Star Trek: Discovery

[Seto Kaiba]

20 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Detached warp nacelles, eh?

Yup... Star Trek: Discovery's creators are getting dragged pretty hard over how ridiculous that looks.

IMO, some of the complaining is unwarranted.  There's no hard and fast rule that says that warp coils have to be energized by plasma direct from the warp core.  As long as they've got some means of either getting plasma over there or sending energy to generate plasma over there there shouldn't actually be a reason why detached nacelles wouldn't work at warp speeds.

 

20 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

now they just need to detach the antimatter magnetic shielding couplings... and we're good to go.

Funnily enough, the crew actually tried that back in season two... it failed due to interference from the AI protecting the sphere data.

 

 

9 hours ago, Thom said:

As for the Short Treks, I view most of them as the show's own fiction. Like Calypso, I view it as them telling a sci-fi story just using the Discovery set for convenience. We know it can't happen now because of the refit and they are in an entirely different century than the one it was portrayed in. It was a good story though.

I'd like to dismiss it on those grounds too... but they've obviously building towards it in season three's story.

[pengbuzz]

  

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yup... Star Trek: Discovery's creators are getting dragged pretty hard over how ridiculous that looks.

IMO, some of the complaining is unwarranted.  There's no hard and fast rule that says that warp coils have to be energized by plasma direct from the warp core.  As long as they've got some means of either getting plasma over there or sending energy to generate plasma over there there shouldn't actually be a reason why detached nacelles wouldn't work at warp speeds.

While I understand (and largely agree), I can't help imagining the following scenario:

Saru: "Let's go to warp"

*warp engines take off without the rest of the ship*

Saru: "Well...that was rather unexpected..."

  

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Funnily enough, the crew actually tried that back in season two... it failed due to interference from the AI protecting the sphere data.

Well, I was envisioning the warp core vaporizing the ship... guess they were too, huh?

[Seto Kaiba]

Huh... so this is amusing.

Star Trek: Discovery season three's mid-season plot twist is that... we're going back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe plotline from season one?  And, like season two, the story arc's based on material plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse?  (In this case, Kirsten Beyer's Star Trek: Voyager novel A Pocket Full of Lies.)

The reason the Discovery's walking, talking, cliched and more-than-slightly-racist asian stereotype and massive karma houdini Emperor Phillipa Georgiou has been a bit out of sorts in the last few episodes is that she's dying.  Slowly and painfully.  The cause is nicked from A Pocket Full of Lies.  Because Georgiou is native to a different quantum reality, the matter her body is made of has a different quantum state than the universe she's living in.  If the difference in quantum states is small, like from traveling up and down the same timeline or from traveling between two similar quantum realities, it's no big deal.  Georgiou's screwed because she's from a thousand years in the past AND a different universe that had diverged a lot from the prime universe, so the matter that makes her up is being torn apart as it tries to reconcile that disparity... causing tissue breakdown and occasional bouts of intangibility.  The only person that Starfleet has record of experiencing something similar was an Betelgeusian 24th century Starfleet officer named Yor from an alternate reality 2379 who traveled up to the 32nd century because of the Temporal Cold War and was left in such agonized incapacity that he was granted euthanasia.  

So instead of The Burn we're switching gears to a story about offloading Georgiou back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe via a convenient portal that appears for... reasons.

[pengbuzz]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Huh... so this is amusing.

Star Trek: Discovery season three's mid-season plot twist is that... we're going back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe plotline from season one?  And, like season two, the story arc's based on material plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse?  (In this case, Kirsten Beyer's Star Trek: Voyager novel A Pocket Full of Lies.)

The reason the Discovery's walking, talking, cliched and more-than-slightly-racist asian stereotype and massive karma houdini Emperor Phillipa Georgiou has been a bit out of sorts in the last few episodes is that she's dying.  Slowly and painfully.  The cause is nicked from A Pocket Full of Lies.  Because Georgiou is native to a different quantum reality, the matter her body is made of has a different quantum state than the universe she's living in.  If the difference in quantum states is small, like from traveling up and down the same timeline or from traveling between two similar quantum realities, it's no big deal.  Georgiou's screwed because she's from a thousand years in the past AND a different universe that had diverged a lot from the prime universe, so the matter that makes her up is being torn apart as it tries to reconcile that disparity... causing tissue breakdown and occasional bouts of intangibility.  The only person that Starfleet has record of experiencing something similar was an Betelgeusian 24th century Starfleet officer named Yor from an alternate reality 2379 who traveled up to the 32nd century because of the Temporal Cold War and was left in such agonized incapacity that he was granted euthanasia.  

