Star Trek Discovery: The Bryan Fuller TV reboot

Might as well give it its own thread. We got teaser trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXpPweAooeE

Huh! I assumed it would be on the CW.

Nah, CBS is going all in to build their own private Hulu, and this show is going to be anchor for it.

Ugh I could not even watch that trailer - I guess I am too old.

Capt. Mads Mikkelsen or bust.

fingers crossed but I am skeptical

hoping they'll go for mostly single-episode plots like old treks rather than just make another serial like every other major tv series these days

TV seems to have lost their touch - its all been downhill since Picard gave Mr Data his last rimjob

I've thought for a while that taking the "Far Beyond the Stars" conceit as real would've been amazing, though not exactly sustainable on a series-wide basis (i.e. that would've been a much better DS9 finale than what we got).

what does the startrekman have to say about all this

time to merge star trek and star wars and add in ALF

https://inventorysystemsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/gene-roddenberry-george-lucas.jpg

Hmm, well Paramount will probably sell the Trek to Disney once they are finally able to admit to themselves the glaringly-obvious fact that they're embarrassed to own the property, and I'm pretty sure ALF is a Muppet, so I think this has legs.

you dont think wb would buy trek to keep the wb/disney battle going on a new front?

Interesting proposal, I look forward to the WB Trek movie where Spock drives an axe through Kirk's spinal column for no particular good reason other than that it's totally dark + extreme to the max.

I think they may reenvision ALF as CGI

...looks like I should edit the thread title

http://tvline.com/2016/10/26/star-trek-discovery-bryan-fuller-showrunner-stepping-down/

Oh great another Kurtzman-Goldsman joint. Because they did such a great job with Fringe.

akiva goldsman's continued success is one of life's great mysteries

oh c'mon, s2-4ish of Fringe were pretty good

this is weird to me. why would fuller walk away from this because he 'doesn't have time'? clearly something must have been going wrong.

I hear he wants to spend more time with his family.

season 3 of fringe was pretty good. then kurtzman & orci demanded a dumb cliffhanger and the show never recovered.

Trek has always had a mix of inspired weirdos and hacks, I feel like it benefits from that.

Fuller's working on at least two other tv series, including American Gods. If the Paramount people kept meddling and were an irritating presence, it'd be a good reason to bail.

He's still writing/plotting at least

http://www.polygon.com/2016/12/14/13962170/star-trek-discovery-lead-walking-dead

Sonequa Martin-Green will play the lead (the XO of Discovery).

Should we change this thread title?

I'm not going to believe this show is happening until there's an actual pilot date.

Should we change this thread title?
to:
Sasha Deathwatch

It's funny how much she looks like a younger Angela Bassett who had been tipped to be in the series.

wasn't there a rumor they were doing an anthology series with a different timeframe/cast each season? hmm.

Well this is still taking forever. I will however happily back this:

https://tvline.com/2017/03/31/star-trek-discovery-rainn-wilson-harry-mudd-cbs-all-access/

lol I watched the original Mudd ep the other night w my daughter and the entire time I was distracted by the highly visible shaving line all around Carmel's neck.

Fucking hell it's tomorrow

I have concerns but I really *want* it to be good

I guess I hadn't been paying attention but, uh, you have to pay for some CBS streaming service to watch this beyond the first episode? Really? I hope everyone enjoys the first ST series to last exactly one season.

It's on Netflix in the UK and a bunch of other countries

A few reviews have slipped through the embargo and been decent

This should be worth a flyer just for more Michelle Yeoh.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood: CBS is only airing the first half of the two hour pilot on actual TV. Fun idea.

If they streamed it only on the CBS app but allowed digital purchases on amazon, itunes, etc. it'd make more sense. but, afaik, they are making it only available on the CBS app

so irritating, I'd shell out for the entire season purchase even if it trickles out a week at a time as per usual

i'll probably wait until next year and stream the whole season then. or find "other ways" that will appear soon, i'm sure

I just did the free CBS trial on my tv device, but I guess it doesn't air until tonight? boo

I guess I hadn't been paying attention but, uh, you have to pay for some CBS streaming service to watch this beyond the first episode? Really? I hope everyone enjoys the first ST series to last exactly one season.

― Señor Winces (Old Lunch)

yeah i mean i know game of thrones seems to do ok and all but i'm not sure why directly adopting a piracy-based business model is cbs's schtick here

anyway when the streaming service fails they'll probably just toss it to another streaming service. doesn't necessarily doom the show.

Phase II - proposed for Paramount Television Service, a fourth US network
Voyager (1995-2001), Enterprise (2001-2005) - designed to support UPN (1995-2006)

nice ship -- too bad they haven't invented probes yet and have to send their first officer into lethal radiation

this was fun but fuck CBS for making me watch a thousand NAVY SEALS promos and then asking for money to keep watching

points for having the main plot thread be about a black woman trying to tell everybody "no really, they're going to kill all of us" and being shouted down

cbs has consistently been tightassed with digital access to its programming since the tv-web boom, it's annoying

Enjoying this!

First question: how can I get one of those dope uniforms

We signed up for free trial - canceled after 2nd ep & got a month free so 4 more episodes

But seriously $6 for 1 original show and commercials is a joke. $10 if you want commercial free? Eat a dick

A few minutes in, it looks right at least. The ship and cinematography look like a Star Trek show (vs. the new movies).

New Klingons - ehhhhhhhh. The makeup is so heavy their faces barely move.

Huh.

The theme manages to have twelve different sections, goes a bit Mahler for some reason, not very catchy

Although I speak as someone who liked Faith of the Heart so ignore me

Only seen the first hour - I feel like I can semi-credibly guess which ideas/dialogue came from Fuller and what came from Kurtzman/Goldsman. Not bad but the character-backstory shit is hacky and painful.

Thought it was ok. Will keep watching.

But yeah, the theme tune is a mess

I liked the show!

At the beginning I was thinking "hmm, is this Star Trek enough?"

But, thinking back, the best shows start out with their own scope and integrate. Enterprise was slavishly devoted to tying into continuity while not fleshing out much history. More than anything I got the impression that someone (Fuller? looked like he was the writer w/Ortzman) had an understanding of what TNG and DS9 did well.

The previews make it look like it's going to be scientific discovery (hah!) in a time of war. Which is a clearer mission statement than we've gotten recently.

Yeah did enjoy that and thought there was going to be more, but I guess CBS is running it as a weekly show and selling it on elsewhere.

Gotta free up airtime for those Chuck Lorre productions and NCIS: Anchorage.

I know it's a Toronto production, so I hate to say this but most of the sets looked pretty lacklustre. Felt like they were adding the occasional lens flares out of sheer desperation to spice it up. And yeahhh, the guys playing Klingons can't even act in all that get up. Hopefully they will sort it out as it goes along.

I'm guessing the backgrounds in the Klingon ship were put there in post-production, because they were pretty ornate?

I thought the story was engaging & the character development pretty solid for a 2-ep premiere. I am so used to expecting exposition dumps for new shows but this played out like a mini movie, it was kinda thrilling tbh

I think the Michael character has been set up with good layers & i’m really interested to follow her journey now

Doug Jones was great & I loved Michelle Yeoh

Klingon makeup looks more like the movie Romulans but dont they always seem to screw around with their look iirc?

Mr Veg had some gripes about how it doesn’t look like it’s taking place before the original series but i wasnt too bothered by that myself

I was wondering if teh original Klingons were supposed to look like evil humans intentionally. Seem to be a bit Hispanic pirate update in the tv series or something don't they? Is that why they were made to look less human.

Latest look has shades of Tudor era doublet and hose and tunic look don't it?

klingons lose a bit of menace when they sound like they're trying to talk through a retainer.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/1/1f/Shelley.png
today ish a good day to die, you turdsh!

lol

should I watch this or is it going to be totally cancelled within a year

(I hated enterprise and found most of voyager boring as fuck)

it won't get "cancelled"... i'm sure first season's in the can
also, if they're really using this as a push for CBS All Access (I wonder how The Good Fight did) they'll probably keep it alive for that alone, regardless of ratings or quality. i mean look at Netflix's insane stable of shows, who knows how well any of these do or how much they cost to keep going with the verticality of it all

i can't even imagine picking up another subscription tv service, not for this. piracy it is.

The first hour was a disaster. tons of pilot-speak where characters explain things that should be obvious in their world. tons of phrases that they put in because they sounded cool despite not making sense -- how is a species both "prey" and "bred to sense death"? the michael actress ruins a bunch of her lines. i found michelle yeoh's accent distracting, but the rest of her performance was solid. filler with an optical scrambler that lets them do the "go back to old technology" bit, which has been done frequently in Star Trek but still sucks. crap CG during the space walk.

second hour does the "balance of terror" / enemy below thing. not the best use of it but it still works. lots of forced parallels that are more coincidental than meaningful. i was pleasantly surprised by the ending.

oh and i was distracted by trying to figure out where in the ST timelines this happens -- young Sarek + Klingons gone for a century = shortly before TOS, timeline still not split. i suppose ST fans will just look it up online.

Continuity-wise, Shran from Enterprise will be happy to see they've named a ship after him... it's certainly BEEN A LONG ROAAAAAAAAAAD

I thought this took place before Enterprise?

100 years after Enterprise, or thereabouts. About a decade before the original series.

Just read it said that it was supposed to be about 10 years before the Shatner series. But that might be open to debate.

They might run into, or at least hear about, the Enterprise commanded by Christopher Pike

oh I'm sure they will at some point if not this year then next year when the ratings start to flag. expect a time travel episode with someone from TNG at some point too to revive interest.

they've already got Sarek, what else do they need?

Khan's older stoner brother Chad.

