ya sure but most of the time we at least got clever / good stories out of time travel like Voyager’s Year of Hell or TNG’s Cause and Effect. Discovery uses time travel just as a clutch like Enterprise once did and that was horrible too and they dropped that plot line for a reason, guess we didn’t learn from that mistake.
The time travel is also used as yet another macguffin which resolves around Michael and her family because everything in Star Trek obviously resolves around her (and Spock).
Discovery/Star Trek has now officially the Star Wars virus, everything and everyone is related and the galaxy isn’t a huge place, nope it’s actually pretty small.
I mean it’s certainly no surprise that someone here already drew comparisons to Marvel/Thor because this is certainly getting closer and closer to comic book territory including Lt. Awkward who is now Ms. Comic relief. And btw I did like Tilly in the first season but man are they overplaying the whole awkardness angle. I mean we get it, she is socially awkward but please keep it down a couple of levels with her, it’s bordering on the incompetent if she shows this kind of behavior in critical/dramatic situations. Don’t make her an annoying mix of Jar Jar Binks and Neelix.
Agreed that that time travel worked better there, because it’s use was limited. When you make time travel a bigger plot (e.g., in Enterprise, here in Discovery, the Terminator) element that stretches over multiple episodes and/or movies, the cracks really, really start to show. From a literary perspective, time travel makes better short stories than it does entire novels and certainly series.
On Michael being at the center of the universe, I didn’t get that impression overly much in season 1. It’s definitely ramped up in season 2, but I think the hated time-travel mechanism actually makes it more plausible (once you accept time travel)—she and Spock are so central because of the “cheat” of the time traveler steering events to be focused on them as the time traveler’s tool for stopping the apocalypse.
eh, it was already in season one with Burnham being at the centre (start) and direct cause of the Federation/Klingon war and all the B-Plots also being about her (like the whole Tyler love-triangle or the Klingon plot in general).
It was more subtle in season 1 and I know they are going for a more protagonist centered TV show so it’s hard to avoid this completely. I’m the first one to admit that my favorite ST show DS9 did fall for some of the same traps with Sisko as pretty much “the chosen one” but there it was introduced slowly and over time and it was at least tied to an overall bigger story as well as a real character arc (Sisko slowly coming to terms with his role as the emissary).
With Burnham they don’t even bother to come up with a reason why the fate of the galaxy always ends up in her hands. Now her parents were suddenly secret section 31 spies involved in some super secret project and they were not only spies but apparently also super scientists that invented a suit which is beyond anything anyone else developed in this galaxy.
This is approaching fanfiction levels of writing and it’s now all generic “save the universe” stuff all the time including generic evil AI that has so far as much character as any generic evil Marvel amry of bad guys.
It’s now two in two seasons that no less than the existence of all sentient life is at stake. In the first season it was even the life in all multiverses because even more abstract stakes make the story obviously more exiting.
And that’s the whole problem, they treat the characters in the same way. Instead of investing into the development of a character like Airiam we get a single episode with flashbacks so we as audience are supposed to feel something when they kill her off to establish some sort of stakes and then they have this big funeral scene in the next episode where people TALK about how much she meant to them and how important she was while we actually never got to SEE anything of that. I mean the whole “show don’t tell” thing could never have been more appropriate than this and it’s not like they have any excuses. Even if they don’t want an ensemble show there were plenty of episodes before that one and enough filler (where is that Klingon subplot even going this season? How many awkward Tilly moments can they pack into one season? How long do they want to milk the Culbert/Stmets drama? How much time was wasted on Section 31 and Tyler? And so on).
If there is one redeeming thing about this season so far it’s Pike and Spock. Pike is overall great character even if he sometimes gets sucked into the whole Burnham crazyness (him agreeing to that suicide plan of Burnham is imo out of character, just like in a few other cases where he ends up on her side so the plot can be moved along without creating any conflict between them because we obviously can’t have that between our audience surrogates).
