In retrospect, most Star Trek series start very slowly, with the exception of TOS: both TNG, DS9 and VOY have... weak first seasons. ENT had to wait two seasons to get any good.
If anything, quality- and strength-wise, DIS has one of the stronger first seasons, and experiences a rise in quality much earlier than other Trek series.
As many other people have stated here, Discovery’s biggest problem for me too is that it lacks in Star Trek-iness. I liked all the shows for what they are (haven’t seen TAS though), TOS being the for-the-time grandiose space adventure, TNG had more subtleties about the human condition in it and really fleshed out the universe in ways TOS and the TOS movies never could have, DS9 was sort of a character study that focused on aspects we didn’t get to see on TNG and developed the established universe even further, and Voyager was (admittedly a bit ham-fisted) a story about survival against the odds. Enterprise then had, from a certain point of view, a wonderful spirit of discovering new things about it, and some of the crewmembers are part of my personal favourites. It turned 180 degrees with seasons 3 and 4, and I get the feeling that ENT gets a lot of bad rep for how the show was handled, because honestly what was going on behind the scenes was more than chaotic at that point.
Discovery then is a show about... well, I can’t really tell. I enjoyed the first season as a good scifi action show, but in Star Trek regards, it’s hit or miss with DIS. Not only are the (well-produced) visuals a point of contention, with the displays looking more like the USS Relativity from the 29th century than a ship predating Kirk’s Enterprise, and the much-discussed Klingons, whose Klingon-ness has been dialled up to 11, minus the hair. I really wonder how, if ever, they will explain that.
Also, the show’s predictability is a problem for me. Some of the “surprises” could be seen very early, like the
Mirror Lorca or Voq/Tyler
thing.
I would have been okay with the overall story if the show was maybe set in the, say, 25th century. That’s far enough away from established events that the writers would have been able to take all the liberties they want, but with that prequel nonsense, it’s hard to suspend my disbelief enough to buy into it. Plus that method worked really well for Star Trek Online.
Oh, and also that last shot with the USS Enterprise... that’s not only a mf of a cliffhanger but also they completely botched the design of the ship. Plus I hate what Hollywood likes to call “fan service” and that scene just reeks with it.
But on the main question, I was tempted at first to airlock every DIS crewmembers without blinking, but since I play the game to collect all characters I can get my hands on, with 201 currently immortalised, I thought, why the hell not.
Only thing that bugs me is that these new characters, who as of yet still have to leave their mark on the larger Trek canvas compared to all other crews (yes, even Archer’s) are so unbelievably powerful. Just why, for example, would Burnham be better at Science than, say, Jadzia, or Seven? Seven has the comprised knowledge of the Borg Collective, and she designed the Astrometrics lab with a little help from Harry. So I guess she could easily best Burnham in any scientific competition. Heck, she can open dimensional portals with Voyagers deflector! It certainly wasn’t designed for that stuff...
That's just standard new crew stats creep. New Scotty is pretty damn effective too. If they do another new 5* Jadzia or Seven before too long they will creep the power even higher.
That's just standard new crew stats creep. New Scotty is pretty damn effective too. If they do another new 5* Jadzia or Seven before too long they will creep the power even higher.
Yeah I know... I just liked the idea of this being an immersive game that represents Trek as a sort of trading card game, and if that were the case Discovery characters couldn’t (yet) be as strong as others, mainly because others had more time to shine.
Discovery then is a show about... well, I can’t really tell. I enjoyed the first season as a good scifi action show, but in Star Trek regards, it’s hit or miss with DIS. Not only are the (well-produced) visuals a point of contention, with the displays looking more like the USS Relativity from the 29th century than a ship predating Kirk’s Enterprise
Recently I just finished watching the first two seasons of The Expanse. Another Sci-Fi show that takes place in the 23rd Century. The ships in the Expanse are very low-tech in comparison to any Star Trek ship yet many of the details are much more advanced looking than anything pre-Discovery.
Hell, the holographic displays for both Expanse and Discovery are almost eerily the same right down to the actors using similar hand gestures to shape information. Discovery might be a little too over the top but its sure nice seeing actual force fields plugging hull breaches instead of just saying it.
Discovery then is a show about... well, I can’t really tell. I enjoyed the first season as a good scifi action show, but in Star Trek regards, it’s hit or miss with DIS. Not only are the (well-produced) visuals a point of contention, with the displays looking more like the USS Relativity from the 29th century than a ship predating Kirk’s Enterprise
Recently I just finished watching the first two seasons of The Expanse. Another Sci-Fi show that takes place in the 23rd Century. The ships in the Expanse are very low-tech in comparison to any Star Trek ship yet many of the details are much more advanced looking than anything pre-Discovery.
