I intended it metaphorically, like in “grizzled veteran” - IIRC he was only a little greying. Replace with “Experienced and slightly world-weary” and that’s the sense I meant.
I’m not defending his characterization (not agreeing, either), just disputing that PM characters aren’t describable.
I do think Qui-Gon suffered from only being in 1 movie. He also seemed to be someone who was pretty stubborn - saying I don’t care what you say Jedi Council, I’m going to train this kid anyways (bad idea! but maybe he would have done a far better job than Obi-Wan?). I don’t think Obi-Wan, were he a Jedi Master at the time would have gone against the Council in such a way.
Arguably homophobic, though.
…unless you consider “Prissy Englishman” to be a race, that is.
can we get the bad star wars discussion out of the bad star trek discussion???
Oh, training they forbid
Because Yoda sensed in him much fear
And Qui-Gon said, “Now listen here
Just stick it in your pointy ear
I still will teach this boy”
You mean this isn’t about Star Twars?
Is it just me, or is episode 4 one of the worst written ones of the entire series?
I stopped watching last season, when they managed to make even the Evil Universe Burnham a whiny brat with mother issues. It boggles my mind that they’ve managed to get even worse.
It was very, very bad.
We have three stories here; Story B, Tilly’s trip with the cadets, wasn’t awful. This was a good, solid little Star Trek story; a bunch of people need to figure a way out of a sticky situation. It’s marred by far too much overt “let’s talk feeling” nonsense; there’s no problem learning what these people are all about but as always the ST:D writers don’t seem to know how to write DIALOGUE, where you find out about these things organically, as opposed to having the story just stop dead while everyone stands or sits and says “Let’s talk about how I feel.” But they were presented with a problem and solved it.
The A story, about NiVar joining the UFP, was just awful. Absolutely terrible even by Discovery standards. The Nivar objection never really made a lot of sense, Saru does not actually do anything or find anything out but later is profusely thanked for his help - here it felt like different scenes were written by different people and they forgot to have him achieve something - and of COURSE Space Jesus not only comes up with the solution, but the solution she proposes is literally herself, and the idea of an officer of the Federation military being a neutral party is so stupid I don’t even know where to start.
The C story with Book and Dr. Whatshisname in therapy was too boring to even discuss.
Someone should have called in Retief…
Saru’s job here was to make the Federation president ‘think’ that the Nivar side was discussing things.
And… that’s it? My goodness.
It would have been so cool if he’d actually done something, but all credit must go to Space Jesus.
Maybe I’m just slow, but I only now realized that there’s a larger idea at play here, and it’s not even a bad one, and that makes me angry, because it’s just so marred by Michael the great, by hollow pretend-emotionality, and by wafer-thin characterization. That idea is that Discovery acts as a bridge to a more optimistic past, in a jaded, post-ruin present, and as such, might help ignite the hope for the future that’s what Star Trek (or in-universe, the Federation) has always been about. With a capable execution, this could carry the series even given its many ludicrous and poorly-justified aspects, help cut past the current self-aware cynicism where each shred of optimism is just derided as naivety; but as it is, it just serves to highlight the shortcomings of this sort of ‘better angels of our nature’-attitude by bundling it up with a savior-by-fiat type of figurehead, thus making it seem exactly as empty as its detractors have always held it to be. And that’s a tragedy.
Have you ever seen Andromeda, the 1990s syndicated series with Kevin Sorbo? It was ostensibly based on notes left by Gene Roddenberry, and (in the first season and a half or so under the original show runner), this is pretty much exactly what it was about (with “the High Guard” and “the Systems Commonwealth” being barely-veiled stand-ins for Starfleet and the Federation).
Partially. And while it’s a similar setup, I think doing this within a (more overt) Star Trek setting might’ve packed some additional punch—not just recapturing a sense of optimism about the future, but also returning Star Trek to its optimistic roots. I think we’re in need of some sort of hopeful narrative—not the naive techno-soteriology of days past, but a sort of respite of the doom-and-gloom mostly on offer these days. Something that posits that while yes, there are grave, and potentially devastating, obstacles in front of us, it still makes sense to have hope for the future, because everything else just leads to fatalism, and makes for self-fulfilling prophecy. Doing nothing out of despair isn’t any better than doing nothing out of denial. But that’s a whole other rant…
The plots this season at least feel more Star Trek but the melodrama is just layered on way too thick. Not every emotion has to be turned up to 11.
Dealing with some kind of space time weirdness is very Star Trek and I did like the Tilly-and-cadets side story, but the space oddity thing is being dragged on now; it’s the kind of story that could have been told in one episode, two at the most. That’s why there’s so much filler; there isn’t enough plot.
I have little confidence they can stick the landing. In Season 2 we started with the “Seven signals” thing and they only got around to four of them and forgot there were seven, and in the last few episodes had clearly missed critical points and forgotten to explain setups they’d established earlier in that season.
like how the person that sent the signals only knew when/where to send them after they had been investigated?
Or how the season’s big bad suddenly became this computer that someone built for some reason that turned evil for some reason and was somehow going to destroy all life in the galaxy, for some reason.