We are still waiting for an explanation as to why Starfleet abandoned Earth and set up camp in a secret deep space fortress.
We will never get one.
I thought we got one, when Discovery visited Earth. I thought the Earth militia officer said that after the Burn, Starfleet Headquarters and the remnants of the fleet attracted constant attacks by raiders, so it was more of a liability than an asset to Earth, and so Starfleet left by mutual agreement. Presumably, anywhere they went, they’d attract such attacks, so they hid, rather than expose any planet to the danger their presence brings. Or am I misremembering that?
On the other hand, it was never clear to me why Starfleet’s presence was such a danger magnet. The implication was maybe supposed to be that Starfleet still had some dilithium reserves, or raiders thought they did? Maybe?
I liked the tribute to Anton Yelchin (new-Chekhov) with the USS Yelchin.
When Burnham questions her role on Discovery, was I the only way thinking, fine, why don’t you run away with Book into the unknown, having all kinds of wild and heroic adventures I never hear anything at all about?
I don’t recall that, but I saw the raiders, and I saw Starfleet’s capabilities, and, I mean, no. That doesn’t match up with anything else we’ve seen - Starfleet is kickass, the raiders were a motley bunch, and Earth was still being harassed by them. I don’t even want to get into the idiocy of the idea that Earth couldn’t communicate with Titan, a moon of Jupiter we can communicate with TODAY.
Look, other Star Trek series were not hard sci-fi. They weren’t “The Martian.” But an effort was made to make sure that an episode was at least consistent within itself and well-written enough that you weren’t yanked out in Minute 26 thinking “Wait, what did she just say? Why did he do that? What the fuck? That makes no sense.”
ST: Discovery is NOT well-written. But the implication, from what I recall, seemed to be that in the aftermath of the Burn, raiders from all over were coming to Earth to attack Starfleet, and Earth was under constant attack, so Starfleet left and Earth created a planetary defense shield. We know some dilithium survived the Burn (like the dilithium the Couriers use), so I thought the implication was that most of the remaining non-Starfleet warp-capable ships in the quadrant basically went pirate, and were constantly trying to raid Starfleet to replenish their own dilithium supplies.
After Starfleet left, ragtag raiders still occasionally showed up, which the Earth militia assumed were just more alien pirates, but which turned out to be from the human colony on Titan that everyone had apparently just forgotten about.
Again, the whole thing is dumb, and it’s both poorly plotted and largely unexplained in dialogue, but I think that was the explanation, such as it was.
I am this close to stop watching this show.
This last episode was the worst imo.
The plot sucks, the main character sucks, the only decent thing going on for this show is the space shots. Top notch imo.
I will keep watching it because my wife and I enjoy hating it together, but yes, the last episode was a new nadir. It was almost stupendously bad.
When the cloaked figure appeared onthe transporter pad I immediately said “You have got to be fucking kidding me, it’s her Mom.” And it was. And of course her mother had been accepted into the same gang of sword-wielding Romulan murderers we saw in “Picard” because God forbid there be more than a few dozen characters in this show, or that everything not somehow be connected to Michael C. Burnham (the C stands for Christ.)
Of particularly stupefying idiocy were
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The big ol’ “scientific inquiry” thing became an inquiry into - SURPRISE!!!1! - Michael Burnham’s emotions. Of course it fucking did.
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And of course Michael Burnham’s emotional speech got her the MacGuffin, as opposed to, ya know, logic and science. And of course Michael Burnham’s mere presence caused a rift between the Vulcans and Romulans, and caused their leader to commit an act of espionage against her own people for Michael “God’s Last Prophet” Burnham.
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But that said, the dumbest part was Tilley being made first officer. That simply doesn’t make any sense. Nothing about it made sense. It makes no sense in terms of character (Tilley seems like a hard working young officer but no more so than lots of other people) or plot (we have never been given any story-based reason to think this was coming, or made sense in the moment) or the internal logic of a military organization or, for that matter, the dozen or more OTHER characters in this military organization who’ve been working for this sort of thing their whole careers and were just passed over for no observable reason at all, and should logically have been quite insulted.
Early on in the first season, Tilly made the bold pronouncement that one day she would be a captain. And then in the 2nd season she joined a command training program thing, for a while anyway. Plus, in the mirror universe she’s Captain Killy. So this isn’t something completely out of the blue in terms of her character development.
I mean, on the face of it is it dumb? Yes.
Did they do it just to torture us with that group hug shot of the bridge crew? Yes.
But I think it’s fair to say that the narrative groundwork for Tilly to take a bigger hand in the action had already been laid.
Tilly being made acting XO is perhaps the least silliest part of the show.
