[timun]

Good for Christina Chong getting a chance to do something other than play the rather dour and serious Singh character. It was nice to see her get the opportunity to "stretch her legs" and show that she is capable of much more emotive acting. Acting as a perpetually "serious" character is deceptively difficult.



I can see why a lot of people may not have been a fan of this latest episode, and I went in quite skeptical as I'm not a big fan of TOS episodes like "The Squire of Gothos" or "Shore Leave". That said I was pleasantly surprised by the explanation for why the crew had suddenly begun a ren faire on the ship, and the resolution of M'Benga's daughter's story is as satisfying as it could have been. I wasn't really sure where they were going to take that plot point when they introduced it earlier in the season, as they had quite clearly established that she couldn't stay in the transporter buffer much longer, and if she'd just died there's no way they could believably keep Dr. M'Benga on the crew: he'd be a crushed, just a shell of a man afterward.

So it was never really a question of whether she would live, just a question of how. I figured there would be some deus ex machina medical cure and she'd live happily ever after, which wouldn't have been satisfactory but at least would have made some sense. Instead the idea that she'd live a non-corporeal existence is satisfying and not as clichéd, and it gives M'Benga more to do going forward. I don't know who wrote this plot thread into the series in the first place but in retrospect it was always going to be a bit of a dead end (no pun intended) for the M'Benga character.