So instead of The Burn we're switching gears to a story about offloading Georgiou back to the 23rd century Mirror Universe via a convenient portal that appears for... reasons.

So we go from a galaxywide burn to a one-person burn?

I think the real burn is being foisted onto the fans at this rate...

[Thom]

Would much rather stick with the Burn or the Emerald Chain. Georgiou's problem should stay a minor plot-line in favor of the two bigger stories. This feels like filler, and certainly doesn't deserve to have a two-parter! And I was under the impression that the door merely sent her tripping through her memories, rather than across time and dimension, though convenient certainly.

I'm much more interested in the developing AI aboard Discovery though. And maybe them FINALLY GOING TO THE SPOT WHERE THE BURN STARTED seeing as that was the whole point, right?!

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

So we go from a galaxywide burn to a one-person burn?

Yup... and the last few episodes made the supermassive plot hole that Star Trek: Discovery's third season orbits a little bigger.

Do you remember how, early in Discovery's third season, it was (stupidly) claimed that the Federation tried and failed to develop a viable warp core design that didn't depend on using dilithium to moderate a matter/antimatter reaction?  How the writers conveniently forgot that the Romulan Star Empire had long since perfected a forced quantum singularity core for their warp drives when the Federation got its first good look at the D'deridex-class warbird in 2364?

Yeah... "Unification III" reveals that the Romulans had reunified with the Vulcans and were members of the Federation before the burn.

Not only did the 31st century Federation apparently forget that singularity cores were a thing along with all the other warp core alternatives we've seen over the years, the people who perfected the singularity core in the first place apparently did too.

"The Burn" has become an idiot ball so large light cannot escape its surface.

 

7 hours ago, Thom said:

Would much rather stick with the Burn or the Emerald Chain. Georgiou's problem should stay a minor plot-line in favor of the two bigger stories. This feels like filler, and certainly doesn't deserve to have a two-parter! And I was under the impression that the door merely sent her tripping through her memories, rather than across time and dimension, though convenient certainly.

I'm left to wonder if this is Michelle Yeoh's exit from Star Trek: Discovery.

It's pretty obvious that Michelle Yeoh stuck around for Star Trek: Discovery's second season because the showrunners promised her that she would get a spinoff series of her own in the near future.  There wasn't a lot for her to do besides make the occasional catty remark and have fight scenes in tight pants.  Now that Star Trek: Section 31 seems to have joined several other proposals on the reject pile, there's no reason for her to stay on the show as an increasingly irrelevant character.  ("Better to quit than be fired", I guess.)

 

7 hours ago, Thom said:

I'm much more interested in the developing AI aboard Discovery though. And maybe them FINALLY GOING TO THE SPOT WHERE THE BURN STARTED seeing as that was the whole point, right?!

I'm dreading it.  We've already seen that the developing AI is a going-nowhere plot and we know the explanation of "the Burn" is going to be dumb.

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yup... and the last few episodes made the supermassive plot hole that Star Trek: Discovery's third season orbits a little bigger.

Do you remember how, early in Discovery's third season, it was (stupidly) claimed that the Federation tried and failed to develop a viable warp core design that didn't depend on using dilithium to moderate a matter/antimatter reaction?  How the writers conveniently forgot that the Romulan Star Empire had long since perfected a forced quantum singularity core for their warp drives when the Federation got its first good look at the D'deridex-class warbird in 2364?

Yeah... "Unification III" reveals that the Romulans had reunified with the Vulcans and were members of the Federation before the burn.

Not only did the 31st century Federation apparently forget that singularity cores were a thing along with all the other warp core alternatives we've seen over the years, the people who perfected the singularity core in the first place apparently did too.

"The Burn" has become an idiot ball so large light cannot escape its surface.

 

I'm left to wonder if this is Michelle Yeoh's exit from Star Trek: Discovery.

It's pretty obvious that Michelle Yeoh stuck around for Star Trek: Discovery's second season because the showrunners promised her that she would get a spinoff series of her own in the near future.  There wasn't a lot for her to do besides make the occasional catty remark and have fight scenes in tight pants.  Now that Star Trek: Section 31 seems to have joined several other proposals on the reject pile, there's no reason for her to stay on the show as an increasingly irrelevant character.  ("Better to quit than be fired", I guess.)

