Star Trek: Discovery

[JB0]

In the Star Trek universe, facial hair is an almost 100%-reliable indicator that you are evil. Exceptions include Captain Sisko, and possibly Commander Riker.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, SMS007 said:

Is that not an unnecessary limit on Vulcan culture? Consider if aliens visited a real life U.S. military base. Would it not be disappointingly unimaginative of them to assume that all persons on the base are representative of what U.S. military personnel look like during long term field missions? Or leave? Or while experiencing personal crises? Or that military standards are universal across Earth?

This would be a compelling argument if we were talking about most any alien-of-the-week from Star Trek, but we're talking about the Vulcans. 

We've seen a pretty good cross section of Vulcan society over the years... from their pre-Federation military troops and Starfleet officers to various stripes of civilians like teachers, scientists, diplomats, politicians, religious officials, housewives, children, random civilians, some political and religious dissidents, and even a serial killer and a gun-running terrorist.  The only times we've seen an even slightly unkempt Vulcan was the Vulcans who'd been living rough in the desert for religious reasons like Sybok, Syran, or T'Pau... and only Sybok eschewed typical razor-straight Vulcan hair.

(Vulcan grooming standards are heavily lampshaded by comic relief Vulcans like T'Vau or T'Ryssa, whose messy personal grooming is acknowledged as a rather distinctly un-Vulcan thing.)

 

 

2 hours ago, JB0 said:

In the Star Trek universe, facial hair is an almost 100%-reliable indicator that you are evil. Exceptions include Captain Sisko, and possibly Commander Riker.

A specific type of facial hair... the Mirror Universe goatee.

Disco Spock is rocking a full Riker.

[Chronocidal]

Maybe they've just gone fully trope-aware, and are trying to invoke growing the beard for Discovery?  

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

Maybe they've just gone fully trope-aware, and are trying to invoke growing the beard for Discovery?  

Considering the press coverage for Discovery's second season has focused pretty heavily on how CBS is trying to appeal to the many Trekkies who were put off by the show's first season, it wouldn't come as much of a surprise.

(I'm mildly amused that CBS appears to be choking down a slice of humble pie WRT their, and Jason Isaacs, boasting about not needing Trekkies in the audience.)

[Dynaman]

Perhaps they should call the channel "CBS: All Star Trek"?

 

http://www.startrek.com/article/new-trek-animated-series-announced

[Seto Kaiba]

43 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Perhaps they should call the channel "CBS: All Star Trek"?

 

http://www.startrek.com/article/new-trek-animated-series-announced

It's going to be a Star Trek comedy... I guess I got my sadistic wish that they'd do a Star Trek version of Red Dwarf.

[UN Spacy]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, UN Spacy said:

 

Well, we'll see if they can salvage this one of if this attempted return to form is Enterprise Season 4 Mk.II.

[Seto Kaiba]

It looks like Star Trek: Discovery season one has hit at least one non-CBS streaming service finally... Google Play Movies has the first season now.

[Nightbat]

 

[TehPW]

I suppose I should not be surprised how suppressed this lawsuit is...

[Seto Kaiba]

I thought they settled this one a while back?

[Sandman]

19 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I thought they settled this one a while back?

Nope.

[JB0]

Last I heard, Paramount was still insisting every aspect of Discovery was a unique creation and that it is sheer coincidence that they happen to have developed giant blue psychic FTL tardigrades just like a video game.

...

And somehow, they genuinely expect people to BELIEVE that "giant blue psychic FTL tardigrades" is something that accidentally collides.  (Or more likely, they expect their legal team to be able to bury any accusation of wrongdoing and are still trying to figure out what to do when the guy didn't back down)

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

Last I heard, Paramount was still insisting every aspect of Discovery was a unique creation and that it is sheer coincidence that they happen to have developed giant blue psychic FTL tardigrades just like a video game.

That kind of utterly insane coincidence does happen occasionally.

