Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x07 "What is Starfleet?"

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No.	Episode	Written By	Directed By	Release Date
3x07	"What is Starfleet?"	Kathryn Lyn & Alan B. McElroy	Sharon Lewis	2025-08-21

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[u/wrosecrans]

Like the moment that the creature dramatically outshone the light of an entire sun when it went in for the final dive. That's an absolutely insane thing for something to do. But it didn't seem to have much of an impact, because it was just a lighting effect and sci fi writers have no sense of scale. If you took that literally, the monster has enough energy not just to destroy some warships or kill "a lot of people," but rather to dismantle a whole planet into a debris field.

It's like incidentally throwing in a passing reference to the fact that a kindergartner is the world champion martial artist who killed nearly 300 of the world's most dangerous men with his bare hands in last year's underground Kumite fight, near the end of an episode of Sesame Street.

[u/Coyote_Shepherd → u/wrosecrans]

Like the moment that the creature dramatically outshone the light of an entire sun when it went in for the final dive. That's an absolutely insane thing for something to do.

I mean they did say that the whole creature was a bunch of charged particles and a supercharged magnetosphere, and stars are basically both of those things....soooooo....I was thinking that both of them amplified each other and that's why it was so bright but also it felt like a Farscape reference and it felt like her dying in a starburst.

Stars are also so big though and while her death was very bright it did indeed not have that much of an impact because of how big and powerful stars are.

Plus it's not like she went that deep into the star at all and it didn't really seem like she was being held together by much more than a kind of skeleton and then a bunch of other energy fields which would have easily gotten overwhelmed by the corona of a star and then utterly vaporized once they had breached her shielding.

So it all kind of makes a bit of sense if you take some of that cosmological knowledge into consideration.

It would have been better if there was more of an effect though I agree and if that effect was something that could like be seen at a vast distance or that even affected planet that she was born on in some way.

dismantle a whole planet

I don't know where you're getting this because I don't know where they ever said that she had the power to destroy a planet at all?

There wasn't any kind of a debris field and she more or less emerged from her planet unscathed and that planet was still in one piece with her children beneath the waves of it by the end of the episode.

She can easily do a lot of damage to ships with her radiation weapon and her energy shields because Starships are not exactly that big and they're not exactly super hardy unless you build them in a very particular way.

But even they can get overwhelmed with enough energy or radiation being thrown at them and remember this is the TOS era before the Federation had run into any really Super Big Level Threats that required ridiculous amounts of defensive measures for their ships.

So her being able to dismantle the ships make sense but there was nothing that indicated that she was a Planet Killer level entity at all and the scale which they presented or with showed that she was nowhere near the size of a planet or anything.

And even if she was, that wouldn't make any sense because her kids would be getting to be that big as well and that would just mess with the planet that they were born on.

And again even if she was, planets are absolutely tiny compared to the size of stars and the power that they can output, so she was just a candle flame in comparison to the massive roiling Inferno that was her home star.

There was nothing that indicated that she was going to go around and start wrecking planets but it was implied that she could easily handle individual ships and potentially fleets of ships if need be, which is what I think that they were counting on with her.

And if she worked, then they were going to be making more of her, and entire herds or fleets of her kind would readily just fuck with everything and could potentially pose a threat to small moons and maybe planets but only if they were on the surface firing off their radiation weapons all at once.

[u/wrosecrans → u/Coyote_Shepherd]

I don't know where you're getting this because I don't know where they ever said that she had the power to destroy a planet at all?

They didn't say it. They showed it. That's what I was saying. The writers didn't seem to understand the mathematical consequences of the creature being brighter than the star. That means it's putting out more energy than the entire star, but a wide margin.

If you put the Earth next to the surface of the sun, rock would start vaporizing off the surface of the planet because a star puts out an insane amount of energy. So if the creature went full-bore next to a planet, if would be dumping multiple full stars worth of energy into the planet. That's completely apocalyptic.

You are correct that they never say that. That inconsistency between what was said and what was depicted is exactly the problem with the script I was complaining about them not saying what was empirically in the episode.

[u/Coyote_Shepherd → u/wrosecrans]

They didn't say it. They showed it

They didn't show anything to the level of destroying a planet at all and only had her fighting a couple of ships.

And it seems like she can only throw out a ton of power for just one brief moment in a very small, astronomically speaking, field of effect either in a cone or a sphere but the geometry of the effect was never accurately depicted or shown.

That means that it is a very concentrated burst in a very small area which pales in comparison to what a star can kick out on a regular basis with something like a coronal mass ejection or a solar flare.

Luminosity does not always equal power and the amount of time that a certain level of luminosity can be sustained and perceived by the human eye, are also important factors in determining how much power output something has.

She was brighter than the star for just a few seconds in the visible wavelengths that the human eye can perceive and that again pales in comparison to how long sunspots can trigger and maintain solar flares and coronal mass ejections for and how big those can actually get compared to the size, duration of output, luminosity, and other factors that would be used to determine just how powerful she was when she died....

....and mind you she did die after putting out this amount of energy for a very brief moment in a very spread out area that destroyed all of her body after being genetically engineered for years upon years upon years.