 

I'm dreading it.  We've already seen that the developing AI is a going-nowhere plot and we know the explanation of "the Burn" is going to be dumb.

And apparently Strange New Worlds is on that pile as well; I've seen/ heard nothing concerning it since the supposed announcements.

The fans are the ones who are getting burned here, as I stated previously. Apparently, the showrunners are so in love with their failing/ failed concept that they can see nothing but that concept. At this rate, once they cancel DSC, they may as well leave Star Trek to lie fallow for a couple of decades or so.

[Thom]

Well, if Strange New Worlds doesn't come about, then I'd probably stop watching STD... Pike and Co were a big part of what made season 2 of Discovery so interesting.

Looked about and found this from 6 days ago. So, hopefully still moving along.

https://www.techradar.com/news/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-release-date-cast-and-what-we-know

Edited December 14, 2020 by Thom

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

And apparently Strange New Worlds is on that pile as well; I've seen/ heard nothing concerning it since the supposed announcements.

There hasn't been any substantial news about the (proposed) series since they announced it.

The most likely explanation is that ViacomCBS and Secret Hideout haven't been able to secure the necessary funding to start work on the series.

Even though Strange New Worlds would be reusing a lot of assets created for Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, the show's development and production costs are going to be significant.  Star Trek: Discovery's first season was supposed to cost between $6 million and $7 million per episode, but thanks to reshoots and irresponsible overspending by Secret Hideout it ended up costing $8.5 million per episode.  It looks like they coped with Netflix's reductions in their budget by making each successive season one episode shorter than the previous one.  (Season 1 had 15 episodes, Season 2 had 14, and Season 3 will have 13.)  If you assume Strange New Worlds will cost half as much to develop as Discovery and have a similar per-episode production cost, that's at least $235 million you have to source.  Since this is direct-to-streaming, that means finding a distribution partner willing to put up a significant sum for the streaming rights.  Netflix and Amazon aren't entirely happy with what they currently have, so they're not going to foot the bill.  Who does that leave?  Pretty much just YouTube.  Hulu was owned by 21st Century Fox and they're owned by Disney now.

 

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

The fans are the ones who are getting burned here, as I stated previously. Apparently, the showrunners are so in love with their failing/ failed concept that they can see nothing but that concept. At this rate, once they cancel DSC, they may as well leave Star Trek to lie fallow for a couple of decades or so.

I mean, yeah... if that big blowup on the normally tame official Star Trek subreddit is anything to go by, even the fans who liked Discovery are rapidly tiring of it.

I have to wonder how much actual faith the showrunners have in their concept these days.  Strange New Worlds was more or less an admission of defeat, trying to move the franchise back towards its traditional format in the hopes of recovering the fanbase the franchise had lost.  It's been indicated by Netflix that CBS is unwilling to let the series die because they're upside-down hundreds of millions of dollars on its development still after planning for a seven season run.

 

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Well, if Strange New Worlds doesn't come about, then I'd probably stop watching STD... Pike and Co were a big part of what made season 2 of Discovery so interesting.

Looked about and found this from 6 days ago. So, hopefully still moving along.

https://www.techradar.com/news/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-release-date-cast-and-what-we-know

It might've been posted six days ago, but there's really nothing new there.  It's the same stuff we've known since the project was first teased.

[Lexomatic]

On 12/12/2020 at 10:42 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

And, like season two, the story arc's based on material plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse?  (In this case, Kirsten Beyer's Star Trek: Voyager novel A Pocket Full of Lies.)

I'm not sure it's "plagiarized" -- Kirsten Beyer was executive story editor for season 2, and is a co-producer on season 3, so she may've freely tossed the idea into the pot in the writers room. Evidently the show wants us to believe one exists, since it's got a Twitter account. Warning: feed includes behind-the-scenes video of Grudge the Cat mugging for the camera.

(Whatever "co-producer" may entail in responsibility and authority -- there are 20 listed executive, co-executive, supervising, consulting, co-, and no-bloody-A-B-C-or-D producers -- see the official PGA credit guidelines for long-form TV. Huh, "consulting producer" isn't a PGA title. At least during the Berman era, you could trace bad decisions to one guy.)