One of the best examples of that is Dennis the Menace.  Hank Ketcham and David Law, the former in the US and the latter in the UK, had had no contact with each other and no way to be aware of each other's work yet they both launched a new comic titled Dennis the Menace with very similar concepts and characters on exactly the same day (March 12) in 1951.  The courts had a field day trying to figure out who should own the rights to the name, and it eventually ended with them agreeing that they'd both change names in the other's home turf.

 

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

And somehow, they genuinely expect people to BELIEVE that "giant blue psychic FTL tardigrades" is something that accidentally collides.  (Or more likely, they expect their legal team to be able to bury any accusation of wrongdoing and are still trying to figure out what to do when the guy didn't back down)

Maybe they're counting on the sheer inanity of Discovery's first season to put the judge and jury to sleep if it ever goes to trial?

(Part of me wants to see this revealed to be an actual coincidence, just to see the courts tie themselves in knots trying to figure out what to do with it.)

 

Since Discovery's first season is out on Google Play, we started rewatching it out here the other day after I threw it in the Family Library so my parents (lifelong Trekkies themselves) could have a go at it.  I was rather amused that my parents immediately complained about how confrontational everyone on Discovery is.  My mom even flat out called the series "not Star Trek" after just two episodes.

My girlfriend fielded a rather interesting theory after we finished "The Vulcan Hello".  She posited that Michael Burnham's sudden change of personality from a relaxed, thoroughly well disciplined officer who implicitly trusted her captain to a hysterically paranoid martinet wasn't psychological.  She theorized that Burnham was/is suffering from transporter psychosis or some similar ailment caused (or exacerbated) by the Shenzhou's obsolete transporter and/or the repairs to her radiation-damaged DNA that she stopped partway.  She starts to have a number of vivid daydream-like flashbacks and at least one vision that visibly disorient and distract her, she repeatedly becomes hysterical, and begins to behave in a paranoid manner.  Paranoia, psychogenic hysteria, and somatic, tactile, and visual hallucinations are all symptoms of transporter psychosis.  She also seems to have trouble sleeping later in the series, which is also a symptom.  (The series conveniently takes place almost exactly equidistant on the timeline between the first diagnosis of transporter psychosis and the elimination of the condition's root cause.)

IMO, she made a compelling case for Burnham's mutiny and subsequent behavior being the result of undiagnosed mental illness rather than bad writing.

[Mommar]

The Trekyards guys are hyper-analyzing the background ortho's of the Enterprise from Season 2 that look an awful lot more like the TOS Enterprise.

 

 

[Mazinger]

Just watched this.  I thought it was actually pretty good.  Directed by Rainn Wilson himself "SHORT TREKS: THE ESCAPE ARTIST":
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/star_trek_discovery/videos/11310175?

The full episode is available on daily motion.  Enjoy.

[UN Spacy]

Just three days from Season 2 and another new Star Trek show has been green lit for CBS All Access.

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, UN Spacy said:

Just three days from Season 2 and another new Star Trek show has been green lit for CBS All Access.

 

 

Hard pass.  Between Jar-Jar Abrams's trio of cinematic crimes and Discovery's first season, I am 200% done with this attempt to reimagine Star Trek as a playground for protofascist characters.

[Magnus]

13 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hard pass.  Between Jar-Jar Abrams's trio of cinematic crimes and Discovery's first season, I am 200% done with this attempt to reimagine Star Trek as a playground for protofascist characters.

Who was asking for this?  Who wants to watch a psychotic, megalomaniacal murderer flounce around the galaxy?  And I still don't understand how she got such an easy pass from Burnham et al. while Lorca was condemned as a literal Hitler before being stabbed and vaporized.

[Mazinger]

10 minutes ago, Magnus said:

Who was asking for this?  Who wants to watch a psychotic, megalomaniacal murderer flounce around the galaxy?  And I still don't understand how she got such an easy pass from Burnham et al. while Lorca was condemned as a literal Hitler before being stabbed and vaporized.

