Star Trek: Discovery

[kajnrig]

So this trial really isn't selling me on their "limited ads" service. So far this has been the exact same experience as watching the show on TV, with only marginally fewer ads.

Anyway, this first episode was decent. I'm no big fan of Trek - the only show I've seen is Voyager when it was airing, and the fandom hasn't been kind to it in the years since - so I can't speak to how well it adheres to "canon," but I think it's fine so far.

[Dangard Ace]

So anybody watch the season finale?  That ship they meet at the end looks too advanced for the timeline.  

[UN Spacy]

Yup but what isn't too advanced for the timeline?

Still looks

better than the Abramsprise

.

[UN Spacy]

VERY sweet studio scale models.

http://www.startrek.com/article/first-look-discovery-shenzhou-studio-scale-models

Edited February 13, 2018 by UN Spacy

[Vortech]

1 hour ago, Dangard Ace said:

So anybody watch the season finale?  That ship they meet at the end looks too advanced for the timeline.  

They have to spruce it up to keep new fans enticed.  By your current logic, then even the discovery technically looks too advanced for the timeline as well. 

[Dangard Ace]

1 hour ago, Vortech said:

They have to spruce it up to keep new fans enticed.  By your current logic, then even the discovery technically looks too advanced for the timeline as well. 

Yup.  

2 hours ago, UN Spacy said:

Yup but what isn't too advanced for the timeline?

Still looks

  Hide contents

better than the Abramsprise

.

Yup.  Those nacelles look alot better but still too much blue light for my tastes.  It's not supposed to get blinged out like that until the TMP.

[azrael]

2 hours ago, UN Spacy said:

Still looks

  Hide contents

better than the Abramsprise

 

Yup.

[kajnrig]

I know I'm late to the party, but I always like time loop stories.

That said, I get what people have been saying that the show, at least these first seven episodes, get kind of same-y. Maybe it's just because I'm bingeing them, but the focus hangs a bit too much too long on the main character, with too little time spent on the rest of the ensemble. Makes her seem like a bit of a Mary Sue, though with a more balanced treatment she wouldn't be.

Still, it's not enough of a detriment to undermine the whole thing. It's still a fun ride so far.

EDIT:

Them basically re-hashing Q though is kind of... uninspired. I don't know much about Trek, but I do know enough about him through osmosis that this performance makes my eyes roll just the slightest.

Edited February 13, 2018 by kajnrig

[Seto Kaiba]

13 hours ago, Dangard Ace said:

So anybody watch the season finale?  That ship they meet at the end looks too advanced for the timeline.  

12 hours ago, Vortech said:

They have to spruce it up to keep new fans enticed.  By your current logic, then even the discovery technically looks too advanced for the timeline as well. 

Er... there's actually a fair amount of evidence that the USS Discovery is, in fact, too advanced for the timeline.  The most often cited example is the holographic communications tech that's all over the Discovery, which was previously established in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to be a brand new system only just being introduced to Starfleet in 2373, 117 years AFTER the date Discovery is set, and ones that could actually roam a room instead of being confined to a ring of holoprojectors on the floor were presented as an entirely new innovation that even Starfleet didn't have yet in 2379 (the first and only appearance was in Star Trek: Nemesis).

Having a spruced-up classic USS Enterprise is going to be a bit of a problem, continuity-wise.  The USS Defiant in the Star Trek: Enterprise mirror universe episodes was shown to be identical in just about every respect to the classic TOS USS Enterprise.  ENT deliberately averted the "Cosmetically Advanced Prequel" trope for the Defiant, so having it now is a bit jarring.

 

 

9 hours ago, kajnrig said:

That said, I get what people have been saying that the show, at least these first seven episodes, get kind of same-y. Maybe it's just because I'm bingeing them, but the focus hangs a bit too much too long on the main character, with too little time spent on the rest of the ensemble. Makes her seem like a bit of a Mary Sue, though with a more balanced treatment she wouldn't be.

I'll admit I never got any shades of Mary Sue-dom from Burnham... my biggest problem is that she's written so inconsistently that the only possible interpretation for her behavior is that she's a massive hypocrite.  She spends the first few episodes after being imprisoned moralizing at people then doing 180s on her allegedly firm morals so fast it makes your head spin.