CHAAAAAAAAAD

lol

I liked this quite a bit and I think it's about as good as a Star Trek show could be in 2017. It's not what I would consider ideal, but it's what works now. Hopefully, they can keep it up.

the internet informs me that giving strong female characters traditionally male names is a 'trademark' of fuller or one of the other three dozen executive producers

i don't really gi

i’ve met several women named michael, just kind of figured they decided in the future “michelle” is just how french people pronounce the name

and let’s not forget queen of all michaels, michael hyatt aka mama barksdale

http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/558867506da8111716adf0f6-840-688/screen%20shot%202015-06-22%20at%203.51.04%20pm.png

whoa, Michelle Yeoh

however i will probly never watch

who plays Sarek?

james frain

which is weird bc he’s the “bad guy” in like, everything. so seeing him play sarek is some cognitive dissonance like “ok well i ~guess~ he’s cool bc he’s sarek ...but it’s james frain so he might be plotting the downfall of the entire starfleet!”

we don’t have a lot of cool-mannered, calculating figures who look like that who normally play protagonists

serious sheldon cooper vibes from lieutenant saru (whose name is maybe a nod to joe meek's i hear a new world?)

ha, i was thinking the same thing about saru

this was fine, i guess? the floaty-camera dutch-angle shots were getting pretty tiresome by the end of the second episode but, having said that, i did enjoy how much more they made of the freedom of movement available in space than previous star trek shows - ships not always lining up in neat horizontal angles and the off-centredness of the accretion rings was cool

i also liked how the lighting helped the spaces inside the ship feel more like they were actually in space - instead of the flat, institutional lighting of tng or voyager the sets and characters were sometimes lit by sources outside the ship's windows, and it looked great

kind of a bummer that michelle yeoh isn't going to stick around but since she was listed as a guest star in the opening credits it was immediately obvious that she'd end up getting killed :(

i also liked how the lighting helped the spaces inside the ship feel more like they were actually in space

It's one of the weird/interesting things about Trek that it never feels like a space show in *actual* space - it's just set in spaceships. There's no dogfights, space walks, gravity losses, all those cliches - every time you see a Trek character in a space suit, it feels like the rules are being breached. Even the space battles feel like turn-based RPGs rather than action sequences. (I'm sure there are exceptions - "The Doomsday Machine" springs to mind.)

My partner was like "The whole point of spaceships is to *avoid* being in space - sailors don't keep jumping in the sea to get things done."

"kind of a bummer that michelle yeoh isn't going to stick around" well fuck, that was actually the main reason I was even going to bother watching it.

i think she'll be showing up in flashbacks in future episodes fwiw

she's ghost mom, sarek appearing via katra vision is ghost dad

Finally watched - that was pretty fun. I enjoyed it more than any single episode of Voyager or Enterprise I can recall.

The design worked, I think - all that primary colour neon is lovely. But the direction was pretty wretched - the floaty camera makes everything look like an RPG cutscene.

Michael is a bit wooden so far, but will hopefully be a bit more layered after next week's time jump.

The theme is growing on me but it doesn't build - just when it should be climaxing it segues into the old TOS fanfare.

#StarTrekDiscovey joins "Game of Thrones" as one of the most pirated TV shows in less than 24 hours: https://t.co/WLUg8O1J7d pic.twitter.com/nN57FF0ZQU

— IndieWire (@IndieWire) September 26, 2017

shocking news

This is smugly delivered and full of old staple TNG jokes... but the clips are very endearing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Zc8Co2H3w

The lead actress (RIP Michelle Yeoh ;_;) does bungle at least one of her lines, but most of her dialogue and delivery are pretty effective -- I was looking for pointy ears just based on her demeanor before we're told that she grew up on Vulcan.

I liked how the show is splitting the difference of society's worst traits between Starfleet and the Klingons, particularly the Klingon wariness about Starfleet's "We come in peace" rhetoric. Also, it's a corrective to Starfleet's stated mandate of scientific exploration masking its imperial impulses. I don't expect it to be carried out much further, though.

The SF half of the cold open was hokey, but I guess one of the most Trek things of this so far.

I did like how they departed from Vulcan pacifism to a Gonzo pragmatic realpolitik.

Also the reviews saying that the hologram communications were novel are forgetting that it was already introduced by DS9, and I'm pretty sure Voyager used something like it too. (I was bound to go into out-nerding mode!)

Michelle Yeoh's death was kind of offhand and (mostly) offscreen - I kind of felt like she wasn't definitely, definitively dead.

Or maybe it was just bad direction.

who knows, maybe she'll show up in future episode in a captain pike-style techno-wheelchair

Would watch a Star Trek iteration where the entire crew is consigned to Pikechairs.

I watched the first two episodes, was mostly disappointed. I guess I was optimistic in believing that a return to original Star Trek timeline would make this series more like the previous Trek TV shows and less like the Abrams movies. But the first two eps were exactly like the rebooted movies: more violence, more grim and gritty action scenes, a brooding and edgy anti-hero protagonist, who starts the story by neck-pinching her captain and attempting a mutiny.

OTOH, the utopian idealism and the cool sci-fi concepts that made the best of TV Trek so unique were nowhere to be found. Okay, pretty much none of the pilots for other Star Trek have been perfect, but at least all of them tried to explore some neat sci-fi ideas, even if they weren't always successful. Here, however, it's just Klingon and Federation ships shooting each other in space, protagonists arguing and shouting at each other, Klingons being stereotypically proud and violent and stupid.

The Klingons were really the worst part. I guess I can live with the inexplicable change in their physical features, but the story made them look more childish and stupid than ever before, even for race who's niche has always been that they're the Space Vikings.

To summarize, a random spaceship captain summons the leaders of the 24 ruling Houses. This captain, whom none of the other leaders seem to rate very highly, tells them that they should start a war against the Federation, pretty much for the sole reason that he doesn't like humans. The leaders don't seem to be particularly convinced, but then captain dude fires his weapons at Shenzhou and provokes a battle between the Klingon and Federation ships. And somehow this random and pointless act makes the other Klingon leaders suddenly think he was right, and at the end of the episode they're chanting his name like he's some kind of Messiah... Even though he still hasn't provided any better justification for war than his personal feelings towards the Federation.

So, basically, we're supposed to accept the leaders of the great Klingon Houses are like little kids, willing to wage a war against an powerful interplanetary coalition because another kid dares them to do that? It's just corny.

And of course there's the time-honoured tradition of Starfleet captains ignoring Starfleet regulations and personally going on dangerous off-ship missions instead of ordering someone else to do it. This time it was particularly stupid, though, cos captain Georgiou thought it would make sense for the two highest-ranking officers to board a Klingon ship and take no one else with them, not even the redshirts seen in the previous episode. I guess the writers at least wanted to point out how silly this is, cos their mission failed utterly, leading to Georgiou dying and the Klingon captain becoming a martyr, which is exactly what they wanted to avoid.

On the acting level, the protagonist seemed decent, but as much as I've liked Michelle Yeoh in HK movies, it feels she was miscast here. All that technobabble just didn't seem to suit her well, in some of the more jargony scenes it felt like she was reading directly from the script. Sarek's actor was okay, but it felt like he was being a bit too nudge-nudge, wink-wink, a bit too human compared to how Mark Lenard played him.

Also the reviews saying that the hologram communications were novel are forgetting that it was already introduced by DS9

Can't blame anyone for not remembering the DS9 comm holograms, cos they were introduced in one episode, then maybe used in one more, and after that promptly forgotten for the rest of the series.

Oh, yeah, I meant to add to the actor reviews that the guy playing the big alien did a fine job, he was pretty much the highlight of pilot. I could imagine him becoming the Data or the Phlox of this series. His spider-sense for death was total anti-scientific bullshit tho. And I was gonna say the same about Sareks' intergalactic telepathy, but I guess it was already established in that "Beauty and Beast in space" Enterprise episode that some telepaths can communicate over extremely long distances. Still, makes you wonder why no Vulcans have ever been shown using this ability before? I'm sure it would've been handy in the countless episoded where the away team is stranded on a planet and they're communicators won't work.

Same reason why we've never heard mention of Spock's adopted sister before now, it's a handy retcon.

they're very quiet about it when among outsiders

So, basically, we're supposed to accept the leaders of the great Klingon Houses are like little kids, willing to wage a war against an powerful interplanetary coalition because another kid dares them to do that?

And yet the possibility of something like that happening in the regards to some actual world leaders isn't that far off.

I don't think establishing that the Klingons, especially in the early Federation days, as a culture that prizes battle as social interaction and victory as a marker of social prestige is any thing new. Even in the relatively diplomatic Klingon era of DS9, you still have the idea going to battle together is how you cement a partnership, and the risk of dying in battle isn't a negative, it's a cost of doing business.

"this battle has a high risk of casualties" isn't a moment for klingon introspection. for them, they're thinking "fuck yeah, that is a worthy battle"

I thought the use of stealth mode not to, as many would, gain a tactical position on which to fire but using stealth as a weapon in itself and intimidation tactic was kind of new but still very Klingon

using stealth to sneak up behind your enemy -> weak

using stealth to get close enough you gloriously ram their ship -> for the empire!!!

Insane Clown Fosse (Leee) at 5:38 27 Sep 17

Same reason why we've never heard mention of Spock's adopted sister before now, it's a handy retcon.

Well yeah, but at least they've promised an in-story explanation for why the adopted sister has never been mentioned before... I kinda doubt they'll do the same with the long-range telepathy.

how many people in Trek have both had a connection to someone else's katra *and* been trained enough in Vulcan culture to be able to tune in?

Might have been some situation with Tuvok on Voyager but he was on the same ship as the people he'd had to mind-meld with for the most part, Kirk definitely was an unfocused mind, etc

mh at 5:54 27 Sep 17

"this battle has a high risk of casualties" isn't a moment for klingon introspection. for them, they're thinking "fuck yeah, that is a worthy battle"

Well yeah, but my point is that they were tricked into a battle by a guy who they don't respect much, and for a reason only that guy seems to care much about. So their sudden conversion, where at the end of the episode they're chanting the captain's name, and being all, "hell yeah, he was right!", felt unearned. That's like a stereotype of the Klingon bloodlust, but the problem is that the other Trek series have already made that stereotype more complex. For example, it's been shown several times that "proper" Klingons don't fight unless they feel the fight is honourable. How is being tricked into joining someone else's personal war honourable? If the captain dude had somehow made it look like the Federation started the conflict, then it would make more sense for the House leaders to demand revenge... But they were right there and then when he fired the first shot at Shenzhou, and he made his whole plan quite clear to them.

uniting the empire seems honorable!

it's a problem in search of an enemy

Michelle Yeoh's death was kind of offhand and (mostly) offscreen - I kind of felt like she wasn't definitely, definitively dead.