At least in TOS the position of First Officer wasn’t set in stone, it was given to the one of the qualified line officers, presumably the usually senior most one, but not necessarily and its in addition to their regular duties. Spock was Science Officer of the Enterprise throughout the series and did not start getting referred to as the First Officer until I think late season 1 (around the time he gets promoted to full Commander). And its possible that at that time the rule was that you had to be command qualified to get the role and command path was something not everyone was placed on. So its perfectly within the realm of possibility that since Discovery, which is a science vessel not a capital ship onlt a handful are command qualified.
(In the 24th century during TNG time the position of the First officer was a separate one and it was whatever was the Starfleet personnel bureau who sent them, Riker was sent by them to be the First officer, it wasn’t Picard’s choice and Riker’s replacement was also so sent).
That said, if everyone besides Saru, the Emperess, Culber, and the cute chick who used to be Ariam died the show would not lose anything at all.
3 seasons and as a watcher you have no particular attachment to most of the bridge crew. There is a black lady who sits next to Detmer. A black guy who has some role no one has yet managed to explain and an oriental dude who is just…there. And a bug faced comic relief alien called Linus. Its like they went through a checklist during production meet (gay, check, blacks… both genders, check, check, Asian, check, a cyborg…of course, and lets get an obvious alien. Now get them some good stories…nah this is enough that sounds like too much work
The best and most memorable characters were Lorca, Pike, Spock and his parents, all of whom were guest stars, and that’s not a good thing when your guests are more memorable than most of your regular cast.
It’s not as good stories are that difficult, Culber was basically the gay doctor who was the gay scientist/engineers lost love. Until this season when he suddenly starts doing actual doctor stuff and is the focus in one episode. Now you actually care about him.
Stamets, well Antony Rapp is a fine actor who like Robert Beltran on the later seasons of Voyager has basically given up and is phoning it in now.
Only in terms of what characters have said, not what characters have done. Tilly has never shown any actual command or leadership ability at any point in the show. Like Michael, everyone says how awesome she is, and yet she never does anything awesome.
Michael is awesome, she has done her job well. Sometime in the 2390’s a changling travelled back in time to the 2240’s and replaced Michael Burnham. Its job was to destroy the Federation from within a century and bit before the ass kicking that was the Dominion War.
She has started a war with the Klingons, made the Feds forget about a rapid travel technology and taken the only prototype into the far future and made them lose pricless reams of data which might come in useful.
Telling you she has done an excellent job.
Its the only thing that makes sense.
You may be on to something.
Burnham and Co are as removed from their time as we are from the 11th century. Its about the difference between us and William the Conquerer and the Battle of Hastings.
If Bill the Bastard showed up in the modern UK, just how effective would he be? Now the UK has had its own version of the “Burn”, ie Brexit ( 
). Could he solve Brexit in a few days?
His weapons would be laughably archaic. Sure an 11th century sword can do some serious damage if you aren’t expecting it but after the first five minutes when you get over your surprise it should be easily handalable.
If Billy and his guards show up, and offer their services to England sorry the UK , well Her Majesty 's armed forces may be suffering from cuts these days, but what exactly are they going to do with them.? Weapons, logistics, organisation and hell the very idea of how war is prosecuted is very very different from 1066. They can’t just “upgrade” their existing weapons and vehicles like they have on Discovery.
What Discovery has done is the equivalent of trying to put internal combustion engines on the Bastards’ carts and wagons, giving his archers radio and radar support and giving the swordsmen NVDs. It wouldn’t work and its laughable. What they would do, if they were really that hard up for men, would be to order them to surrender their weapons to a museum and retrain them in modern ones.
Yesterdays Enterprise when the alternate universe Enterprise D saw the Enterprise C, they were skeptical it would be useful since it lacked modern systems and the jump forward was about 25 years.
I’ve read that in World War I, aircraft development went so fast that a new model could be dominant when first deployed, useful for a few months after, and vastly inferior a few months after that.
Will it come as any surprise when the “Burn” is named by Mom (or someone else) sending out a message to Burnham that got messed up? Probably she had found out the Burn was coming and attempted to warn Burnham, but the message is incomplete.
fixed quote tags, WE?
The cause of the burn will be due to the red angel’s trip thru time, and the only fix will be to go back and stop herself from the trip - which will cause a temporal paradox that even Q can’t quite fathom
I never considered this as a possibility and now I hate you.
Well every time I think ST: Discovery couldn’t get any worse, it does.
Emphatically asking alien locust to leave.
Instead of new information on the Burn we get a song and nothing else.
Even the Orion slave girls are middle aged.
And fully clothed.
Lower Decks beat them to “trying to come up with a good catch phrase”.
reading this thread, I agree. It sounds really sad what has become of this great franchise.*
The factt that this show has like a 70% positive on Rotton Tomtoes does make me weep for the younger generation.
*starting with Voyager…