Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Ghosts of Illyria" | Season 1, Episode 3
Number One takes command, finding the light in a dark time
I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to refer to Rebecca Romijn’s character in these reviews. Typically when I’m writing about a show, I’ll latch on to whatever name gets used most often in the context of the show itself; on Star Trek these tend to be surnames, so it’s “Kirk” and “Picard” and “Janeway” and not “James T.,” “Jean-Luc,” or “Kathryn.” Which is straightforward enough, but it gets tricky when some characters are referred to one way, and some characters aren’t—it seems almost disrespectful to refer to someone on a first name basis when everyone else is getting last name treatment, but at the same time, the whole point of naming the character in a review is to let you know who I’m talking about. That loses efficacy if you have to keep googling something every other paragraph.
So: we’ve got “Number One,” “Una Chin-Riley,” “Chin-Riley,” or “Una.” If I went off the show, “Number One” would be, well, Number One—it’s how the character was referred to in “The…