Like in "The Battle at the Binary Stars", she has absolutely zero problems with attaching a photon torpedo warhead to a Klingon corpse.  Attaching booby traps to wounded or dead persons is very much against the Geneva Protocols... and the very next episode, she's ripping into Lorca over her suspicions that he's developing biological weapons banned by the Geneva Protocols.  She's totally and unapologetically racist/xenophobic when it comes to Klingons, but is somehow deeply morally affronted when the Terran Empire is revealed to have the exact same attitude towards all aliens... and then does ANOTHER 180 when she brings the Emperor to the prime universe and the crew all decide to lie to their superiors so they can put the genocidal despot mirror-Georgeau in charge of the Discovery so she could end the war for them by committing the very same kind of genocide in the prime timeline that they were so disgusted by in the mirror universe but are all apparently fine with now.

A little moral consistency would be nice, y'know?  

Then again, we are dealing with a "Starfleet" crew who were handpicked by an omnicidal maniac from the mirror universe who is such an extreme xenophobe that Emperor Georgeau was the lesser evil.

[kajnrig]

 

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Then again, we are dealing with a "Starfleet" crew who were handpicked by an omnicidal maniac from the mirror universe who is such an extreme xenophobe that Emperor Georgeau was the lesser evil.

I didn't know about the Captain spoiler, THANKS VERY MUCH! -_____-

(I jest, I suspected as much.)

But I'll be honest, the Emperor Georgeau spoiler was what pushed me to finally watch this show. Michelle Yeoh, man, I've been watching her movies since the early 90s. I think of her as like my cool Chinese kung fu mom.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

I didn't know about the Captain spoiler, THANKS VERY MUCH! -_____-

(I jest, I suspected as much.)

My apologies all the same... I'll have to be more vigilant with my spoiler tags.

Still, it was kind of the Un-Reveal, considering Jason Isaacs is not someone you'd hire except to play an Evil Brit and had an introductory scene that stopped just short of a Disney villain song.  (My one regret is that he didn't go out cursing those meddling kids and their Kelpian.)

 

3 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

But I'll be honest, the Emperor Georgeau spoiler was what pushed me to finally watch this show. Michelle Yeoh, man, I've been watching her movies since the early 90s. I think of her as like my cool Chinese kung fu mom.

Apart from Tomorrow Never Dies, Star Trek: Discovery is the only thing I've ever seen her in and I didn't much care for Captain Georgeau... they way they killed her off seemed pretty excessive and gratuitous.

I'd welcome recommendations from her filmography tho.

[kajnrig]

Apparently she's actually Malaysian . I'd only ever seen her Chinese films, I didn't realize.

She was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its sequel. She plays a bit role in the GotG films, too, as one of the... original Guardians? I never understood what they were referencing with her, Stallone, and the other Ravagers.

She has a long career in wuxia films, too, and became really well-known for performing her own stunts. She was part of that same 90s wave of wuxia movies that gave us Jet Li, Donnie Yen, et al. She starred with Li in Tai Chi Master and headlined the movie Wing Chun (with Donnie Yen in supporting role). One of the sillier movies of hers I remember really liking was The Heroic Trio, a sort of campy superhero flick set in the... 1940s? and its sequel, Executioners.

These are all films from decades ago, so their actual quality might not match up to my memory of them.

There's also this gem:

 

Edited February 13, 2018 by kajnrig

[kajnrig]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'll admit I never got any shades of Mary Sue-dom from Burnham... my biggest problem is that she's written so inconsistently that the only possible interpretation for her behavior is that she's a massive hypocrite.  She spends the first few episodes after being imprisoned moralizing at people then doing 180s on her allegedly firm morals so fast it makes your head spin.

If she's inconsistent, it's because she's always (or usually) presented as being right; or rather, the writers want us to sympathize with her, even in those cases where, if we take a step back, we see how much her actions might contradict each other. Such as...

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Like in "The Battle at the Binary Stars", she has absolutely zero problems with attaching a photon torpedo warhead to a Klingon corpse.

Yeah, that was a pretty fraked up strategy. I can sort of see the ways they could rationalize it - the battle wasn't over despite what the Klingons thought, and so the Shenzhou was (were?) taking advantage of a strategic miscalculation, not necessarily rigging the dead for a "nefarious purpose." It's a flimsy rationale, though, and when they just went ahead with the plan without a single protest... yikes.