Spock on the other hand is close to being fourth wall breaking with his comments regarding Burnham but while I don’t buy him as “TOS Spock” I do respect his performance and he would be a great Vulcan character on his own which makes me even more angry that they had to use this Spock crutch in the first place like we couldn’t just have different Vulcancs (same is of course true for Burnham/Sarek).
Stuff like that is for me just a constant reminder that they:
a) don’t trust their audience
b) don’t trust themselves to create characters that can stand on their own
c) we live in an age where nostalgia gets constantly recycled
All of that makes me nervous in regards to the new Picard show. That one at least moves forward in time so it hopefully has less baggage but I do wish we could have some truely new ST.
Love the revisionist Star Trek stuff. Stop acting like Next Generation was high brow sci fi because about 75% of it was the same old rehashed crap. And TOS was even worse. Both had their moments but the rose colored glasses effect is very much in force here.
I feel the budget/episode count/serialised format mean we have higher expectations of Discovery than TNG.
It’s one thing to “waste time” in TNG where they churned out the episodes and everything reset at the end of the day, but it’s hard to forget the sins of previous episodes in Discovery if they’re all meant to “link together”.
I thought these were hilarious comments, especially pointing out Burnham’s saviour complex.
Hopefully next week he’ll tell her to stop constantly whispering.
I liked the first couple of episodes of the season quite a bit - well, except the one centered on the Klingons maybe. Just like Leinad, I’m not particularly fond of how things are going now. Burnham always seems to be the key figure in major events, and when they established that her parents did secret work and that there was a direct connection to Leland, I wanted to groan. As if the whole aspect of making her Spock’s adopted sister wasn’t already a bit much. And, of course, because all that wasn’t special enough, she’s the one person that Mirror-Georgiou cares about for reasons.
Also: let’s assume you have a mindboggingly bonkers plan that will result in the suffering and (possibly) horrible death of crewmate - how about maybe not having a live video/audio feed on the big screen for everyone to see?
Late to the party. I didn’t want to pay for another streaming service for one show, so had put this out of mind. Yesterday I launched Netflix not realizing Ruth had turned off the VPN, and was surprised to see it available. Turn out it is - if you can get Netflix Mexico.
Anyway, I thought the pilot was pretty good, although the Klingon redesign isn’t working for me. Perhaps it will grow on me.
It won’t.
It won’t.
Terrific episode far as I’m concerned.
It’s also clear there’s a hate Discovery crowd no matter what it does and will nit pick every episode to death. If previous Trek shows were judged every week with the same absurd levels of inquisition Discovery is by some…well it wouldn’t be pretty.
Yep. I’m enjoying it!
Can someone clarify for me where this falls on the time line? From the depiction of the Klingons in the pilot I’m guessing pre-TNG. Correct?
Pre ToS.
It is said to be set roughly ten years before the beginning of TOS. This season involves Captain Pike and Spock as crew members on the Enterprise, so that seems accurate.
Gracias
Did I miss where they explained what happened to Leland in this last episode? That looked horrible.
He got stabbed in the eye by the traditional eye-sensor-security-spike, and presumably died*, and then the AI/Control faked his voice and ordered Ash to attack the wormhole thingy.
*
Other possibilities I can think of:
- Not dead, but now a proper Pirate Captain as he’ll have an eye-patch
- He’s being assimilated by the Borg
- He actually has a computer-brain, like Airiam, and is now infected like she was
Or the AI has the capability to “hack” a human brain but requires a more direct form of input, hence the eye stabby input device.
I am in the pro Discovery camp, but this last episode was pretty bad for a number of reasons that @Leinad went into. The whole funeral was completely unearned and frankly ridiculous. You can’t spend a fraction of one episode trying to introduce how much everyone likes a character, then promptly kill them off.
I did like the security chief approaching Burnham, I actually bought she was emotionally shaken so hats off to the actress. Otherwise this entire episode was just a bunch of missteps in an otherwise great series.
It’s was a series of great one on one moments with characters, with some of the actors best work and then finished with an exciting ending. If this was a series of “missteps” then give me more.