Star Trek Discovery - is it bad like an STD or is it good?
NOprophet_NØprofit
Shipmate
in Heaven
I've watched Star Trek since forever. I watch re-runs at various times, dream at times of being Captain Picard, or a non-dead "red shirt" on the original series. My order of liking are Next Gen, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise. But I cannot even include Discovery on the list. This current season is bad. The others were borderline.
Please use spoiler tags when needed!
Things I dislike:
Please use spoiler tags when needed!
Things I dislike:
- Too much heroic music and smiley happy 'aren't we good' scenes.
- Too much touchy emotional stuff. Star Fleet is quasi-military. Loving each other's hair? really?
- the spore drive - riding around on space muchrooms connected to a crew member? really?
- lack of continuity. This is supposed to be before the original captain Kirk series, the technology exceeds it.
- The Klingons are awful They don't look like any of the other Klingons in any other series.
Comments
Of the new batch, Picard is my favourite - apart from the one episode which got fast-forwarded quite a bit.
It's also annoying that despite it being an international franchise, there's no attempt to make the new cartoon available outside the US.
In spite of being a jedi, I love Star Trek! Picard is my favorite captain/admiral. TNG was such a thrill when it first showed! D-U was just a couple of months old and that was...wow...a few years ago!
[edited because I have dodo brains!!!]
DS9
TNG
Enterprise
Voyager
TOS
I watched the first two seasons of Discovery, but I can't bring myself to watch the third. I probably will at some point. The universe is about to be destroyed, but instead of getting on and rescuing it the crew has to listen to some tedious heroic speech by one or other of the characters. This happens time and time again. We did a fair bit of fast forwarding.
There's also a new "Picard" series which I thought was going to be a bit pathetic but was actually quite OK. Picard was always more of a cerebral captain than a macho cowboy figure like Kirk, so he ages quite well.
Probably my greatest issue with Discovery is that it isn't true to the general direction of ST, of a future where complex problems will be solved or at least reasonably wrestled with, plus some good adventures which, even if pseudo-scientific in basis, had at least some believably amid the technobabble. I confess to having a set of Next Gen and DS9 action figures*, a TOS Enterprise ship Christmas Tree ornament (it plays the theme), and a large mock-up framed picture of the Enterprise D with all sorts of technological explanation. It was a joint project of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab.
*ST action figures: after some decades, they are now expected in our little Christmas Nativity scene. Who says there weren't Klingons at Jesus' birth?
Picard is my favourite but that is based on the character of Jean-Luc, because some of the storylines weren't fantastic. I did like the La Serena crew and the return of Seven, but I thought the Big Bad was a pretty weak enemy.
And the magic mushrooms were just too much.
Meh; maybe just me. I much prefer the short story form to novels as well.
I also really loved the introduction of Captain Pike, Young Spock, and even the glimpses of Number One in Season 2 -- love that there is going to be a spinoff series exploring the original Enterprise. I do agree that there's a problem with setting a series filmed in the 2020s, in the pre-TOS era, because obviously the designers want to make all the cool new tech gadgets they can now create, but it looks far too advanced for the Kirk/Spock era, much less for a few years before that.
One thing I HATED about this series were the Klingons. I don't mind that they redesign the look of aliens a bit in every series, but this iteration of the Klingons was awful -- didn't allow the actors ANY ability to move their faces to express emotion, and all the Klingon dialect being their screamy subtitled language just made it so hard to get into any scene they were in. At least it was appropriate that it was subtitled in all caps because they all sounded like people yelling at you on the internet.
Also, even though I know there's suspension of disbelief with the era of the technology and the redesign of aliens, the fact that that TOS-era Klingons were almost fully human-looking makes it even more ridiculous that this particular redesign of their look would be for a series set just a few years before TOS. I've enjoyed Discovery proportionally more, the fewer Klingons are in it.
For Discovery, I'm liking Pike, Georgiou, Stamets (full disclosure, always a Rapp fan - I can't explain it, but there it is), but most especially Saru - an absolutely fascinating character.
I like Picard better though.
Good news Penny S: Yes you do! It's on the Horror Channel* weekdays at 7pm repeated next weekday morning at 9am and with five ep catch-up run at the weekend. Enjoy!
*On Freeview ch 68 and others: Freesat (I'm sure), Virgin, satellite
Agree entirely about this last episode. And I never understood why Michael Burnham's mom is a member of a Romulan sect.
I liked Picard a lot, though I thought the end was a bit of a mess. I love Lower Decks!
