f13.net

CBS announces a new Star Trek series to be broadcast on their streaming service in Jan 2017: http://www.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series-premieres-january-2017 (http://www.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series-premieres-january-2017)

Not many specifics in the announcement but Alex Kurtzman is set to produce.

Yup, they're going to make a new series, on CBS. Showrunner is one of the screenwriters for the last two films, but he's also worked on Fringe and Sleepy Hollow, so I guess that's a bit more hopeful. New characters also, not the reboot Old Cast.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/star-trek-tv-series-works-828638

It's going to be on CBS' streaming service so not on the network proper.  It'll likely be the flagship for that product along with NCIS: Qo'noS.  Posted the same news in the movie thread.

$6/mo for the CBS streaming channel? No thanks.

The 'beginning' of the end of network TV - a major network putting a 'highly anticipated' show behind a paywall.  OK, so HBO was probably the beginning way back in the 80s, but this is another big step and this is the networks themselves pulling out of the free space. 

It seems wrong that such a hopeful tv franchise should be the show putting the dagger in network tv.  Hopefully they'll put in on CBS proper after a few week/month delay...

How this makes sense for a network who's viewers average age is over 55 I don't know.

 :why_so_serious:

I guess we know what Shatner will be doing.  :why_so_serious:

CBS still owns the first right of refusal, I suppose. They're scrambling for properties and want to hop on the Mouse's Star Wars bandwagon.  Much as we saw a reboot of ST after 1980 and a poorly-executed attempt to pickup fantasy movies after LOTR.

Plus, the majority of people who give a flying fuck about ST are over 55. Painful but true.

Their biggest problem is that the paywall is half the cost of Netflix per month for one channel's content. Fuck that. Millennials will say the same and that's who they're trying to cozy up to.

I'm betting their paywall will end up including movies, CBS shows, and CW shows.  I'm betting we'll also see a "combo" package come into being where you can get Amazon Prime, Netflix, CBS, ABS, etc... pay services for about 25% off if you get all of them.

Ah combo services. The start of Cable 2.0.   :awesome_for_real:

More than that, CBS owns Paramount, which owns Star Trek.  They don't have to scramble for anything as they've owned the property for some time.  A new Star Trek series was never not going to be on something CBS owned.

CBS On-Demand and Screen Door Company

I'm sure they are working on hows to break up the stream with adverts as we speak.

Ah right, I forgot that. The syndication of everything TNG on instead of trying to put it on CBS proper had me thinking it was only distributed through CBS/ Paramount.

Now available on a direct-to-cancellation service

They'd better not just call it "Star Trek".

I'm wondering how many episodes will be made per year - 10 to 13 like other pay services or 22 to 24 like network TV.... Also, wondering if they'll change their tune at all once they hear the backlash and people realize it is pay only. 

This isn't stopping Starz, HBO, Netflix, and Hulu from making projects.

The January start time implies the first season is a "half-season".

I guess this is the shape of things to come but there is a limit to the number of subscription TV services I'm willing to join.

Hopefully before long the show will end up on one of those services that let you pay a one-off fee to watch things.

But they started out as pay for play entities. CBS did not. If Netflix had been the new home for Star Trek I would not expect much, if any, backlash for having to pay for a new series. However, having CBS bill you after putting only the pilot on broadcast tv will hit people a bit like their spouse charging a prostitutes rates.

Wouldn't it likely be cheaper to just pay $6 for one month of access and then cancel?

I dunno.  I'm kinda glad it's behind at least some kind of sub service.  The reality is, the show is going to likely be the most expensive on TV (if it's done correctly), and despite the naysayers in the thread who say it's only for 55+, it'll largely be watched by the <50 crowd.  TNG is still wildly popular (just ask Netflix) and Gen-X salivates at the idea of another Trek (hopefully better than Enterprise).  Having a new StarTrek hold a traditional network model afloat doesn't appeal to me.  Costs are more easily spread in an online model, levels of interaction are better, and on-demand services are automatically included.  They'll need the direct revenue, rather than hoping advertisers play ball... which increasingly they are not.

I foresee it being another BSG if it can garner the same level of commitment by the network.

Lastly, realize that a newer version of Trek will likely require a solid hour of time per epi.  Recall, TNG was at a time when advertisements were tolerable.  NOW?  Half the show would have to be ads in order to pay for it.  Given the genre, that's impossible to do and create a quality product.

True. If that's all you're after and they it could be worth the price for a month of binge watching. I'm not signing up for another subscription service, myself. I've got three already, I don't need another dollar vampire to keep track of.

I recall hearing either a freakonomics or marketplace report talking about the same thing happening to other latecomers to subscription services. People had already reached their mental cap on things to keep track of and didn't sign-up even if it was a better service. Wish I could find it.

Anyway, I disagree about Gen-X salivating about the idea of another Trek. Voyager was a dud to me and Enterprise killed the last vestiges of my enthusiasm. Anecdotal evidence and all, but I was also the last of my peer group to hang on. I don't think the two guys who hung on until season 5 of Voyager even watched Enterprise at all, I'll have to ask the next time we have lunch.

Gen X is waiting for a "real" Trek.  People were tired of Star Trek when we got Enterprise and Voyager.  I think people will be looking forward to this series - and angry that it is behind a CBS paywall. 

Personally, I think I'd watch Trek if it were on TV, but I will not pay for another subscription service.  I'll watch the pilot, and if I like it, I'll at most wait for there to be a bunch of episodes available and then I'll subscribe for a binge and then drop off.

It's a $6 paywall. Chances are you're paying around twice that if you want to go see the next Trek movie in the theater. It's more likely to inspire apathy rather than anger. The effort it takes to sign up and download an app or whatever is probably a bigger blocker than the actual money.

Right. Reason will prevail and there will not be a lot of complaints about paying for a cbs show. Sure.

Time will tell.

Without even looking at any of the comments made on the original story, I'd be willing to bet that there will be more nerd rage about this being set in the Abrams Star Trek universe rather than the original timeline than anything paywall related.

It's not clear which universe it's set in. That said I'm not interested in more Abrams Star Trek. This isn't nerd rage - Star Trek was about classic science fiction themes, writers who wanted to explore a variety of interesting topics rooted in Roddenberry's vision, etc. (Including writers like Harlan Ellison) Nu Trek is just poor man's Star Wars. It's science fiction in that it has spaceships and space guns and such, but it's just space opera.

The Abrams universe has no real interest in the type of stories that are considered Trek classics.

I suppose it could be set in the Abrams universe and still embrace the classic Trek style of science fiction - theoretically which universe it's set in doesn't really matter. But Orci and Kurtzman making a Trek series based in Abrams Trek doesn't fill me with excitement.

Yeah. Partly because they've shown no interest not only in Trek themes but even in some of the basic underpinnings of Trek storytelling. Space being vast and much of it being unknown; captains who need autonomy because they're often too far away from Star Fleet to get direct instruction anyway. There's no sense of distance or exploration in Abrams Trek, and that almost has to be fundamental to a series approach to the property.

Shit, that possibility was one I hadn't even considered. I just realized that I find the nuTrek so far from the originals that mentally I consider them a different IP entirely.

Fuck, that'd kill any interest I've got in the series.

You've got the writers of the Abrams Trek movies making this show, and the last time Old Trek did the numbers at the box office that these movies are doing (adjusted for inflation) was Star Trek IV. From a business perspective, I can't see any reason why they'd set the show in anything other than the Abrams Trek timeline. That the old stuff had been run so completely run into the ground with the last few movies and tv series is what made the reboot necessary in the first place.

nuTrek is almost entirely about the relationships between the principal characters, not much about the life aboard the Enterprise and even less about exploration and contact with other cultures. It's also way more centered on Earth and on Starfleet and also on ship-to-ship combat. nuTrek is more like a Star Fleet Battles miniature game than it is like Trek the RPG; a series has to be more the latter than the former and I actually have some hope that they'll see that simply because they have to see that in the format they're going to be working in. But even if it's sort of nuTrek or they don't make a big deal about the continuity, they'll need to completely forget some of the conceits of the two films (beaming across star systems, travel between distant points that takes an hour or two, etc.) because those totally destroy the story-telling of almost any space opera setting. Distance and time are crucial staging platforms for long-form serial storytelling.

nuTrek, the beast at Tanagra.  :awesome_for_real:

I kind of hope they do a show where it's not even obvious to the viewer which universe it's based in, and it doesn't matter. Have a new crew which actually goes and seeks out new life and new civilisations rather than worrying about continuity. You'd still have the Federation, a ship called Enterprise and some nice nostalgic nods to the past (a passing reference to previous ships called Enterprise or whatever) but make it a show that people who have never heard of Star Trek before can get into. I actually think that would be more attractive to fans too.

And if at some point we learn whether or not a planet called Vulcan exists or was blown up then that's okay, but don't make it a storyline. Make new stories.

Darmok, on the ocean.

--Davr

Abrams, when the walls fell.

To be fair to Abrams, grudgingly, Abrams Treks are movies, and movies are fundamentally different from a TV series. Most of the Next Generation movies weren't terribly in line with the series either, also focusing more on space battles, action, etc. Insurrection is the only one I'd say was close to TNG - it was still a terrible movie though.

I also agree that no matter which universe it's set it there's no need to make a big deal out of it.

TNG movies were just extended TV shows.  That's all they were and they were fine as that.  Dunno why people expected more.
As for Abrams et. al., are they even capable of making an episodic show???  Because if he serializes Trek, I probably won't watch it.  (I'm lying)

But really, they need to let people (even amateurs) write good stories/scripts that are self-contained in each epi. and just run with it.  Keep it simple.

They really should make two shows. One about the ship and it's adventures and the other about the janitor on said ship and his poker buddies. I'd be willing to bet the poker buddies show would end up being the ratings earner.

I hope it's a new crew, new ship set in the new universe.  Make it accessible to folks who've never seen Trek but with a few nods to the history.  The pay wall is dumb, but I'll shell out $6 for it, see how it goes.

Kurtzman has a pretty good resume of making episodic TV. Actually I think his episodic work is better than his film work.

Arise!

It's not much but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXpPweAooeE

I remain ever hopeful.  Very excited to Nicholas Meyer brought on board.

I'm still seeing tons of bitching about the paywall thing. I think that, more than anything else, is what is likely to doom this project.

The second level of bitching is about how it's obvious this is more Nu_trek than old_trek, meaning action-adventure rather than high-sci-fi and the way it deals with issues and social commentary. If they're taking that route, they'd better hope the Nu_trek fans are willing to pay, because the old fans won't.

Yeah, well I'm still not sure how the paywall plays out.  That's my biggest fear is the paywall screws any chance it has at succeeding.  If the whole season drops at once, I could see a lot of 1 month and out signups. (Edit: appears they will be rolled out weekly)

In Canada it will likely end up licensed by one of the shitty Netflix competitors owned by Canada's TV oligopoly.  CBS has been pulling all the old series off Netflix I presume to hide behind their paywall, though there is one here that still has TOS and TNG.  Space channel has also dropped all their Star Trek re-runs.

I think the show goes nowhere without old fans, and I'm hoping some of the people they brought on is a sign that that's the direction they're taking.  I begged for a new show and I'm getting it so I'm staying positive until something comes out.

If this is definitely behind a paywall when it comes out AND it's dropped weekly as opposed to all at once, it has zero fucking chance of succeeding, especially as you know there's going to a fuckton of goddamn ads on it (even if they are just in-house CBS ads). Millenials sure as fuck aren't going to put up with weekly drip scheduling as well as having to sit through ads. For that matter, neither will I but then they lost me at paywall. Fuck a bunch of paying for 1 series.

I am still assuming the paywall idea is some sort of exotic IP maneuver right now designed to compel some possible distribution channel partner to offer a premium deal to the producers in order to get the distribution rights for the show. E.g., "We don't *have* to let you have the show, we're ready to do it ourselves, but pay us $$$ and you can have it."  Otherwise this is going to be New Coke levels of stupid.

Some people liked New Coke though...

Eh, this will be put up on usenet, which is where I will get it. The paywall thing is a terrible idea unless it comes with access to the complete CBS/paramount library. I'm already pissy enough about having to have cable TV to get decent internet access to use netflix. I'll be damned if I'm going to support the opening moves in having to pay extra for streaming shows that should be on a channel I'm already paying to get.

There's going to be a long and slow movement, but I think we'll eventually end up with a small number of on demand service they each have a share of the big Library. Instead of paying for cable or satellite, you'll be paying these on demand services so that you can get access to the shows that you like. The thing I fear is these on demand Services moving to the Disney animated movie model where certain films enter release for a short period of time and then are put into a vault for a prolonged period of time giving you no access to the show in order to build up an appetite for it again.

Yeah, I can live without a CBS bill every month. 

Still need the internet access, which is bundled with cable for $120 a month or by itself for $115. Thanks for that bundling discount Time Warner.

Over time, there will be more options for internet access. The monopolies and price-fixing that exist today have a finite life span. Regardless, there is a petition going around to try and get Nathan Fillion to be the next captain for the show. They've been a lot of decisions that are making it easy for me to pass on this show, but Fillion being the captain might pull me back in. However, there is no reason to believe some petition is going to have any impact on the casting of the show whatsoever.

They have no lifespan in a significant number of cities because the lines are privately owned by the cable companies. Unless the cities or a private entity come in and install Fiber on their own, the cable companies have a lock on providing service.

That's before the bullshittery of the sole-provider laws passed in the 80's and 90's to "help" cities without cable access get it. A large number of those have no expiration.

The only way out at this moment is the FCC declaring internet a public utility. Which isn't going to happen if Congress has anything to say about it. They're already hard at work quietly rolling back the definition of broadband to 3mbp (not MB) and trying to undo the net-neutrality enforcement the FCC did drop.

I'm lucky in that our regional wireless carrier CSpire is starting to roll out fiber to the home in select cities/neighborhoods where they get enough people to sign up before they lay down the lines. We're due for an installation sometime in the next month hopefully (they've been diligently laying the fiber lines since March). But yes, until Congress wises up (or there's a rampant plague that only targets batshit Tea Party fucks), nothing will be done to improve the overall US Internet infrastructure before the heat death of the sun.

Teaser trailer out of Comicon.

http://screenrant.com/star-trek-2017-tv-show-discovery-trailer/ (http://screenrant.com/star-trek-2017-tv-show-discovery-trailer/)

Why the hell does the new ship look like a Klingon D-7 with a saucer bolted on?

"Star Trek Discovery" and the ship name is USS Discovery. That doesn't explain why it looks like a Klingon ship and a Federation ship had a baby. But I gotta assume that this design was purposeful and implies the Federation and Klingons have aligned and shared tech knowledge and whatnot.

The teaser itself kinda sucked. The visuals looked like late stage Babylon 5 CGI.

Oh god, that ship is fugly.

I'm supposed to pay to watch that?

Nope.

Looks like they had a very strict budget.  Luckily the intern works for free.  :awesome_for_real:

Apparently, non-US Netflix users will have access to it...so fire those VPNs up.

