact that with a series per year the actors are going to quickly age ahead of their characters.

It’s also been suggested in the beta canon that the Gorn are made up of multiple reptile variants. The ones in SNW seem to be raptor based. It’s possible the less agile more tank like variants might show up later.

At a minimum the script editor should have asked the writers hard questions about the Chapel and Batel subplots to justify.

I would have dropped the two subplots and used the screen time on La’an who was strangely reduced to giving color commentary for an episode that she should have been front and center on.

(Ignoring sloppy writing as the reason…)

Star Fleet seems to like to compartmentalize information. Examples:

At least post ‘First Contact’ they had hints of the Borg before ‘Q Who’ but kept it quiet. Similarly the Genesis device information was on a need to know basis (although probably for good reason). There was also that Voyager episode based around the Omega directive that only Janeway knew about.

La’An theorises the Gorn have a weapon capable of rendering their enemies blind by interfering with comms, sensors and transport. In TOS: “Arena”, they were capable of faking subspace transmissions to lure starships in.

In Arena while pinned down by the Gorn landing party, Kirk also mentions that communications are being interfered with.