If you developed the Red Angel tech (time travel before the original ST) you can do whatever the hell you want. Or so it seems. I want to see them explain away knowledge of time travel before Kirk appears. After all, Picard - post Kirk - found it conceptually difficult. As the series goes on, there are an increasing number of holes that they have to reconcile with previous series, or else it comes apart.
Where's Occam's phaser when you need it?
Kirk didn't seem to have much trouble dealing with time travel, managing it three or four times in the original series plus a trip to Wales - sorry, to the whales - in STIV. But then, conceptual thinking was not Kirk's strong point. The point of the Red Angel suit was that it was a one-off (possibly from the future? I can't remember), not a product of Starfleet technology. Knowledge of it would have been deleted from history along with details of the Discovery spore drive after the battle at the end of season 2.
But there is always a problem with prequels in that they tend to rewrite series history. In a franchise like Star Trek, with every detail checked and double-checked by every fan in all four quadrants, that is bound to end in tears.
What does piss me off is those who seem to dedicate their whole energy to slagging off shows they don’t like. Like, why can’t they just not watch it and ignore it? I don’t like the JJ Abrams Trek films, so I just ignore them, don’t feel the need to start a YouTube channel to hate them; what is with that? It seems to be a thing in a lot of established fandoms, that anything new is shat upon with unnatural force by a small but mouthy minority. I wonder if they are partly annoyed that they can no longer claim to know everything about it because new things are being made? Or if they are so desperate to keep the thing they enjoyed that it isn’t allowed to grow or change and they’d rather it ossified in a cage. It’s weird, isn’t it?
Not entirely sure whether the space fungus was worse than Baby Yoda, but am fairminded and willing to concede that there are arguments on both sides.
I'm not taken by either.
My complaint about the Baby Yoda show is that most of the episodes don't advance the main plot; we spend most of the time watching Mando dealing with someone else's problem in order to be granted just a tidbit of forward movement in getting Baby Yoda delivered home. I do like the second season better than the first, mainly because the makers realized that people want to see Baby Yoda, and they put him in a lot more scenes.
It’s weird! Why can’t they just not like it, not watch it and move on?
Probably for similar reasons that I feel miffed by being unable to get into either Discovery or Enterprise - I loved tOS and tNG, was OK with DS9 and found a return to form with Voyager - then these came along and didn't feel like Star Trek as I knew and loved it
I feel like something I should like has been made into something I don't so feel a bit cheated. Irrational, perhaps, but there's not much on telly I really like so it feels bad to have something I looked forward to disappoint. I identified as a bit of a Trekkie and it feels like 'my' show has been taken away and given to other people.
Nevertheless, the 'never about diversity or social justice' people must have been watching the earlier series wearing a blindfold and earmuffs.
Personally, I think if it isn't written up by James Blish it isn't canon.
Troy: Captain, I am sensing violent hostility.
Picard: Thank you Deanna. Remind me again why you get the comfy chair and Worf has to stand?
Agreed. I'm on Season three and stopped watching episode 8 after about 10 minutes. There seems to be too much of people standing around emoting at each other for my taste. Spock and Pike were excellent characters in the first two seasons. With their departure, the show has lost something. I'm looking forward to a second season of Picard very much.
I always wondered why Deanna was on the bridge so much, especially in hostile situations, when she was basically the ship's counsellor.
I could come up with any number of in-universe reasons to make it plausible, but ...
I can't watch an episode with her without wanting to report her to whatever licensing board credentials Starfleet counselors...
I liked how this was addressed in Deep Space Nine, where you could do a lot of things in the holosuites including live out James-Bond-style spy fantasies, but it was pretty clear the main thing they were used for was porn.
The biggest inconsistency with holodeck technology to me was Voyager (a series I generally love even though it's popular among Trek fans to hate it). So your ship is lost in the Delta Quandrant for what could be up to 70 years, you don't know when and where you're going to be able to get supplies to power the ship and run the replicators that feed everyone -- and yet you're going to keep the holodeck running, at what must be a HUGE expense in terms of power and energy, so the captain can fantasize about being a Jane-Eyre-style English governess and Tom Paris can act out terrible 1950s-style Earth sci-fi? And then in a later season they create an incredibly detailed early-20th-century stereotypical Irish village, complete with villagers, and keep it running because everyone likes it so much? (That does get, in a rather PG-way, into the "holodeck porn" element though, because it's pretty clearly implied Captain Janeway is banging the Irish bartender because she can't have sex with a member of her own crew).
But if you're facing 70 years without shore leave, how else do you stop the crew from mutinying and settling on Pitcairn (a small planet far from Borg space)? It made sense to me despite the power and resource issues - a trade-off to ensure greater crew well-being.
(My tablet corrected Pitcairn to Picard...)