Earlier this season, when we learned The Burn was due to exploding dilithium, at least one poster on TrekMovie.com speculated the idea had been borrowed from the TOS novel The Last Roundup (Christie Golden, 2002), to wit, the antagonists-du-jour had widely distributed a viral nanoprobe as a plot to inactivate dilithium and corner the market (see also: the James Bond movie Goldfinger), but didn't realize it would instead fracture lower-grade crystals, hence warp core breaches. That's still as-maybe, since we now know there was a center to The Burn, but we don't know what's hidden within the Verubin Nebula, apart from the Kelpien science vessel Khi'eth and a dilithium nursery.

[pengbuzz]

On 12/14/2020 at 2:54 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

There hasn't been any substantial news about the (proposed) series since they announced it.

The most likely explanation is that ViacomCBS and Secret Hideout haven't been able to secure the necessary funding to start work on the series.

Even though Strange New Worlds would be reusing a lot of assets created for Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, the show's development and production costs are going to be significant.  Star Trek: Discovery's first season was supposed to cost between $6 million and $7 million per episode, but thanks to reshoots and irresponsible overspending by Secret Hideout it ended up costing $8.5 million per episode.  It looks like they coped with Netflix's reductions in their budget by making each successive season one episode shorter than the previous one.  (Season 1 had 15 episodes, Season 2 had 14, and Season 3 will have 13.)  If you assume Strange New Worlds will cost half as much to develop as Discovery and have a similar per-episode production cost, that's at least $235 million you have to source.  Since this is direct-to-streaming, that means finding a distribution partner willing to put up a significant sum for the streaming rights.  Netflix and Amazon aren't entirely happy with what they currently have, so they're not going to foot the bill.  Who does that leave?  Pretty much just YouTube.  Hulu was owned by 21st Century Fox and they're owned by Disney now.

So Discovery's tanking has pretty much poised the well insofar as future funding for anything else? No surprise there.... Especially with money being short all around due to COVID taking a chunk out of films and whatnot, the studios' parent companies aren't willing to risk precious funds on yet another potential "sinking ship" if ViaCBS can't produce something with more coherency than the dumpster fire DSC remains.

 

On 12/14/2020 at 2:54 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

I mean, yeah... if that big blowup on the normally tame official Star Trek subreddit is anything to go by, even the fans who liked Discovery are rapidly tiring of it.

I have to wonder how much actual faith the showrunners have in their concept these days.  Strange New Worlds was more or less an admission of defeat, trying to move the franchise back towards its traditional format in the hopes of recovering the fanbase the franchise had lost.  It's been indicated by Netflix that CBS is unwilling to let the series die because they're upside-down hundreds of millions of dollars on its development still after planning for a seven season run.

Too bad they didn't thing of Strange New Worlds first, right? Then again, we may not have gotten the version that we all want now if that were the case...

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

So Discovery's tanking has pretty much poised the well insofar as future funding for anything else? No surprise there.... Especially with money being short all around due to COVID taking a chunk out of films and whatnot, the studios' parent companies aren't willing to risk precious funds on yet another potential "sinking ship" if ViaCBS can't produce something with more coherency than the dumpster fire DSC remains.

More or less... though I think the final nail in the coffin was probably Star Trek: Picard's first season being just as poorly-received as Star Trek: Discovery's second.

Picard was supposed to be the olive branch CBS extended to the fans that Discovery drove away.  The nonsensical, heavy-handed writing and the visible disrespect for Jean-Luc Picard that permeated the series only drove them further from the franchise when it was supposed to be renewing their faith in the brand.  With Netflix unhappy with Discovery's performance to the point of slashing its budget and not carrying the Short Treks in most markets, Amazon Prime upset with Picard's reception, and merchandising partners upset by the Abrams Trek aesthetic they knew wasn't going to move merch, the prospect of finding the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to make Section 31, Strange New Worlds, or any of the other proposed shows must've begin to look like a fool's errand.  Especially after Lower Decks came out and was similarly panned by fans... with those three collectively being the three lowest-rated Star Trek shows on RottenTomatoes and some of the worst-scoring Star Trek titles overall.

Who's gonna put up the flipping great wodges of cash needed to produce a show like that, especially one with a poorly-received concept like Section 31's.  

 

Quote

Too bad they didn't thing of Strange New Worlds first, right? Then again, we may not have gotten the version that we all want now if that were the case...

TBH, I'd expect that if they'd pitched Strange New Worlds first it'd have been panned just as hard as Discovery pre-release, for messing with the continuity and visual aesthetic of TOS the same way Enterprise was often taken to task for doing.

Prequels in general are kind of Star Trek's no-win scenario.

Edited December 16, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[pengbuzz]

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

More or less... though I think the final nail in the coffin was probably Star Trek: Picard's first season being just as poorly-received as Star Trek: Discovery's second.

