Star Trek Discovery: The Bryan Fuller TV reboot

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?

xp Having to investigate seven signals scattered throughout the galaxy as a season arc seems a lot more conducive to story of the week type episodes

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.

I'm wondering if the investigation of the signals will continue to chain solutions to problems as an ongoing plot device. They're first led to somewhere where they can pick up a super-heavy asteroid, only to use it in the next episode to tow a radioactive cloud away from a threatened planet? These red angel things seem increasingly Q-like

Wasn't there a TNG episode where Picard broke the prime directive for pretty much the same reason as the Discovery crew here: to prove to a pre-Warp society that the "miracles" they'd witnessed had a scientific explanation? This episode reminded me a lot of that one.

That sounds like "Who Watches the Watchers," but Picard only resorted to that after a bunch of smaller PD transgressions kept snowballing into a much more serious situation.

I wish the show gave a reason for why the "red signals" were important. I don't mind them breaking the PD, i just don't understand why mysterious signals justify it.

There was also the TNG episode "Devil's Due", where they expose a false god to a pre-warp society.

I really like this last episode! Michael's interplay with Amanda is wonderful and with one great bit of comedy (when Michael is all "MOOOOOOOMM" when Amanda lets slip that she stole Spock's records). And the Klingon scenes were actually good! Nothing that's never been done before (especially on DS9) but having SOMEONE with forehead ridges not be a complete tosser gives us someone to root for, and the resolution (which isn't all that surprising, admittedly) is straight up Worfian in its quiet, noble suffering.

“starfleet security consultant”

Yeah, the latest episode was quite good, mostly it was moving all the various subplots ahead a bit, but they're all cool, and lot's of interesting and complex interpersonal moments too. So far the quality of this season seems much more consistent than with the first season, where every cool moment was followed by something ridiculous or stupid.

would mindmeld with spock's mom

I like how they're drawing out the Spock reveal, since without knowing any other details, I'd have expected him to be on screen no later than the end of the second episode.

it seems like good plotting! hoping they pull it off well

Theyre really playing up Michael's having done something utterly awful to him to make him disown her though, and I'm worried whatever it ends up being will be a let down?

I'm "meh" on this season so far. It doesn't have anything as bad as the many low points of S1, but so far it also lacks S1's occasional high points. The adventure-of-the-week stuff is better than S1, but still never as focused as it was in TOS and TNG because there's so much serial plotting to deal with. I'll stick with the season and see where it goes.

Theyre really playing up Michael's having done something utterly awful to him to make him disown her though, and I'm worried whatever it ends up being will be a let down?

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Sunday, 3 February 2019 08:03 (thirteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thought it was odd that Amanda stormed out before knowing what Michael did, seemingly motivated only by the needs of the plot.

Also, what was fungus hallucination actually after? It/she wanted Stamets to do something.

That part was hella confusing for a while there!

Also I am really struggling to GAF with the whole Klingon Houses sub plot.

As to the parasite in Tilly - I think it is angry at Stamets from when they were fucking around with the spore drive jumps and he went into that alternate universe? It saw him as the "captain" of that. I...think!?

yeah I think that's right but what did it want to find him for?

it might be trying to make its way home

Bit of a messy letdown after the first two episodes. I'm not sure if the Klingon story was agreeably metal or just a bit stupid. Although I think we can safely put severed baby heads into the column labelled "not super Star Trekky".

Anyway, if this was just an episode long-excuse to drop the Klingon story and setup the Georgiou's Section 31 spinoff, I'm fine with that.

Awww @ this, though

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtB_BeLFqh7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link