Star Trek: Discovery

[Cybersnark]

The main issue to me with the entire premise of "modern Trek" is just the cultural sensibilities the writers and directors have shifted to. When you think of anything from TOS - Enterprise, the idea of a Starfleet crew is in the form of highly trained, highly disciplined and highly competent individuals. These people respect the chain of command, the infrastructure of Starfleet and (generally) the rules. They behave how fictional soldiers should. Sure you have outliers and incidents that often become the specific focus of an episode here and there, but for the most part, the reason you don't have to counsel *everyone* on the bridge is because they are the "best of the best". And in order to get to even the first level of "best" they had to endure all that training, both physical and psychological and score highly to even get INTO Starfleet Academy. And those that were lucky enough to make it can still crack and wash out before ever graduating into actual ranked officers.

Where as now, the crews are less like officers and more like a small group of anime kids that go off on random adventures and get into all kinds of mischief. Burnham has failed upwards at every opportunity because she's good at everything and doesn't take no guff! That's not how traditional Star Trek characters have progressed through story arcs. And it's the same with everyone else always crying or jumping up and down like middle school kids. It's one of the flaws I don't expect to ever be "fixed" because I think for the most part it's "working as intended"

It occurred to me a while ago that my perfect model for a modern Star Trek series would actually be Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.

A tight-knit group of highly-trained, morally-solid (yet endearingly quirky and likable) professionals, with clear specialties, responsibilities, and a chain of command, being given specific missions, which they accomplish through a combination of trained know-how, scientific exploration/inventiveness, and surgically-applied violence. Complete with the "token alien/outsider" character (Skye/Daisy, Yo-yo, Enoch, Deke, Sousa, etc), and a good blend of episodic early adventures and season-long arcs that still manage to give every character time to shine.

 

[Kup]

Dr. Culber, though, I can't possibly square. He is consistently the only medical officer who matters, and has been since at least S2. I don't remember him being established as not CMO, but they should retcon it.

Who was CMO when Culber was dead?

 

[Copper Bezel]

Well, apparently Dr. Pollard, that was just news to me too.

 

[Andrusi]

It just seems excessive to me to have what seems to be the entire senior staff, and the ship's computer, requiring so much counseling. A couple of them, sure.

By way of explaining why the entire senior staff would need counseling, I refer you to the entirety of Discovery up to this point.

 

[Kup]

Finally forced myself to finish this season. Had 3 to go.

Realized tonight one of my biggest gripes with this show, besides the pacing and the story and the way everyone needs therapy and…

I digress. I showed my wife the battle from Sacrifice of Angels. You could tell what was going on. During the scene at Earth, it felt like all of the Federation ships were just blue and gray blobs on screen.


1998, you could see the detail lines in the a Bird of Prey’s impulse engines. 2022 I couldn’t make out any detail on any of the ships. The name drops were cool, but it just feels like the future is less HD than 20+ years ago.

 

[The Predaking]

I still need to watch this season. I watched the first episode and haven't picked it back up since.

 

[SHIELD Agent 47]

NYCC 2022 trailer for season 5:

 

[Kalidor]

Nothing at all compelling here. Looks like the same generic "action" without substance that every other season had. They need to sunset this series and focus on the ones that are good.

 

[Dake]

Yeah. I mean, I'll watch it, but there's nothing particularly exciting there to me.

 

[Thefakelink]

I havent kept up with Discovery since season 2. Have I missed anything of substance? Does it feel like Star Trek at any point or is it still a generic sci-fi series with a Star Trek coat of paint?

 

[Dvandom]

I liked S3, it wove together several plots of both galactic and personal scale, but then in S4 it felt like the writers had no real idea where to go with the characters after that, so they blew up a bunch of stuff and went back to the Michael Show.

---Dave

 

[Cybersnark]

I feel like S4 fell into the same trap that Andromeda (and for that matter, the Star Wars EU) did years ago; "the Federation/Commonwealth/Jedi Order is gone --Until our Heroes bring it back completely in a single weekend, complete with an older generation who've apparently been doing this job for years."

It's ironic, because Star Trek has been trying desperately to be Star Wars for years, and the 32nd-century time jump gave them the perfect opportunity to have the 32nd-century galaxy just be the Star Wars galaxy; a mostly lawless frontier, full of smugglers, mercenaries, and bounty hunters tooling around in run-down light freighters that look like junk but are nonetheless a thousand generations more advanced than Discovery (sure, the Burn wiped out warp drive, but by then most people had switched to transwarp corridors or quantum slipstream, and human-level AI is so common that droids can be bought and sold second-hand).

Rather than easily rejoining the shrunken-yet-still-functional Federation, Discovery could have found a patchwork of successor states, forcing them to actually build a new Federation (or, more likely, something that only resembles their Federation while still being something new), complete with questions about how exactly to go about that --do they establish a government and try to legitimize their authority (like the New Republic did in SW), or start from the bottom, building a grass-roots coalition (like Enterprise did)? It would've given them a chance to address all sorts of juicy dramatic questions, like what are the most basic, fundamental tenets of the Federation, the things we absolutely cannot compromise on (and what are the things that that don't matter, or that we could genuinely stand to do better)? Why would local populations who were getting along perfectly fine be willing to sign on to this? What benefits does the Federation actually offer its members? What happens when you need the support of someone you can't countenance (say, who has built a prosperous nation on slavery or colonialism)?