Or maybe it was just bad direction.

I felt like this was the worst part of the pilot, except for the scene right afterwards with the albino Klingon and T'Kuvma when they zoom all the way in on his face. Everything in that sequence is so telegraphed and pokey and dumb.

the federation is without honor, "we come in peace" isn't a way you make allies. you make allies with war, and come to a detente via respect (seen in how the vulcans apparently acted)

B-b-but Vulcans are a part of the Federation!

how many people in Trek have both had a connection to someone else's katra *and* been trained enough in Vulcan culture to be able to tune in?

T'Pol and Tucker definitely had a strong psychic bond, and there were many episodes where one or the other was stranded on some planet where the Enterprise couldn't find them with their sensors. This kind of remote telepathy would've been pretty handy then.

I can't be as negative as Tuomas as I thought it was pretty fun and unlike the Abrams movies. And even as a gold-plated Trekkie nerd, I can't bring myself to give a shit about the internal consistency between shows.

But, yes, it was kinda disappointing that it all ends with a space battle and a lame punch-up, and none the characters who believe in peaceful negotiation get a sympathetic ear.

Really the only good Star Trek fights are the TNG ones where someone gets clocked in their living quarters and falls over a table.

Enterprise wasn't real, that was Riker watching a tv show version of the past

I'm sticking with this

xpost
Nah, any original series punch up where Kirk gets his shirt ripped is CLASSIC in every sense.

Fair, I'll add anything that involves sweaty shirt ripping

T'Pol and Tucker definitely had a strong psychic bond

i believe they actually did have a remote telepathic scene in one episode. towards the end of the series there was a case of "why are you in my dream?" then t'pol explained something similar to the explanation in discovery

So last night was pretty bad all around -- dialogue, acting, characters, plot. (Was the tehcnobabble on the other series so poorly delivered as it was last night?) Overall, the worst thing about the episode was how ham-handedly it tries to say, "THIS AIN'T YOUR DAD'S STAR TREK," especially with the gore and the one-off profanity.

Lorca is like Zach Snyder's version of Kirk with his unscrupulous cowboy diplomacy x 10 (and wtf was he doing with a tribble?).

Black alert sounds cool, though -- I wonder how involved Discovery is with Section 31.

I do wish we got to see some of the AI characters a little more.

Discovery is the first time that the Aspie stand-in is an actual human Aspie. Don't know how successful that will be.

ep3 suuuuuuuuucked ;_;

mystery set-up
v
prisoner abuse
v
generic space monster
v
speed-reciting alice in wonderland because it sounds cool, oh wait no it doesn't

But the first two eps were exactly like the rebooted movies: more violence, more grim and gritty action scenes

why is Star Trek so cynical and violent what's going on

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) October 2, 2017

dont mean this as a dig but TNG was the only good liberal propaganda–Heroes are essentially imperial middle mgmt but super nice & benevolent

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) October 2, 2017

fitting that rick and morty made fun of the generic monster of the week adventure in the same week.

they made the jeffries tubes gigantic so they could fit their big blob monster in them. then akiva goldsman shot it with far shots and wide angles because nothing says confinement terror like wide open spaces.

mr veg said something otm - the show is ok but it’s not Star Trek. they say Star Trek words but that’s about all. i’m inclined to agree. if you just watch it as like, a crummy Expanse or something it’s not bad

god the CBS app is garbage though.

yeah it really feels nothing like star trek at this point

Star Trek: Discovery... That This Is Not Actually Star Trek Lol Nerds Psych

you'll make the discovery that...

that is to say, VG otm

Eh I enjoyed this one too, even with its many awkwardnesses, although I hope Jason Isaacs's accent gets better.

And let's try and do an episode without an action sequence. No chases no fights no space bugs.

turns out i dont really want space monsters?
i didnt know that til i was given them

this sounds stupid, think I'll pass. too bad as the first trailers looked great and I was intrigued by the cast.

Said this on the other thread but I think I like Orville better than this :/ Too much lens flare. Why are the Klingons Spe King So Slow ly. Pacing was weird (havent seen ep3 yet tho tbh).

Dorn apparently had trouble speaking through his fangs, but soldiered through. nu-klingon orthodontia is probably even harder to enunciate with.

Burnham Kirksplaining the brig computer into releasing her felt like a corn kernel of Trek had survived the digestive process.

iirc by trek rules any computer encountering logical contradictions has to destroy itself tho

Speaking of corn kernels surviving, did anyone else notice they kept a few old-school sounds? Door openings, certain computer bleeps/comms bleeps?

I only saw it for a moment, but I believe they re-used the red alert graphic from the TMP Enterprise on the Shenzhou.

ah ha, found it:

http://trekcore.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/red-alert-696x354.jpg

Saw ep 3 finally, it was a lot better than the first 2. Still on the fence about all this tho.

Off the fence, I was done when their new super drive was navigated by tweaking the nipples of an alien dust mite.

Similarly off the STD boat. Humongous, card-carrying Trek dork here, but the oppressive negativity has been a serious turnoff. Troubled at the prospect of an intelligent creature being exploited against its will to power the ship's magical mushroom drive. Burnham looking constipated while crewmates lament "oh well, war" doesn't cut it.

The bar I have set is that first season TNG episode where the slug aliens take over starfleet high command and Picard has to trick them and kill them

Conspiracy? If only Discovery were that entertaining!

The parasite infiltration of Starfleet plot never got a follow-up because they morphed into the Borg in the writers' room.

The dialogue is awful! "Who just saved us?" was lol bad.

the oppressive negativity has been a serious turnoff

Same. This has had a serious Oedipal complex about proving how much darker and more violent it is than its predecessors, with no charm whatsoever, nor any depth. Plus, the Starfleet officers are so dumb.

The Michelle Yeoh cameo was comforting, a glimpse of what could've been. But the series is intent on killing such nostalgia, and replacing it with movie-quality protection values.

throwing in Elon Musk with Zefram Cochrane, ugh

spores must flow

yeah i thought michael was an interesting character after the first 2 eps & now she’s as boring as the rest of them. the crew seem extraneous/unimportant which OK WHUT, there’s zero curiosity or starfleet level anything going on here

i really do not know what it is i am watching

spores tho

lotta spores

Star Trek: Spore Wars

the kid from my so-called life tho!

remember in the 90s when there would be two trek shows airing simultaneously? i think at this point if we ever want that to happen again we have to suck it up and pretend like this is the best show ever made and that cbs all access is a great idea oh if only i could afford it

As it's on Netflix elsewhere in the world, I'm not sure the success (or not*) of CBS All Access is a dealbreaker.

One bad episode in 4 is not a bad strike rate for Trek. Though I'm gonna hold on watching it for a few weeks in the hope things get better.

* definitely not

spore travel would have negated most of TOS, TNG, and all of DS9, VOYAGER -- so it looks like the trajectory points to season finale timeline reset?

I think we're going to end up with another Star Trek directive against a particular technology after this goes horribly awry

like, no genetic enhancement technology (KHAAAAAAN!), no time travel (temporal prime directive), no biophysics-based travel

i would imagine if she were aware that the tech existed at some point, janeway would've considered breaking whatever directive against its use. i think maybe discovery and its tech were ultra-top-secret and it wouldn't have been something future starfleet officers would know about

I'd imagine creating a spore drive is not exactly trivial

you'd have to first turn the saucer section into a turntable.
then you need a DJ.

well yeah but it's something i'm sure they'd brainstorm. and since voyager takes place like 100 years later, they might have the technology to make a spore drive in less than 75 years

they did get mad at that other federation ship that was using hyper-dimensional aliens as super jet fuel.

it's just a really big water bear

i'm hoping that the series ends in a humanist "humans, vulcans, klingons, we're all just really big water bears, maaaaaaaaaan"

you'd have to first turn the saucer section into a turntable.

This really didn't help me get over my thinking of a pizza slicer every time the ship appeared on screen (and I really like the ship) - I have no idea why revolving is necessary

As to the severe canon violation of this spore thing, I guess at some point all of these spore lifeforms are going to get wiped out, or it'll be mandated that using them as a propulsion system is unethical, or the spores will just turn on people and teleport them into the middle of a star every time they're forced to take anyone anywhere. But before that happens we have to have a character made of spores so it can have awkward conversations with people a la Persis Khambatta in Trek the Motion Picture

the entire cast of TNG is actually spores who have taken new forms

"You humans ... cannot be everywhere at once? It must be so ... limiting"

x mh bwahhhhh hah ha, solves that canon problem then

more like star trek human after all amirite

The tardigrade breakdown just to let them go all Minority Report with their screen technology was seriously eye-roll inducing, still not as bad as the Clockwork Orange scene.

I'm watching CBS's new Navy SEAL show (as long as I'm borrowing a CBS All Access login...) and Discovery feels more similar to that than it does any prior Star Trek.

tardigrade warp "able to materialize anywhere in the universe" = warp 10, making this the second time warp 10 has been connected to animals

In the new episode I counted them saying "DNA" 6 times which is voyager levels of technobabble. still, best episode yet.

The spore drive tech is very Dune like. Spores = spice?

This show is officially bad, quantitatively speaking.

I ... like this show.

Quantitatively speaking == there aren't enough episodes? But qualitatively it's fine?