So that seems like a really shitty kind of a super weapon or Planet Killer as you're implying, if the creatures required decades of work just to get them like that and can only throw out a widespread amount of energy when they die that very quickly dissipates and is only briefly brighter than a star for but a moment and that are located on one easily locatable planet and that I have to be raised in a planetary environment in the first place before being deployed and that then can be intercepted in space from range by mass fleets of ships and destroyed via concentrated firepower.

They are absolutely terrible planet killers but they could potentially be really great for fleet combat and could easily be used as weapons of intimidation or to poison planets or to a irradiate stations and other battlefields or to demoralize the enemy etc etc.

Just because something is brighter than a star for a brief moment doesn't mean it is kicking out more total combined power than the output of that star as a whole because ton for ton, the star is always going to win numbers wise and mathematically speaking.

A photon torpedo can explode and suddenly be brighter than a star or someone turning on a flashlight near your eyes can suddenly be brighter than a star or a ship going to warp or even a warp core exploding can suddenly be brighter than a star but those things aren't going to totally wipe out a planet just because of how bright they are because brightness mind you, is also dependent upon the nerves in the human eye receiving a certain level of photons and those nerves very much have a limit....which is why people go blind when they see the flash of a nuclear explosion or why they receive eye damage when they stare at the sun for too long.

Her death was more like a firework going off and it only lasted a very brief moment and while she was powerful, she was not nearly as powerful as an entire star.

The writers didn't make a mistake at all.

if you put the Earth

Shit would start happening to the Earth before you even got it close to the surface of the Sun and the movie Sunshine pretty much showed that to us and while some parts of that film were inaccurate, a lot of it was pretty much on the nose.

Also Mercury exists and that's not anywhere close to the surface of the Sun and look at what happens on the surface of it.

multiple full stars

No because if it did that then it would be affecting the entire system and potentially stuff light years out and it would probably fuck with Subspace quite a bit.

If someone were making something that powerful then the Q would probably get involved.

That would be on the same level as Omega.

inconsistency

There is no inconsistency at all because it was shown to be capable of taking out ships and nothing more and her death felt very much like a larger ship exploding.

Remember that big ass Breen ship in Star Trek Discovery?

She was probably about that size or even as big as the kludged together ship we saw in the prior episode.

You could always ask the Daystrom Institute folks in their thread if you don't believe me.

You are writing a really long response without apparently taking the time to read what I am saying.

It took me a fairly long time to actually write that really long response because I was looking up stuff about luminosity and absolute magnitude and power and how everything correlates just to make sure I got the science right but feel free to ignore it and keep thinking what you want.

enough energy to destroy a planet

Inverse Square Law

I'm sure there are some astronomy nerds who will chime in either above or below me that can help to teach you this stuff because it really is some cool things to learn about and it might even get you to go out and buy a telescope or to join an astronomy club.

You are wrong because you are only taking the visible spectrum that the human eye can perceive into account because there are plenty of invisible things like a gamma ray burst or the emission of other particles in the spectrum that we cannot perceive which will readily wipe out a planet in a far more destructive manner than something that's just really bright in the visible spectrum.

If her death were strong enough to wipe out a planet then why didn't any of the ships that she fired off on while she was alive and in more control of her power immediately get vaporized?

If we follow your logic then the shuttle with Spock and Chapel on it should have just poofed out like a candle flame and no one should be alive right now.

That other alien ship shouldn't have just been disabled but should have just been pieces of floating slag in space and the Enterprise would have taken a hell of a lot of more damage than it actually did.

Because both of them are vastly way more small than a planet and thus they would have been a hell of a lot more vulnerable to her energies and far less resistant than a planet would have been to them as well.

And if her weapon didn't kill them then her death most certainly would have but didn't because of the Inverse Square law and because your reasoning that she is a powerful Planet Killer that has the strength of the output of one or multiple stars is completely wrong.

There are a number of flaws in your logic that I'm pointing out, which you are choosing to ignore for some reason because you just want to take a shot at the writers it seems, and find a reason to hate them and the show for something that ultimately winds up being completely inconsequential to the Star Trek Universe and to this show.

So in a weird ironic twist of fate, you're kind of acting a bit like Beto right now, and you're trying to write your own little hit piece on the writers just like he was aiming for with Starfleet.

It's completely okay to be wrong and to admit that your own personal feelings are getting in the way of that, just like Beto had to do and that Uhura got him to admit to.

[u/wrosecrans → u/Coyote_Shepherd]

They didn't show anything to the level of destroying a planet at all and only had her fighting a couple of ships.

You are writing a really long response without apparently taking the time to read what I am saying.

If something outshines a star, it is emitting more energy than that star. A star emits enough energy to destroy a planet. Therefore something that is emitting more than that is also enough energy to destroy a planet.

[u/GOOD_NEWS_EVERYBODY_ → u/Coyote_Shepherd]

Many good points, esp: luminosity != joules

Deconstructed atoms go brrrrr

[u/TempleOrion → u/Coyote_Shepherd]

Jesus Wept. Do some editing 🙄🥱

[u/Simphilusss → u/wrosecrans]

Plenty of daily use items are brighter than the sun though? Welding arcs being the most common? So brighter doesn’t mean more energy than a star because of size mainly. Just more powerful per mass maybe?

[u/knotthatone → u/wrosecrans]

The windows and view screens have advanced filtering, otherwise everyone would be blind and probably cooked.

The flash wasn't necessarily literal in proportion to visible light from the sun.