Hell, the holographic displays for both Expanse and Discovery are almost eerily the same right down to the actors using similar hand gestures to shape information. Discovery might be a little too over the top but its sure nice seeing actual force fields plugging hull breaches instead of just saying it.
Recently I just finished watching the first two seasons of The Expanse. Another Sci-Fi show that takes place in the 23rd Century. The ships in the Expanse are very low-tech in comparison to any Star Trek ship yet many of the details are much more advanced looking than anything pre-Discovery.
Hell, the holographic displays for both Expanse and Discovery are almost eerily the same right down to the actors using similar hand gestures to shape information. Discovery might be a little too over the top but its sure nice seeing actual force fields plugging hull breaches instead of just saying it.
Your point being? What does it matter how advanced technology looks like in other franchises? In Firefly or Star Wars the Tech looks vastly different from Trek, as it does in Gattaca or Battlestar Galactica or Blade Runner or or or. My point is that Discovery’s look is out of tune with the rest of the prime universe. Enterprise looked like a nice step up from NASA stuff and reasonably planted seeds for the direction things were going in Kirk’s ship. And the progression from TOS to TNG was well done in the TOS movies, especially Final Frontier and Undiscovered Country (I’m just talking about the visuals here, before anybody says FF is a bad film) did that well, and the Enterprise-B also did well in that regard.
Discovery evokes in me a feeling that, as mentioned, it is a successor to Captain Braxton’s Aeon and USS Relativity timeships, or that it really wants to be in Abrams’ alternate reality, but so far I haven’t seen anything that makes me think “so ten years later all these ships will look a lot lower-tech”.
Just look what they did to the Enterprise in that final shot of Discovery’s first season. As if Abrams’ butchering of the iconic design wasn’t bad enough.
Discovery evokes in me a feeling that, as mentioned, it is a successor to Captain Braxton’s Aeon and USS Relativity timeships, or that it really wants to be in Abrams’ alternate reality, but so far I haven’t seen anything that makes me think “so ten years later all these ships will look a lot lower-tech”.
Making a ship look hi-tech does not mean its out of continuity. They could've just wallowed in nostalgia and made everything look TOS to appease fan boys but I think that would've been a mistake.
Its been 50 years. That's a lot of time to develop TV production technology and its also 50 years of learned futurism. There are things in TOS they didn't think of and things they didn't have the ability to do. Hell, TAS is more futuristic than TOS simply because a presentation of high technology isn't impeded by low quality animation.
That's why I brought up The Expanse. The ships are low-tech, sometimes even patchwork but many details are far beyond pre-DSC Trek. DSC might be unnecessarily flashy at times but its a better presentation of a 23rd Century space ship because many of the things in it are something we can do today or in the near future. A better description would be the Prime Universe looks out of tune with Discovery.
Discovery evokes in me a feeling that, as mentioned, it is a successor to Captain Braxton’s Aeon and USS Relativity timeships, or that it really wants to be in Abrams’ alternate reality, but so far I haven’t seen anything that makes me think “so ten years later all these ships will look a lot lower-tech”.
Making a ship look hi-tech does not mean its out of continuity. They could've just wallowed in nostalgia and made everything look TOS to appease fan boys but I think that would've been a mistake.
Its been 50 years. That's a lot of time to develop TV production technology and its also 50 years of learned futurism. There are things in TOS they didn't think of and things they didn't have the ability to do. Hell, TAS is more futuristic than TOS simply because a presentation of high technology isn't impeded by low quality animation.
That's why I brought up The Expanse. The ships are low-tech, sometimes even patchwork but many details are far beyond pre-DSC Trek. DSC might be unnecessarily flashy at times but its a better presentation of a 23rd Century space ship because many of the things in it are something we can do today or in the near future. A better description would be the Prime Universe looks out of tune with Discovery.
That seems a little Wag the Dog in your concluding statement.. but really... we're talking in a way about doing a 'Period piece'. And the question is, should the period piece match what we know now about what might be in tech, or the period as presented previously. Because it's the future it gets muddy. This also could have been avoided by not doing a prequel.
I think it's a red herring in some respects as far as if you're gonna like it or not, but that's what it boils down to. Some folks want a, some folks want b.
Roddenberry and people, in the 60s, did not make sets out of cardboard and make costumes from pieces of cloth they had bought for $10 because they thought the far future would look like that. No one said "tricorders should be rectangles made of cheap plastics" because they thought technology would never move on past cheap plastics. No one said "Klingons should be basically like slightly tanned humans wearing ugly shirts" because they thought aliens should look like that.