Good guy CBS.. knows most people might be conflicted about paying for a single show, gives a really shitty design for the centerpiece ship so you don't feel tempted.

The Enterprise's replacement at the end of Beyond wasn't much better. It was ugly too, but at least it was closer thematically.

I dunno, I think it respects a central theme of Trek. See an Alien and PROCREATE!!

(https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p240x240/13781769_2056134131279202_4721109219831974956_n.jpg?oh=33dd1c782f6b3e7e73adc4154a15a39b&oe=581E5936)

Wow... that is horrible.

So the trailer was just the ship pulling out right? No cast, no action sequences, no brooding captain, no strange alien life... just the ship pulling out?  :oh_i_see:

It's just a teaser.

That said, everyone everywhere hated it. You figure they would focus test something like this. I honestly haven't seen a single positive comment about it from anyone.

If the ship design weren't so goddamn terrible I think people would have enjoyed it more. The ships' been commissioned, just pulling out of drydock. It's the very start of its journey! Woo!

It could use some jazzing-up, for certain. You could have had some sort of narrative around it leaving drydock. Maybe some text ovelay giving info like "Class: <whatever> Crew: <blarg> Commissioned Stardate: xxxxx" before the big reveal.

As it exists, it's a terrible, uninspiring teaser lacking in any real tease. What really kills the entire thing is they made THE SHIP the focus of the entire thing and we got.. that design. If you're going minimal you'd better have something pretty goddamn kickass that you KNOW is going to generate buzz.

Instead we got, "wtf.. why is it Klingon?"

They don't start filming until September. They have nothing to show yet.

Clearly.

A show around a ship.  Pretty sure B5 and Stargate spin-off's did that.  Both were the final gasps of both franchises.

As far as design goes, it looks less ridiculous than the TOS Enterprise. Even as a kid, the way that the parts looked like they were held together with Tinker Toys sticks bothered me. Don't really like the colors, really should have stuck with the classic grey on that.

--Dave

Yep.

Aesthetics vs. Functionality.  Also Iconography vs. wanting something "new and different."

I get you enjoy being contrarian, Dave, but you know what people are about when discussing the design.

I hold out hope that there is a clear reason why the ship is the way it is.  Likely a commemorative ship commissioned during the Federation-Klingon accords that ended the war; heralding an era of Starfleet exploration.  This is the only plausible reason, give that the series is supposed to be hearkening back to the TOS era, though in the Prime Timeline.

Regardless of explanation it's ugly as shit. Even if they wanted to make a Klingon / Federation hybrid they could have done a lot better.

It looks so incongruous. The bottom half is all hard angles and flat surfaces, then the top is a saucer. It's less like Klingon and Federation engineers worked together and more like they created a horrible centaur.

Or they were tasked with creating half the ship without consulting one another about how their half was being designed.

(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9a/c1/a3/9ac1a33681f56576b6febdde29714e2c.jpg)

It sounds like the explanation is that it's based off of Ralph McQuarrie concept art from the 70's that never got used after the plans for Star Trek Phase 2 fell through.

Netflix will stream CBS' new Star Trek series all around the world (http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/18/12211820/netflix-star-trek-cbs-all-access-international-streaming)
...except in USA or Canada.

This makes it seem like the new Trek isn't doomed from start due to a limited viewership (if it's any good).  :grin:

Fuller Beams Out of Discovery Due to "Timing" (http://www.thewrap.com/star-trek-discovery-loses-bryan-fuller-showrunner/)

He'll still be involved, like Joss Whedon was involved in Agents of SHIELD in Season 1 after he handed it off (which is to say, only superficially as time allows), but this stopped being his show. 

I just can't bring myself to give a fuck because screw CBS video service.

This.

That totally, plus another prequel-era bullshit. We get it: eugenics, nuclear war, warp drive, Vulcans, Klingons, Starfleet, Kirk/Spock/McCoy. After Enterprise and the three recent movies, they need to push things forward. I don't even care what timeline it is. Retreading the same stories and re-unlocking the same technologies just isn't interesting anymore. Thinking this is the way to draw traffic to All Access is middle-manager dumb. And thinking All Access is big enough to get people to watch this show, it's probably the guy in the other cubicle dumb.

I'm betting this gets quietly canceled before Feb.

Would anybody who still watches actual CBS (not Netflix, Hulu, etc.) care to weigh in on how heavily CBS is advertising this?  And how much are they not mentioning the sub-only aspect?

I DVR Big Bang, Elementary and NFL games.  I don't recall a single ad for it.  We are about 9 months out from the new date.

If it weren't for this thread, and a single spurt of neckbeard bitching on FB about how the new ship looks like a Romulan Warbird hatefucked the Enterprise, I wouldn't have heard anything about it at all.

--Dave

Same. Not a peep.

But at the same time you're asking about how much advertising CBS is doing for next Summer's mid-season replacements right now. Also none. That doesn't happen until a month or two out from the actual start date.

Gotcha.  For some reason I had it in my head that this was launching between Thanksgiving and Christmas; didn't realize it was so far off.

On the other hand, NBC used a large chunk of their Olympics ad space to promote shows that launched in October.  That's 3 months lead for your plain old "coming this fall" stuff.  Wouldn't you want 6 months lead for a new service?  Would you need the extra time to build hype for the return of such a huge franchise?  I'm asking -- I don't know squat about marketing strategies for stuff like this.

They have been marketing the All-Access thing, because it's what they stream their shows on, but nothing specifically about Star Trek.

The showrunner recently stepped down because he's too busy or something. The premiere date was also pushed back. I think this thing may go off the rails before it ever gets started.

They just announced the lead, Sonequa Martin-Green.

So now when it fails it will be: "because sexism/ racism!"  and not, "We shouldn't have put this behind a paywall."  :why_so_serious:

Oh, also she won't be the captain. She'll be a Lieutenant-Commander, because "We've had 6 series from a Captain's point of view so it's time for a different perspective."

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/12/14/star-trek-discovery-walking-dead-sonequa-martin-green

Delayed, again:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/star-trek-discovery-delayed-again-as-spocks-father-is-cast-965494

Great example of what happens when you don't have deadlines, stuff doesn't get done.

I wonder what the female equalivant is to growing a beard. It worked for Riker and Sisko...

Jason Isaacs as captain.

I can't help thinking this "the captain is not main character" schtick is missing the point a little. If a trek series works, surely it must be ensemble driven - it can't be a main character vehicle.

If they just want to make clear that they aren't going to screw this up in the exact way they screwed up the one with Dr Sam Beckett then ok I guess.

New trailer out.  Embedded in an article that points out all the reasons for my feelings of "Meh."

https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/05/first-star-trek-discovery-trailer-goes-where-many-treks-have-gone-before/ (https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/05/first-star-trek-discovery-trailer-goes-where-many-treks-have-gone-before/)

Pros:
Michelle Yeoh

Cons:
Redesigned Klingons
"My species is biologically determined ..."
Still CBS on demand service exclusive

The rest of it is Star Trek-ish stuff.  Trailer looks stylistically more nu-Trek, but we'll see how it shakes out, I guess.

If that's the Klingons, wtf guys.

Prequel = bad. Why do that? So that they don't have to figure out which continuity it is? If they're doing yet *another* look for the Klingons, it's neither, so stop fucking around and just do a completely new series set well after TNG and then do nothing to refer back to any continuity. Put the ship way the fuck out beyond any Federation space, but on purpose this time and then take that premise seriously.

a species that can sense death. great, another premise that they'll have to constantly ignore whenever it's plot-inconvenient, just like Counselor Troi being unable to get a read on emotions any time that would fuck the plot.

Yeah, safe to say I was unimpressed by this trailer and not inspired to spend money on a streaming service I would likely only use for this show.

Wait.. they're prequels and in the same timeline as TOS.. wtf?  :uhrr:

Now add-in the engineered species who can 'sense death' and therefore makes 0% reason not to have onboard every Federation ship ever.

This isn't a series. This is a series of Fan Wank and "wouldn't it be cool if" thrown against a whiteboard to push on a market.

Don't know if anybody has mentioned it yet, but Prelude to Axanar looks tons better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W1_8IV8uhA&t=601s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W1_8IV8uhA&t=601s)

The lead ship, the Ares, looks a bit like the lead ship id Discovery

That was awesome. Better than most Trek movies.

Not sure if this is the same trailer since the one previously linked is dead, but this seems to indicate an eventual arrival on Netflix.

I think it'll be on Netflix in the UK, but CBS VOD in the US.

Yes - that is my understanding...   I hope we start to see these VOD services strt to consolidate.

So they've changed captains like 3 times now?  And Isaacs is out?  (Yeoh is in)
Also, this is clearly the Prime/Kelvin timeline.  This is Abrams' world, where the Klingons are rabid animals basically.  The stardate of Discovery is the most disappointing aspect imo.  10yrs before TOS????  Why?  So they can be at war with the Klingons?  Clearly there will be very little peaceful exploration and storytelling.  I'd go as far to say as they may have dumped the episodic model altogether and went serial (maybe that's why the original director left).

Also Obi (probably their best actor after Yeoh), will now just be a bit part antagonist since he is an evil dark Klingon.  So lame.

And dunno where they dug up that 1st officer, but she was horrible.  Basically came across like a girl from the Bronx larping a half-Vulcan.   I pretty much hated every aspect of this trailer except the ship bursting through the clouds.

She was Sasha on the Walking Dead. And she's the main character in this series.  :uhrr:

Space people doing pew pew and space-like things out in space.  Good enough for me.

Cons for fans of Trek:

A) It ignores that badges in the TOS era were unique to ships and stations and that the classic Starfleet badge was originally only for the Enterprise. That changed after Kirk's five year mission.
B) It is set in the time period of the original TOS pilot called the Cage. The uniforms in that time period did not look like a sort of Enterprise with silver piping like they do in this series. They looked like this:


(http://www.knowitalljoe.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Crew-on-Bridge.jpg)


Admittedly, these uniforms are kind of boring and blah. But they are what was worn in this time period. This tells me the showrunners have zero respect for the property. This should have been set after Voyager and advanced the timeline. If that were the case we could've ignored this kind of thing. "Oh, it's later in the timeline, guess they changed uniforms again and some weird shit happened to the Klingons. Wonder if they'll explain it?"

It is known.

If you followed production, this was always the case.  As usual, the IP owners were at odds with the folk with the vision and the passion (and the fans).  This is why the original director left and a lot of cast bolted.  Now we have this Abrams prequel basically.

This is still all basically carryover from handing the franchise to Abrams though.  If you want to cast blame, cast it then/there.  You cannot have that much Hollywood money/power dipping their hands into ST and expect quality at the lower end. Low-level producers will fall into line to catch the scraps.

Not making "Captain Worf" when any idiot knew it would be gold?  Speaks volumes.

What they need to do is a total reboot, put it on TV and collect the monies for 7 years.  Get rid of the bad films, the forcing of a contemporary series into the structure of the old timeline(s), and all that junk.  Thank Trekkies for their loyalty, but start anew with a new take on the original crew.

I see trek is breaking new ground by daring to feature tv's first wood-based lifeform captain

Do I need to say "It's dead, Jim." or can we just all agree this pile of horseshit is going to be best avoided.

TOS 4 lyfe

It's dead and they're killing the IP with all this fuckery between this awful series and the reboot that isn't loved by hardcore fans.  This risks becoming Dick Tracy in terms of becoming an IP whose response is, "Oh yeah, I remember my Grandparents watched that."

At this point, all hope is lost.  I mean, look at Paramount's response to Renegades (which was the last original timeline 'movie' ever done).

As I said, the Prime timeline is... prime now.  And that's that.  There will be no rebooted original timeline, nor will there be an original one, nor any offshoots.  The IP is no longer open and the direction mutinied back to Abrams' style.

A crapton of great Trek concepts have been pitched to Paramount, and they've killed all of them.  Including pitches by original cast members (Dorn included).  You're talking about a company that killed a full-sized Enterprise D being built in downtown Vegas as a casino-resort.  Because...  "they'd mess it up and make Trek look bad."  The real reasons were more about ego and current IP than anything else.

Can't believe Star Wars is a better, more open, and capable concept at this point.  It's almost like their roles have reversed and SW is the way richer, more rewarding 'verse to play in.  Iamsad.

What I find kind of fascinating is that Paramount is so relatively indifferent to the IP. I suppose someone there thinks he's safeguarding it, but it really comes off as "eh, who cares, I guess we own that."

 Ever underestimate the power of an executive with a bias. Especially in creative and production environments.

Of they figure they have sucked as many Billions as it can out of this lemon and its time to junk it, to stop it interfering with other IPs.

I'd buy that only if Paramount wasn't also trying to revive other garbage IPs like xXx and GI Joe to create 'movie-verses'. Those are the big thing everyone wants now that Disney is making bank on two of them.

They've done it with Transformers, are trying to do it with GI Joe and (rumored) M.A.S.K., Micronauts and Visionaires. The last 3 were BARELY passable IP in the 80's, nevermind trying to build a property around them now when everyone realizes they were just Toy-tie-in garbage trying to capitalize on the popularity of Transformers, GI Joe, MLP and Care Bears.

Star Trek HAD that cache. The only reason not to exploit it is bias or a complete disdain for the property.

I really think the only explanation is a kind of irrational disdain for the property, yeah. Somebody up there literally is just sick of people who liked the show complaining when they make it much more about tits and explosions, because that's just about all they know how to do with their "verses".

While the theories usually imagine a nefarious intent, the reality is usually that someone without talent gets the wheel and they'Re too arrogant to get the assistance needed to do things right.

Trek seems to have issues with that in general, to be honest. Even Roddenberry got pretty out of control after having had Trek adulation heaped on him for years; the showrunners during the TNG/DS9/Voyager era definitely developed some odd forms of possessiveness and obsession at times. There was a guy overseeing the licensed comics and books who was apparently a psycho control freak who drove many authors away. Maybe it's because it was available to be "owned", as opposed to Star Wars and other franchises that were highly creator-controlled or where the megabucks involved were several magnitudes greater.

I'm pretty convinced that Trek can make megabucks but very likely only if they really wipe the slate clean and try a completely new show that:

a) respects the basics: this is an optimistic and basically liberal-American future; some of the drama has to come from balancing the military, scientific and diplomatic responsibilities of a Starfleet vessel; at least feinting towards more thoughtful or issue-oriented narratives is important.
b) tackles the weaknesses: Trek has never done arcs and continuity well but has been at its best when it has done arcs and continuity, so learn how to do them; do some better world-building that shores up long-standing Trek weaknesses rather than makes fun of them or plays them for laughs (you can't beat Galaxy Quest in this respect, so don't even try); some more complex characterizations and character arcs are needed.

I think I have mentioned it before but I recall JMS back when he used to engage fans before and during the making of Babylon 5 saying that he'd pitched a Trek reboot at one point and been turned down flat that basically had the following elements:

1) ditched the universal translator and everything else that made first contact easy
2) put the ship at the center of it way, way out beyond easy resupply or support from the Federation, with even communication taking several days, so that the crew genuinely has to make decisions on its own
3) make the crew small and the ship vulnerable, so that they can't just breeze their way into dangerous situations
4) make the ship's mission to be fundamentally about first contact, and have 3-5 episode arcs that center on first contact with a new world, with a subplot/background arc that involves an entire region or area of space and its secrets
5) get rid of the transporter; all landing is via shuttle

This seems completely right to me.