Picard was supposed to be the olive branch CBS extended to the fans that Discovery drove away.  The nonsensical, heavy-handed writing and the visible disrespect for Jean-Luc Picard that permeated the series only drove them further from the franchise when it was supposed to be renewing their faith in the brand.  With Netflix unhappy with Discovery's performance to the point of slashing its budget and not carrying the Short Treks in most markets, Amazon Prime upset with Picard's reception, and merchandising partners upset by the Abrams Trek aesthetic they knew wasn't going to move merch, the prospect of finding the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to make Section 31, Strange New Worlds, or any of the other proposed shows must've begin to look like a fool's errand.  Especially after Lower Decks came out and was similarly panned by fans... with those three collectively being the three lowest-rated Star Trek shows on RottenTomatoes and some of the worst-scoring Star Trek titles overall.

Who's gonna put up the flipping great wodges of cash needed to produce a show like that, especially one with a poorly-received concept like Section 31's.  

 

TBH, I'd expect that if they'd pitched Strange New Worlds first it'd have been panned just as hard as Discovery pre-release, for messing with the continuity and visual aesthetic of TOS the same way Enterprise was often taken to task for doing.

Prequels in general are kind of Star Trek's no-win scenario.

Sounds like DSC and Picard disd SNW a favor by sucking more than it would have.

[Seto Kaiba]

36 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Sounds like DSC and Picard disd SNW a favor by sucking more than it would have.

Eh... in all fairness to Discovery and Picard's showrunners, trying a radically different approach to the Star Trek setting would probably have been a fantastic idea twenty years ago.

You see, a big part of what ultimately ended Star Trek's golden age on television was a lack of innovation.  Star Trek had been back on the air for eight years, and had two of its shows (TNG and DS9) running concurrently for the last two years, when Star Trek: the Next Generation ended and Star Trek: Voyager was rolled out to replace it.  Voyager's ratings suffered because executive meddling changed its premise to make it much more like the Next Generation and that decline continued when Voyager reached the end of its run and Star Trek: Enterprise started.  Audiences were just burned out on Star Trek and that led to Enterprise being cancelled before its time.  If they'd tried something like Discovery back then alongside, or instead of, Enterprise it would've probably been received as a much-welcomed breath of fresh air for the franchise instead of condemned as a bastardization.

Discovery had the misfortune to come out at a time when audiences were craving some more lighthearted, optimistic entertainment.  A return to classic Star Trek form would have been more welcome, though with audiences also burned out on prequels the idea of setting it in Star Trek's pre-Kirk past would've been a bad idea regardless.

[tekering]

I never would've expected to hear the voice of Bart LaRue on Discovery, but I'm pleased to say it confirmed my suspicions from last week's episode. 

[renegadeleader1]

22 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Voyager's ratings suffered because executive meddling changed its premise to make it much more like the Next Generation and that decline continued when Voyager reached the end of its run and Star Trek: Enterprise started. 

I never gave even one wet fart about Voyager because it's entire plot of "Will they ever make it home?" was boring and oppressive especially when it devolved into a worse species of the week than ToS or TNG. The refugees searching for home had already been done before better by Space 1999 and original Galactica and Voyager didn't have the interesting cast, or space battles to hook you like those did.

 

As for Enterprise it suffered from the same problem all prequels do, in that we already know how this all ends so why should I care about what happens in the show? The only mildly interesting storylines they touched upon like the Vulcans not being all that truthful about their intentions, or the birth of the federation were either dropped too quickly or addressed far too late to hold interest.

 

A better follow up to Voyager would have been finding a way to establish a wormhole and explore more of the Beta quadrant that Voyager bypassed to get home. The entire show could have been based on territorial expansion and establishing frontier outposts/colonies alongside other nations like the Klingons, Romulans, or Ferengi using the 19th/early 20th century "Dash for Africa" as historical context.

[Focslain]

41 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

A better follow up to Voyager would have been finding a way to establish a wormhole and explore more of the Beta quadrant that Voyager bypassed to get home. The entire show could have been based on territorial expansion and establishing frontier outposts/colonies alongside other nations like the Klingons, Romulans, or Ferengi using the 19th/early 20th century "Dash for Africa" as historical context.