[kajnrig]

So I'm two episodes into the mirror world and I'm already tired of how caricaturally evil it is.

EDIT:

Is it ethical and/or within Starfleet protocol to seed an uninhabited celestial body with alien biology?

Edited February 15, 2018 by kajnrig

[kajnrig]

This show takes place 100 years before Enterprise, no?

[renegadeleader1]

3 hours ago, kajnrig said:

This show takes place 100 years before Enterprise, no?

10 before the original series. Not 100.

Edited February 15, 2018 by renegadeleader1

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, kajnrig said:

So I'm two episodes into the mirror world and I'm already tired of how caricaturally evil it is.

The impression I got from the mirror universe arc was that that's actually the whole point.

When TOS first did it, the whole idea of an alternate reality made up of evil twins to the noble and upright crew of the Enterprise was an excuse to really ham it up.  Discovery, I think, is using all of the mirror universe's trademark ham and over-the-top darkness to try and make the heroes look a little more heroic.  The show's gray and black morality hasn't really left the Discovery's crew in the position of looking heroic... more like antiheroes or maybe "good is not nice".  With all the morally dubious or definitely illegal stuff they've done already, the only way to make them look like saints was to put them up against the kind of cackling villainy you'd normally only expect to find in your saturday morning cartoons.

In a rare show of self-awareness, Burnham is noticeably uneasy about how well her xenophobia helps her fit in...

 

11 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Is it ethical and/or within Starfleet protocol to seed an uninhabited celestial body with alien biology?

Based on TNG's "Home Soil" and a few other episodes, the answer is "Yes" with a MASSIVE set of asterisks.  (I just watched this episode the other day while I was home sick.)

The United Federation of Planets apparently exercises VERY strict controls over the introduction of non-indigenous species to planets.  For terraforming purposes, a planet must be certified as being incapable of giving rise to life under natural conditions before any work can be done modifying its surface conditions and transplanting life from other planets.  There's a whole bunch of species for which Starfleet prohibits trade in, export/import of, etc. because they're known to be invasive or a health hazard/public nuisance like tribbles, voles, etc.  IIRC Dr. Bashir ended up in trouble after he contacted Quark to import some spiders so he could use their venom to help some part of Kira's pregnancy along but didn't get a proper import permit and ended up in a holding cell.

 

 

7 hours ago, kajnrig said:

This show takes place 100 years before Enterprise, no?

From the end of Star Trek: Enterprise (or, at least, "Terra Prime", the last episode with an explicitly given date) to the present day events of "The Vulcan Hello" is 101 years 3 months, 2 weeks, and 5 days.  So, Discovery is set a little over a century after the events of Star Trek: Enterprise's fourth and final season, and about nine years before the events of the TOS episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before".

[Sandman]

Anyone know anything about this:

https://hlj.com/product/AOS08713

It looks awesome. I would love to grab one. Looks like the D was the only one they did. Why did they stop? 

[Kanedas Bike]

4 hours ago, Sandman said:

Anyone know anything about this:

https://hlj.com/product/AOS08713

It looks awesome. I would love to grab one. Looks like the D was the only one they did. Why did they stop? 

Missed it way back when at it's initial release. Every now and again I see one pop up on Mandarake for like twice the price. And that's for opened versions. I would have loved an E, which also left me wondering why Aoshima stopped with just the Enterprise D.

I've seen/read only good things, so I guess if you can find one at a price you like buy it.

-b.

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, Sandman said:

It looks awesome. I would love to grab one. Looks like the D was the only one they did. Why did they stop? 

Maybe the license expired and someone else got it, like Diamond Select?

Not too long ago, I got a few of Diamond Select's Star Trek offerings (an ENT-A and ENT-B) and they're pretty darn good.

I'd love to see someone tackle the unused Enterprise Season 5 NX-01 (Columbia-class in the EU).

[UN Spacy]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, UN Spacy said:

 

Wherever that's going, it can't possibly end up weirder than Dan Abnett and Ian Edington's Pike-centric Star Trek: the Early Voyages comic. 

They did come up with some interesting stuff in that series before it got canceled though, like the USS Enterprise stumbling onto a surviving colony of pre-Surak Vulcans who still had starship-grade psionic weapons (like the anti-personnel one in TNG's "Gambit"), or the TOS-styled version of the Miranda-class.

 

[Dobber]

Cool. He has a resemblance to the original Pike actor.

