The sticky warns that spoilers should be avoided in the first six or seven lines of an OP because of the mouseover effect.
So that was one line, here’s the second.
And now a third.
After three comes four.
Five gol-den rings!
Here’s six, almost there.
And seven, just to be sure.
————
So this is kind of a remake of “Andromeda”. I don’t hate that.
I did roll my eyes, though, at Burnham saying “that’s impossible” when she heard the Federation was defunct. It was only, what, 150 years old in her time? But she cannot conceive of its failing to last over a thousand years? C’mon, she must have studied history. I can understand her being disappointed, but ISTM a more realistic reaction would have been to very cautiously hope it was still around, and then be like “okay, it lasted over 900 years, they had a good run.”
So time travel tech has been banned. Okay. But isn’t this a more lawless era? And can’t people just do the old “slingshot around the sun” maneuver like in ST IV?
Apparently, TV bad guys don’t know how to shoot any better in the future with more advanced weapons than TV bad guys in the past. But intoxicated Burnham is fully capable of going on a killing spree.
The guy manning the desk at the semi-destroyed space station for 40 years waiting for StarFleet to show up again. Why?
He says that there are 2 Federations ships in his scanning range. Why not call them? Why doesn’t Burnham call them as she has no idea if Discovery will show anytime soon?
And just how many producers does it take to make one TV show? Is that why it is so bad because it is designed by a committee?
More importantly, why am I still watching this Star Dreck?
They did say that the Federation coincidentally fell apart right after the Great Dilithium Shortage, that is, as soon as they could not maintain a Starfleet. One wonders why… Anyway, it’s clear the Federation now consists of the occasional lone re-enactor geek like that guy and whoever is on those two ships that were in range and no longer has the resources for basic infrastructure like sensors, not to mention has zero political power, so he obviously was not really waiting for a fleet of warships to fly in out of the blue (or doing anything to make such a fleet possible in the foreseeable future). He was just amusing himself.
The real problem is that the guy controls a massive bit of valuable tech - why has no one stolen it from him and recycled it for scrap? I suppose he has some working defenses, and provides enough services for the locals that he’s more valuable left alone than raided, but it would be nice if that was clarified.
So I’m watching the first episode, and within like ten minutes we have Burnham crying.
And was this whole cringy overdone ‘have hope’ stuff that maybe from the ruins of Star Trek Starfleet something good can yet be salvaged just sort of a message to the viewer? If so, then that’d at least demonstrate some manner of awareness.
Great choice of filming location, though. I spent three weeks traveling through Iceland last summer (ah, those halcyon days of ages long past, when one still could go places…), so half the time I was like, ooh, I walked around the rim of that crater! I stood behind that waterfall! I think I even swam in that water!
Also, with the dilithium gone, why hasn’t everyone switched over to Romulan-style singularity drive cores? IIRC, they had to do without dilithium, which was rare or nonexistent in their part of space…
Also, did anybody else think it odd that Book scoffed at the idea of keeping the Federation alive, clinging to the past, and all that, only to then turn out to be a secret conservationist? Seemed kinda inconsistent.
Also also, hearing the name ‘Book’ in a sci-fi show just unnecessarily opens up old wounds
I don’t like that Starfleet failed not because of some sort of internal decay or external conflict but because some Q or something suddenly decided to make most dilithium blow up everywhere at once.
Obviously without fuel the fleet automatically fails, but no one subsequently forced the individual nations/planets of the Federation to go their completely separate ways— that sounds exactly like internal decay, albeit probably much faster than they were decaying before. And if they were overwhelmed by raiders or Romulans, that would be external conflict.
Jesus Christ, that was bad. Just terrible. It’s gotten to the point that I wonder if Alex Kurtzman actually hates Star Trek and he’s trolling us. Everything that as bad about S1 and S2 was amped up.
Michael Burnham sucks. She just does. How many times did she well up in this episode? Five? I don’t want to see ST characters cry, I want to see them deal with scientific and ethical conundrums, and solve them intelligently. Oh, and ST should be an ensemble show. This is the Michael Burnham Hour and she’s not a compelling character.
Michael Burnham is also a murderer, by the way. She and Book just straight up murdered a bunch of people who were, as near as I can tell, mostly involved in enforcing the law. She belongs in prison.
Stop fucking crying! Oh I said that already. Alright, the fight between Burnham and Book was stupid. This isn’t “Enter The Dragon.” That fight served no purpose, but the nitwits who wrote this thin a TV show has to have fights to be interesting. You know what would have been better? More smart dialogue.