Now that is an interesting premise that I'd pay to see.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, renegadeleader1 said:

I never gave even one wet fart about Voyager because it's entire plot of "Will they ever make it home?" was boring and oppressive especially when it devolved into a worse species of the week than ToS or TNG. The refugees searching for home had already been done before better by Space 1999 and original Galactica and Voyager didn't have the interesting cast, or space battles to hook you like those did.

Eh... yeah, that's that executive meddling I mentioned.

Voyager was supposed to be an even more heavily serialized story than Deep Space Nine, and it was supposed to prominently feature the conflict between the Starfleet and Maquis components of the crew.  Kind of a seven season long version of "Year of Hell" and "Worst Case Scenario".  It'd been almost twenty years since Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica, and the Galactica reboot was still eight years in the future, so general audiences weren't really put off by the superficially similar premises.  General audiences - and even the cast - were more put off by the way the Paramount execs turned the series into an almost literal season 8 of Star Trek: the Next Generation.  The episodic formula had gotten a bit stale over 8+ years, and Voyager's premise of the Starfleet ship and crew stranded on the far side of the galaxy and having to cooperate with the hostile Maquis proved to be pretty toothless once the studio execs got done with it.  Perhaps nobody was so upset as Robert Beltran.  He'd signed on to play some serious drama as the hard-nosed Maquis captain opposing Janeway and got stuck playing Janeway's personality-less yes-man magic indian after the whole idea of hostility between the Starfleet and Maquis characters got abandoned.

Paramount went into production on Voyager with a formula that had already started to get stale for most of the viewers.

 

1 hour ago, renegadeleader1 said:

As for Enterprise it suffered from the same problem all prequels do, in that we already know how this all ends so why should I care about what happens in the show? The only mildly interesting storylines they touched upon like the Vulcans not being all that truthful about their intentions, or the birth of the federation were either dropped too quickly or addressed far too late to hold interest.

Not so much, IMO.

Enterprise did suffer from the usual problems that come with developing a sequel, but unlike a lot of prequels it was set far enough from the previous stories in its timeline's future that the conclusion of its specific storyline wasn't foregone.  It was 114 years distant from the next-closest Star Trek series in the timeline when it was made (though Discovery cut that down to 105).  The only foregone conclusion - apart from bad ideas like the Borg episode - was that Archer's mission would instigate the events which led to the formation of the Federation.  It wasn't like the Discovery plot lines where it was obvious everything was a foregone conclusion because it was only a few years distant from TOS so we knew the Klingon War was going to end in Starfleet's favor in a way that preserved the TOS status quo and that the Control plot would also end in a way that didn't upset the apple cart because its bad future overlapped with the one Agent Daniels and co. were from in ENT.  If Enterprise had run long enough to run into the Earth-Romulan war, then I could concede that its plot would've been Discovery levels of foregone conclusion.

For most audiences, the problem was that Star Trek: Enterprise's episodic format was too close to what the three previous shows had done to the point of staleness and that they introduced familiar Star Trek technologies from a century in the future much too quickly.  The transporter's unreliability was quickly dismissed.  Hand phasers were introduced halfway into the pilot episode and ship-mounted phasers were introduced halfway into the first season.  Photon torpedos rolled in at the end of season two, looking virtually identical to their 23rd and 24th century counterparts.  The only staple technologies that the NX-01 Enterprise was missing were shields and the tractor beam.  It eroded the show's distinctive setting pretty quickly.

 

1 hour ago, renegadeleader1 said:

A better follow up to Voyager would have been finding a way to establish a wormhole and explore more of the Beta quadrant that Voyager bypassed to get home. The entire show could have been based on territorial expansion and establishing frontier outposts/colonies alongside other nations like the Klingons, Romulans, or Ferengi using the 19th/early 20th century "Dash for Africa" as historical context.

Eh... I imagine that'd probably get samey pretty quick.

TNG offered enough proof of what ineffectual villains the Ferengi make... they're comic relief at best.  Romulan and Klingon territorial expansion is mostly just armed conquest and we already got a good look at how the Klingons do it in DS9.  Like, what's a single Starfleet ship going to do while the Klingons or Romulans are invading less developed civilizations, massacring their governments and militaries, and enslaving the locals?  

[Dobber]

I just remember it being said about Voyager a long time ago was that it suffered from the Giilagans Island Lost in Space paradox. That the whole premise of the show basically prevents any serious expectations as they can’t solve their main problem...getting home..as the show would then be over. So you know any “solution that they come up with will never work.

Chris

[JB0]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The only staple technologies that the NX-01 Enterprise was missing were shields and the tractor beam.  It eroded the show's distinctive setting pretty quickly.

