Star Trek Discovery: The Bryan Fuller TV reboot

why would the censors cut that scene???

yikes, I missed that.

given the show, i thought they'd do some sort of foie gras thing or maybe the monkey heads in temple of doom.

It wasnt gorey or anything, just commented on while they sat at dinner iirc?

not gory in visuals, but in essence...

looked like they were eating lotus root.

I was confused by the ending and thought they'd brought back the *original* Girorgiou.

Otherwise, solid episode! Science and problem solving and corridor walking - it felt like the most old school Trek episode so far.

And "my lorca is dead" seemed like a clear cue that he's alive, somewhere.

one’s missing, one is a spore lad now

Namedropping Archer so conspicuously seems like they're itching to bring out Scott Bakula in old-man makeup to give some rousing braveheart speech while porthos softly weeps.

like old man Sarek in TNG

that was the worst episode

i liked the groovy vintage theme during the credits tho

Well that was one of the weirdest first seasons of a show I’ve ever seen. It started to grow on me after a while even with it making zero sense most of the time.

That said, rolled my eyes hard at the last shot in the finale.

it's settled: clint howard is the throughline that ties all the series together

Just realized that it was Evil Lorca who dropped Elon Musk’s name as important space pioneer, suggesting Musk’s prominence in the evil fashy MU

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/star-trek-discovery-elon-musk/

"Oh, she's not..."
unh-unhh

"So she's from.."
mm-hmm

poor Tilly

Yeah, Tilly bursting out of costume with such effusive excitement in her entrance was a lot of fun.

she really had a hell of a day, get your hopes up that your captain's back from the dead, then get smoked up by Clint Howard

"I'm very high right now but I'm pretty sure the emperor is trying to blow up this planet"

akiva goldsman: the episode

that was pretty bad

so star fleet doesn't commit genocide, they just threaten to commit genocide huh

akiva goldsman: the episode

That pretty much says it all.

Been hit with heavy depression the last couple of weeks and over the last couple of days I shotgunned all of Star Trek: Disco (so who is calling it STD?). Powering through the first couple of episodes was a dreadful slog and reminiscent of the terrible Cylon-heavy episodes of nuGalactica, but after that this was.... great.. I was watching four or five episodes a night - the block of mirror universe episodes alone were better than any recent ST movie. Tilly is the best. I hope Michelle Yeoh will have a recurring role in season 2.

The last episode was a little all over the place and underwhelming but overall this series is a blast.

Last episode thoughts:
- Why not just have the Federation say "we can blow up Q'onos"? Seems like more effective bargaining. I guess some Klingon groups wouldn't care and would keep on prosecuting the war regardless.
- WTF did they do to Paris??? Buildings almost on top of the Eiffel Tower? Nothing like what we've seen in TNG etc.
- New/Old Enterprise looks GREAT (and I'm a purist) - although the engine struts should have been straight.

Season 2 of Discovery promises just as many shocking revelations of the first, as the showrunners reiterate they want to include the show in more of Star Trek‘s extensive canon.

This is one of the more tiresome aspects of sandbox narratives.

lenny kravitz is no beastie boys

Half way through this. Just had the cliffhangar episode devoted to finding a way to detect the klingon's cloaked ships. Half way through, before they've found the solution, a crewman says 'long range scanners detecting a cloaked klingon ship dropping out of warp'. WHAT?

Overall it's a solid crew and cast, passes the bechdel test in spades, Klingon redesign is great, loved the old skool timeloop episode; shame the spore drive central macguffin is such hot garbage.

Back today in the UK.

Netflix has also got the Short Treks available now too but they're stupidly hard to find:

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll want to search for “Star Trek: Discovery” and then click for more info. Next to the tab “episodes”, you’ll find another tab called “trailers & more”. Click on this, and then scroll all the way to the right and – SUCCESS! – you’ll find four episodes: Runaway, Calypso, The Brightest Star, and Escape Artist.

Loved Calypso

Wow, this was so much better a season opener than with the first season! Feels like proper TV Trek again, with exploration and sense or wonder, not fights and war. And they managed to give almost everyone nice little character moments too. Seems like the pattern they've had with every series since TNG still holds, that they get better after a meh first season... Or at least this ep gave me hope it'll be the case with Discovery too.

!!! I didn't realise this was already happening.

Loved the mini-episodes too, especially Calypso, which was apparently co-written by Michael Chabon. The connection to the actual series was flimsy, but nothing wrong in doing proper science fiction in this context.

Calypso was good. I didn't like any of the others. The last one had the main character being extremely one-note and boring, and that turned out to be the joke? -- not a great idea.

Brightest Star was my fave if only because it gave a nice back story for Saru.

Tig Notaro was so good and unexpected! And her name is COMMANDER JET RENO!

Fun opener. Enjoyed the contrast between trad Pike and the Disco-ers. Spock incorporated in a surprisingly non-embarrassing way. And that was maybe the least shot-in-Canada-looking Canadian production I've ever seen.

more Jet Reno please

I had an especially hard time following the story! It was like an Aaron Sorkin version of Trek: walk-and-talks full of technobabble that were so dense that I felt constantly half a scene behind trying to figure out what everyone was doing.

This is a weird complaint to make but they made Tig Notaro’s character too high energy and not droll and dry enough.

Is this story about how Michael and Spock arent speaking a sly way of back-filling the fact Spock never mentioned having a sister before, I assume?

pretty rude just busting into the personal log

lol I was thinking that too. Sure, just stroll into his quarters and go through his shit.

Also the log seems like it was aimed at her? I couldnt tell exactly what happened there but she knew to "throw" it like sand and it made a map... will that be explained later I guess?

She knew to throw and draw it, cos on the log Spock was talking about a dragon of which he had had nightmares as a kid, and as we saw in the flashbacks, Spock was constantly drawing it that way. And the map wasn't just any map, it aligned with the points where Starfleet had detected those weird signals (we saw a map of them earlier), that's why Burnham was amazed by it.

Very familiar twist in The Orville this week

I thought the second episode was a lot more fun! Even if some of the places points seemed underbaked.

Thank Q that they've avoided the grim gritty nonsense so far.

rip the prime directive

Oh yeah, that.

I do have a problem with how easily they're dismissing or
trivializing the Prime Directive; Pike makes noise about how important it is and then Burnham reminds him that the Starfleet orders to investigate the red signals is supposed to be even higher priority, and he goes "oh o good point." I know that they're resting on established continuity from previous shows about the importance of the Prime Directive but the way it's been handled so far seems lazy; the red signals are so information-free and without context that in managing to overrule the PD, they just make the PD seem weaker.

All the same, Tilly was too cute this episode.

to be fair, i guess it's relatively early days in the federation and the rules may not have the weight of centuries (or examples of mistakes made) yet. just recently they were willing to completely obliterate the klingon race

besides, all the other captains broke the rules and disobeyed orders constantly, so it's hardly out of character

Yeah, the other series usually mention it only to break it. Disco having so few episodes probably magnifies how flimsy it can be as a plot device.

I'm surprisingly digging Pike and so far they're nailing the season-arc-to-single-episode-story ratio. "Science mystery" is a much better season arc concept than the space opera stuff last year. I hope they keep it up! Interested to see how they'I'll integrate all the Dark Trek characters from last season (presuming they turn up). Plots are still a bit clumsy but the rest is good enough that I'm no longer caring. The main crew also seem a lot more likeable too.

has there ever been a prime directive story that didn't end with it being minutely-to-majorly broken?