The thing that I found most unbelievable in this one (out of a lot of generally unbelievable things) is that Starfleet would allow their one-of-a-kind, most-top-secret weapon-to-end-wars ship to take what could easily have been a one-way trip behind enemy lines to rescue Captain Ends J. Means

I kept hoping the admiral would say 'yep, consider him dead, we're not endangering the entire course of this war to to save one guy. In fact, if you do come across him, kill him yourself if he can't be extracted'

The mirror sting was pretty boss though

Quantitatively speaking == there aren't enough episodes? But qualitatively it's fine?

Qualitatively this thing has been abysmal since the third episode, we've just got a majority of bad episodes now.

it's good enough that we're still watching it which is really the only relevant criteria for whether a show is good or bad

idk, I'm on the verge of hatewatching / praying to Q that it stops being repugnant.

I do a see a lot of fan productions being on the dark/militaristic end of the spectrum, to the point that maybe this is what ST's fanbase wants now, and I'd point the finger at DS9 being the turning point.

Love this more than any Trek since I camped out at the St. Paul campus commons to watch Next Gen in the '90s.

I think the utopian radicalism is still there, just pressed against hard times and reluctant to speechify, which feels appropriate on both counts. The direction/action/FX make the battles as scary as they are striking, and I think the romantic plot and Elephant Man voices of the Klingons oddly give them more humanity than previous incarnations—they're still camp, just more enjoyably so. I love the silent shots, how each show starts with what feels like a cold open that just keeps going, the tense dialogue in suspenseful situations that packs as much evocative meaning as the original series but without underlining itself (sometimes orders must be disobeyed, sometimes monsters aren't, sometimes shame interferes with repair), and stays with me after the plot particulars fade. I like that the show includes a character with autism, but love the suggestion that she still has trouble fitting into this flawed utopia, and that the moral standard of the 23rd Century—and the leading role—may be held by someone other than the Captain.

appreciate the enthusiasm, Peter

Girlfriend (not a natural trekkie) loved Voyager and is loving this and so am I.

i can understand the reluctance of a star trek show being produced today to fully embrace the series' 'utopian radicalism' (great phrase btw peter) in favour of darker moral shades but i just don't understand why you'd choose to set it within a few years of the original series' swashbuckling optimism, where the clash of tones is going to be the most jarring

like, wouldn't it make more sense, and have more potential for drama, to set it years past tng/ds9/voyager? if you wanted to push past roddenberry's 'no personal conflict' rule like this show does, there's a million interesting stories you could tell. like, every human organisation in history has faltered and fallen eventually - wouldn't it be interesting to ask what would make a future starfleet wobble on its axis and threaten to collapse? what would save it?

anyway, enough fan fiction - it just really bugs me that they're trying to squeeze a morally-compromised star trek story into a place where it doesn't quite fit imo

we find out why they have all these rules and directives: the federation of the original series was built on top of a stack of dead bodies

bizzaro, I think that, from a studio's perspective, a post-TNG/DS9/Voyager show wouldn't be able draw in the civilian/non-Trekkie viewership. Kirk/Spock are so much well-established in American pop culture, Picard memes aside.

i thought one of the seasons was intended to take place in that era?

I counted them saying "DNA" 6 times which is voyager levels of technobabble

at least they didn't bother trying to explain how they tracked down the kidnapped lorca

i thought one of the seasons was intended to take place in that era?

they dropped the anthology conceit. One of the reasons Fuller left

bizarro otm, this feels more like dark timeline DS9 than post-Kirk

i think the timeline setting is the biggest mis-step. this would work better in a later period.
with all the egos & sarcasm & unpleasantness it’d work better not being Star Trek at all imo
but that’s just me.

super interested in space toothbrushes tho

I can see an artistic argument for going a different, new direction... but I dunno, that's not the appeal of Trek TV to me.

super interested in space toothbrushes tho

― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 19 October 2017 3:49 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was wondering what they were doing with those prostate massagers.

super interested in space toothbrushes tho

you should check out this show called battlestar galactica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s77l5ti2ATk

Simultaneously impressed and repelled.

wish they'd gone with my title, star trek: tardigrading on a curve

lol mookie

xp

This last episode is so much better! I still have a lot reservations about how badly amateurish SF seems to be right now, but I'm *hoping* that now that Michael's gotten back onto the bridge, that we'll avoid the relentless grimness. Her mentoring Tilly is a refreshing development.

Obviously the show is pushing Michael and Ash into a relationship, which is going to be a source of consternation once Ash is exposed to Lorca's tribble.

Klingons continue to be one-dimensional -- so far I hate them. (They were at least TWO-dimensional on TOS, TNG, and DS9.)

I think the utopian radicalism is still there, just pressed against hard times and reluctant to speechify, which feels appropriate on both counts. The direction/action/FX make the battles as scary as they are striking, and I think the romantic plot and Elephant Man voices of the Klingons oddly give them more humanity than previous incarnations—they're still camp, just more enjoyably so. I love the silent shots, how each show starts with what feels like a cold open that just keeps going, the tense dialogue in suspenseful situations that packs as much evocative meaning as the original series but without underlining itself (sometimes orders must be disobeyed, sometimes monsters aren't, sometimes shame interferes with repair), and stays with me after the plot particulars fade. I like that the show includes a character with autism, but love the suggestion that she still has trouble fitting into this flawed utopia, and that the moral standard of the 23rd Century—and the leading role—may be held by someone other than the Captain.

Lots of interesting points -- I disagree with how you characterize the Klingons, they're drained of camp IMO as they've been painted as the abject Other (eating Georgiou (my god) sort of changes the stakes). I do like your suggestion that Discovery isn't centering its morality around the Captain, but Lorca has been terrible simply as a character.

I don't like this show when it's trying to be the Marily Manson of Trek.

I wonder who came up with the DISCO shirts?

CBS really didn’t allocate enough resources to their streaming service when it comes to Star Trek. The stream was a complete disaster live last night! I thought it was maybe just me but a few friends confirmed.

so was the vulcan haircut just a terrible fashion that happened to coincide with first contact and a while after, or do they have to grow it like that for like logico-physiological reasons

Yes on that note why did Michael have a vulcan haircut in her past but now shes just grown it all out.

Sarek took her to a federation hair stylist on the way to her new job instead of the barber back home

I think that was a signifier that her relationship with Yeoh had 'humanized' her

I do like that the first hour or so of the show establishes Trek-as-we-know-it: admirable captain with a familial relationship with her second in command, wacky and idiosyncratic yet endearing crew members, complete adherence to an Enlightenment-derived worldview, etc. This is destroyed as soon as it's introduced in favor of ends-justify-means warmaking and crew members who are seething masses of aggression, bile, and trauma. Paradoxically Michael, the destroyer, is now the only person who seems to remember what the values of prewar Starfleet are, and the viewer after despising her for killing what was familiar now has to root for her as the last living exemplar of what the show 'wants' to be

I do not have a book contract, I'm just really pedantic after a couple of beers

This is an example of screenwriters getting better with the demands of writing reboots. They could have jumped straight in to the 'dark, gritty' Trek, but they knew they had to introduce it in 'classic' mode to walk the viewer through the transition. In theory it's a great idea, I just think the Yeoh relationship needed more time to breathe. Each scene with the two of them had so many character points to hit, and it had to hit them in quick succession. One flashback to Michael's arrival to show the development and history of the relationship wasn't enough to really make it hurt when Yeoh was offed

Next on Discovery: This is not your father's Star Trek time loop!

http://www.cbr.com/star-trek-discovery-theory-voq-ash/

Hope it's misdirection that Ash is played as kind of shady.

DISCO t-shirt is tempting.

disco! disco disco!

just what I have running through my head every time I see them in the shirts, although I'm trying to place the sample

https://shop.startrek.com/product/Z1CTSTK221/star-trek-discovery-disco-tshirt

there's something wrong with ash -- perhaps someone has put creatures in his body to make him tell lies? -- but him being voq would be enormously bullshit

liked this ep the best so far. probably not a coincidence that it didn't have much klingon content

could he be an augment virus descendant? I can't remember the timelines

I think that if A = V, then maybe they were able to download the real A's memories into V to better impersonate him.

liked this ep the best so far. probably not a coincidence that it didn't have much klingon content

co-sign!

Burnham mentioning "Constitution class, like The Enterprise" was so tantalizing. Will they show it? What will it look like?

Also, I'm probably not going to order that shirt because of the TM on Disco. Why would that be on the real shirt in the show???

it's most definitely not the shirt that was shown in the show

Constitution class Enterprise, according to Discovery:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/additional/large/dea2_enterprise_pizza_cutter_inuse.jpg

I have always hated how that thing has no guard to protect your hand!

This was a great episode. Extremely predictable - every plot beat involving the admiral I'd seen coming long before - but still great because of how well Isaacs is carrying this very, very flawed character. Now that the admiral's out of the way, looking forward to seeing the Starfleet sharks move in looking to depose Lorca

Agreed that Ash is way too easy, there's some reveal waiting there. He's not Voq but something is up

So, what, the Enterprise has athletic shirts that say E N T E R ?

While I'm gushing let me give a shoutout to the DP and the CGI folks, every frame of this show is exquisitely beautiful

first episode with ash was highly suspicious -- lorca plants a word in his vocabulary, gets it replayed by his captor, then concludes mudd is the spy because mudd was listening in? i think it was intentionally crap.

I like this guy's videos, he throws out some possible alternative theories about Ash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syOt1ntFBJs

So, what, the Enterprise has athletic shirts that say E N T E R ?

LOL, then DS9 would have D E E P S tees.

