I liked the fact that they put on some extra armor and webbing before going on the away mission. Doesn’t match previous canon, but I thought it made a lot of sense and added to the verisimilitude of the show.
As far as Tilly goes, goodness knows the show needs a bit of lightness and hopefulness to it. The actors and writers have said at various times that they think the show provides a sense of hope for us having a dark time in the Trumpian timeline, but we certainly haven’t seen much of it from the show yet. Maybe they’re going for the “the payoff will be that much better if we start out dark” but so far, Tilly is the only light/hopeful character we’ve seen. Maybe she’s a bit much, we’ll have to see where everyone ends up by the mid-season break.
I’m not sure there was much verisimilitude there. After the first jump scare in the ship, you know, the ship whose entire crew was brutally killed, they just sort of shrugged and carried on. What? No. Get your marines in there.
I meant verisimilitude meaning more realistic than the standard Star Trek approach of everyone wears the exact same thing on away missions as they do when walking around the ship, and where what everyone seems to wear walking around the ship is a comfy terry cloth shirt or a Lycra outfit depending on the era. Here there was at least a sense of “we’re going out on an away mission, we should don something more durable that can provide protection and have handy places to put equipment”.
Does Star Trek actually have marines? That’s mostly the role of the Security Red Shirts isn’t it, and they did have the Security Chief with them along with a Red Shirt (who in fact got Red Shirted). I did like the fact that the security personnel were carrying around what IIRC looked like bullpup rifles.
I do agree it would have made more sense to get more security personnel there as soon as they started running into bodies — in fact, I’m not seeing much reason why they didn’t send more personnel in the shuttle, seems like more people is always better than less in this situation, unless they’re worried about biological contamination. I do like the fact that they didn’t send the Captain down there. I heard some speculation that the reason why Lorca has his eyes injured is so that he can be a bad-ass but has an excuse for not actually going on away missions.
Did they have a reason why they didn’t use the teleporter this episode? I don’t recall hearing one.
I don’t remember seeing them in any of the shows but in the FASA RPG there are definitely marines, with armor and heavy weapons and such. Whether any of that is canon, no idea.
It’s more jarring in the second episode, where they send two lonely officers to capture the leader of a physically superior warrior race as a last ditch attempt at peace (assuming Klingons are stronger than humans, not really sure since I was raised on a diet of Worf jobbing to every other alien race out there.)
It’s odd because I’ve always thought of Starfleet as being a military organization. So when I see that the Marines were disbanded because Starfleet wasn’t a military organization that seems strange. I grew up with TOS, so I wonder if that’s a difference between the TOS era and the TNG era. Kirk always seemed like a military leader to me.
They could have fixed this with just a few minor bits of conversation in the episode, but as it stands I agree.
If you think about it, the Shenzhou was very badly smashed up, large numbers of her decks were completely open to the vacuum of space and just on the bridge half of the personnel had been killed or incapacitated. They could have added some technobabble about how the transporter was on its last legs and they could have only used it to send a few people over and that it could only be used for another 1-2 times — that would have made sense too for why Saru pulls Burnham back immediately. They would have also had to add some comments about Security personnel not available/dead.
Yeah, this has long been a nit I pick with away mission shows. #1 - don’t send your captain AND your second in command to the same hostile spot. I mean, that’s just asking for trouble. #2 - unless it’s a peaceful mission, go in force, for heaven’s sake. My guess is something like your possible conversation to fix it was probably planned but got cut due to pacing or whatever.
Ive never thought of Star Fleet as (strictly) a military organization. Star Fleet has always held themselves out to be an exploratory/science/diplomatic fleet and not a military force. That does not mean that they are not run in a military fashion, with rank and chain of command but their stated mission is nonmilitary in nature.
A review pointed this out. The ships # designation is NC-1031. Trekkie’s of course should know the significance of the #31. Is this the Discovery the genesis of a certain infamous Star Trek ‘Black Ops’ group.
Ok Well I guess then I’ll hang my hat on the Internet speculation that ‘Mirror Universe’ stuff is gonna be brought into this show since they are talking about instantaneous teleporting vast distances and such which doesn’t line up at all with future shows.