Didn't Enterprise do some of that?

And then people hated it?

Enterprise did some of that, but it also did a lot of really horribly executed crap as well.  Sexy decontamination was not on the above list, for example.  The failure of one implementation of an idea doesn't mean there is no way to execute it and make something great.

I'd love to see a JMS Star Trek.  He has my faith.  Sense8 has been a bit disappointing to me, but all of his other stuff has been enjoyable for me.

Enterprise didn't really have the guts to do all of that--and what people hated about it was not that notion of a less-masterful Federation. They hated the really dumb Time Cop element, the generic episodic scripts (people started kind of digging it when they moved to having a more high-stakes arc), and some of the really WTF fan service (see: radiation decontamination with erotic gel in underwear for starters). Like, I'm not against sexy Vulcan porn but let's just do sexy Vulcan porn, then, not try to mix it into an ostensibly non-porn show because you think a bunch of horny guys who never got out of mom's basement are watching.

I still have nightmares about the Space Nazi season. Their last season though, when they knew they were cancelled actually had some good episodes. I'm glad I didn't stop watching out of disgust.

Well I never once watched Enterprise, but now you guys have my interest perked.   :awesome_for_real:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRRE9zA1C5Q

I will note here that Jolene Blalok has nudes out there that weren't stolen from a phone. You will, however, have to rummage through hundreds of bad photoshops.

I've never watched Enterprise. HOLY FUCK. That scene was awkward, uncomfortable and made no goddamn sense. There's no logical reason either of them would have any clothes on nor would they need to rub the gel on each other. Whoever wrote that and decided to keep it in as filmed should never work in television again.

Enterprise was derailed from the start by executives forcing Un-Trek into Trek because they thought they knew better and didn't want to just give us a rehash of TNG, ToS, or anything else that had come before.  If you go back to the elements of the show that were true to the core of Star Trek - it was fine.  However, too many people gave up on the idiocy before they got elements right - and they never eliminated all the idiocy.

As it was some of our earliest Trek continuity, it is unfortunately locked in until we get a real reboot.

The last season of Enterprise was actually decent, IMO. The smaller, multiple story arcs that helped stage some of TNG stuff was refreshing from the time travel bullshit.

Paramount declares that this is, in fact, just reusing an IP 's name because creating a new brand is hard and tosses out the "most restrictive" rule about Star Trek; the "Roddenberry Box"
http://ew.com/tv/2017/06/23/star-trek-discovery-rules/?utm_campaign=entertainmentweekly&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&xid=socialflow_facebook_entertainmentweekly

Ignoring that part of this wasn't just Roddenberry's vision for the future, but that the type of conflicts they're trying to promote get you a court martial in a military. But hey, when has TV writing ever been about realism?

Redux.

Feel it us worth pointing out that in a world overrun by populist idiots, just redoing tNG would be awesome and relevant.

The ones who say that Rodenberry's box too severely hampered their ability to write compelling stories, I say, shut the fuck up. WRITE BETTER.

Undiscovered Country definitely goes against Roddenberry's Box and it's a good movie.  Balance of Terror, in the original series, does as well, and is spectacular.  In fact, a large number of episodes Roddenberry was heavily involved in ditches it.  I mean...just watch Space Seed.  Lots of TNG, DS9 and Voyager episodes do it as well.  Roddenberry, and Star Trek in general, have always been extremely inconsistent.

Star Trek has changed with the times, and that's a good thing.  If we want to go full nerd and expect complete adherence to canon, technically there shouldn't be female captains in this new series at all.  We learn in the TOS episode Turnabout Intruder that women aren't allowed to be captains of starships in Starfleet.  Yet I don't hear anyone complaining about that aspect of deviation from canon.

Honestly, I think Star Trek at several points succeeded in spite of Roddenberry, not because of him.

Leonard Nimoy, in particular, never got on with Roddenbery and talks about it in his Autobiography. Some of the "Nimoy hates Spock" stuff actually came from Nimoy fighting with Roddenbery.

Roddenberry had a vision for his universe.  However, it wasn't his universe by the end of his life.  A lot of hands owned it.  However, when it was first released, nobody cared enough about it to get in his way and he was able to establish it over 3 seasons.  Since then, a few people that 'got' Roddenberry continued his vision (and while he was alive - with his heavy involvement).  Since then, Trek evolved into a money stick and everyone wants to make their name, and paycheck, by guiding it.  Most of them have no idea how to maintain the Roddenberry vision, much less how to evolve it into the present day.   

The best thing they can do is find someone that gets the Roddenberry's vision and can update it to the present day, ask them the best way to do it, and run with that for 5 years to re-establish the brand value (regardless of how profitable it is). Then they can start another round of breaking it down and making profit off of it and repeat the restoration in 15 years.

https://youtu.be/hC7IMj7WFyE

Trailer.

Yeah I'm really not that worried about a few inconsistencies


And yanked for some reason.  But I got your back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqBz8QsZNcQ

While I love a good space battle, I hope they're jacking up all the action and explosions for the trailer, and the series has more Stars and Trekking.  But I am a little more optimistic.

EDIT: wait a sec, Klingons have 4 nostrils now?

Yep, still not paying for it.

I'll watch it but I still haven't seen the latest movie.

But I won't pay for it.

There is no way I'm paying for this separately even if it's great. I just am not buying more services. If it gets bundled into what I already buy, great, I'll give it a watch.

Where is my slow-paced nerdy pondering? I wanted slow-paced nerdy ethics and political commentary!

Also I do not understand Jason Isaacs career at all. The man looks like James Bond but plays nothing but scenery-chewing weirdos and psychopaths.

That looks like absolute garbage. Like TFA levels of bad misuse of IP. Fuck everyone involved in that stupid thing, unless that is the most poorly edited trailer of all time that show is going to be way worse than Voyager and/or Enterprise.

I like the ship design.

Otherwise, that Trailer sucked. If that's all from the pilot I have no idea how they could string all that together into a coherent story. There is just way too much in there, so it gives the feeling of the Star wars "prequel" movies. The Captain seems to be a decent actress, however.

Maybe it's just me but I've had enough of prequels and reboots. It's time to advance a few years into the future, IMO.

BSG arguably takes place completely out of this "box". Frankly, the idea that people were perfect and rarely argued in the future did cause problems, especially in early TNG episodes. I'm in the camp that thinks that some aspects of Trek improved after Roddenberry's death. DS9, for example, probably wouldn't be the show it was had Roddenberry had much input into it.

Admittedly, Enterprise is awful and Voyager is only so-so but that's because by then the IP owners had gotten lazy and put their own restrictions on it that severely hampered both shows. Voyager should've been Trek meshed with BSG but the producers wouldn't allow it so despite years of being away from Federation space the crew always had nice uniforms, got along for the most part despite being from very different backgrounds and the ship not only didn't get worn down, it actually got better as the show progressed.

Enterprise. Well, Enterprise just showed how bad the idea of doing a prequel was, particularly if the writers decide to rewrite Trek canon as they go because why the hell not?

I think Roddenberry's box was real. I think he misunderstood what a utopian society as a setting has to be, and he also came to believe in his own publicity as much as any bloated rock star surrounded by groupies might, and made the same kinds of dumb overreaches that many creative people in that situation do.

There is a possible Star Trek that is set in a comprehensively better, post-scarcity society that nevertheless has a smart vision of why people might continue to have serious dramatic conflicts. One of those would be basic philosophical differences about the purpose of life, some of which might be surprisingly resistant to the elimination of scarcity; the other would be that people are just different from each other in some pretty serious ways in terms of personality and outlook that might not go away even if we have all our basic needs met. But by all accounts Roddenberry was dubious about #1 in his post-TOS influence on Trek (all the philosophical differences are thrown off onto crazy admirals and 'backward' civilizations); and he was actively opposed to storytelling that dealt with #2, which is just dumb and bad.

Any future version of Trek will have to shuck that off entirely without insisting that shucking it off means tits and explosions and nothing more.

I feel like nBSG took it so far in the other direction after a while that it was every bit as ridiculous as any episode filmed in Roddenberry's box, and much more unpleasant.  I would prefer to watch any third season TNG episode over any third season nBSG episode.

Once nBSG left New Caprica (with that fantastic battle scene episode), it had no fucking idea where it wanted to go. Once it did figure out where it wanted to go, it started manipulating the characters in such a way as to force the destination, often in complete opposition to everything we'd seen from those characters previously. The characters became ciphers for the authors, which always ends badly. Plus... fucking angels and hidden cylons. FUCK OFF.

Yeah, the problems there were less with forcing conflict between people and more with what happens when you launch a show that has a "mystery metaplot", e.g. asserts that there is a hidden plan or design or truth that is pushing the situation that the characters are in, and yet have no idea what that plan is. nBSG is almost the very best example of why you should never, ever do that--you should always know, as show creator, what the basic 'hidden truth' is.

Now if you don't have a single "mystery plot" but you do know the overall rules or principles at play in your universe or setting, you can still introduce new or surprising elements that will affect how characters relate to one another as time goes on--conflicts don't have to be purely internally driven. In fact, they shouldn't be, because sooner or later this forces you to have characters who undergo an implausible number of transformations in their relations to other characters, or it forces you to do dumb things to the characters in order to explain why they're still relating to one another or working with each other. Thinking about a Trek that doesn't have the Roddenberry box, for example, if you have characters whose evolving story puts them into unmanageable conflict, sooner or later you need to resolve that by having one of them leave the ship and the show if you're honest to the conflict. If you have characters fall in love or flirt, you have to move that along too, and so on.

There's a lot wrong with how Babylon 5 was managed if you take the full production history of the show, but the character arcs for G'Kar and Londo are nearly perfect examples of what *can* happen if you're committed to avoiding the reset button, willing to let characters evolve as they ought to (and as the actors add life to them).

I just rewatched S1 of B5 and I'd forgotten just how different G'Kar was and how on the outs the Narn in general were at the beginning. They were the intergalactic bad guys right up until the Shadow showed up and things flipped and suddenly everyone hated the Centauri. Makes for a much more real show.

It didn't hurt that you had to excellent actors who both really inhabited those characters to the fullest.

I have no idea whether the plot and tone for the new Star Trek will work or not, but I got to see the costumes and props up close at SDCC this weekend, and they are certainly going all out on those. They looked great.

I agree, the props and costumes look great. They just don't look like props and costumes from a decade before TOS.

That trailer looked like a really fun to watch Sci-Fi action series. I would have no idea that it was anything to do with Trek without the intro title though.

Don't what happened in the lead up. I am super-excited.
 :awesome_for_real:

People are saying this isn't shit.  Is it shit ?

No idea. But in the end I'm a fanboy that prefers mediocre Star Trek to no Star Trek at all.

The trailer sure looked action-y I presume it distilled a lot that down because otherwise it would be the most expensive show ever.  While I love a good space battle, I am hopeful that it has more Stars and Treks than what was shown.

FWIW my teenage daughter (admittedly already a TNG fan), thought the trailer was "pretty awesome".  That is a demo they need if they're going to succeed.

God damn, that was nothing but a teaser to make you pay to see conclusion of the episode.  Long, dull and boring.

People I trust are saying it was pretty good.

So, still not paying, but.

Missed it because the wife was watching Outlander, and I didn't care enough to interrupt her show .  Hopefully it will be on one of the On Demand for a few weeks before it goes in the CBS vault.

If not, then there's dubious streaming sites that will have it in a week.

I think it might be free on Netflix over here, so I may have to give it a twirl.

Watched both e1 & 2. While I disagree e1 was a bore, it definitely was a total tease. To get the full premiere you need both episodes. It was certainly the darkest of any Star Trek launch, but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun.

Things I liked: The space shots & visuals are spectacular. I am warming up to 4 nostriled "new" Klingons. Are they canon? Dunno, but they sold 'em well.  Space battle fucking rocks.

Things I didn't like: I really didn't like the interior shots. They seemed sterile, with awkward camera angles. Not much character development outside a couple cast.  Without spoilers: I could see how this would hopefully improve.

It's definitely is not your standard Star Trek, at least not at launch. But it left me pretty hopeful for where it goes. I am still fearful that the CBS paywall cripples is potential. Would 1 show make me pay for a channel or steaming service? Probably not, but I have it already and it's giving me Star Trek so that makes me happy.

So wait, they showed the first ep on regular TV but that is the only one they are airing outside of their pay-for on demand service?

Yep!

Well that's some bullshit.

There will eventually be a way to see this (legally) without suscribing. I watched the pilot, but will wait for the free option for more. Pretty, some interesting elements, but flawed. It feels like some insanely rich kid made their fan fiction after only watching the recent movies and reading message boards. 

It was an interesting pilot, but not Star Trek. It also had a lot of logic gaps. Without the Star Trek name or the pay wall issues, I'd be recording it and seeing if they could fix the flaws.

I think Trek is just past its prime thematically altogether. I think The Expanse is much more in tune with the current zeitgeist.

I believe that if DS9 or the Next Generation where to go back into production today and continue on as if they had never ceased that both shows could be successful today despite the changes that have taken place since they went off the air. I'm not saying that they would be massive hits, but I am saying that they could hold enough of an audience that they would continue on for a number of seasons. In fact, I think DS9 in particular would be a well suited show to address current concerns in the world. DS9 was explicitly not the same as the Next Generation. It was a distinct departure from the structure of the first two series, but it still felt like Star Trek to me. This show does not.

Watched the first two episodes (no, I didn't pay to access the service; nor would I). Some elements were good; in general the visuals were good (interiors were good, but felt off to me, likely due to camera angles and the like as has been said before). Did not like their visual take on Klingons at all. It isn't just the change in their personal appearance; much of the visuals (interior ship design, for example) seem divorced from anything even remotely Klingon. The speech patterns were horrendous, often sounding like the actors were struggling to speak Klingon (literally at times it was one word, pause, one word, pause, etc.). Even Shatner would shake his head. In general the acting wasn't good among the core characters, even to Star Trek standards.

Overall it doesn't come across as Star Trek, but generic sci-fi show stealing core Star Trek lore and dressing it up as 'meh' action sci-fi for the masses, and not doing a great job of it (DS9 had better fight scenes from what we saw -- largely because the camera work and such was very modern-jump-cut heavy). I wasn't expecting much from it, and the preview of the rest of the season at the end of episode two (dumb idea, imo) made it look un-appealing. I'll probably give it one more episode in hopes they turn it around, but I have strong doubts that its for me.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice.  For some reason, they felt it necessary to tilt the camera on so many shots for no reason.  Why would you do this?  It's distracting to me. And scenes on the bridge just didn't look right.

It was playing on Space up here, so I got to see both episodes, sort of. They started it 15 minutes late for some reason, so anyone who PVR'd it lost the last 15 minutes of the second episode. Of course they replayed it like three times through the night, so Ive got it recorded to watch tonight.