Well to be honest, Michelle Yeoh is much more attractive than Lorca's actor.

Now as for the high ideals of Star Trek, I think I'm gonna start watching the Orville with my nephew.  Something tells me that is the most Trek show on TV right now.

[kajnrig]

53 minutes ago, Magnus said:

Who was asking for this?  Who wants to watch a psychotic, megalomaniacal murderer flounce around the galaxy?  And I still don't understand how she got such an easy pass from Burnham et al. while Lorca was condemned as a literal Hitler before being stabbed and vaporized.

41 minutes ago, Mazinger said:

Well to be honest, Michelle Yeoh is much more attractive than Lorca's actor.

Damn, beat me to it.

More Michelle Yeoh is always welcome Michelle Yeoh. I will never complain.

[JB0]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hard pass.  Between Jar-Jar Abrams's trio of cinematic crimes

Duo. Star Trek Beyond wasn't an Abrams film.

 

1 hour ago, Mazinger said:

Now as for the high ideals of Star Trek, I think I'm gonna start watching the Orville with my nephew.  Something tells me that is the most Trek show on TV right now. 

You're not wrong. It is the most Trek that Trek has been since Next Generation ended.

Unfortunately, I absolutely cannot stand Seth MacFarlane's sense of humor, and it brings the entire thing crashing down around me. Every time I've seen Orville, I get into what appears to be a show that can stand with the best Star Trek has to offer... and then someone tries to be funny.

[Seto Kaiba]

13 hours ago, Magnus said:

Who was asking for this?  Who wants to watch a psychotic, megalomaniacal murderer flounce around the galaxy? 

The producers, apparently... what producer could possibly pass on Springtime for Space Hitler?  (Max Bialystock, call your agent.)

On one level, I can understand why the edgelord-infested creative staff that shat Star Trek: Discovery's first season into existence would think a Section 31 series would have a lot of potential.  When it appeared in Deep Space Nine, Section 31 was basically the ultimate expression of Star Trek fanwank.  The Federation having a hyper-competent intelligence and covert operations agency that answers to nobody and protects the interests of the Federation James Bond-style while somehow also remaining so top secret that even the galaxy's finest intelligence services have no idea it exists is the stuff of terrible fan fiction.  It sounded like a cool idea for exactly ONE episode, then it started to get silly.  By the end of DS9, the only way for Bashir to pull a win out of a Section 31 episode was for Sloan to inexplicably grab an idiot ball so massive light cannot escape its surface because Section 31 is the organizational equivalent of a Mary Sue.

Star Trek: Enterprise did a pretty good job taking the piss out of Section 31 in Season 4 though, with Reed's handler ending up getting the short end of the stick from a deal with a Klingon general who was denser than a sack of hammers.

Spoiler

(This is, of course, nowhere near as silly as Star Trek: Into Darkness's Section 31... who somehow manage to erect a colossal shipyard and build the largest and most advanced starship of the era in total secrecy despite security so poor literally any idiot could just wander in and the moron in charge keeping a model of his top secret warship on his desk in an office open to the public.)

They really should take a clue from the Star Trek relaunch novel-verse.  Section 31 stories are a BAD IDEA in general.  They're basically James Bond fanfics written in the Star Trek setting, and the stories almost always involve pants-on-head idiocy at every level in order for the plot to function at all.  They were bad enough when it was Julian Bashir who was being asked to play super-spy, and in rare moments of self-awareness on the part of the writers he seemed to occasionally realize how incredibly narmy it all was.  Like when they sent him to the Gamma Quadrant to stop a rogue augment who absolutely isn't Francisco Scaramanga how dare you suggest such a thing from creating an army of genetically reengineered Jem'Hadar.  It all culminated in an incredibly stupid plotline where Section 31 was revealed to be run by a pre-Federation surveillance AI that somehow runs on all the technology in the Federation and its allies without ever being detected.