Would purchase

Despite its obvious inspiration from Edge of Tomorrow and "Cause and Effect" (and the fact that the episode ultimately ignores the rules it sets out in the beginning), this was a lot of fun. This show needs to maintain a light feel -- when it does dark, it's terrible.

we bailed halfway through the new episode

i just don’t enjoy it and i am getting more and more annoyed that they called it Star Trek when it has so little to do with that world ... i can’t get past it

hey hey ds9 already has canon in-universe merch

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/8/8a/Niners-uniforms.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070323010702&path-prefix=en

one-off mindfuck episode was a good choice around now. not a patch on tng's cause and effect though. kind of a shame that they have to make every episode a michael burnham episode, because the plot was centered around stamets.

didn't really need a grimdark device that makes you die in the most painful way possible.

do you still have to pay for the cbs app to watch this?

the lack of klingons improved the episode. none of that time-wasting trash.

ending monologue was awful. "sometimes you need to step out of the routine" uggggggh

you only have to pay cbs if you don't know about bittorrent

I love Tilly so much

I rewatched the last episode before the current one and paused for a second at the "eugenics experiment" line before realizing, holy shit, they just casually violated the Federation's directive on eugenics with this warp drive thing, for real. Can't wait to see some more fun freakouts from our resident spore man.

isco! disco disco!

just what I have running through my head every time I see them in the shirts, although I'm trying to place the sample

LOL I think I know the song you mean, at least I know it in a song with loads of horns and funky backbeat... maybe bronx dogs or something.

Why were people thinking Ash is suspicious? IDGI.

avalanches 'close to you'?

lorca's argument for ruling ash out as a spy is invalid
the name of voq's actor is not a real person

Also:

Voq was supposed to lose "everything," which being turned into Ash would satisfy, presumably.
We haven't seen Voq since Ash debuted.
We saw a Tribble in Lorca's ready room, and Tribbles are Klingon detectors -- Chekhov's Gun.

He knows Klingon fighting moves, was a captive of theirs for way too long, was clearly passing info from conversations to the Klingons. Voq was convinced to go train with the Klingon spies in a prior episode.

I think it’s just as likely the producers planted the fake actor details as a trail of suspicion and all those points are to throw us on a fake trail, though

Oh ok all this time I was "who tf is Voq". The albino klingon? I think that whole storyline kind of went over my head tbh haha. I find the horrible subtitle font hard to follow so I zone out.

they should have put it in Papyrus to really make me tune out

I'm definitely leaning towards this theory as misdirection at this point, the writers aren't satisfied with one twist, they're aiming for a twist on a twist.

His actions don’t really make sense to me in this last episode if he’s a secret Klingon. Surely no intel is worth more than the spore drive.

disco! disco disco!

just what I have running through my head every time I see them in the shirts, although I'm trying to place the sample

This one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_kyz6_UagA

xp long game, he'll show his stripes once he's arranged a few accidents and is commander of the science fleet

i just don’t enjoy it and i am getting more and more annoyed that they called it Star Trek when it has so little to do with that world ... i can’t get past it

Hey I enjoyed this last episode more than 90% of Voyager episodes that I've seen!

Yeah I thought the timeloop thing was very trek!

no Q people, thankfully

After some iffy episodes, the last three were all very solid. I'm enjoying watching the characters/acting/writing evolve and find their sweet spots. It's clearly better than Voyager and Enterprise at this point.

I am surprised that the last 2 episodes were made by the same crew that made the early ones. Much better -- but why did they make the early ones so badly?

They don't know how to depict an antagonistic alien race well?

Yeah the Klingons are the weak spot
t
And I don't really like the production design... somehow it looks cheaper than TNG even though the effects are 6000% better.

But I'm really enjoying it and so are my Trekkie family. The supporting cast are growing on me - it's the "gang" sensibility that's the most important part of Star Trek to me, rather than the continuity or relative lightness/darkness/whatnot

Also the last two eps were fucking dorky as hell which is exactly how I like my Trek

remanding a dude who just killed you 60 times over to the custody of his prospective father-in-law is indeed dorky as hell

Even if it doesn't feel Star Trekky, I'm getting into it. A big part of the non-Trek feel is stuff like Tilly's convos with Michael and Michael's feelings toward Ash that previous shows never dealt with in the same way - it feels more modern and personal in that sense.

the klingons are tedious, lorca is insanely over-the-top and suru is mostly annoying (though i guess he gets his this weekend). i like tilly in small doses and stamets in slightly larger doses

i suppose i keep watching because burnham/martin-green are awesome, apart from the voiceovers/monologues. her predicament isn't entirely reasonable, but it's interesting, and i hope they don't wreck it

Tilly is awful. xoxo

If we really do get a season 2, I might revisit this.

Already renewed.

In spite of all the p!racy? That's impressive.

Yeah, both this and Orville got renewed, didn’t they?

https://i.imgur.com/rLF9GZl_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium
Dorky enough for trek

In Star Trek TOS they broke ground by having non-white Anglo ethnicities on the bridge. We’ve had aliens and androids through theough the other series. Now with Tilly we have regular shaped human beings (later TOS movies notwithstanding)

Still can’t deal with Clem Fandango as head of security or deadmau5 arriving by spacewhale.

I suppose this one was mainly set-up for the next episode? Two things going on, but neither went anywhere interesting.

i may be an outlier here but i really enjoyed the last two episodes as fun, largely standalone riffs on the TOS/TNG formula.

the klingon scenes are unbelievably silly and incomprehensible and i say that as someone with a high tolerance for 40k style bullshit. so is the starfleet admiral dead now? and the female klingon? what was the point of any of that if so?

Complaints aside that last one was probably the best so far. It's not often we see a time loop plot from the outside and it was done pretty well. Mud does seem like a classic TOS villain.

Between this and The Orville I feel like I'm enjoying Star Trek for the first time since TOS.

DISCO has shown it has potential, at least. No longer a hatewatch for me.

I actually really enjoyed the last episode as well! Even the Klingon scenes weren't terrible -- I'm kind of curious what's going to happen to L'Rell.

I am really enjoying this unreservedly now. There are lots of callbacks to TOS, but it doesn't just seem like recycling. I *really* like Saru's race's origin story. The show also strikes a nice balance thus far between episode and serial and although I'd prefer pure episodes as that kind of world offers more possibilities , I know entertainment has changed. One weird thing is Burnham's height. As Sasha on TWD and as Burnham, Martin-Green WALKS TALL, so it's always surprising to see her so short next to Saru and Ash (who are tall).

I read somewhere that sets on films are usually built 90% of scale, too, so the actors loom larger. I want to go back now and see if he's always ducking his head getting into elevators. There are some fairly recent SF books featuring a prey species developing a civilization, I wonder which ones of those the runners have read.

I like how the writers are indulging in some Westworldesque fucking with expectations - I thought that of course the 'I want to defect' bit would turn out to be a ruse, for it to be genuine I didn't see coming. There's some long game that's hard to see underneath those giant rubber heads (how painful must those contact lenses be). The legalese surrounding the not-yet-Prime Directive is interesting too

I thought that of course the 'I want to defect' bit would turn out to be a ruse, for it to be genuine I didn't see coming.

I'm not convinced she really wants to defect! She hates Kol for sure, but she's a spy and pretending to defect would give her so much access to Starfleet.

Didn't like the last episode - too much too fast, all three plots needed more room IMO.

She hates Kol for sure, but she's a spy and pretending to defect would give her so much access to Starfleet.

if she really wanted to defect, she could have just gone with lorca/ash rather than take a phaser disruptor to the face

she's also much smarter than every other klingon, it would seem. which is more evidence that ash is a time bomb -- letting lorca/ash get away was uncharacteristically half-assed of her

So am I right in thinking that Stamets is actually exchanging places with himself from a parallel ('mirror', if you will) universe/dimension, in which case the spores are not only a method for instantaneous travel but may also be a method of traversing universes - implying that each jump is actually a jump to a different physical point in a different but very similar universe? That seems to be where we're going but if we are it feels too much like a retread of the 2009 film which justified itself as a reboot by starting over in a fresh timeline

some sort of *engineer voice* organic quantum folding going on here

My timecubes, let me show you them

i think it's a retcon for the genetic engineering ban -- suggesting that the engineering is a form of time/dimension travel.

This is post-Khan being out on ice and the admiral did call them out to doing a banned eugenics experiment

Mid-season finale *sigh* tonight; series resumes Jan. 7.

So am I right in thinking that Stamets is actually exchanging places with himself from a parallel ('mirror', if you will) universe/dimension, in which case the spores are not only a method for instantaneous travel but may also be a method of traversing universes - implying that each jump is actually a jump to a different physical point in a different but very similar universe? That seems to be where we're going but if we are it feels too much like a retread of the 2009 film which justified itself as a reboot by starting over in a fresh timeline

Intriguing!

Pretty clear that A=V is correct from tonight's episode. Not only in L'Rell's words but also in the tech of the humans being able to mask as Klingons.

Next up, mirror universe arc where they wear VERY shirts.

I didn't think about it, but they're going to be in the universe where Michael's preemptive strike plan went into effect, aren't they?

Oh good call, circling back to roads-not-taken plot points from earlier episodes, I hadn't thought of that

This and the Mudd-loop episode is making me wonder just how mindfuck they want to get with the show. If they reveal bf to be a surgically-altered and brainwashed Klingon this whole ride is going to turn into a serious acid trip

Who am I kidding, the torture-sex scenes have already sent it over the edge

It would be wild if - assuming they could ever get back to 'their' universe - Discovery instead of a weapon-to-end-wars became the ultimate research vessel, collecting information on how things turn out elsewhere given certain choices. They'd have to rename the ship the A/B Discovery or the USS Choice Architecture

Now I'm really wondering why they call the Prime Directive "General Order 1".

That's what they called it in TOS, IIRC.

if tilly is going to be working on starfleet's most important system, she really needs a promotion

even wesley got acting ensign

definitely going to get a “Tilly steps up” plot in here somewhere, where she steps up in some dire circumstance and her awkwardness is cast off

xpost

Memory Alpha says "General Order 1" is actually from The Animated Series - nice.

They’ve made other refs to the Animated series, too

Fun episode with one genuine shock (although as they're now in an alternate universe I imagine it will be fairly easy to bring him back)

I'm enjoyjng this but a Michael is getting a little boring.

The "shock" was interesting - I would've thought the writers were smarter than that trope, so I'm guessing that's not the end of that story.