It was pretty much what I expected - PEW, PEW, KABLEWY! And Theo Galavan for some reason.

I think I would have preferred a show about Michelle Yeoh as Captain instead, but I'll give it a chance.

The first two episodes looked pretty good and hopefully it isn't just the extra money usually used for pilots. As for the plot it didn't impress me but then again Star Trek rarely does at the start.

Hopefully they'll get to exploration etc instead of more Klingons for a while.

Unlikely. Klingons have been Mary Sue fan wank for years.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Worf is not a Mary Sue, he's almost the opposite. He gets his ass kicked regularly and everybody ignores his suggestions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edflm7Hh3hs

I enjoyed this a lot. It's true that the first two episodes are really one extended pilot, but that's not a bad thing (if you're able to watch them both, I guess).

Some people say it doesn't seem very Star Trekky but to me it's reminiscent of later DS9.

That's me out.

Edited to Add :  Yeah, 1.5 episodes in.  It's kinda telling that I'm .5 into the second one and can't be arsed anymore.  I'm not enjoying this and given the cast and prod values, I should be.  But I'm not.

This appears to be a major sticking point with a friend at work.   It's like the guy responsible for continuity checks was beaten with a club and stuffed in a closet or something.   He describes it as trying to suspend disbelief while attempting to watch a show set in 1920s, except that everyone is driving cars with power windows, using push button telephones, and catching the news on flat screen TVs.  The technology level is all wrong for a show that is supposed to be set 10 years before the original StarTrek series.

Ye that was TNG, where his role was to show that the Alien of the week was totally bad ass because they kicked Worf's ass. In DS9 he was "TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE RAWR RAWR BULGE MUSCLES!!"

The show was pretty damn impressive visually from effects to costumes to sets. Hopefully the story is good.

The tech thing is a dumb argument. "Future tech" is always what we perceive as a society as futurish. To go preTOS would make it unbelievable to think that people 200 years in the future couldn't make a big screen TV. You have to move on.

Plus, the first eps of TNG had really cool holographic displays and projections but they killed that quickly.

I agree with Draegan regarding tech. Maybe if Discovery came right on the heels of Enterprise, they may have tried to retro more stuff.

It's been almost 20 years. Channel your inner-Elsa and let it go.

Trek was never about science in anyway. Just consider the fact that Michael jetpacked 2000 km in 10 minutes into an asteroid field and how any explanation for that would be a lot more interesting than the inconsistencies in Trek tech series to series.  :why_so_serious:

All that said, in another 15-20 years when we reboot Trek again, can we please go back to the TNG/DS9/Voy era?

Nah. Need to go 100 years further.

If you go too far in the future, the technology gets unrelatable.

If I were in charge, I'd:

1.) Put together a 3 year plan to end Trek.  It would take the TV series, the movies, all the remaining casts and fold them together in a series of movies and miniseries to give the original Trek (and the JJ verse) a final send off that celebrates the history...

2.) Then in year 4 I would reboot TOS on TV with the folks that worked on TNG and DS9 in charge and give them free reign to be inspired by Star Trek Lore, but not be beholden to it when you reboot.  What I mean by this is that the technology of the future should not look outdated by the tech of today (communicators, screens), but we should have the same tone, same general personalities, most popular makeup designs for aliens, etc...  be there, while not being locked into the same exact history (no need to rehash the Kobayashi Maru again), but free to bring back the elements they want and even expand upon them (Khan's story has been told a number of different ways, but there are still a lot of great options there).  Nobody would have to work arount TOS time travel episodes, future time cops, Enterprise continuity, etc... which would be nice.

Discovery fails because they took elements of Star Trek and made a new universe around it.  Same thing with the JJ verse.  They're fun, but not Star Trek.  Let's clean the slate and give us the optimistic Trek, free to add an edge like DS9 did, but not sliced too far from the core as we saw with Enterprise, Discvoery, the recent movies, etc...

So, you mean make a show like The Orville?

Think he means we need to reanimate Roddenberry's corpse, wipe his memory of everything after he started TOS, and have him try again.

--Dave

Let's not do that. Then the GOP will want to use that shit on Reagan, and no one needs that.  :why_so_serious:

Yes, I do mean an updated version of Roddenberry's original vision. However, if you think that is the Orville, you have no recollection of what the original vision of Star Trek was.

Get rid of the transporter, the translator, and put ships beyond instantaneous communication with Star Fleet. Do a show that's about nothing other than first contact missions. Have 4-6 episode arcs about one first contact. Voila, interesting Trek.

Sarek Katra Bullshit.

I've heard people say that the Transporter is a really good thing for story as you can get characters exactly where they need to be for the story very quickly. So from a story writers point of view it's a really really good invention as it moves the story along. So its a good invention from that point of view.

Of course, in reality its the one thing that would pop conflicts instantly - for example "Hi an entire army just appeared inside your fortress, good luck" "We just beamed up the main antagonist, shall we commence kinetic treatment with the Wrench now that he is alone vs all our security staff?" "Ok, we just beamed all the invading aliens into the Sewage treatment plant."

It just forces ST writers to constantly find reasons that it doesn't work at exactly the moment that working would cancel the action and drama of a given story. If your crew has to travel to the surface in a shuttlecraft, and then protect or hide the shuttlecraft and remain somewhat close to it, then you can put them in danger in ways that aren't just ended by a quick call to the ship on a communicator. The number of ST stories that have to give a lot of space to juryrigged no-transporter-right-now solutions is legion, and it is never something that helps. Plus once your transporters become replicators, you have another problem, which is having to ignore the implications of a technology that should relieve the crew of most kinds of limitations. Same thing--you have to constantly come up with reasons why an extremely flexible kind of nanotechnology can't be used to resolve 99% of the issues the crew encounters. "Oh, that's the one thing you can't replicate", etc.

Transporters, replicators, and translators are not an issue.  There are plenty of stories where working transporters and replicators aren't a solution to the issue. The issue is a lack of imagination, vision, and creativity among the writers.

Why can I say this with any authority?

The same reason having cell phones, data back-ups, and more-than-one-copy of a macguffin file is NOT a solution that has to be written-around by good writers to produce good stories.

I agree with Merusk and Khaldun.

A good writer will accept that certain things are just not challenging to certain heroes and will not try to make those things be a challenge to those heroes.  It is the same problem we see in comics.

However, going back to the tech level of ToS and further placing some limitations on transporting, such as shorter range, line of sight, etc... would give them more room to create challenges. 

Does Rogue One count as "writing around" or did they just flat out ignore that concept?   :awesome_for_real:

They flat-out ignored it because of the story being told from 1977.  The glaring weakness of going back and doing prequels to a thing 40 years later.

Or hell, do a whole season around a first contact situation.

Spend a few episodes on initial contact, figuring out how to communicate, mishaps along the way.

Now once you can communicate you have a whole pile of options -- what do these people want / need / hope to get from the Federation?

Get away from Planet of Hats silliness and spend time encountering multiple species / cultures / races / whatnot on *one planet* and explore how Federation do-goodery impacts that for good or bad.

You can still tell all kinds of stories within that framework, you get the advantage of sets you can use across multiple episodes, and you weave your season-wide story arc through all that.

Watched the first two episodes. Liked it better than I thought I would.


If they avoid passing around the idiot balll like they did in the first two episodes, this could actually be good.

So far I don't like the new Klingons. Their faces are two expressionless and like somebody else said, they do not sound fluent in their own language.

I didn't like either of the two episodes I've seen and the Klingons were awful.  They looked stupid and it sounded like they were trying to speak with marbles in their mouths.

I thought the new Klingons looked just fine.  But the language thing, didn't much like it.  Oh well, overall I thought it was pretty decent and it sure looked the business.  I hope at least they keep the high production values.

Sorry but not feeling the love on this one.  It occurs to me we have three hours of show in this series and we could've covered this ground in a single episode.  Looks like all flash and no substance.

My free trial of All Access is over and I will not be paying for more.  The value proposition just isn't there for me.  The show isn't good enough for the $6 fee AND having to watch commercials too.  And there isn't enough value in the rest of All Access compared to subscriptions like Netflix and HBO.

The football screwed up my DVR recording of the first episode of this, so I deleted it before I realized that even though the first episode was free, it wasn't being shown on my cable provider's On Demand service. At that point, I just couldn't be arsed to give enough of a fuck to find a free option to watch it.

Not sure where this goes, so putting it here:  https://m.imgur.com/gallery/wpZ4w

The comments on this are pretty funny.

I'm almost kind of interested in this as I read the rough summaries of the first three episodes. Seems to me that they actually did some thinking about a new kind of character, links to the Vulcans and all that notwithstanding.

Not interested enough to buy a streaming service.

I'm not paying for this, but I am watching. I agree that the first two episodes could have probably been compressed into one in some fashion, but that third episode? Now we're getting somewhere.


This isn't going to be a typical Trek adventure, with episodic self-contained epochs and a crew that miraculously survives every time. And I'm ok with that. Also, every Trek series always has an awkward start; I would say that Encounter At Farpoint was probably a really stupid episode when taken at face value. But when looked in the hindsight of seven years of character development and exploration, it's a pretty significant starting point.

I'm willing to keep watching for now. Certainly something to look forward to now that Rick and Morty are off the air for...well, while anyways.

Yeah, episode 3 has me wanting to see where this all goes.  Still could turn out awful, but there are some interesting things going on here, and if the the writers and actors get things figured out and they lose some of the clunkiness it could be fun.

Also, I'll happily take space mushroom spore technology as an alternative to particle-of-the-week for this round of trek technobabble.  Why not?

Quantum entanglement subspace mushrooms. And yeah, why not, beats tachyons and neutrinos doing things that physics says they could never actually do.

--Dave

STD doesn't feel like trek at all and I could more easily see it as a Mass Effect tv-series with some slight changes. With that in mind I'll keep watching it at least for now (especially since it's on Netflix here and not on some separate VOD service)

Problem going into a trek series is always going to be how hard it is to watch it on its own merit.

What I want from a trek show is TNG but with "golden age of television" writing, production values, and continuing story. The West Wing in space, basically. I don't expect to get that - but instead of working out if this is any good I'll spend half the time working out how much better this would be with Captain Picard.

Which isn't really fair, but there you go.

Why should we watch it on it's own merit when the creators didn't create it on its own merit?  It wasn't good enough to stand alone without the Star Trek label, and they didn't bother making it fit within the label.  The Expanse stands on its own.  The Orville fits in the Star Trek label.  STD can't seem to do either.

Got around to actually watching ep1 to 3.

I don't understand why ep3 was not ep1.

Other that, its ok. Showed some ambition, did something new. It also justified the concept of having a main character in a trek setting - which I was sceptical of.

I suspect people are going to complain about too much grimdark.

It has already managed to be more interesting than Into Darkness was with not entirely different subject matter.

As well as walking dead lady, props to Lucius Malfoy and unlikable Engineer guy for the scenery chewing. Glowering-asian-lady-from-BSG also very watchable. In fact what struck me in ep3 is how they'd clearly taken the time to work out the personalities,  relationships, and culture on the Discovery in a way they didn't bother for the USS Michele Yeoh.

Which makes it even more inexplicable to have us sit through 2 hours of backstory before anything 'current'.

If anyone hasn't seen this yet you should start with episode 3. As well as what I wrote above the episode 1 "twist" will probably seem less idiotic if you know it to be the premise of the show.

<wrong thread, please ignore>

Wrong thread ?  :awesome_for_real:

Having watched the third episode now, I wonder if the actor playing the captain was antagonizing the fans on purpose because that seems to be something that would fit the character he portrays.

Jason Isaacs has a weird career.

But suspect you have it the wrong way around.

It's not that he gives no fucks because hes playing that character.

He's playing that character because he gives no fucks.


Imo he's the guy who should have been hired to play Littlefinger.

If Rekha Sharma's involved, expect shit to go sideways in short order.

If this weren't Trek, it might be enjoyable.

Alas, at this stage, I'm merely watching good actors pay the mortgage.  Malfoy was a pleasant surprise.  Also, Security Chief is hot as hell.  So.

She's hot but oh-so-toxic.

See her roles in Battlestar Galactica, and the 100.

OMG yes.  :drill:

The show is thoroughly mediocre, and at times really stupid.  That said, this was the best episode yet, but...

If this IS a / the mirror universe, I will lose my shit.  :awesome_for_real:

Best part of the episode was the Klingon flirting going on. I had great fun watching the actors desperately trying to emote through that makeup.

I also wonder what "everything" is.

Annnnnnnnd there goes another of my reasons.  What the fuck was that.  That was just retarded.

Bonus retard points for her being the security officer.  :uhrr:

Prometheus levels of retardery.  It was truly epicly stupid bad writing.

Yeah, I had to rewatch that scene because I thought that I surely must've missed something.  No...it was just really dumb.

Though now I want a mirror universe episode where the Discovery has adequate lighting on all decks, and is entirely transparent about a thoroughly wholesome scientific mission to save kittens and orphans.

I remember reading a Trek Comic once where the Mirror guys slipped into RealTrck Universe, then attacked some Klingon ships because they assumed they were Pacifists like in their universe.  :awesome_for_real:

(This was before TNG)

"White Alert! Deploy the solar sail!"

Presumably this is the whole point of the show.

Whole pages of script in the first three episodes were dedicated to telling us that main character is and always will be "star fleet".

I assume eventually she will face down Malfoy. Admittedly I have low expectations for that scene and will find myself rooting for The Inquisitor no matter how much of a bastard he has turned out to be - because everything on the Discovery is defined by its relationship to the captain and without him this would not be half as watchable.

The problem I have is I don't care if Mike redeems herself or not.  I found her initial mutiny to be beyond stupid.  I think she should just die.

As well as all the other cast I don't care about.  I'm being serious here ;  they haven't given me ANYONE beyond Albino Nutter to even remotely care about.  And I'm rooting for the Klingon Cannibal with Respect Issues.

I mean.   It's just not good.

The giant killer woodlouse seems like a nice guy.

I'm quite happy in this universe.

I prefer the starker, darker sci-fis like The Expanse, Terminator and Aliens to the somewhat lighter Star Trek and Doctor Who stuff. To me, this is a darker Star Trek and I mostly like it so far. I'm a bit bored by the extended Klingon language scenes.

So, you are not going to buy the nuKlingon-English Dictionary and attentd the nuKlingon language classes?

(I'm actually scared to search and see if those are actually a thing)

More observations from this week...

Ginger haired bridge lady must be getting really pissed off with the length of time spent in make up getting her war wound on just to do meaningful looks and deliver zero content dialog. I'm starting to think they filmed a selection of meaningful looks to use as library footage then gave her the year off.

I don't understand Discovery battle tactics...
1) Jump into fire fight
2) Get shot at
3) Jump out
4) ? ? ?
5) Klingons explode

Elon Musk reference was.... so bad.

I wonder how long the writers meeting was when they decided Gen Zhukov should say "Go" when Picard would have said "Engage".

