Last episode:
Overweight neurotic giggly ensign beats obviously fitter shipmates (even after stopping to chat with spore friend) in long distance run.
Said ensign has meltdown in front of Captain during training exercise and announces removal from command training. Later gets back on training track after finally admitting to hallucinations and saying “sorry”.
First of all, fatness is cured 200 years in the future. This isn’t like Picard not caring about curing his baldness as baldness doesn’t affect his capability to perform his duties. So, every time I see this person I have to wonder how she got by the selection board.
Secondly, getting infected by spores isn’t a disqualifier from command, not telling anyone about having hallucinations should. Why isn’t there a standing order that requires reporting unusual activity to a supervisor or at least log it (so that the computer can flag ‘crazy’ to command)? Given that there doesn’t appear to be such an order, command candidates should have the intelligence to determine that having hallucinations could affect their ability to perform their job function and potentially endanger others on the ship. Michael is also guilty of this.
I actually sat around trying to think who was the first ‘heavy woman’ to appear in Star Trek (Mudd was first male of course),I think Worf’s mom was what I came up with. I’m not counting Lwaxana Troi cause she’s legacy casting.
I got no problem with Tilly* and I appreciate that nothing (that i’ve heard) was said about how “progressive her body-positivity casting was!!!”.
*If she’d dial it back. And yes her beating fitter people screams Mary-Sue. In fact the whole show screams Mary-Sue for her and Burnham
Today I noted how in the past, it was the GOOD GUYS who are xenophobic extremists. The Vulcans, Humans and Bajorans. Now of course we can’t have that.
Edit: And the thing that would negate Burnham’s Mary-Sueness…her conviction for TREASON…makes no sense. What she did wasn’t treason, it was mutiny. And the same level of mutiny we’ve seen before. See Garrovick punching Kirk. But I don’t find it surprising at all that DISC writers don’t know what treason is.
Yeah, I have no problem with the casting of Tilly, but no way in hell she would win a half marathon. (And before anyone asks, I would quite possibly literally drop dead within the first quarter mile if I attempted to run one.)
(For me this was possibly the least bad episode of the whole series so far.)
To counterbalance the negativity, I’ve liked this season. It feels like Star Trek. I am concerned by what they have planned for Spock and hope they do right by one of my favorite fictional characters but the sense of adventure and fun is turned up and I appreciate it.
Didn’t really like the latest episode. It just sort of feels, I don’t know, careless? Like the writers just go with whatever they come up with first, then ignore things that don’t make sense. Like evil Klingon guy just showing up without any sort of assurances, so that everybody who knew about the whole thing conveniently gets murdered.
I think what’s missing to me is really that it’s the constraints that make a Sci-Fi setting believable, that make it feel like a universe and give it coherence. But this show just casually ignores such things—’…and then, they zip through the universe using a magic fungus, you know, and that fungus can also infect people and manifest hallucinations of people from their past…’. That’s not a plot, that’s Mad Libs.
I will say I didn’t and don’t like the taste of the Section 31 spin off we got. S31 are the villains not the heroes. They shouldn’t headline a show. Especially a Trek show. I did like that they mentioned CONTROL which is a concept from the Novels.
I skimmed over the thread to avoid any spoilers, but it seems like the reception so far is not great. Is it worth watching this year?
I haven’t really thought about it until now. Wasn’t a big fan of last season. The most interesting part of last season was Lorca, and it turns out that he’s only interesting because he was an alternate universe character. Apparently main universe characters are not allowed to be interesting.
I also fucking hated the “oh let’s pat ourselves on the back for maintaining federation values and not wiping out the klingons when they literally have a genocidal force coming to wipe humanity out in our solar system” ending of last year. Made no sense to me. If someone is literally minutes from wiping out your home planet and most of your race, I would fucking say “game on” to whatever you could do to them.
But on the plus side, there was… um… Saru is kind of a cool character.
Also, it kinda bugs me how they introduce new things we haven’t seen in the other series, only to then have to come up with some justification for why we haven’t seen them. So the Federation had holographic communication tech all the time, it’s just that the Enterprise didn’t have it because Pike thought it looked too much like ghosts… :rolleyes:
If you want to be unshackled by continuity, don’t make a prequel. I mean, I even would’ve been fine with just not addressing such issues—the image we have of the future is bound to change over time, and new series will reflect that. As long as it’s nothing critical to the plot, I can forgive an older ship not having the buttons and dials the Enterprise had; it’s just a visual representation. It’s more important to look future-y.
But this half-and-half sort of deal—introduce something new, then try to handwave it away—just highlights every inconsistency.
I’ve watched some videos on ST legal rights and different companies and timelines and cats and dogs living together oh the humanity!!
Right now Star Trek…imagine the different iterations of DC comics…Pre-Crisis, Crisis, New 52, Flashpoint,…I’m sure I’m forgetting some. That’s what Star Trek is right now EXCEPT it’s legally required to be different from previous iterations. What a headache.
Basically IMHO, barring all of the ST licenses coming under one banner, Discovery wont make it past next season, if its renewed at all. I doubt the Picard series gets made or we see a new Kelvin movie. NOW if they do merger CBS and paramount and the two Viacoms (dont ask)…then they COULD use the Picard series and a season 3 or 4 to “fix” the timelines. I’d be onboard with that.
Now I’m sure there are people who say “What does it matter? Why can’t we just have Discovery stories and not care if it matches up with canon?” Well, I guess you could if the stories were good as stand-alone stories and not propped up by nostalgia and old characters. But they are. And if the the timbers propping up the stories are rotten…then people arn’t going to watch.
I’m ranting. Sorry.
Is that what happened with the screens? I thought they’d just eventually say that holo-tech has an exploit or potential hack (see NuBSG) and they’d shelve it. It also looks like they’re going to find a way to get rid of the Spore Drive soon too. Which I’m fine with. Why introduce it all??? It’s way too frigging powerful.
From bits and pieces I’ve picked up from various articles there was a lot of stuff forced onto the showrunners by the studio, and from Bryan Fullers original pitch. In particular the whole Klingon war idea, which is why they ignored it for half the season to go and visit the mirror universe. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were under orders to make things different and more futuristic than previous shows, with things like the holoscreens to show off some vfx.
Having been successful in the first season it seems like the showrunners have been given more freedom, and are trying to correct things. Killing some of the advanced tech will help, and I’m hoping the current klingon storyline will eventually get them more like the established Klingon culture. I still don’t like the Klingons as they are now, but they have improved over last season.
I am slightly concerned where they’re going with Section 31 though, it doesn’t seem secretive enough based on their DS9 appearances, but I am liking [Del] Emperor[/Del] Captain Georgiou.
I didn’t quite get this in the last episode—something about how the holo tech had something to do with the Enterprise’s being incapacitated? But the line about the ghosts also was there.
Other than that, I liked the most recent episode surprisingly well. It still felt like a kind of mosaic of well-worn Trek tropes, but brought them together decently enough.
My nutty idea was have Discovery destroyed in the events right before The Cage…have the Disco crew on board 1701 during The Cage and then let the combined crew have adventures.
I don’t particularly care about “canon.” Each of the series/movies kind of stand on their own for me. If I had to worry about canon, things would be way, way too complicated.
I was watching History Buffs work on Apollo 13…you know what’s been missing since TOS?? Goddamn engineering. You’re in a spaceship!! Stop with magic/technobabble solutions and give us some real tension as seen in The Naked Time and That Which Survives.
I guess ST:Enterprise did it a little and it was so-so in some eps and not so so-so in others.