I think I should have seen it coming when the episode had me thinking, "Wow, this character is maybe the most empathetic character we've seen in this role on Star Trek, what a great guy"

I should have guessed, all spontaneous declarations of love for a partner must be followed by death.

It's a little unnerving to see out of all the spinoffs, Enterprise is the one that is being mined for the most material to weave canon out of. Maybe we'll get to see evil Porthos cameo.

Ashhole amirite?

It's a little unnerving to see out of all the spinoffs, Enterprise is the one that is being mined for the most material to weave canon out of. Maybe we'll get to see evil Porthos cameo.

Maybe WE'RE the ones in the mirror universe.

no midriff mirror universe uniforms yet so may it’s changed over there

It's nice to see Frakes directed this, IMHO his is the first Trek name to have been associated with a good series.

Oops, forgot Nick Meyer.

he went a little overboard on the camera-circling-everyone thing

The camera NEVER STOPPED

Static locked down shots don’t exist anymore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpHbLewg79c

I know the agony booths were in TOS, but the lingering over Lorca's pain felt like another example of the show's being EXTREME and EDGY and GRIMDARK. File it with the most painful way to suicide bomb, the most painful possible gun disintegration, and the warp engine booth that tortures the occupant.

Similar to a comment made in the RLM vid on Abrams’ approach to the ‘09 reboot. Everything must be HYPERCHARGED.

I’m curious how a TOS/Constitution-class ship looks rendered in the particular art direction of this show, esp with the lighting.

Here’s what it looked like 15 years ago:

http://www.treksinscifi.com/trekdaily/pictures/2010-04-23_Defiant.jpg

the lingering over Lorca's pain felt like another example of the show's being EXTREME and EDGY and GRIMDARK

Yeah, you'd think that the show would've outgrown its Oedipal impulses by now, but maybe they feel that a midseason premiere required them to reassert the GRIMDARK.

Similar to a comment made in the RLM vid on Abrams’ approach to the ‘09 reboot. Everything must be HYPERCHARGED.

I think with JJ, he may have been overcompensating because he wasn't that familiar with Trek prior to getting the franchise.

Next step in L'Rell's master plan: get Burnham's answers to her security questions.

some viewers were upset that the asian captain gets killed/the black woman gets court martialed/the female admiral gets tortured/the gay guy gets killed*/etc., so it seems only fair that the white guy gets a little agony booth

he does have the pre-existing messed up vision. definitely a problem in the terran empire, where insurance is absolutely brutal

I’m curious how a TOS/Constitution-class ship looks rendered in the particular art direction of this show, esp with the lighting.

maybe aztec'd like this:
http://deg3d.biz/posts/deg3D_NCC-1701_112.jpg

and lit like this:
http://deg3d.biz/desktops_art_SOMS.html

whoops:
http://deg3d.biz/images/deg3D_TOS.5_E_SOMS_1956.jpg

There was a 3d wireframe of one on the show this week that had a kink in the engine struts, but otherwise looked similar.

https://imgur.com/a/zc0K1

guh

https://i.imgur.com/jKQCGnV.jpg

Yeah, thats what made me think of it. Every other ship in the show is “darkshiney” as it were, so I’m wondering what they’ll do to the usual battleship grey exterior

So I guess everyone who predicted the Ash thing was right eh?

(awesome episode btw)

Sarek was right there! How could have scanned the dude after he freaked out!

Yeah that occurred to me as well! But I guess there was more urgent "hey dont kill us" standoff going on.

a mind meld can be dangerous

I honestly didnt see the 'how they got the data' trick coming at all either, so that pleased me a lot.

I think generally a mind meld is pretty risky if the other party isn’t willing, so it’d be a bad idea

Spock was pretty cavalier about melding with anything that moves.

first mind meld episode had it be dangerous. afterwards they did it willy nilly.

Willy nilly...Tilly...Killy?! This is a clue!

Best episode yet. Hopefully a sign of whatever shift the show underwent.

I wonder if there were a bunch of Klingon segments planned for each episode that they just cut out.

i'm such a newbie trekkie that i didn't realize that the depiction of the empire was canon. i thought it was something disco came up with. welp, off to watch the two ENT episodes i skipped

In my head Yesterday's Enterprise is a mirror universe episode, I only just realised it's a regular old parallel universe

they have some common structure, the biggest reveal is "so who is the Emperor THIS time?"

Man, I thought this episode was kind of a dud. None of the people who were supposed to be menacing or dangerous came off that way. Also, the episode felt overburdened with Burnham (overburnhamed?) -- I actually got tired of hearing SMG's voice, especially when she was playing Evil Mirror her.

I thought that two SF guards would still be easy for a Klingon-reduced-to-a-human to overpower.

Faceless Emperor didn't stay faceless for long!

Was Burnham's original plan on the rebel planet to stick around for the hour to make sure that they were able to evac, under the guise that she's still infiltrating, then explain that when Ashhole got activated, they couldn't stay on the surface any longer and HAD to return to the Shengzhou. Did they just not mention it onscreen? That would've made a lot more sense than just beaming out and hoping that she'd be able to keep her crew from firing on the planet. Though I guess that would've meant that Burnham and Tyler would've been smoked when Faceless Emperor swoops in and razes the planet.

I'm glad that Stamets at some level gets to be coherent again -- I was worried that Anthony Rapp would spend a lot more time being semi-catatonic.

I'll admit to being tickled by Sarek's goatee.

I mean, uh, you know what I mean.

This episode had a twist that some people had guessed, but it was never a sure thing like v=a. The show's been playing the long game, with dumb shit from early episodes starting to pay off.

I do complain that they revealed the twist as soon as the clues were all in place. They could have stretched that out.

I've tired of shows that have held plot twists just out of reach until they're just a disappointment when all the cards hit the table

get that shit out there, make the characters and the shows writers deal with it all constructively, imo

It would be an interesting meta-twist if it turns out the entire series is meant to be an alternate or redundant timeline, meaning the writers had total narrative freedom the entire time.

The twist wouldn't have to be a multi-episode stretch. A commercial break would have been enough.

Yeah, liked this twist. The A=V one was kind of botched because some guy guessed it after about two episodes and it was all over the internet and then they basically spelled it out to viewers anyway before the big (messy) reveal.

This one was more of a straight up shock and we now have three episodes left for it to play out.

I completely blanked yesterday when I wrote that previous comment. I only saw this week's episode last night after writing it, and I'll still stand by it, but I give the show credit for setting up a more-obvious twist (fake actor name, telltale signs and flashbacks) masking a more subtle one that was right in front of our faces the whole time, then just dropping that bomb in one episode

that is, I think they "botched" it in such a way that everyone would talk about that twist even though it's a red herring

I could do with to the show never having a Shyamalanesque twist in to the first place.

Yeah, to paraphrase something FilmCritHulk wrote, clarity is far more effective than this mystery box/twisty bullshit

Good twist IMO - wasn't expecting it at all - even though Fringe pulled almost exactly the same twist about five years ago.

I like how Yeoh is turning into Disovery's Shatner - wooden delivery, huge charisma.

john noble would be a good trek guest star

Wait are we all trying not to spoiler... which twist do we mean now, the er... whos who in the parallel universe one in ep12?

kind of

SPOILER ALERT:

So are we going to meet the presumed dead Terran Burnham? Also, what about the Prime Lorca???

they missed an opportunity to show multiple stamets in the mushroom kingdom with varying degrees of beard length as a hairy bar graph showing just how evil the universe is where they're from.

feel pretty confident we will meet mirror burnham

any guesses on hairstyle?

THE BURNHAM WE KNOW *IS* THE MIRROR BURNHAM WHO REALLY *DID* HUNT DOWN MIRROR LORCA

god i hope that's not the case

mirror Burnham was Lorca's pawn, it sounds like? to the extent he didn't just groom her as a protege, they were ~involved~

I'm not even convinced there is a non-mirror Lorca we'll ever see. If there was one, mirror Lorca probably merked him

so many burning questions and they're all-new after this episode and pertinent!

prime lorca runs a tribble rescue / sanctuary and matches them with bajoran refugees as support-tribbles.

I was trying to remember whether someone (non-mirror Michelle Yeoh? the admiral?) had remarked back near the beginning on Lorca's eye problems being new, or whether I just retrospectively imagined that

also, hello, I have only just got caught up enough to read the thread, even with the big gap in the middle. for some reason I've been enjoying it more post-mirrorverse though I do have some reservations abt the mirrorverse direction

(1. the "like Star Trek, only dark, how post-modern and clever" vibe
2. the feeling that Mirror Universe is not real and they may never make their way back - certainly ducks a lot of "why did we never hear about this tech / person in the other series" qs - and so I feel weirdly like it doesn't count, even though duh none of it's real and I've only ever been the most casual of Trek viewers and not personally super invested in the canonical Trek universe
on the plus side, fewer interminable phlegmy Klingon cutscenes)

yeah, my appreciation of the show has an inverse correlation with the number of klingon scenes, and i find the ash/voq thing absurd

waiting for them to be saved by mirror-harry mudd tho

that is an idea that sounds... fun? I should be saying horrible but if Mudd zoomed in and did some crazy shit I'd just accept it

I was trying to remember whether someone (non-mirror Michelle Yeoh? the admiral?) had remarked back near the beginning on Lorca's eye problems being new, or whether I just retrospectively imagined that

Yeah thats the point where I sat up and said "hang on", when she commented on "our race" having the eye sensitivity. But I still didnt fully twig till Lorca was all "mwahaha I have fooled you all".

Still not sure i'm on board with this development but eh.

explaining that humans (terrans!) in the mirror universe have the sensitivity was a real "wait does that mean... oh no.. wait what? oh NOOOO" moment

and then a moment later I'm thinking "oh YES"

I'm sure someone is currently writing the "10 times it was totally obvious Lorca was from the mirror universe that you didn't notice" thinkpiece right now

The geek sites called this twist a few weeks ago, apparently - although god knows how! It didn't seem at all obvious (to me).