The problem is, Star Trek is not intended to be darker sci-fi. It's intended to be an idealistic look at the future. Changing it just to change it just doesn't ring true. I let it go in the JJ movies because he went out of his way to spin things off and basically turned it all into an Alternate Universe, but even in '09 and Beyond you get a glimpse at what Star Fleet is really intended to be.

That is just giving writers an excuse.

There is no reason at all that a dark scenario can't exist in star trek if well written. The underlying theme of "how far can we push tech and how do we spot ethical lines in a changing world" is extremely star trek.  The problem is there are few signs that the characters on this ship will deal with a darker scenario in a competent or interesting way. I agree the show needs hope - I think it is supposed to have it and I don't think the premise precludes it.

Except from what I'm seeing these guys and other fans saying it's more like:

"I'm re-writing The Lord of the Rings. Except this time it's a story about a Hobbit who steals a ring and tries to take over MIddle-Earth only to be foiled in the end by our hero, Gollum. He's the scarred and loyal pet of the true king, Soron, who is being assaulted by various squabbling warlords making him weak enough for the Hobbit to think he can win.

It's a darker story but I know I can really cash-in on the branding that was established by that less-visionary, idealist hack Tolkein."

A pure cash grab that ignores the original in favor of leveraging an established brand.

Hmm. I think they're overstating it.

Its darker, but except in ep3 - most of the darkness is more 'redshirts die sometimes' and 'we aren't resolving everything this week'.

I was surprised how much of the episode 3 uncertainty was resolved in episode 4.

I'd be surprised if the woodlouse torture dilemma stays unresolved for long. And the captain doesn't seem much more of an asshole than the typical admirals that Picard or Sisko had to deal with.

I see you played shadow of mordor

That's exactly what I was thinking !

Its ok. Shelob turns into a sexy woman in a revealing dress next game.

I....what ?

I wish i was joking...

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

I haven't played the first game but the story hints in that trailer just make me go LOLWUT?

The first game is fun. I bought a GOTY edition with a Best Buy reward certificate and haven't regretted it. It's a bit...off lore-wise but the gameplay is fun enough. It's sort of like....Batman in Middle Earth.

The lore is pretty bonkers and Merusk has the right idea about how close it hews to Tolkein.  However, it is still enjoyably bonkers, and the first game has lots of little moments that make it obvious that the makers have a pretty good knowledge of - and love for - the original works.

That being said, the "Shelob as sexy lady" thing is pretty :uhrr: I must admit.  Because she is voiced by Gwendoline Christie, I'll allow it.

I don't mind people laying with the lore a bit, but lets face it, Orcs are still Orcs in the first game. When you think of Shelob, characteristics that might come up are "Cunning, highly intelligent, is a fucking Spider," but I oddly never thought "makes the Orcs do what she wants with her massive boobage and sexy voice."

I mean fucking come on. I would have no problem with her talking.

But hey, maybe I should actually play the first game sometime :D

There reasoning is a bit shaky but it's just enough for me not to worry. Basically, Shelob is the daughter of an angel and at one point the word "spider form" is used in one of the books or something. So they reasoned that being a spider is a form she takes but she can take others when she wishes.

"Angel" is the wrong word. "Spirit of devouring, tentacled darkness" is closer.  :oh_i_see:

Sounds right to me  :drill:

And she was the daughter of one of Melkor/Morgoth's sidekicks Ungoliant, mother of all the spiders. Ungoliant I think could take other forms before she ate the two trees, but I don't remember reading anything about Shelob doing that in any of the prehistory stuff.

Shelob as Pennywise.  Well, why not.


Annnnnyway, Star Trek is still pish.

She is the dumbest officer in the history of Star Fleet.  That's what. Ok, I'm sure if I went digging for some obscure bad episode I could find someone dumber, but really, how is someone that stupid.


I really want to like this.  I'm trying.  But every time something good happens something bad drags it back down.  I'm holding out hope that it finds it's stride the way TNG and DS9 took a while to figure themselves out but I don't know if there's the same level of patience today that there was then.

I think going for the TV-MA rating was a big mistake.  Just so they can stick in a bit of gore-porn and swearys?  Did it really add anything other than limit your audience?

It's what all Trek fans have been asking for since the 70's

Next you will want them smearing blue gel all over themselves...

Hahahah, that was fucking TERRIBLE.


Edited ;  And the Internet has already figured out where it's all going and it's fucking lame and I officially give up now.  You'll be pleased to know.

Oh god.  :ye_gods:

Oh just say it, I'm not going looking.

Spoiler tags exist for a reason, you tease.

Yes.

I had assumed the tech was going to turn out to be a forerunner to genesis.

The thing the internet thinks is....   much worse.

Also, thank fuck Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet.

Except, you know, that black guy there.

It wants a cake and it wants to also eat a cake.

Instead, it can eat a dick.

Um, guys... if giant woodlouse went in to hibernation by splorging out most of its water, um why did it magically un-dehydrate itself when they shot it in to space? All that ambient water in space?

Would have been a much better ending if the thing had just frozen in to a dead rock after they ejected it.



Oh, shit, sorry, that's not what we are supposed to be talking about. They said FUCK! Twice!!1!

The characters swearing barely even registered.  There was too much swearing on the OTHER side of the screen.

At the end of this show netflix suggested I watch some TNG.

Weird watching a star trek about competent people making reasonable decisions, having sensible relationships with each other and acting like grown ups.

You know, there are people - horrible people, twisted and wrong, malformed with misintent - that think DS9 was the best Star Trek.  And, even if you do not subscribe to that theory, you could quite clearly make an argument that Trials and Tribulations, the TOS Worship Episode of DS9 was something truly special indeed.

You could then say that the latest Discovery Episode was, in fact, the exact same TOS worship with pretty much the same intent but with everything, and I truly do mean everything, done wrong.

It does my head in.

They got the Kirk style, hammer fist hand to hand combat right?

I try to like the characters in this but they make it so hard. The captain lets himself get captured with minimal resistance only to reveal a bit later that he blew up his previous ship along with all of its crew (while he ran and was the only survivor) to keep them from the horrible fate of being prisoners. Michael keeps up her rebel attitude once again disobeying direct orders but that's okay because reasons (also bonus points for quickly getting rid of the telescope her previous captain went thru all the trouble to testament to her).  :oh_i_see:

re: Lt. Ash Tyler

Episode 6

Yay I guess, Star Trek Discovery renewed for season 2 (http://trekcore.com/blog/2017/10/star-trek-discovery-renewed-for-season-2/). (most treks have gotten better once they had a season or two behind them).

I enjoyed episode six and it gives me hope.  There's still plenty of goofy stuff about this show, but we're starting to see the characters developed a bit and I feel like things are trending positively as far as overall quality goes.  We shall see!

Wow. Finally a good episode.

Anecdotally, most people I know IRL who know what Trek is but aren't hard core Trek nerds really like this series.  That pretty much describes myself as well.  This doesn't seem any more or less retarded than other Trek series I have seen.  Visually, it is actually quite impressive.

I think I'm most amused by the people who are *so mad* that the ships, etc, are fancier than the 60s era sets from TOS and *that's* what ruins it for them.

Same. Still happy.

I haven't seen any of it but I'm mad that they pussied out and made another prequel instead of advancing the timeline.

At this point they're in the same uncomfortable space as Lucasfilm was with that. Years and years of garbage material and infill that conflicts with each other and fans are rabid about.

Not to mention the questions of "where the fuck do we go from here" with all the legacy crap from the actual TV series. Voyager dodged a shit ton by not being in the Alpha Quadrant, but any "future" Trek has to deal with Voyager's shit, Gamma Quadrant shit and the rest. Because fans will demand it.

Better to do a prequel and punt, creatively, than to be guaranteed to piss off your fan base by ignoring it all. Or worse; decide to dump it all as garbage.  Disney took (and takes) a lot of flack from that, but being that they're movies they can dodge the most rabid fans and go to the general public for the 3-4 weeks it takes to make the money back.  TV series don't have that luxury and have to keep those rabid fans who'll erode long-term ratings by shitposting.

Star Trek's basic ideas are sound; there is a good argument for just starting over in order to move past the naive New Fronterism. I just rewatched the TOS one with the two guys who are half-face black and white and folks who have long eye-rolled at it are right--it is essence of smug 60s liberalism. Imagine G'Kar and Londo on Babylon 5 reduced to just being complete moral mirrors of each other in a simplistic way and having Sheridan mock them as unevolved dummies who just need to luv each other. The reason that whole thing works is that it takes the bleak history of the relationship between the Centauri and the Narn. The dumb episode with the Draal on B5 got close to that but at least it was for laughs, compared to the deathly serious TOS presentation of the same. Voyager could have been a version of that (namely: once the security blanket of the Federation is removed, do these people become even slightly more interesting and resonant with our own times?) but they really fucked that one up.

So if you don't reboot to make the ST universe a more dramatically interesting and complex one (while keeping the optimism), you have to figure out some post-Voyager rupture that soft-reboots the established universe. Say, the replicators and the translators and the transporters and the post-scarcity shit stops working and the Federation has to start making harder choices again. Or you go the other direction and push the entire ST universe into a genuinely post-scarcity frame and start doing really really visionary storytelling (e.g., Banks' the Culture novels) about that. That is WAY harder. So I am sympathetic to various reboots, soft or otherwise.

Or they could keep Star Trek's (utopian) society and keep exploring while emphasizing the non-interference rule more strongly (maybe after a terrible mishap from too much meddling). The moral preaching could be done not from being superior but from telling about earth's past failures (there's stuff like eugenic wars and world wars in earth's past in trek timeline).

In some ways Orville is scratching my trek itch so there's that (with interesting and likable characters trying to do the right thing) and Discovery is getting better especially if you try to forget that it's trek instead of a separate scifi ip.

God, I would love some "Culture" movies or TV.  :awesome_for_real: I think. :ye_gods:

I would commit a minor felony to get a Player of Games or Consider Phlebas miniseries made. Nothing too violent, maybe Assault With Intent.

--Dave

TNG worked just fine. The enterprise moves around solving problems that don't threaten to sunder the galaxy in two, but were a big deal for the people involved, despite replicators existing.

I have no issue with show runners choosing to do trek in wartime or on over-epic quests, but I hate the argument that they 'have' to.

TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and even Discovery each have a perfectly fine premise, a reasonable budget, and casts that vary from more-than--adequate to excellent. They didn't stand or fall for any more complex reason than some had better writers and directors than others.

I can't find it, but somewhere there's a Banks interview where he says he'd agree to any treatment for Consider Phlebas just so long as they did justice to the escape from the Vavatch Orbital -- one scene he really really wanted to see on the big screen.

I'd love to see the final confrontation in Excession where the Sleeper Service shows what it's been up to in the back half of the book...

Episode 7

I really liked episode seven.  It was *fun* and I appreciate that.  I like that the writers clearly realized that the viewers were familiar with the concept the episode was built around, didn't waste much time revealing what was going on, and then proceeded to play with it a lot.  And Stamets was a riot.

Agree with you. Good episode, want more. 

EP7 felt more like Orville than previous episode of STD and I liked it. Maybe the show can now concentrate on being trek instead of forcing more of the main plot which I can't seem to care about.

The ending was  :uhrr: ... the guy murders and pillages his way through the whole episode and then his punishment is he has to marry that girl ? I get that he did not kill anybody in the final timeline, but he still is a sociopathic asshole that I would not let run around free.

Also, how convenient that his father in laws ship was just around the corner.  :awesome_for_real:

Still a fun episode, it is getting better.

I think part of it was the fact that Mudd didn't kill anyone in the last iteration of the time loop.

(but then again had this been the Lorca of previous episodes who left Mudd to be tortured in the first place then a summary execution would have been in line with the character)

I haven't even seen the episode yet, but from the description it sounds like they are simply calling back to the original Mudd episode (TOS) where Kirk's punishment for him was to strand him on planet with robot versions of his ex wife.

Well I really enjoyed it.  It was more of a self-contained episode, which I'd like to see sprinkled in among the more serialized ones.  It was pretty fun.

I know Mudd comes off as really murdery but he knows they don't really count. And yeah the end was pretty convenient, but I'm ok with it.  The somewhat TOS-style civilian outfits at the end were pretty cool.

<spoiler>Between this episode and "I, Mudd" that is a rough looking 10 years for Stella</spoiler>



re: ep 6. Whether it was by accident or design they ended up with some pretty good in-show marketing.  I know a lot of people that want 'DISCO' shirts now.

Re the ending of the latest episode: never was a telegraphed thing so telegraphed. "One last time" and "no more after this" and "we'll do all these things after this final time" etc etc.

Which followed "these things we are wearing will make us undetectable" and "confirming our things that we are wearing are making us undetectable". Write better!

Once again Lorca goes against orders and makes a nice speech about how "the crew were scientists but now they are warriors!" keeping up with the Trek ethos. again they teleported the people on board the Ship of the Dead proving that Klingons should be easy fodder for Federation (nothing to stop beaming a few bombs in instead)

bonus psycho points for saying:"do whatever you have to do to keep him alive until he finishes the jumps"  :why_so_serious:

To be fair beaming across a bomb wouldn't have provided a general solution for cloaking.  I didn't feel the need for a line of bad exposition in which star fleet engineers spout technobabble at each other that they already know to explain why the materials in a bomb won't make it across in the window while shields are going up.

I just assumed Klingons used tachyons somehow.

It is always tachyons.

Current show status  :  Quite Good.

When doing a clandestine mission to infiltrate an enemy ship to plant sensor beacons, you might want to use something a little less conspicuous than a large cylinder that announces itself with bright blue lights.  You might not want to stamp a return address on it too.  :why_so_serious:

That was pretty busy episode.  It had some ups and downs, but overall I'm liking the show quite a bit now.  

The sensors did make me laugh.

I could believe he did the thing in your spoiler to go investigate the anomoly more readily than for the reason you wrote.

But I think it is even more likely this is a plot mechanic to reintroduce albino-klingon-dude now that stripy-klingon-dude is dead.

Remember sneaky-torture-klingon-lady is aligned to albino-klingon and is still on the discovery for some reason.

Finally, nude female Klingons ... that took them forever.  :ye_gods:

How big were their... tentacles?

I just finished the first 9 episodes. I thought it was fantastic.

I wish I understood what the CBS people were thinking. They've added the show to Amazon Prime--but you have to pay extra on top of your Amazon Prime subscription to see it. Wait, what? Oh, I get other CBS shows in there too, thanks for nothing. Nope, not gonna do it.

First episode after the break and it was pretty cool.  Some suspicions answered

Was a good return episode.

Fake edit: Fun fact: This episoide was directed by Jonathan Frakes, who just directed an episode of Orville. We live in interesting times.  :awesome_for_real:

Frakes directed a few TNG episodes too. On his third outing they gave hims a story where the enterprise was trapped in an endlessly repeating time loop with the same things happening over and over, probably to prove he is not a Director, and if so it failed because he pulled it off, creating an interesting episode.

Yeah, but he rescued Frasier from the Typhon Expanse, so fuck that guy.