“The Burn” is the dumbest idea ever. You know a better way to have the Federation collapse after 800 years? Have it collapse because it was EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS! Or have it divvied up into smaller states or something.
The future appears to be a dystopia. Oh my God that is soooo boring. Dystopia is overdone like a well done steak.
Uzi made a much of good little points about logical holes. Why aren’t they contacting those two Federation ships in range? Why is Burnham standing there weeping and looking all I’M ACTING NOW and not like “Two ships? Alright, what’s this one? USS Asshole? Call 'em up!” And if there are Federation ships in that sector why is the guy always alone?
The scene with buddy and his Federation flag might possibly have worked at the end of a season, when a lot has happened, and we’ve grown to know and like his character. Let the actor subtly demonstrate his longing to belong to something and his devotion to a seemingly lost cause, and we learn more about him and start to care about him, and THEN he gets commissioned.
Instead all this happens in two minutes. There’s a rush of exposition and all of a sudden everyone is ACTING and it’s EMOTIONAL!!!1! It’s just so hack.
Actually, I thought it was an overall improvement—hokey space-west stuff notwithstanding. Struggling for a reassertion of Federation values, even over their own internal distress. Going out to help others because it’s the right thing to do. In fact, I distinctly thought that this could be a halfway decent show without a focus on all Michael, all the time.
That is, until the ‘enemy vessel’ approached while they were struggling to get out of the ice. My first thought was, that better not be Michael coming in to save all of them at the last second, because god forbid anybody else on this show actually shows some agency, and manages to help themselves without her having to intervene.
I’m really looking forward to next week, when we get to learn of all the terrible sacrifices Michael had to endure to save her poor friends.
Why were they in a saloon, one that even had swinging doors? Well, it was just a theme, I guess. The sci fi/Western thing worked for The Mandalorian.
This episode was not worst then the first; it was better, not that that is high praise Episode 1 was a 1/10; this was a 4/10. It had at least some elements of a good episode of Star Trek, most notably that it was an ensemble cast approach, featuring some of the actual tolerable cast members, rather than the Michael Burnham Show. Of COURSE Burnham shows up and the end and of COURSE she’s welling up with tears. Jesus Fuck.
I get what they were trying to do in the Icy Saloon, but a lot about that made no sense either. I don’t understand how the bad guy was so easily bullying these people, and why they couldn’t just vaporize him the moment the big idiot walked in without having drawn his weapon; they did a poor job explaining what the guy’s leverage was. The episode also suffered from a severe excess of Phillipa Georgiou (sp?) who is just an awful, awful character. The really good Star Trek episodes didn’t require an evil bad guy to be a pointless part of the crew and I don’t know what this one does, either. At least Ash Tyler isn’t around anymore, thank Christ.
Anyone notice how many producers this show has? I counted; there are 20 credited producers. No wonder it’s a mess.
He’s their Courier. Only Couriers have dilithium and warp capability. The colony is obviously not close to self-sufficient. They need a Courier to transport the ore they mine, and bring them supplies. Couriers can apparently kill each other to take over routes, but if a planet kills a Courier, they presumably just get scratched off of the routes, and then they starve and die.
Of course, their post-scarcity tech like programmable matter seems to be working, so it’s not clear why they need trade, but that’s been a plot hole for the entire franchise since at least TOS, and certainly since TNG and explicit replicator technology.
Oh good, now they finally have their very own Wesley.
Other than that, not terribly much made sense in the episode. OK, I get an initial misunderstanding leading to hostilities between Wen’s people and Earth, but why would they afterwards go out of their way to appear non-human? And no matter how bad things are, they couldn’t whip up some form of communication device? I mean, it’s only Titan, we can communicate that far with present-day tech…
And Stamets was weirdly eager to divulge all their secrets to girl genius there. Sure, we’re trying to pretend we’ve been through 900 years the long way round, but I’m sure we can tell the person who started out with sabotaging our ship the whole truth, she seems trustworthy. Nevermind that Discovery appears to be the only ship with non-warp FTL capacity. Does the spore drive need dilithium? I seem to remember there being a line about the warp core being ‘powered down’ when they went on shroom power. And nevermind, again, that the Romulans were perfectly well able to get around at warp speed without dilithium…
And why does this series keep thinking that you create emotional scenes by playing sappy music and having everyone talk with a quivering lip, staring at each other really, really intensely? Seriously, half the time I feel like the show’s just trying to play off some emotional connection between (and to) the characters it’s never actually bothered to establish.
(ETA: So, am I the only one who didn’t know there’s a real mycologist named Paul Stamets?)