 

Don't forget the crew INVENTING force fields and red alert.

Only reason they didn't have tractor beams is that the grappling cannon they did have looked cooler onscreen.

[Chronocidal]

2 hours ago, Dobber said:

I just remember it being said about Voyager a long time ago was that it suffered from the Giilagans Island Lost in Space paradox. That the whole premise of the show basically prevents any serious expectations as they can’t solve their main problem...getting home..as the show would then be over. So you know any “solution that they come up with will never work.

Chris

I feel like they could have averted this by actually planning out the entire 7-year story arc better, but I'm thinking planning that far ahead wasn't going to happen with the writing shenaniganry they had to deal with.

[Seto Kaiba]

33 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Don't forget the crew INVENTING force fields and red alert.

Eh... I'm actually inclined to give them a pass on those.  

It's not like they invented the concept of alert status, they just applied something that had already existed for centuries to their everyday operations.  Likewise, the force field tech that the Enterprise crew builds is something the episode it first appears in establishes is something Starfleet was working on for years and had almost completed, and is much more limited than incarnations of the tech from other shows.  That's excusable, IMO, since it shows progression in the technology over time.  Not like, say, the way Malcolm just casually breaks out a suitcase full of phasers that work just like 23rd and 24th century ones without comment or the new photonic torpedoes being the existing photon torpedo prop from over a century in the future with a matte grey paintjob instead of gloss black.

It's when you get into the continuity-breaking nonsense that prequels like Enterprise or Discovery start to cause problems.  Like the Enterprise crew making contact with species which weren't officially encountered until the 24th century and conveniently not catching their names (the Borg and the Ferengi, both over 200 years before official first contact), Dr. Phlox's successful invention of a way to prevent late 24th century Borg assimilation in 2151 (something beyond even late 24th century medicine), mid-23rd century Starfleet making common use of a type of holographic communications tech that explicitly wouldn't be invented for another 117 years (and a superior version of it at that), or Dr. Stamets creating a new faster-than-light drive technology that knocks every other form of space travel (warp drive, transwarp, quantum slipstream, etc.) into a cocked hat that is conveniently forgotten about after being tested ONCE.

Think about that.  The c.2257 vintage Crossfield-class has a more advanced propulsion system in 2257 than all of Starfleet in 3189.

 

33 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Only reason they didn't have tractor beams is that the grappling cannon they did have looked cooler onscreen.

It was certainly more action scene-friendly.

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's not like they invented the concept of alert status, they just applied something that had already existed for centuries to their everyday operations. 

That would be the logical approach, but my impression at the time was that Reed was supposed to have invented the "security alert" policy. Which he jokingly considered naming "reed alert".

[renegadeleader1]

4 hours ago, Dobber said:

I just remember it being said about Voyager a long time ago was that it suffered from the Giilagans Island Lost in Space paradox. That the whole premise of the show basically prevents any serious expectations as they can’t solve their main problem...getting home..as the show would then be over. So you know any “solution that they come up with will never work.

Chris

This.

[Thom]

I fast forwarded through most of this episode. And wish I had done the same last week. Let's get back to the Burn.

[Seto Kaiba]

23 hours ago, JB0 said:

That would be the logical approach, but my impression at the time was that Reed was supposed to have invented the "security alert" policy. Which he jokingly considered naming "reed alert".

IIRC, Reed's main contribution was that he automated certain readiness functions like charging weapons and polarizing the hull plating when an alert was declared.

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, Thom said:

I fast forwarded through most of this episode. And wish I had done the same last week. Let's get back to the Burn.

Yeah, this latest visit to the Mirror Universe was kind of a massive turd.

In a way, it's pretty pathetic how far over the top Star Trek: Discovery has to go with the villainy of the Mirror Universe equivalents of its characters to make it obvious to the viewer they're the evil twins.  We kind of had to take the show's word for it that Mirror Lorca (the only Lorca we ever meet) was someone so insanely xenophobic and bigoted that he was considered too insanely evil to be allowed to gain power by the incredibly evil Emperor Phillipa Georgiou, someone who cheerfully engages in cannibalism and genocide.  Now that we've seen Mirror Burnham, any pretense of subtlety is gone and we're seeing levels of cartoonish villainy that even the worst writers would blanch at.  Somehow, actual cannibal Phillipa Georgiou is presented as the voice of moderation in the Mirror Universe in a downright Dickensian secret test of character by the Ghost of Christmas Past "Carl" AKA the Guardian of Forever before sending her back in time.  The episode even wraps with a hilariously insincere-feeling emotional sendoff to the one character everyone on the crew hated and knew better than to trust.

