Star Trek Discovery: The Bryan Fuller TV reboot

Huh.

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

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

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

Thought it was ok. Will keep watching.

But yeah, the theme tune is a mess

I liked the show!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doug Jones was great & I loved Michelle Yeoh

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

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

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

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

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

lol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought this took place before Enterprise?

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

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

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

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

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

Khan's older stoner brother Chad.

CHAAAAAAAAAD

lol

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

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

i don't really gi

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

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

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

whoa, Michelle Yeoh

however i will probly never watch

who plays Sarek?

james frain

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

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

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

ha, i was thinking the same thing about saru

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— IndieWire (@IndieWire) September 26, 2017

shocking news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe it was just bad direction.