Just started watching this.  Really impressed.  Super surprised how good it is.  Writing, Production (incl. CGI), pacing, most of the Acting.  Really, really good.


Khaldun: just opt for the 3-day free trial on Prime.  Show is worth it.

Narrator :  It wasn't.

Yeah, this episode was really good. Helluva return and a sticking farewell.

Do you US people not get this on Netflix?

CBS is using it as the flagship show on their new streaming service. They also sold it to CraveTV in Canada so it's not on Netflix here either. The rest of the world has it on Netflix as is right and proper.

I guess I should be thankful individual channels don't go around trying to run their own subscription services over here.

It isn't the cost I'd object to - its managing however many subscriptions.

This is fundamentally my issue. I do not want another subscription. Period. I might be fine with paying out the money a la carte, but I want to pay through one of the already innumerable payment streams I'm sunk into. I object profoundly to the request for another subscription.

Yeah, been saying for years the ultimate end state (ideally, obviously corporations are greedy fucks who will resist) would be a single subscription (be it to a cable company or netflix type place) where you pay al a carte for access (instant, any time, no commercial access) to their entire catalog of content.  You just add what ever amount of money onto your monthly subscription.  Hell, the way the content producers  and ip owners are eating each other lately, wont even be that many options.

How long it takes to get to that point, who knows.  Everybody seem to be pulling content from netflix to try their own streaming service, but that's long term self defeating because except for maybe Disney and HBO, they don't have enough to stand on their own.  Ultimately, it benefits both sides to have a single platform to distribute everything on.

You can literally do this through amazon prime right now for this specific channel/show, as mentioned earlier.  If you're fast, you can even binge the whole thing in the free trial and never look back.

More from this episode re: Stamets

Edit :  Stop it dude.

Although he still seems to be good? Maybe the real Stamets was secretly evil.

Meh, there were plenty of non-evil types in the mirror universe. Most of them ended up dead but they were there.

Hell, Spock in the original Mirror episode was not exactly Evil.

Ok, we did the three-day trial, 3 episodes in. My video-game savvy daughter said in the middle of episode 2, "It's more like a sidequest in Mass Effect". Which was not a criticism from her.

I've been trying to avoid overt spoilers, but the discussion here mentioning the Mirror Universe pretty much was like "Yeah, I see that even in Episode 3"--"black alert", lots of stuff. Ok. We will see where it goes, at any rate.

We're caught up, and damn them, we'll stuck with the sub for now.

Um, it's good? I think? I'm interested, at least.

It's predictable as fuck but it delivers that predictability with such precision that I'm fully on board.

I still like it. Really enjoyed the latest episode.

I mean, yeah, I totally got from about episode 3 that the captain had a dark secret, and once he had his post-coital conversation with the Admiral I realized what it was.

What I can clearly see coming is something like a better ST: Voyager. Saru's going to be captain, he's going to be in over his head, he's going to turn over command to Burnham. At that point, either:

a) they're going to stay in the Mirror Universe and this becomes a Mirror Universe show; they're going to change the history of the Mirror Universe and that will let them avoid the timeline questions that would loom large if they were back in the 'main' universe

b) they're going to come back into the 'main' universe via the mycelium network but it will be in the far future of the Federation and they'll say, "See, we always were going to tell a story about the post-DS9/post-Voyager ST universe, we fooled ya"

c) they're going to jump to other parallels via the mycelium, and it basically becomes Star Trek: Sliders.

I can't see it being a long term mirror universe show. I suspect the mycellium is almost gone in its current form  but there will be a new rule changing setting or tech.

They seem keen to keep the setting in flux. The clue is in the name. They don't want the crew or viewer in any kind of comfort zone and changing the premise every few episodes is the weapon of choice.

I don't see burnham as captain any time soon (maybe for a short arc) because it would be hard to maintain her as an outsider, which is too useful when the setting is 'weird shit happening'.

It's possible that Prime Lorca comes back into the mix too, I suppose. You know, every Starfleet vessel by TNG's time should have had:

a) quantum scanning of all crew members, once per month
b) "surgically-altered Klingon agent" scanning of all crew members, once per month
c) shapechanger/possessed person psych tests once per month (what the fuck was Troi doing if not something like that?)
d) shapechanger/possessed/evil twin lockdown protocols

In *any* timeline all this shit happens a ton. And every single time, they act like it's the first time ever.

Instructing one crew member to chew scenery is an excellent way to turn in a low budget episode.

This is a pretty good take on what the showrunners might have been up to. I particularly like the point that if the Discovery didn't seem like it was a Starfleet vessel, it turns out that it wasn't: https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/7uatct/why_discovery_didnt_feel_like_star_trek_at_first/

Mirror Lorca was trying to run it like a Terran vessel, and using the war as his excuse. I think looking back, one thing I like is that they realized that a Terran in the Prime universe would feel that same way as Burnham did having to pretend to be her counterpart--that it would slowly eat away at your soul. There's all these moments now where you can kind of see that Mirror Lorca was playacting at being a Starfleet officer and sometimes struggling with it--look at the desperate and unconvincing way he invokes PTSD and so on after Admiral Fuckbuddy confronts him about his attitude. But like the linked article points out, he was organizing his crew like it was a Terran crew, which is why everything felt kind of off.

I'm not sure why Michael thinks Mirror Georgiou is her friend who must be saved while Mirror Lorca is an evil who must die. If anything, from what she and the viewer has seen, Mirror Georgiou is worse.

I know Georgiou looks like her surrogate mother while Lorca looks like some guy she hardly knew (I've lost track of whether Michael ever met the "real" Lorca at all) but she knows they are different people. I mean, it's Mirror Georgiou that led an empire that kept Mirror Saru as a slave. If she's just behaving irrationally due to her guilt at betraying Georgiou then fair enough, but I'm not sure the show is really telling that story.

Disclosure: I haven't watched any of this, all my info comes from reading this thread.

I can't help but wonder where they are going with this.  If they somehow make it back, how will the writers justify that no one ever heard of the mirror universe or the Discovery?  To Khaldun's point: "And every single time, they act like it's the first time ever."  Or, they are stuck in the mirror universe forever, in which case I'm already tired of the show concept and I haven't seen it at all.  I'm really struggling with how they thought this was a good idea.

It is fairly clear that they aren't getting stuck in any situation for more than a few episodes.

The concept is 'what do star fleet people do under weird circumstances'. They flip the setting around every few episodes, and so far every time they've done it it has paid off.

In the last switch they've even managed to turn Saru and Tilly into competent worthwhile personalities. Show has earned a good amount of trust from me.



As an aside, what makes you think nobody in the future settings had heard of mirror universe? Probably isn't general knowledge and it isn't somewhere people can drop in every day, but it is known this can happen. There is a TNG episode that has like a dozen of alternate quantum thingys, and DS9 also had a plotline in mirror universe.

One thing I really give zero fucks about on this show is 'how come Kirk/Picard/Sisko didn't explictly mention this event'. Even the spore drive can be trivially waved away by 'it broke and we can't build one without another space bug'.

Yeah, I think if this piles into either the Abrams timeline or the TOS timeline, it's going to be "Starfleet has decided that even mentioning the spore drive will get you executed" kind of thing. I mean, they had a death penalty for even mentioning Talos IV, so this is just more of the same.

The next thing they need to do is start building a sense of "crew". Robot lady, black lady, lady with the thing on her forehead, earnest dude who mans one of the stations, they have now all got to be given some personalities. They did a good job with Tilly--I kept calling her "Cadet Tumblr" in the first three episodes she appeared in, but she seems pretty real to me now as a character.

I'm fine with Burnham saving Mirror Georgieu--precisely because it's a stupid thing to do. It was an impulse--an emotion. It was stupid and she's going to pay a price for it in this coming episode, I'm sure. I like characters who make dumb but understandable decisions.

Showrunners claim they are working on the basis they have ten story years before tOS starts and if the show keeps going they have basic plan for getting the universe where it needs to be.

Given all they have do is break the spore drive and flip the Klingons and Federation into a cold war, that doesn't sound too hard to do.

I'm looking at it from a paradigm shift perspective.  There is every reason to let everyone know about multiple universes (if you transport someone, and all the sudden they have a goatee... yeah, that's bad), and virtually no reason to keep it quiet.  I'm also not a fan or the, "we're all good, they're all evil", aspect of the mirror universe.  Largely because at every point during the continuity, the goatee universe always seems to have the same folks, technology, etc, as this one, even thought they are all way more stabby.

I didn't know that about Talos IV, the way I remember it from TOS was that the Talosians themselves were largely responsible for it not being widely known.  I thought that the Federation had a quarantine on data and access, not that it was a capital offence to even mention Talos IV - which seems super not-a-utopia way of going about things.

"It is fairly clear that they aren't getting stuck in any situation for more then a few episodes" - is this the case?  It seems like the entire first season is wrapped up with discovering and escaping the mirror universe.  Am I misreading what's in this thread?

Edit: tried to fix horrible sentence

We had 2 episodes on USS Yeoh, 2 coping with the ethics of murderous space woodlice and albino klingons, 2 facing down that guy from the office,  3 with "holy shit solve the cloaking thing or we all die" and stripy face klingons, then a whopping 4 in the mirror universe - though even there it has been under two distinct premises.

So yes.

I think it is safe to say Discovery doesn't plan to establish a status quo.

The Talos IV episode basically says: any mention of this planet = big trouble; going there is automatic death. Meaning, there's intense secrecy about it, which is curious.

The problem with the "we have ten years to TOS" thing, is that if it's the pre-Abrams universe, Kirk is out there doing shit already.

It does explain why  they got so aggressive about Axanar, because they arguably want to DO Axanar.

But so far I'm not seeing anything that absolutely can't be reconciled with the pre-Abrams timeline. I'm seeing stuff where they'd be better off just doing another reboot, but then, Abrams would have been better off doing a reboot without time travel bullshit too.

This is Prime timeline, not Kelvin.

Sure, Kirk is out there doing shit. If they need him in season 4 maybe he'll pop up.

Till then, it's a big old sky.

Ok, the bit where the admiral lady introduces the new captain is dumb.

Colossally dumb. The show very nearly lost all three of us watching at that point. I know it's traditional for Starfleet admirals to be complete dumbfucks and this one has slightly more excuse that the usual (losing a war) but still. Just keep her down in a secure room and let her give advice. Making an evil duplicate the actual captain of the ship--and also letting a Manchurian candidate Klingon walk around free--just adds up to such WTF stupidity. At some point I just cannot relax and enjoy the show if it requires this level of dumb.

Letting Ash walk around with a funny bracelet is fine.

It is exactly what Picard would have done.

Maybe not in the middle of a war with the Klingons and after the guy murdered Counselor Troi.

I really would not put it past them. If they locked up Data every damn time Lore took him over or a virus made him go crazy I doubt he'd have had time to make it to 2nd officer.

Neelix tried to poison the crew every other day and was still free to move about the ship.  :why_so_serious:

I...

Ok, that's a good point.

Saw that end coming and it was still awesome. The closing music was key.

Got to love how the plot is solved by federation giving a torturer a nuke with which to threaten a global annihilation.

Yeah, I am pretty "meh" on the finale as well. :oh_i_see:

But was she actually a torturer, given what we now know about Tyler?

I thought the finale was fine.

If I have any complaint it is that it was a bit too vanilla "star trek" and not very "discovery". Without Lorca it feels like the show is waiting for someone else to drive the threat/uncertainty. Evil Michele Yeoh didn't seem likely to get away with much.

Pardoning Burnham seemed a bit odd in that it discards the limited pov and status outside the system that she had as a mere specialist. But to be fair given the shit the TOS crew got away with and points above about people on specific ships, maybe it is inevitable.

Given that choice it now feels inevitable that she will eventually be captain. This feels a bit cheap - but given how bad the whole show looked after the early episodes it is hard to complain much.

There's a significant problem with pacing when you look at the whole season--the wrap-up on the Klingons was pretty rough. I also think there's an interesting question about just how many people were in on the plan to destroy Kronos--if it's most of Starfleet Command, then that should be a continuing plot point going forward (and it makes you wonder whether pardoning Burnham is an attempt to buy her silence about it).

The fact that top command makes you the most likely person to fail to live up to the Federation's values is such a persistent theme across all Trek that I think that it might almost be time to build in some form of conscious, non-ironic attention to it. One thing that no Trek has paid much attention to is the specifics of how the Federation government and Starfleet relate. If you think about democratic militaries between 1950 and 2016, generally there's two ways that some of the core ethical propositions they are supposed to follow get breached. First is because the top brass and some of the civilian government agree to circumvent those commitments. It's really rare for command staff to decide on their own to do something that has a major chance of having serious political consequences, even in the middle of wars. Douglas MacArthur might be one of the few examples of a general who was inclined to make major decisions independently from civilian authority and it's why he got reigned in. The second is because the rank-and-file commit atrocities or otherwise engage in serious misconduct. The brass may know about it, they may even countenance it or be implicitly ordering it, but frequently this is soldiers in the field simply deciding to do whatever they are doing.

In Trek, partly because the shows are always biased towards the adventures of the Starfleet rank-and-file (or at least the unit commanders of the rank-and-file), ordinary Starfleet crews are rarely shown as strongly breaching Federation regulations or ethics. When they do, as with the Prime Directive, it's usually in a forgiveable way that reflects a genuine, difficult ethical challenge. Sometimes we get the "crazy captain" subspecies of the "crazy admiral", but I'm hard-pressed to think of a "crazy crew" where it's the crew that initiated serious misconduct.

When it's admirals who are not crazy per se but instead are doing 'rationally' unethical things, Trek never makes clear whether the civilian government is in on the decision. The season finale of Discovery might be the first time we get affirmation that at least some parts of the civilian government are completely involved, e.g., Sarek is part of the decision. Given that this is the 'classic' timeline, I don't think you can get a house-cleaning of the Starfleet and Federation leadership in Discovery, there were a lot of bad admirals in Kirk's time as captain (both before and after his own service as admiral). But I really would kind of enjoy it if the series would tackle the whole issue head on in some way.

Didn't DS9 do that a bit with all the Section 31 stuff?

A bit. DS9 also finally showed some sympathy for trespassing ethical boundaries, and stopped structuring plots around "The Captain gets to give a speech about why we don't do things like that after kicking the Evil Admiral's ass". Though Voyager incomprehensibly went right back to that with a premise that should have demanded abandoning it.

The build up during the episode felt mediocre and I hated the ending. It should have been a double episode finale, this one was rushed.

So this is back. And good.

- I like Pike.
- I like deadpan engineer lady.
- I even quite liked 'random enterprise douchebag'.
- The story seems much more star trek.
- Even more running and explosions that last year - but it earned it - didn't become not-trek.
- Production values seem up.
- 'Hey there we' re doing religion' was a bit on the nose. But I guess that is no different to the overdone first episodes last year.

At least they finally stopped using all of the bridge crew as a bunch of nearly-unspeaking props, though we are still miles away from them actually being characters.

It's a mixed bag.  Tig Notaro's character and Pike are fun.