I guess the Guardian of Forever sent her back in time in the forlorn hope that someone will agree to pay for Section 31.  

[Thom]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, this latest visit to the Mirror Universe was kind of a massive turd.

In a way, it's pretty pathetic how far over the top Star Trek: Discovery has to go with the villainy of the Mirror Universe equivalents of its characters to make it obvious to the viewer they're the evil twins.  We kind of had to take the show's word for it that Mirror Lorca (the only Lorca we ever meet) was someone so insanely xenophobic and bigoted that he was considered too insanely evil to be allowed to gain power by the incredibly evil Emperor Phillipa Georgiou, someone who cheerfully engages in cannibalism and genocide.  Now that we've seen Mirror Burnham, any pretense of subtlety is gone and we're seeing levels of cartoonish villainy that even the worst writers would blanch at.  Somehow, actual cannibal Phillipa Georgiou is presented as the voice of moderation in the Mirror Universe in a downright Dickensian secret test of character by the Ghost of Christmas Past "Carl" AKA the Guardian of Forever before sending her back in time.  The episode even wraps with a hilariously insincere-feeling emotional sendoff to the one character everyone on the crew hated and knew better than to trust.

I guess the Guardian of Forever sent her back in time in the forlorn hope that someone will agree to pay for Section 31.  

CANNIBLE?! Jeesh, so glad I skipped season 1! Would have been nice if the Guardian had replaced her with Prime Universe Phillipa, then she could become captain of Discovery.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, Thom said:

CANNIBLE?! Jeesh, so glad I skipped season 1!

Yup... like 80% of Commander Saru's backstory is that his species, the Kelpiens, were/are a species that were kept as sentient livestock and routinely eaten by the dominant sentient species on their homeworld.

They were also regarded as a delicacy in the Mirror Universe's Terran Empire.  The first time the Discovery visited the Mirror Universe, Emperor Georgiou had a bunch of them and basically served them up "pick your own lobster out of the tank" style when she had Michael Burnham over for dinner.  Fortunately this (illusory?) trip to the Mirror Universe passed without anyone eating a Kelpien onscreen unlike season one.

Pretty much all of Mirror Georgiou's bad traits - which make up about 99% of her character traits - were left out of the last two episodes.  I guess acting slightly less like a racist stereotype counts as character growth in Discovery.  

 

5 hours ago, Thom said:

Would have been nice if the Guardian had replaced her with Prime Universe Phillipa, then she could become captain of Discovery.

...

...

...

That would have been SO. MUCH. BETTER.

[Dobber]

Is it really cannibalism though, as they are different species? If it counts, then the Klingons are also because they said they ate the remains of Georgiou. 

Chris

Edited December 20, 2020 by Dobber

[Thom]

Yeah, I don't think it is really cannibalism if it's a different species. But still, eating a sentient person... bring on the knife and fork, huh?!

Edited December 21, 2020 by Thom

[Dobber]

Oh I agree, it’s messed up. We really don’t have an applicable word I guess, just debating the definition for fun is all.

Chris

[sketchley]

1 hour ago, Dobber said:

Oh I agree, it’s messed up. We really don’t have an applicable word I guess, just debating the definition for fun is all.

Chris

"Bloodlust"?

Anyhow, it's not like TNG et al were so different.  Worf (or another Klingon) once or twice mentions "eating the heart of an enemy".  That said, the difference is that in DS9 et al, those lines came across as possibly metaphorical (E.g. not literally doing it).  However, DIS goes out of the way to not only describe it in detail, but gives us some props to look at too...

[pengbuzz]

Okay, seriously....what's eating you guys?

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Okay, seriously....what's eating you guys?

The #1 question received by the (very irritated) Kaminar Office of Tourism.

 

6 hours ago, sketchley said:

"Bloodlust"?

Anyhow, it's not like TNG et al were so different.  Worf (or another Klingon) once or twice mentions "eating the heart of an enemy".  That said, the difference is that in DS9 et al, those lines came across as possibly metaphorical (E.g. not literally doing it).  However, DIS goes out of the way to not only describe it in detail, but gives us some props to look at too...

You never know...

DSC might've had Klingons resort to actual man-eating, but the general impression was it was something done out of desperation but not socially unacceptable.