Can you imagine how much worse it'll be when the main character in a ridiculous spy story is not only a fantastic racist, but someone categorically incapable of subtlety?  What the hell use does an organization that covertly protects the Federation have for someone who has ZERO investment in the Federation?  She's less Elim Garak and more Leeroy Jenkins.  It's kind of a final F*** YOU to Star Trek fans, having a series about the evil mirror universe version of the only character in Discovery who actually acted like they were in Star Trek.

 

Quote

And I still don't understand how she got such an easy pass from Burnham et al. while Lorca was condemned as a literal Hitler before being stabbed and vaporized.

Burnham's Starfleet-issue moral compass is badly defective and spends most of its time wildly spinning at a pace that would shame most particle accelerators. 

If she wasn't so bad at the follow-through, she'd have a chronic backstabbing disorder.  TBH my reaction to seeing Burnham get a pardon, have her sentence expunged, and give a speech about sticking to principles was to be downright offended.  On my recent rewatch of the series, I was sitting on my sofa thinking "First of all, how dare you.  Second, HOW DARE YOU?" when she started going on about how important it was to stick to Starfleet's lofty principles.  I honestly consider her to be a Villain Protagonist.  She's basically Captain Benjamin Maxwell from TNG, recast as a woman.  A paranoid psychopath who uses her xenophobia as an excuse to chuck the rulebook at the earliest opportunity.  It says a lot that they had to not only go to the Mirror Universe, but jack the Mirror Universe's evil quotient up, to make her look like less of a shitty person and even then all it achieved was to give her a Heel Realization when she fit in a little TOO well.

That said, Mirror Georgeau seems to have gotten a pass from Burnham because each had fond memories of the other's alternate self.  This is, of course, just one example of how the hilarious inconsistency of Burnham's moral compass is consistent in one regard only: she's an absolutely TERRIBLE judge of character.  If Pike had an ounce of sense, he'd flush her out the nearest airlock or at least confine her to the brig for the entirety of his tenure in charge of the Discovery.  (I'll be absolutely livid if Pike doesn't mistrust her intensely after all the bullsh*t she's pulled.)

 

As for Lorca, even though he wasn't really any worse than Mirror Georgeau he ran afoul of some of the most unsubtle socio-political commentary in Star Trek history.  He isn't Hitler, he's someone a lot more recent and a good deal more orange.  Killing him off so unceremoniously after all that bluster was pretty much a "take that!" aimed at you-know-who.

 

 

11 hours ago, JB0 said:

Duo. Star Trek Beyond wasn't an Abrams film.

Meh... Star Trek: Beyond might not have been directed by Jar-Jar Abrams, but it's built on his sad attempt to turn Star Trek into a fascist bad future full of military adventurism and xenophobia.  It tries, halfheartedly, to rebuke its predecessors but ultimately fails because it's made in their image.  His grubby fingerprints are all over it.

You have no idea how relieved I was to see that Paramount pulled the plug on the Kelvin timeline's fourth movie.  Good riddance.

Edited January 15, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[Bolt]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

He isn't Hitler, he's someone a lot more recent and a good deal more orange.  Killing him off so unceremoniously after all that bluster was pretty much a "take that!" aimed at you-know-who.

Orange is the new Voldemort..

I enjoyed the first Jar Jar Kelvin , a bit simple but the rest just fell off the map for me.. and onto the floor.

[UN Spacy]

Thread for Section 31: 

 

[Dynaman]

I said it before and I'll say it again.  CBS All Access should be called CBS All Star Trek (or something with that name at any rate)

[Chronocidal]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If she wasn't so bad at the follow-through, she'd have a chronic backstabbing disorder.  TBH my reaction to seeing Burnham get a pardon, have her sentence expunged, and give a speech about sticking to principles was to be downright offended.  On my recent rewatch of the series, I was sitting on my sofa thinking "First of all, how dare you.  Second, HOW DARE YOU?" when she started going on about how important it was to stick to Starfleet's lofty principles.  I honestly consider her to be a Villain Protagonist.