I'm kind of Spocked out though and wish they wouldn't go back to that well.  Maybe Sybok'll drop by and spice things up?  :awesome_for_real:

I know it's silly but that picture of bearded Spock made me groan.

Considering where the series went last season, maybe it's Mirror Spock.

Even Mirror Spock only had a goatee. But it'd be funny if they went back to that same well again.

I'm only 5 episodes into the series but i'm enjoying it.  I like how they don't seem to be sticking to any strict star trek rules that have ruined other trek series.

Edit: the ending to Season 1 Episode 07 was bad.  They should have done a summary execution.  It's war after all

Was that the one with Harry Mudd?  If so, they can't execute him because he appears in two episodes of the original series and one episode of the animated series, all of which happen after Discovery, chronologically.  It'd be like Discovory finding the Botany Bay and killing Khan.

Lorca's decision at the end was really out of character, but I still liked the episode because the time loopy thing felt very Trek.

Yea I know, but the idea that you can try to takeover the flagship of the fleet in wartime, sell it to the enemy, and not be immediately executed pushes it a bit.

I'm not exactly surprised that you take a keen interest in Mudd's modus operandi and its consequences.

Do you have to bring your politics everywhere?

It's seriously bad writing:

In wartime, how does that ship just appear right there at the end to pick up Mudd?  No commander is going to allow anything to get close, especially after the captain got captured by a cloaked Klingon ship.  At the very least, there should have been a prison ship (which we have seen already) to take Mudd away.  I get the idea that they writers are trying to inject a little humor, but it just doesn't fit the setting.

Seemed like the sort of thing that happens in Star Trek to me and wasn't remotely important to the story of the episode but OK.

Yes you are right.  I was enjoying the the darker Battlestar Galactica type of stories and was hoping they would continue.

Presumably it was important to Lorca to look like he was still respecting basic Starfleet norms.

Oh, they definitely continue.  But this is still a Star Trek show and you're going to get episodes like that from time to time.

The first episode of this season was good.

The original series reference with the fortune cookie was amazing.

So, I saw this thread popping up and read the last page or so, said what the fuck, and started watching.  Its surprisingly watchable.  I certainly have some issues with it (like, they still haven't done a good job of portraying why everybody thinks Mike is evil and her 5 second failed mutiny that didn't do a damned thing resulted in the war), and they have been slow on getting me to actually like any characters (they are slowly figuring out roles for everybody).  But as I've progressed, it does seem to be getting better.  A Trek with a budget set firmly in established universe is pretty fun.

Though somebody please tell me the Red Head dies a violent and painful death at some point.  Her character drives me up the wall and I literally have to just skip forward on Netflix whenever she has an scene where she speaks.

So, I think the main issue with this episode is just a tone problem.  Mudd is an over the top 1800's style lovable conman out to steal literal moons if he could.  OK.  If he had just been using the time thing to figure out how to take control of the ship and run circles around the crew in a comical manner, the ending would have been perfect.  Total throw back to old school episodes and a good time.  'Aw gee shucks, you got me.'

However, they showed that he had zero problems with (and actually enjoyed) violently killing shit tons of crew members on every pass, and having no qualms about torturing them in the most painful ways possible with zero remorse.  This makes him also come off as a complete psychopathic animal.  On that front, years of movies and TV have taught us the appropriate end of that episode would be for the crew to trap him into a 30 minute cycle where he slowly and painfully melts from radiation exposure in his shuttle over and over again for the rest of eternity.  The crew smiling and hitting the button to cut off Coms has he screams out nooooo in desperation from his disabled shuttle.  That's how most writers tend to end characters like that, and we've come to expect it.

But instead we got the charming rascal of a conman who isn't malicious, just greedy, ending.  After he spent 45 minutes being Ramsey Bolton.  So, basically, just really off tone writing for what they were trying to go for.

Still enjoyed the episode though!

I really, really hated the red-haired ensign for the first half of the season--like, I could not stop myself every time she was on screen from saying stuff like "Ensign Sensitive Snowflake" and so on. And then something weird happened--in part because of some of what happened in the season--and lo! I suddenly liked the character quite a bit.

I'm still liking this.

The stories of the week are great.

But the red signal overarching plot is now tiresome.

Also mopey ex-boyfriend is not a great readdition to the crew.

Sylvia Tilly (red-haired ensign) still gets on my nerves like Jar Jar Binks. She's occasionally redeemable when she has to assume another persona, but her default persona is too irritating.

It's like they've got a corny comedy team and an intelligent sci-fi team and they take turns writing the show, which jumps from terrible writing to great writing all the time.

It's the Klingons that really bug me. The only decent world-building Trek has ever done, really, and these guys decided that the best way to show there was a new sheriff in town was to undo that. Now this season the writers are trying to climb out of a mess they got themselves into.

What a fucking great episode this week. Old into new, done very well.

Yeah when I saw the opening scene I thought I was going to die of shock.

I was impressed.  I’m digging everything, warts and all.

Watched episode 9 last night.

They even managed to convince me she'd turn out to be the red angel about half way through.

Burnham felt a bit weak in this episode.

But emo-Spock I loved. I thought Spock would be an Easter egg too far, and I wasn't sold last week, but this week I was. It was definitely adult Spock and he was believably furious. I don't recall a better spock scene.

Rest of the crew started coming through better and better as well.

You know, this chap GETS Spock.

His Spock is fucking PERFECT.

Sure, the show is shit, but the SPOCK IS AWESOME.

New episode was... bad.

Cast all delivered and the flashing lights and whatnot were exciting.

But the plot is 'lets all do the most obviously stupid thing and await the the most obvious and leaden footed twist I've seen in a long time'....

It was not good.

Except for Spock. 

Pike and Spock are the show's two best characters. Lose Discovery, move them back to the USS Enterprise and run a pre-Kirk series.

Given that we've already seen Number One (and I liked her), I'd be behind this idea.

Also, Number One.

Episode 11

I hope not.

But maybe.

Either way, Michelle Yeoh alternately punching dudes and making fun of star fleet remains worth the price of admission.

Nah,


That said, yeah, Pike and Spock are. fucking. perfect. Mirror Georgiou being her snarky, badass self is the icing on that cake.

Still liking this - but going a bit off the boil.

Much more Running! OMG Run that way! Flashing light! Glowy Thing! Angst! than earlier. And not enough Spock.

I really have to give this show credit for adding another Best Captain to the pantheon, though. I really like this version of Pike.

That season ender. Saw it coming about four eps back, still damn good. Super excited for season three now.

Would be great if they use this to undo the JJverse. But as they are 9 centuries beyond the Narada my bet would be on just ignoring it. I could imagine them meeting the temporal dudes who just say something like 'yeah that was shit so we undid it'.

They have said s3 will be set in the 33rd century. So has to be post everything we know really.

We're going to the 33rd century. Even if they did incorporate JJverse (they aren't), it wouldn't really matter in the long term. Space travel in the latter years of Voyager was already on the brink of making it from one end of the galaxy to the other seem fairly quick. Between the spore drive and trans-warp tech, I'd think we'd be looking at a much bigger scope for S3; one that has them jumping between galaxies across the 'verse.

The idea of S3 cameos is also neat. Q, Data, the EMH, hell even Sisko might swing by.

I'm really excited to see what they can do when not trying to navigate all the hazards of existing Trek canon.

I also sort of hope they can do something about the pacing and maybe not be saving the entire universe every couple episodes.

The stakes don't need to be that high for it to be interesting television, and it would let the show breath more and make the pauses for emotional/character moments seem a bit less absurdly out of place.

I like the cast (and will miss Spock, Pike, and Number One) -- I wish the writers would up their game a bit.

Agree the stakes don't need to be so high, but think they will be. This show just wants to be melodramatic, and if it has any constant it is that it never lets the crew get comfortable or established in a context. I've been surprised how well they've managed to make it good and star trek despite this.

If you want a slower show I think we'll need to wait for Picard.

Or The Orville. That was slow as fuck this season.

The Qualon invasion wasn't excitement enough?

It was the ONLY excitement.  :oh_i_see:

So we don't know yet if the parameters of the wormhole journey as described actually come to pass, I should note. Maybe they don't go where they're thinking they will.

The showrunners have said they are in the future if that is what you mean, it isn't intended to be a cliffhanger.

Also it completely explains the short. Which is probably worth rewatching for s3 hints.

It was also a nice closure in the event they didn't get a season 3.

I really don't think there's much question that Discovery is getting a season 3.

So, watched the first episode and it looks like Season 3 is indeed gonna be Andromeda 2: Electric Boogaloo

Interesting plan, will Michael Burnham be better or worse than Dylan Hunt at self-righteous speechifying?

I had to actually look that up to see whether it was a reference to a shitty TV show I never watched or a shitty Mass Effect sequel I never played.

Shitty show. Only redeeming features were Lexa Doig and Keith Hamilton Cobb.

Episode was silly but fun.

My thoughts exactly. I'm on board.

I remember thinking Sonequa Martin-Green was making a mistake when she left her Walking Dead role, but each season (of this) I'm happier and happier she did. (As for the other show? What other show.)

God this show is so fucking bad sometimes. Michael has to be one of the most poorly written characters going around.

Somehow I've still watched halfway through season 2.

The weird thing is how good other characters are in comparison. Especially season 2.

Spock, Spock's mum, captain handsome, the fish guy, even Tilly and Ash.

But for main character 'hey we have 30 seconds more to fill, can you just gurn a bit? Thanks.'

I'm glad she was trained on Vulcan. Imagine how her histrionics would be if she was an emotional human.

I actually like the character. I just don't think they'd been able to clearly decide what her narrative arc actually is fully, partly because of the terrible execution of a halfway good idea in her initial introduction. The good idea was: what if we follow the story of a superb Starfleet commander who has the same ethical compass and decisiveness of other Starfleet commanders but due to circumstances is temporarily disgraced and has to fight to redeem herself? That's a great idea, but they did it in such a Rube Goldberg way. It would have been better if she'd been framed or if she'd had a genuine Hobson's choice that was much more narratively coherent than all the Klingon garbage (e.g., where the decision to mutiny etc. was not based on an impulsively bad read of a dangerous situation but was more cleanly and simply a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't thing).

So her characterization has wobbled a lot ever since and often been subordinated to more interesting secondary characters and to the overall season-long plot arc.

I would be glad to see the show very quickly redshirt Ensign Klingon Guy--he's a constant reminder of how badly the show fucked the pooch on the whole Klingon thing--and I'm annoyed that apparently they're going to reprise Mirror-Universe Evil Georgiou. (I don't know how she can even be here at all, but ok.) I also hope for god's sake that they finally give memorable names and personalities to some of the bridge crew.

Ok, so I guess Georgiou was on board during the trip into the future. I could have sworn Ensign Klingon Guy was too but maybe not.

We're halfway through season 3.

This show is so good right now.

I don't think I can keep watching this anymore, it's just that bad.

I know better than to believe that you'd actually just stop watching the show and shut the fuck up. So do carry on.

I'm getting mixed messages here.

I've liked this season a lot. Feels like Trek and yet also feels different in a good way.

I did not have high hopes for it. But so far, great.

I keep expecting the lazy shitty plot twist. Earth would be evil? No they are fairly reasonable. Surely star fleet admiral guy will be needlessly malicious or inexplicably incompetent? No, just cautious.

Even main character has been within the emotional range of a  competent professional in unusual circumstances.

I did like Admiral Guy's performance. Not so keen on Michael being a whiny manipulative shit, but I guess we're meant to think this comes from all her trauma and understand. I agree with Khal's points about the character, as an idea. The writing and acting can't just sell it for me.

When the show itself is making jokes about her over-emoting, but she keeps doing it... do they think it's endearing?

They've had to bend over backwards to avoid saying, "She got some good sex in that year with an actual man as opposed to a sullen double agent weirdo, so she let her hair down and washed that Vulcan nonsense right out", cause that's pretty much how it looked, a kind of Trek "How Stella Got Her Groove Back".

In prior seasons I'd agree.

In the last episode I think they really hit the balance right. She didn't come across as whiny or manipulative in this episode, just overly certain of being right and continually tempted to believe that is more important than star fleet's regulations.

Also the interactions with Saru were great. Previously people have either let Michael do whatever the fuck she wants or been needlessly restrictive for the sake of it. Saru is the first authority figure to call her on crossing the line in any sort of professional or competent manner.
 

This. She's always been vocal about her opinions on things, but now instead of complaining in the style of Vulcan logic, she does it with sass :drillf:.

Which is ok, I guess. We'll see how it goes.

Is Book even human? I thought that might be why they went out of their way to say "no, no, we didn't even" (not that different species don't get it on, just that perhaps his doesn't get it on in a human way).

I have suspected that Michael's sass and freedom is related to something she knows that others on Discovery don't yet. Something over-arching like the situation they're in is not entirely real (but she has to play along) so she's liberated by not having to act like it's the real world. See her "not Starfleet protocol" killings on Trill.

So I think that's the subtext of what the show is doing this season: how much is Starfleet's ethos about orders and discipline and rank and how much is it something that's heartfelt in the soul, such that if you're cut off from Starfleet you'll still do what's right?

It's been the basic issue with the Prime Directive all along: it sometimes prevents people from doing what is, in their judgment, plainly and obviously the right thing to do. It holds out the threat that maybe you don't actually know what the right thing to do actually is and that you can't know what it is when there's a gross power imbalance between you and the people you're interacting with. Against that, again and again, we get episodes that suggest that some kind of ethical obligation sentients owe to one another transcends power imbalances. It's a very contemporary debate and it should remind people that we still are working shit out from the 1960s.

I like the idea that the crew has to decide for themselves: what do you owe to people who have been shaped into what they are without any real dependency on what you chose centuries ago? If a group of knights who fought for Charlemagne were suddenly transported to 2020 Paris, and they fairly quickly recgonized that they were often romantically invoked as heroes of France etc. but that also 2020 France literally had nothing to do with people in the era of Charlemagne, and that any claims to the contrary were ideological garbage or shallow-minded and incurious, what next?

Start of the episode I thought 'oh not again', but the substance of the mission was pretty great, and the bit at the end they managed to make about Saru growing into being captain and less defined by his relationship with Micheal.

Liked what they did with Evil Michelle Yeoh as well.

Fridays bringing both consistently good star trek and star wars  is blowing my mind.


Also I am eagerly awaiting Internet post hoc rationalisations of how a detached nacelle works.

Seriously...they make a big to-do about them being detached, but we don't get a demonstration or explanation as to how?!

(https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/030/338/New.jpg)

Well, she didn't have access to a large database, she hung out with a guy who had very particular and focused interests and who mostly seems to have been involved with Orion-controlled planets, FTL travel is sharply curtailed and folks only seem to know much about the two or three systems in their vicinity. Think about how much Booker knew about the Federation's current status or the specifics of its post-Burn (or pre-Burn) history, which was almost nothing.

Nevertheless, I would have thought that the moment that Discovery had access to Federation databases, they would have been reading avidly about the history of the last millennium, starting most specifically with the century + following their initial adventures. I especially would have thought that once Michael found that there was an important experiment on FTL alternatives that she had to access, she would have found it was conducted on Vulcan, which would have been an immediate tour down the rabbit hole.