 

[Kalidor]

Season 4 was the least garbage of them all. But that's not exactly high praise when now we have other stuff like Strange New Worlds and The Orville to watch. Even Lower Decks redeemed itself in my eyes and is now one of my favorites. Prodigy is also really good for what it is.

 

[Axaday]

I just got around to watching season 4 and probably won't generate a lot of discussion...

It is a pretty high sci-fi idea that an alien could be so alien that they don't even perceive people flying around in spaceships to be higher life.

Hard to buy that Book didn't bail on Tarka when he found out all Tarka wanted was the power source just for his own weird idea and didn't care about absolutely anyone else anywhere.

Last season, I really felt that the Admiral was going to be a villain. He just all read that way to me. This season, the same with the Federation President. I thought she'd be behind the DMA somehow. They played her exactly the same way through the entire season and never pulled back the curtain. She and the Admiral are excellent good people that just totally look shady to me in every scene.

 

[Dekafox]

Well Season 5 looks like

Spoiler

a call back to that TNG episode with their version of the First Ones, though I kept wanting to call them Preservers instead of Progenitors because that's how STO always referred to them(and conflated the two concepts). I was a little disappointed as I thought based on where they were going and what they found that it was going to be another ship from the Delta Quadrant that got Caretaker'd and tie back to Voyager stuff but this isn't a bad option either. I do like that, just like what they're calling back to, this is going to be a bunch of tracing clues to a final destination as that plays well to how Discovery likes to do serialized stories. Just hope they stick the landing again at the end.

Also I have a feeling Stamets is going to be involved in the final resolution, with the hammer-to-face level of foreshadowing of killing the revived Spore Drive project in favor of the Pathway drive, and talking about leaving a legacy again and again.

 

[Axaday]

I hope we're going to get the details of Pathway Drive.

 

[Axaday]

Spoiler

I didn't see Season 4 until a couple months ago, but when I did I really didn't feel like they flubbed it. I am willing to hear them out on Season 5, but I am frustrating by the premise they seem to be running with. I didn't feel like "The Chase" left a question needing to be answered. I had no impression that they had tech that designed life on every planet. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I have believed that they just seeded bits of their DNA across every planet and let nature take care of it from there.

 

[Dake]

Watched the 1st episode of S5 and enjoyed it for the most part. I'm hopeful that the storytelling style of Strange New Worlds is being carried into this to make it a bit less tedious.

It's an interesting premise for the season and I'll be curious to see how it winds up.

Spoiler

It occurs to me that we never really see further pursuit of the technology behind the Genesis device (to my recollection) and certainly the Progenitors' "space seed" tech could be seen as the ultimate example of something similar.

And hey look - potentially big blink and you'll miss it spoiler from the little "This season on ST" thing at the end of episode 1.

.
.
. (seriously, don't click if you don't want to see a surprise - that I'm unsure how they'll actually integrate into the story line).

Spoiler

The classic temporal anomaly I guess?

At first I thought it might even be TOS version, but the saucer shape is flat like SNW version.

 

[Steamed Hams]

Spoiler

ISS Enterprise A adrift in a wormhole and the breen were unmasked to reveal generic aliens.

I'll take old yeller out the back.

 

[TM2-Megatron]

Spoiler

ISS Enterprise A adrift in a wormhole and the breen were unmasked to reveal generic aliens.

I'll take old yeller out the back.

Spoiler

I'll have to re-watch at some point, but I think that was just the regular ol' 1701. It's a bit reminiscent of the Ent-A we're used to because they're using the updated DISCO/SNW design for the basic Constitution-class, which incorporates some elements from the original movie refit/Ent-A.

I have to admit, I'm kind of baffled at the timeline of events that was suggested. Supposedly the crew of the ISS Enterprise revolted after the attempted reforms to the empire failed (was this unnamed High Chancellor perhaps mirror Spock, who Prime Kirk influenced during his visit? I'd like to think so). Ascending to that position must have taken him at least a few years, so you'd think the ship would have undergone its major overhaul around the same time as the its prime counterpart during The Motion Picture. In any case, the reforms, revolt and subsequent escape clearly occurred during the 23rd century, probably at least a few years after Mirror, Mirror, which was 9 years after the USS Discovery vanished into the 32nd century.

But then we have this Dr. Cho, who was implied to have been among the rebel crew trying to escape. So they did, and apparently made lives for themselves in the Prime universe. But then, like 100+ years later, in the late 24th-century, Cho is somehow still alive and active enough to revisit this incredibly dangerous shipwreck to plant the clue aboard?

I dunno... all this seems like it's stretching basic common sense, and for no particularly good reason other than the fact the writers wanted to have the mirror Enterprise in an episode for some reason.

When I first saw the ISS, I got a little excited. I thought we were in for some wacky Mirror universe shenanigans or a few callbacks to the TOS or ENT episodes. But nope, just a few reused sets from SNW redressed with the Empire's insignia. Such a wasted potential.

Spoiler

As far as this Breen revelation goes... at least now we know why they joined with the Dominion during the war, and why the female Founder seemed to trust them so much more than her Cardassian allies, or even the Dominion's subject species. The Breen are either in the middle of, or have just recently completed an evolutionary transition from humanoids to a liquid form not unlike the Changelings themselves. The founders may have considered them kindred spirits.