To make an out-of-universe comparison here, this was the exact same way I felt about Poe in TLJ, just not so much a villain as a universe-breakingly talented schmuck.  Yeah, mister "I was just demoted for disobeying orders and getting the majority of our fleet vaporized, so I'm going to start a secret mutiny, and put a secret plan in motion to rescue us that'll result in 90% of the Resistance dying in defenseless escape pods, and in the last 5 minutes of the movie I'm going to have a dramatic realization about how important it is to follow the chain of command, and that'll make it all better."  

One can only hope that after these sorts of characters die, all that built up karma follows them around like Jacob Marley trying to drag a Dyson Sphere behind him.

Edited January 15, 2019 by Chronocidal

[JB0]

5 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I said it before and I'll say it again.  CBS All Access should be called CBS All Star Trek (or something with that name at any rate)

CBS: The Final Frontier.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

One can only hope that after these sorts of characters die, all that built up karma follows them around like Jacob Marley trying to drag a Dyson Sphere behind him.

One can only hope.  Starfleet has produced some real moral mutants over the years, but nothing that compares to Burnham.

Mark Jameson, Erik Pressman, Benjamin Maxwell, Michael Eddington, and Thomas Riker all had fairly well-considered reasons for doing the things they did.  Jameson took the only available way out of a hostage negotiation and tried to salvage and re-balance the situation by arming the opposition just as well as he had the hostage-takers.  Pressman was a man who saw a major and unaddressed strategic weakness that'd already cost the lives of innumerable Starfleet officers and civilians over the course of almost 200 years and sought to remedy it.  Maxwell may have been motivated by untreated (possibly undiagnosed) PTSD, but he was also bang-on correct that Cardassia was gearing up to attack the Federation's borders.  Eddington defected to the Maquis and organized the theft of industrial replicators in the name of protecting the colonist populations in the DMZ who'd effectively been abandoned by the Federation and forced to fend for themselves under the threat of attack by military-backed Cardassian hostiles in the DMZ.  Same deal for Thomas Riker.

Michael Burnham betrayed her principles seemingly on the spur of the moment because her captain refused to commit an act of unprovoked aggression (y'know, an act of war) based on nothing more than a secondhand anecdote about how the Vulcans used to do things under the Romulan-influenced leadership of the paranoid and xenophobic Vulcan High Command and the advice of an officer who was obviously emotionally compromised (and possibly mentally as well, considering she'd nearly died from having her DNA denatured by cosmic radiation some hours earlier, which can't be good for one's brain chemistry).

Even the Gabriel Lorca of the mirror universe seems like a saner and stabler individual until he's back in the mirror universe and is outed as mirror Lorca.

[BlackRose]

I feel a little cheated.  All that buildup at the end of season one and the Enterprise and TOS aesthetic are gone in the space of one episode in season two.  Now they're taking pointers from that awful Lost in Space movie.

[azrael]

I thought it was a good season premiere.

[UN Spacy]

MUCH better than last season's premiere.

Holy hell this episode looked like a movie as well. Gimme more of Mount and Tig Notaro...even the crew got time to shine.

Please gimme more of this Discovery.

 

 

[BlackRose]

13 hours ago, UN Spacy said:

MUCH better than last season's premiere.

Well yeah. That's setting the bar awfully low though isn't it?

The season two premiere is the 2nd episode of Disco to actually feel like Star Trek.  If they had started like I might actually not hate Burnham.

[azrael]

15 hours ago, UN Spacy said:

MUCH better than last season's premiere.

Holy hell this episode looked like a movie as well. Gimme more of Mount and Tig Notaro...even the crew got time to shine.

I'm taking a shine to Ms. Notaro's character. Discovery could use a good chief engineer.