More importantly, I would have thought that Michael (and the rest of the crew) should need to know about the current state of the Federation and Starfleet in order to know whether either are consistent with the values that Discovery's crew still believes in. I mean, these are supposedly well-educated sapients who have studied history--they should all know that a millennium is a long time and that things change, even fundamental things. They should have been somewhat alarmed in fact that the Starfleet of this time still has the same ranks and wears recognizably similar uniforms and speaks apparently recognizable languages and uses basically recognizable technology. If a Roman from 1 AD went forward to Rome of 1000 AD, he'd understand the language somewhat; he'd be startled by some of the look of the city; he wouldn't be all that nonplussed that the newly created Roman Empire didn't exist, that would almost be expected (Romans and Greeks in antiquity believed history trended towards decay and diminishment). Christianity would fascinate and annoy him, very likely. But ok. Now take a resident of London in 1000 AD and send him to 2000 AD. He's completely fucked--only a handful of professors would could talk to him and learning contemporary English would be a lifetime project for him. The city and its technology would be absolutely baffling. The basic ethical and social norms of life would be almost unimaginable to him.

So some intervals, I guess, are more like Rome 1 to 1000 AD, but you'd still think that in the logic/science duel, Michael would have had to concede even more forthrightly that she actually doesn't know much of anything about the Federation and Starfleet in this time period. In fact, she should be acknowledging that a Federation without Earth OR Vulcan as members is deeply unsettling and worrisome to her. On the flip side, I was kind of stunned that she didn't make the fundamental move of saying that the Vulcan science purist cannot tell her that his data cancels her data but that she can't see his data--that's anti-science at a basic level. You can't have a debate governed by logic if one person is privy to information that is concealed from the other person and says that the concealed information is the determining information. It was sort of a weird scene designed to set up the Kowot Milat dissection and Michael's epiphany about not putting the peace of Vulcan/Ni'Var at risk.

I liked the episode a lot, mind you, but the crew should be spending every down moment studying what the Federation became over the last thousand years. No way should theyl have had to learn that dilithium supplies were already dwindling before The Burn as an idle side remark in a conversation with the president of Ni'Var--it should in fact have been a very pressing and obvious question (how has the Federation handled being a galactic-level civilization and the attendant resource demands required over the last thousand years)?

I am really liking this season but precisely because they're pressing into this territory they better have some really good ideas about what's going on.

And also, I grant that Discovery takes place before every other Trek show besides Enterprise, but it should be a huge tip-off that they're primarily dealing with an Admiral...And a huge concern that Georgiou has had time alone with anybody in Starfleet and that she has relatively free run of the ship. They know what she's capable of and they know how she thinks and acts--Saru should have someone assigned to be with her at all times.

I really didn't care at all about the spock thing and thought it reasonable that the writers wanted to deal with her reaction on screen.

Yeah, it makes great dramatic sense and it made for a good story.

But I have to say that if you drop me down in 3020, the first thing I'm doing is finding out what happened in between, assuming there are histories I can access that I'm allowed to access. Figuring out what I do next comes after that.

The missing year does feel a bit weird whenever they mention it.

It is a long time for how little she worked out and how little we specifically know about what she got up to, but too little for a convincing 'I'm a totally new person' act.

She talks to her Discovery pals like it was a great trauma, but all we see on screen is how she spent the year hanging out with the cool slug whisperer guy and a cool cat both of whom she seems to like. When she talks to Book there is very much a sense that there were fun times, hijinks, and cool jackets.

Almost as if the writers don't know what she did that year.


All that said, I thought the way they worked with it in this episode was great. The whole 'be honest to gain trust' thing was delivered better than usual, and I liked the resolution, which in a sense was main character acting like a grown up for a change and frankly that was blessed relief.

Whole thing felt like a classic trek lower budget 'people talking in a room' episode. These can be high on the cringe scale. But this one found a way to really lean in to the cringe so hard that they came out the other side.

It could be as simple as "she spent a lot of time at a single trading post or in a single community trying to get a sense of what the galaxy was like and not succeeding very well because local records were poor and she couldn't just go anywhere."

I mean, this is a century after the major galactic power collapsed. It almost feels like Star Trek: Foundation, only there isn't a Terminus around that they know of. It's clearly dangerous and expensive as all hell to go anywhere--every planet we've seen so far has very strong defensive protections. There has got to be a lot of warlordism, plus a lot of planets are likely in a state of continuing anarchy (I mean, the Vulcans and Romulans are experiencing multiple *insurgencies*, so imagine most other places). So maybe Booker took her on a couple of animal-saving expeditions and she got a chance to look some shit up on the local computers, but it would be fine if they said, "I spent a lot of the year just doing nothing much".

The problem is going to be if they keep throwing out "oh yeah and then in this situation she did this important thing in the year, she forgot to tell everybody about it".

The remaining shoes to fall would be: what's the status quo on the Klingons (another thing that the Discovery crew would be fascinated by even if it was just catching up to TNG), what's the status quo on the Dominion/Bajor/Cardassia, what's the status quo on the Borg? I'm not sure there's any other planet or setting where we need to know what's going on.

The Sphere data is obviously going to be a big deal at some point as well. Not sure why they haven't thought to try and study it for other FTL technologies.

The sphere data should really be as big a deal as the spore drive. They did, after all, attempt to destroy the spore drive in order to destroy the data.

Fwiw I honestly don't need a tour of planets to check in on all the old species. And I think I trust the discovery writers not to do that unless it is sufficiently cool.

We're due a fundamental shift in the premise of the show right about now anyway.

Yes, that too. Love to see some completely new challenges. The whole question of how to sustain a galactic civilization without resource exhaustion is a great one if they really want to dig into it. Some new kind of threat or problem, too.

I really hope Glasses Man isn't a Mirror Universe guy or that the Mirror Universe is responsible for blowing up the dilithium, I could do without Mirror Universe shit for the rest of Trek's future history.

I just hope it's not the Past Enterprise or Future Discovery stuck in the Nebula that caused the Burn. Enough time-paradox circular plots already.
[edit] or Control on a ship.

What's sort of interesting is that they've confirmed the whole Temporal Accords thing, which...well, if you had a period in your past where people were using time travel to fight each other, in some sense, that period never ends, does it? At the least it gets pretty confusing to think about. Unless they have some absolutely comprehensive time-travel detection gear that makes any violation of the Accords instantly known everywhere (which can't be, because then the whole galaxy would have been chasing Michael from the moment she arrived) the danger would really never go away, considering that the Trek universe has established that time travel with any warp-capable ship is pretty easy to do. I'm content if they just say "this means from here on in Discovery, no time travel period, no matter what. Never. Nope."

Be kind of interesting if it just turns out it's a natural property of dilithium--essentially the equivalent of a galactic (or universal?) event, that it has a form of catastrophic decay that propagates through subspace, that when one warp-capable source of dilithium 'burns', all dilithium within a large radius 'burns' in spooky-action-at-a-distance fashion. There was sort of a TNG episode that implied just that, where high warp speeds were creating space-time instability of some kind.

We've already seen the spore drive can't be reproduced. So it would be interesting if Discovery eventually introduces an FTL technology that causes entirely new story situations and problems. Say, the classic warp gate/hyperlane idea where you can only travel FTL safely along particular lines of connection between star systems, which tends to make those lines of connection fought over. (What if additionally, to build warp gates takes most of the resources of a solar system, say at a rate of 1 solar system to roughly ten gates? That would be a great moral conundrum for the Future Federation.)  Or what if sustainable superliminal speed is no faster than 3X lightspeed, making deep space truly deep and forcing FTL civilizations in the Milky Way to build generation ships or far more interstellar space stations? I dunno--but this would be a great chance for them to change the basic premises and shake it all up a bit. They're already underplaying the importance of Discovery being the only near-instantaneous travel ship in the entire galaxy--leaving aside the dilithium hoard, that should have led it to being a target for every remaining FTL capable power in the Milky Way.

So, make Star Trek less like Star Trek?  Isn’t there already some Netflix series with generation ships and limited FTL?

I mean I honestly don’t understand the appeal of taking the iconic elements out of this baggage-laden series instead of starting a new series with an uncluttered sandbox.

Look at it this way. If you're going to do mainline Trek--five-year mission, discovery and diplomacy and exploring new worlds and sometimes fighting Klingons/Romulans/Cardassians/Ferengi/Borg, then Discovery is a failure from the get-go--it's never been that. If you throw them into the far future and they're still qualified to do that in a basically unchanged Federation, what's the damn point? It's like throwing William the Conqueror into the US Marine Corps stationed in Afghanistan and acting like there's nothing particularly unusual about him swinging a sword around and talking in Norman while he commands a Special Forces Unit.

It's the same deal as with Voyager, only Discovery is doing better with the idea--throw your guys into a very different situation and see if they can keep their sense of duty and self. Voyager just basically forgot most of the time that it was "a very different situation" and it had totally boring ideas about the Delta Quadrant. So make the situation very different, since that's what it actually is, and then let that play out. What are our Federation folks like when the status quo is irreversibly different from what they're used to? One way or the other the show has to play that out for a while. Now it might be that they eventually decide that the far future is so different in ways they can't undo that it's not a good sandbox, at which point I'd say you have to hit a magic reset button of some kind that brings your characters back to their present, maybe without their ship or at least without the Sphere data. Or bring them back to the time period of Picard at least so you can use them to tell more stories in a continuity that your audience recognizes.

Though that raises another problem. It's now clear that they're doing two things: a) the Abrams-verse is a parallel reality *created* by an event in the standard Trek universe (Spock and Nero's crew going through the red matter warp) and thus b) the standard Trek view that going back in time and changing things changes the Prime timeline is no longer true. If they eventually let the Discovery crew come back to their own original time or near to it, that will create no end of time-travel what-the-fuckery if they end up wanting to intervene in whatever will eventually cause the Burn. 

I’m in the Discovery was a failure camp.

I get that. It's been a serious mess. But they're in a groove now telling some halfway interesting stories and they're finally doing real character work. But they can't flip into the standard "ship explores, does diplomacy, phasers the occasional bad guy" mode--it's just not available to them.

I think the Pike show is going to be a more conventional "Enterprise go there, Enterprise do that, Captain does Captain things, strange new worlds get explored, new life and new civilizations gets sought out".

Episode 9:

This show cannot achieve pacing.

Yeah, it feels like the showrunners are so very ADHD. They don't seem to set meaningful goals for a season, like: build up the supporting cast's backstories, or have a single major theme, or have one and only one major plot arc, or have some really good stand-alone episodes.

I liked s1 mirror episodes but this one not so much.

If they are going to take mirror universe high politics this seriously, they need to explain how the fuck it is a sustainable world.

Yeah. I thought Grant Morrison got it about right when he rebooted the idea of an evil-DC Universe parallel Earth--that you use it to call attention to the metafiction of the good guys always winning in the main universe, that it only makes sense if there's some cosmic principle forcing outcomes one way on the evil world and another on the good world. Whereas Trek seems to want the Mirror Universe to have characters who are "naturally" evil, only sometimes they're not. That's all one thing when it's a one-off and another thing if it's a persistent storytelling engine and the Mirror people are aware of their counterparts.

At least the Mirror-verse didn't last the whole rest of the season. I expect Michelle Yeoh to return for either the season finale or next season though.

Edit : nvm, double posted for some reason.

There is a reasonable chance all of discovery will be back from the future by then. But having sent Michelle Yeoh back to do her new show, maybe not.

I really didn't like these episodes. Making it actually about the mirror universe rather than prime dudes coping in the mirror, overexposes the sillyness of mirror universe.

The one thing I did like, is the hint that Prime Lorca is alive and well in the mirror. Because Jason Isaacs.

I was trying to catch up on the last couple of episodes yesterday (didn't get far due to parenting needs). My wife walked in and checked out what I was watching. The return to mirror universe was happening, with stupid names like Killy, mirror-Michael punishing random Kelpiens, etc, and it was actually embarrassing.

I think this was just all a grand way of playing out Michelle Yeoh and her character(s). I don't think she'll be returning in any capacity later this season. If they do go through with her spin-off series, great!

Can we get back to a regularly scheduled far-future Trek, plskthx?

The Mirror Universe really just does not make any sense, especially now that we're trying to pretend it has a consistent timeline. The problem is that every Federation crew that interacts with it finds that they have a complete set of doppelgangers who are associated with one another even though cohesion and discipline is completely different in the two universes. It's a mirror until it isn't--for example, in Discovery, the Mirror Discovery crew is at the heart of the empire, whereas in the Prime universe they've been a bunch of marginal weirdoes. In TOS, Mirror Spock should be perfectly aware that there's a Prime Federation (and so should Mirror Kirk). The crews should be fundamentally different in part due to the ways Terrans habitually murder and assassinate one another. etc. I'd just as soon have had Emperor Georgiou step through a portal and disappear for good, but I guess the showrunners think letting the actors be evil is some kind of prize for them.

DS9s Mirror episodes were great, IMO.

So, be careful what you wish for?

All the hints and mystery and it turns out to be a baby we knew nothing about screaming. OK then.

They've used the "man-baby" trope many times before in Trek, but this is probably one of the bigger impacts it's had. They're not always handled well, but having Burnham come to terms with the situation as quick as she did and pretend she was part of the sim was pretty good.

Looking forward to possibly seeing the future Starfleet ships in action this week. And I'm still not seeing the point as to why Disco's warp nacelles were disconnected.

I don't inherently have an issue with the 'child causes problem' plot line. But I do think the execution was terrible.

It was positioned as a big mystery but turns out they just needed to go to a place anyone could have gone to at any time and the answer is revealed to have nothing obvious to do with anything that has come before this season.

Sure the child is like the crew because they are both new to this world blah blah but they didn't use it.

At least the burn didn't turn out to be Michael Burnham's fault.

Ok, this season's a wrap.

Finale was better than the finale of S1 and S2, and much better than some of the recent episodes.

I was OK with the inevitable captain change. Would have been better earned over a longer period, but they did a lot in this episode to justify it. I think the season could have used a few more episodes to do what it wanted. Or maybe just fewer mirror universe episodes.

The way they resolved the stamets problem was bad. But I liked that they decided stamets is still mad about circumstances surrounding it.

Very little in the nebula was salvageable, I expected there to be more to reveal - but in fairness it probably would have been bad. I didn't hate how they handled Saru - and if you'd told me the rough outline I would have expected to dislike it much more.

I thought most of this season was self-indulgent and a bit of a slog to get through. I was sure I wouldn't watch next season. But yes, the finale was more satisfying and I might still be on board.

It's Star Trek, and apparently this didn't go anywhere but Michael Dorn had pitched the idea of a series based on the Klingon Empire.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/michael-dorns-idea-for-a-worf-centric-star-trek-series-1846121969?rev=1611535608735&utm_campaign=io9&utm_content=&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0szBEBgegg3RGS8NNaatfnJQV-rdklcS4CKLNQ_gq2SArwXfMxMl-FBN8