I think Star Trek can handle being a mystery twist show better than being a violent grimdark show. Although TNG was occasionally, hilariously gory.

https://media.giphy.com/media/JubIfQVyCuGZy/giphy.gif

It didn't feel like a twist reveal so much as apologia for capt jack bauer torture museum.

It didn't seem at all obvious

no goatee, no credibility

this new light sensitivity thing, is it laying the groundwork for mirrorbeards to invade wearing cool protective eyewear?
i guess they could call them... mirrorshades

I'm still really enjoying this, and the last few episodes have made some genuinely ballsy, unpredictable story choices, by Trek standards.

... I wish the execution was better, though! Burnham is still boring and the end of _______'s arc had zero emotional affect. And yet it's still super fun, somehow.

I loved the most recent ep. Burnham grabbing [spoiler] just as she beamed out was a great move and I can see it being useful for [spoiler as to where theyve ended up now] for tactical reasons.

Can we spoilertalk or should I wait a few days.

dunno if it would be spoiler-y, but it seems totally possible to speak about this show purely in terms of previous series or entirely different franchises, darmok style.
like "this episode was very vader and luke at endor."

I didn't like this one. Michael siding with _______ seemed like a bad idea. I thought Michael was smarter than that.

Also, I just played with my phone during the action scenes. Unrealistic action scenes do nothing for me any more.

what level of unreality should they have been? i think they're missing out on leavening the darkness with some proto-kirkian karate chops and double fisting.

like "this episode was very vader and luke at endor."

LOL that means absolutely nothing to me hahaha.

There was a lot of pew pew pew in this one, thats for sure.

I was a bit bothered by them giving Phillipa karate moves in her fighting though. Come on, shes Asian but must we do that? No one else karate-kicked anyone.

I think the phrase "join me; come to the dark side and we'll bring order to the galaxy" or something very much like it was uttered.

xp honestly i didn't even notice that, but it's michelle yeoh, she's known for martial arts movies.
https://youtu.be/Oh8KnmRvqd0?t=1m36s

yeah the action was actually pretty good and I was left wondering how they pulled off better action/effects than multiple movies in a late season episode

but it's michelle yeoh, she's known for martial arts movies.

Well yeah, granted (my bf said the same thing).

TBH I would've been peeved if they never let Michelle Yeoh do Michelle Yeoh stuff!

(I do wish the fight scenes were shot like HK movies instead of the Western-style, heavily edited stuff, but that's another topic.) (Also, the actress who plays Landry looked like GOT's Sand Snakes level bad.) (And speaking of, I've seen talk that the one freed from the Agony Booth in this ep would actually have been from the Prime Universe and that the one we saw get killed by the tardigrade was originally from the MU -- not at all how it turned out, so I guess the PU Landry was a thug anyway?)

I thought most of the episode plot points were kind of rote, but when the [SPOILER] readies to fly in at the [OTHER SPOILER] and fire its photon torpedoes at the McGuffin, I had a physically tense reaction even though my brain knew that everything would turn out OK.

lol @ all our spoilvoiding sentences.

it was surprisingly easy for some dudes to break out of their agonizers and take over, but hey, plot. guess it helps when the emperor kills all her lieutenants just beforehand

I was left wondering how they pulled off better action/effects than multiple movies in a late season episode

i'm generally not too bothered by the quality of special effects but the show looks amazing. (there was one episode in which the director *really* loved zooming the camera in from outer space through the hull, but i forgive her/him)

My only complaint was that one ep where they spun the camera around the talking scene over and over til I thought I'd vom. I think someone else said similar upthread.

yeah that was riker directing!

I noticed Frakes also directed an episode of The Orville recently.

Think Enterprise is the only post TNG one he hasn't had any involvement with.

wise

except when he turned up in the last scene in the last episode!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkecbH6an0w

he was in that ENTire episode

it's been a long rooooooad getting from beard to beard

Was actively guffawing at Lorca's brilliant battle plan of engaging forces in a hallway/shooting gallery when you have less than thirty people at your disposal

half the point of the mirror universe seems to be demonstrating how you're the biggest hardman, at all times

ROLLING HARDMAN THREAD 2255

I didn’t like how dude went from heelturn reveal to complete genocidal maniac in like 15 minutes across two episodes. That seemed a bit much.

Poor Rehka Sharma.

Also disappointed a certain ship never made an appearance after being alluded to in multiple episodes

we still have 2(?) episodes left. i'm hoping we still get to see that ship

I was thinking throughout this week's episode that they'd end up setting up Georgiou in a position where Burnham ends up handing her too much power under desperation

but no, they went... the other direction

this episode hurt me in my heart because all I could think was "why couldnt Bablyon 5 have looked this good, this is exactly what Babylon 5 could have been like with a budget, arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhh"

(as in, this ep reminded me of the earth vs Minbari standoffs and such)

so i guess they cut the kelpian dinner scene out of the previous episode. thank you censors.

it was in the version I watched

after that scene where Burnham had to pick a kelpian, the emperor pushes her to try one dish at their dinner and says it’s kelpian brain sashimi

It was several eps previous.

why would the censors cut that scene???

yikes, I missed that.

given the show, i thought they'd do some sort of foie gras thing or maybe the monkey heads in temple of doom.

It wasnt gorey or anything, just commented on while they sat at dinner iirc?

not gory in visuals, but in essence...

looked like they were eating lotus root.

I was confused by the ending and thought they'd brought back the *original* Girorgiou.

Otherwise, solid episode! Science and problem solving and corridor walking - it felt like the most old school Trek episode so far.

And "my lorca is dead" seemed like a clear cue that he's alive, somewhere.

one’s missing, one is a spore lad now

Namedropping Archer so conspicuously seems like they're itching to bring out Scott Bakula in old-man makeup to give some rousing braveheart speech while porthos softly weeps.

like old man Sarek in TNG

that was the worst episode

i liked the groovy vintage theme during the credits tho

Well that was one of the weirdest first seasons of a show I’ve ever seen. It started to grow on me after a while even with it making zero sense most of the time.

That said, rolled my eyes hard at the last shot in the finale.

it's settled: clint howard is the throughline that ties all the series together

Just realized that it was Evil Lorca who dropped Elon Musk’s name as important space pioneer, suggesting Musk’s prominence in the evil fashy MU

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/star-trek-discovery-elon-musk/

"Oh, she's not..."
unh-unhh

"So she's from.."
mm-hmm

poor Tilly

Yeah, Tilly bursting out of costume with such effusive excitement in her entrance was a lot of fun.

she really had a hell of a day, get your hopes up that your captain's back from the dead, then get smoked up by Clint Howard

"I'm very high right now but I'm pretty sure the emperor is trying to blow up this planet"

akiva goldsman: the episode

that was pretty bad

so star fleet doesn't commit genocide, they just threaten to commit genocide huh

akiva goldsman: the episode

That pretty much says it all.

Been hit with heavy depression the last couple of weeks and over the last couple of days I shotgunned all of Star Trek: Disco (so who is calling it STD?). Powering through the first couple of episodes was a dreadful slog and reminiscent of the terrible Cylon-heavy episodes of nuGalactica, but after that this was.... great.. I was watching four or five episodes a night - the block of mirror universe episodes alone were better than any recent ST movie. Tilly is the best. I hope Michelle Yeoh will have a recurring role in season 2.

The last episode was a little all over the place and underwhelming but overall this series is a blast.

Last episode thoughts:
- Why not just have the Federation say "we can blow up Q'onos"? Seems like more effective bargaining. I guess some Klingon groups wouldn't care and would keep on prosecuting the war regardless.
- WTF did they do to Paris??? Buildings almost on top of the Eiffel Tower? Nothing like what we've seen in TNG etc.
- New/Old Enterprise looks GREAT (and I'm a purist) - although the engine struts should have been straight.

Season 2 of Discovery promises just as many shocking revelations of the first, as the showrunners reiterate they want to include the show in more of Star Trek‘s extensive canon.

This is one of the more tiresome aspects of sandbox narratives.

lenny kravitz is no beastie boys

Half way through this. Just had the cliffhangar episode devoted to finding a way to detect the klingon's cloaked ships. Half way through, before they've found the solution, a crewman says 'long range scanners detecting a cloaked klingon ship dropping out of warp'. WHAT?

Overall it's a solid crew and cast, passes the bechdel test in spades, Klingon redesign is great, loved the old skool timeloop episode; shame the spore drive central macguffin is such hot garbage.

Back today in the UK.

Netflix has also got the Short Treks available now too but they're stupidly hard to find:

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll want to search for “Star Trek: Discovery” and then click for more info. Next to the tab “episodes”, you’ll find another tab called “trailers & more”. Click on this, and then scroll all the way to the right and – SUCCESS! – you’ll find four episodes: Runaway, Calypso, The Brightest Star, and Escape Artist.

Loved Calypso

Wow, this was so much better a season opener than with the first season! Feels like proper TV Trek again, with exploration and sense or wonder, not fights and war. And they managed to give almost everyone nice little character moments too. Seems like the pattern they've had with every series since TNG still holds, that they get better after a meh first season... Or at least this ep gave me hope it'll be the case with Discovery too.

!!! I didn't realise this was already happening.

Loved the mini-episodes too, especially Calypso, which was apparently co-written by Michael Chabon. The connection to the actual series was flimsy, but nothing wrong in doing proper science fiction in this context.

Calypso was good. I didn't like any of the others. The last one had the main character being extremely one-note and boring, and that turned out to be the joke? -- not a great idea.

Brightest Star was my fave if only because it gave a nice back story for Saru.

Tig Notaro was so good and unexpected! And her name is COMMANDER JET RENO!

Fun opener. Enjoyed the contrast between trad Pike and the Disco-ers. Spock incorporated in a surprisingly non-embarrassing way. And that was maybe the least shot-in-Canada-looking Canadian production I've ever seen.

more Jet Reno please

I had an especially hard time following the story! It was like an Aaron Sorkin version of Trek: walk-and-talks full of technobabble that were so dense that I felt constantly half a scene behind trying to figure out what everyone was doing.