Chris

[Knight26]

Interesting, but who will play young Spock?  And the young Majel Rodenberry first officer?

Edited April 10, 2018 by Knight26

[Seto Kaiba]

49 minutes ago, Knight26 said:

Interesting, but who will play young Spock?  And the young Majel Rodenberry first officer?

D'you reckon there's any kind of contractual language preventing Zachary Quinto from reprising his role as young Spock in Paramount's Star Trek movie reboot trilogy?

Seems a waste to recast when there's already a prominently known "young Spock" actor out there.

[Dynaman]

My guess is that Quinto will want more money then they are willing to pay.  Unless they really change things Spock would be a peripheral character in this show.  Quinto is also not all that young any longer.

[JB0]

On 3/21/2018 at 9:06 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

I'd love to see someone tackle the unused Enterprise Season 5 NX-01 (Columbia-class in the EU).

Lemme look that up real quick...

Oh man, that is gorgeous. This is the first time I've wished Enterprise had gotten another season.

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

Oh man, that is gorgeous. This is the first time I've wished Enterprise had gotten another season.

Yeah, Doug Drexler and Mark Rademaker really knocked it out of the park... though considering the other stuff that was on tap for Season 5 like trying to reuse the Kzinti from the Star Trek cartoon or revealing that T'Pol's emotional control problem is down to her dad being a Romulan sleeper agent, it's probably for the best it never got used.

The refit NX-class does feature prominently in the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch continuity though, as the first new starship class of the freshly-founded UFP.  The writers contradict the 2011 Ships of the Line calendar by asserting NX-01 was too badly damaged in the Romulan War to be upgraded, so in that version it's the last surviving NX-class (NX-06 Endeavour) that is the first Columbia-class ship and the Federation's first flagship under Captain T'Pol.  (Much fuss gets made over both some of the design compromises like moving the launch bay to make room for the "neck", and getting a number of alien systems like Andorian shields, Vulcan tractor beams, etc. to play nice with each other.)

[TehPW]

Not that it matters but how is a calendar considered cannon? Very few novels themselves are considered 'cannon' as it is...

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, TehPW said:

Not that it matters but how is a calendar considered cannon? Very few novels themselves are considered 'cannon' as it is...

A canon is something authors stand behind... a cannon is something you shouldn't stand in front of.

In any event, publications like that generally aren't canon in and of themselves.  They do make use of production materials that were made for particular episodes but not directly included (e.g. specs for the Enterprise-J), material that was drafted for a series but not filmed (e.g. the NX-class retrofit developed for ENT Season 4's finale and Season 5 prior to its cancellation), and some info that was gleaned from creator commentary/Q&A with long-time staffers like Mike Okuda, Doug Drexler, and Andrew Probert.  In some cases, it's simply the only place that info was published outside of blogs run by the respective creators.

(The reason the relaunch novels merit special mention is they're the closest thing to an officially-recognized Expanded Universe that Star Trek has... as a coordinated, shared-universe effort that spans post-series continuations of all five Star Trek series with at least some official guidance.)

[UN Spacy]

 

[Sandman]

video not available.

[azrael]

Red shirts????? Thought they wanted to stick to "The Cage"-colors of Gold, Bronze, Silver/Blue.

[Dynaman]

SyFy wire also had some blurb about two possible Star Trek movies in the, very early, pipeline.  That would be nice but I'm not holding my breath.

[tekering]

On 4/13/2018 at 12:02 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

A canon is something authors stand behind... a cannon is something you shouldn't stand in front of.

Way to put 'em in their place, guy!  

On 4/11/2018 at 12:40 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

D'you reckon there's any kind of contractual language preventing Zachary Quinto from reprising his role as young Spock in Paramount's Star Trek movie reboot trilogy?

Seems a waste to recast when there's already a prominently known "young Spock" actor out there.

I felt precisely the same -- the production design, the technology, and the Klingon redesign closely mimic the reboot trilogy -- until this beautiful lady showed up:

Okay, Discovery is clearly a reboot of its own, so we can set aside all those nagging continuity issues.  This is neither the "Prime" universe, nor the Kelvin timeline; this is a new and different Trek universe again, where Sarek has an adopted daughter, Spock has a human sister, and Klingons are hairless.  So be it.

Oh, and way to put JJ in his place, guys.