This is a weird complaint to make but they made Tig Notaro’s character too high energy and not droll and dry enough.

Is this story about how Michael and Spock arent speaking a sly way of back-filling the fact Spock never mentioned having a sister before, I assume?

pretty rude just busting into the personal log

lol I was thinking that too. Sure, just stroll into his quarters and go through his shit.

Also the log seems like it was aimed at her? I couldnt tell exactly what happened there but she knew to "throw" it like sand and it made a map... will that be explained later I guess?

She knew to throw and draw it, cos on the log Spock was talking about a dragon of which he had had nightmares as a kid, and as we saw in the flashbacks, Spock was constantly drawing it that way. And the map wasn't just any map, it aligned with the points where Starfleet had detected those weird signals (we saw a map of them earlier), that's why Burnham was amazed by it.

Very familiar twist in The Orville this week

I thought the second episode was a lot more fun! Even if some of the places points seemed underbaked.

Thank Q that they've avoided the grim gritty nonsense so far.

rip the prime directive

Oh yeah, that.

I do have a problem with how easily they're dismissing or
trivializing the Prime Directive; Pike makes noise about how important it is and then Burnham reminds him that the Starfleet orders to investigate the red signals is supposed to be even higher priority, and he goes "oh o good point." I know that they're resting on established continuity from previous shows about the importance of the Prime Directive but the way it's been handled so far seems lazy; the red signals are so information-free and without context that in managing to overrule the PD, they just make the PD seem weaker.

All the same, Tilly was too cute this episode.

to be fair, i guess it's relatively early days in the federation and the rules may not have the weight of centuries (or examples of mistakes made) yet. just recently they were willing to completely obliterate the klingon race

besides, all the other captains broke the rules and disobeyed orders constantly, so it's hardly out of character

Yeah, the other series usually mention it only to break it. Disco having so few episodes probably magnifies how flimsy it can be as a plot device.

I'm surprisingly digging Pike and so far they're nailing the season-arc-to-single-episode-story ratio. "Science mystery" is a much better season arc concept than the space opera stuff last year. I hope they keep it up! Interested to see how they'I'll integrate all the Dark Trek characters from last season (presuming they turn up). Plots are still a bit clumsy but the rest is good enough that I'm no longer caring. The main crew also seem a lot more likeable too.

has there ever been a prime directive story that didn't end with it being minutely-to-majorly broken?

xp Having to investigate seven signals scattered throughout the galaxy as a season arc seems a lot more conducive to story of the week type episodes

I do have a problem with how easily they're dismissing or
trivializing the Prime Directive; Pike makes noise about how important it is and then Burnham reminds him that the Starfleet orders to investigate the red signals is supposed to be even higher priority, and he goes "oh o good point." I know that they're resting on established continuity from previous shows about the importance of the Prime Directive but the way it's been handled so far seems lazy; the red signals are so information-free and without context that in managing to overrule the PD, they just make the PD seem weaker.

I'm wondering if the investigation of the signals will continue to chain solutions to problems as an ongoing plot device. They're first led to somewhere where they can pick up a super-heavy asteroid, only to use it in the next episode to tow a radioactive cloud away from a threatened planet? These red angel things seem increasingly Q-like

Wasn't there a TNG episode where Picard broke the prime directive for pretty much the same reason as the Discovery crew here: to prove to a pre-Warp society that the "miracles" they'd witnessed had a scientific explanation? This episode reminded me a lot of that one.

That sounds like "Who Watches the Watchers," but Picard only resorted to that after a bunch of smaller PD transgressions kept snowballing into a much more serious situation.

I wish the show gave a reason for why the "red signals" were important. I don't mind them breaking the PD, i just don't understand why mysterious signals justify it.

There was also the TNG episode "Devil's Due", where they expose a false god to a pre-warp society.

I really like this last episode! Michael's interplay with Amanda is wonderful and with one great bit of comedy (when Michael is all "MOOOOOOOMM" when Amanda lets slip that she stole Spock's records). And the Klingon scenes were actually good! Nothing that's never been done before (especially on DS9) but having SOMEONE with forehead ridges not be a complete tosser gives us someone to root for, and the resolution (which isn't all that surprising, admittedly) is straight up Worfian in its quiet, noble suffering.

“starfleet security consultant”

Yeah, the latest episode was quite good, mostly it was moving all the various subplots ahead a bit, but they're all cool, and lot's of interesting and complex interpersonal moments too. So far the quality of this season seems much more consistent than with the first season, where every cool moment was followed by something ridiculous or stupid.

would mindmeld with spock's mom

I like how they're drawing out the Spock reveal, since without knowing any other details, I'd have expected him to be on screen no later than the end of the second episode.

it seems like good plotting! hoping they pull it off well

Theyre really playing up Michael's having done something utterly awful to him to make him disown her though, and I'm worried whatever it ends up being will be a let down?

I'm "meh" on this season so far. It doesn't have anything as bad as the many low points of S1, but so far it also lacks S1's occasional high points. The adventure-of-the-week stuff is better than S1, but still never as focused as it was in TOS and TNG because there's so much serial plotting to deal with. I'll stick with the season and see where it goes.

Theyre really playing up Michael's having done something utterly awful to him to make him disown her though, and I'm worried whatever it ends up being will be a let down?

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Sunday, 3 February 2019 08:03 (thirteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thought it was odd that Amanda stormed out before knowing what Michael did, seemingly motivated only by the needs of the plot.

Also, what was fungus hallucination actually after? It/she wanted Stamets to do something.

That part was hella confusing for a while there!

Also I am really struggling to GAF with the whole Klingon Houses sub plot.

As to the parasite in Tilly - I think it is angry at Stamets from when they were fucking around with the spore drive jumps and he went into that alternate universe? It saw him as the "captain" of that. I...think!?

yeah I think that's right but what did it want to find him for?

it might be trying to make its way home

Bit of a messy letdown after the first two episodes. I'm not sure if the Klingon story was agreeably metal or just a bit stupid. Although I think we can safely put severed baby heads into the column labelled "not super Star Trekky".

Anyway, if this was just an episode long-excuse to drop the Klingon story and setup the Georgiou's Section 31 spinoff, I'm fine with that.

Awww @ this, though

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtB_BeLFqh7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

HE TOUCHED THE BEARD. O_O

lol @ "agreeably metal" I'd forgot about the severed baby head part :/

When I stroke the beard, thusly

People who don't like each other not having fun. Posted by someone who's not jealous. At all. Or bitter.https://t.co/BmbWx6PjI8#DontReleaseTheAlbum#NoSeriously@SonequaMG @albinokid @actordougjones @may_wise @StarTrekNetflix @startrekcbs @CarpoolKaraoke

— Jason Isaacs (@jasonsfolly) February 5, 2019

Jet Reno!

so whats with the bearded Vulcan, is he evil?

Are you talking about the season 2 promos? Because that's (yet another rebooted) Spock.

This was back to pretty-good-ness again this week!

Could've done with less space blob and more universal translator shenanigans - the show finally comes up with a killer, interesting idea and then fixes it five minutes later.

Tilly/Stamets/JET! are a great threesome tho

i don't really like saru, but i kind of hope he turns into an ice-cold killer now

did you watch the short about his journey to starfleet?

Ha, he’s prob my favourite regular cast member - he’s the most trad Trekky, well-rounded character, but he does such a great job of emoting through all that latex fish shmutz. I like that they’ve found a new place for him to go, too.

“Death” scene went on way, way too long tho

these "death of a regular cast member" episodes haven't aged well in the past. everyone knows worf isn't going to kill himself.

I suppose the sentient planet episode in S1 (which was very bad) was set-up for what Saru will become.

I think I missed something what was the lie that Saru mourned his people still labored under? Was it that you could lose your ear gland things and still live or was there something else/more?

i didn't get that either.

Makes a but more sense if you watch the short from a couple months back

So did I understand it correctly?

I think the death scenes are so drawn out because the writers were trying extra hard to establish Burnham and Saru as becoming such close friends as to be family, when before this episode any time their relationship was a focus it was more adversarial.

I liked the scenes where Meet snarks on Stamets, but otherwise I didn't care for the episode. The vastly more intelligent alien sentience trying to communicate with humans who interpret it as belligerent has been done to death imo so I was really impatient for Disco to figure it out.

Nice to see Number One though, especially without giving her a proper name yet.

Either something different is happening with Saru’s biology because he’s not with his people or they’ve been told a big lie about their lifespan. The implication was that at a certain age they are either harvested or have to do this ritual that kills them.

It really looks like maybe it’s actually a second puberty-like thing and after they lose their fear tendrils they enter another life stage. Which is an interesting concept — having an earlier adulthood with an excess of caution followed by another where you’re not guided by fear.

In the Saru short it was shown that the Kelpians' "gods" come to harvest them regularly, with the obvious implication being that they technologically advanced aliens taking advantage of less developed species... So apparently that's the lie Saru figured out in this ep. But I find that weird, because he should've figured out what the "gods" really are as soon as the Starfleet took him in and he saw their technology.

I guess it's possible he still thought those aliens were doing them a favour by harvesting them before their glands kill them, but I still don't find it credible he wouldn't have looked closer into this whole thing during all his time in Starfleet.

respect for tradition plus the prime directive, I’d guess, but it looks like there’s more to come

Im going to guess the ganglia were some kind of fear implant controlling kelpians for the benefit of the ba'ul (or however its spelt). And maybe not naturally a part of them at all.

tig notaro going "yo, anybody got gum?" and tilly immediately hooking her up with gum is a portentous clue that things are not what they seem.

I didnt think of that.

I did like that she appeared to use the gum as a jerry-rig fixit device though!

That's particularly suspicious when she specifically mentioned duct tape earlier. Why brag about duct tape but then use gum?