The look of TOS isn't Roddenberry's vision. It's what his vision looks like within tremendous technical and economic constraints: everything in the show screams "let's pretend this is much more technological than it is... yes we know that it's cardboard but please play along".
And as a matter of fact, as soon as Roddenberry got the money (in TMP) his first thought wasn't "OK, now let's buy more cardboard". It was "god the show looked so cheap, let's redo everything from scratch, throw everything away. I want new sets, new uniforms, new effects, new Klingons, a new feel".
To me the show should match the vision. Roddenberry wanted his future to look and feel technological. He didn't want it to look like the future is made out of cardboard. He threw everything out of the window as soon as he could: there's no reason why a show in 2017 shouldn't do the same.
Roddenberry and people, in the 60s, did not make sets out of cardboard and make costumes from pieces of cloth they had bought for $10 because they thought the far future would look like that. No one said "tricorders should be rectangles made of cheap plastics" because they thought technology would never move on past cheap plastics. No one said "Klingons should be basically like slightly tanned humans wearing ugly shirts" because they thought aliens should look like that.
The look of TOS isn't Roddenberry's vision. It's what his vision looks like within tremendous technical and economic constraints: everything in the show screams "let's pretend this is much more technological than it is... yes we know that it's cardboard but please play along".
And as a matter of fact, as soon as Roddenberry got the money (in TMP) his first thought wasn't "OK, now let's buy more cardboard". It was "god the show looked so cheap, let's redo everything from scratch, throw everything away. I want new sets, new uniforms, new effects, new Klingons, a new feel".
To me the show should match the vision. Roddenberry wanted his future to look and feel technological. He didn't want it to look like the future is made out of cardboard. He threw everything out of the window as soon as he could: there's no reason why a show in 2017 shouldn't do the same.
Maybe that's also why they should not have done a prequel
Maybe that's also why they should not have done a prequel
So, to summarize, the reason why they should not have done a sequel is: "as much as visuals are concerned, they ended up doing what Gene Roddenberry or Nicholas Meyer would have wanted to do in the same situation".
I can't say I agree with you. I don't hold the Discovery production up to standards that Roddenberry and Meyer clearly didn't have.
Maybe that's also why they should not have done a prequel
So, to summarize, the reason why they should not have done a sequel is: "as much as visuals are concerned, they ended up doing what Gene Roddenberry or Nicholas Meyer would have wanted to do in the same situation".
I can't say I agree with you. I don't hold the Discovery production up to standards that Roddenberry and Meyer clearly didn't have.
Note, I did not say sequel. I said prequel. There is a really big difference. One means it comes after something, one means it comes before from a storytelling chronology standpoint.
And there are numerous reasons not to do prequels, that have been some of the main reasons some fans have not been happy to date. Some would have been unhappy regardless, but there are numerous folks who would have been more satisfied if they had gone further into the future.
Go after Voyager, maybe after the time travel high points seen in early Enterprise with the Ent-J.
1) You don't have to mess with continuity as much as Discovery has.
2) You don't have to deal with the visual inconsistency aspect.
I'd probably still have given up on it due finding many of the characters actually less appealing than Enterprise for reasons I've mentioned enough times for even me to not care anymore.
Incidentally, I thought Axanar's preview showed some ways of making the visuals more up to date without throwing the baby out with the bathwater like Discovery did.
It's too bad Paramount and CBS decided that they feel threatened by fan productions now.
I'm reading some comments on the forum and I don't understand why some of you just auto-delete DSC crew out of hand just because you either a) don't like the series, or b) haven't watched it yet. For me (and I'm almost old enough to remember TOS) Discovery is my second fave series - the writing, acting and STORY is potentially the best there has been in the whole ST universe. Sonequa Martin-Green is incredible, Jason Isaacs lends proper gravitas, and pretty much overall the acting is wayyy better than any of the previous series. If you haven't seen it yet, I would encourage you to do so; those characters have real depth.
For the record I should say my favourite series is TNG for pretty much, except for a few mis-steps, the same reasons. In comparison, and I know it's how it all started, TOS seems, well, *basic* (I fully understand the game-changer that was the Kirk-Uhura kiss and realise the wider importance of the show generally, but some of the acting and story was just wooden, it really was).
For game purposes some of the DSC crew are the best (see Culber for MED as an example) of the bunch and the game includes all characters from all series - which is what Roddenberry would have liked; all inclusive/equal/welcome regardless of origin, right? I will refrain from making any real-world political comment at this stage.
My least favourite personally is Enterprise but some of those cards are useful in the game, so I keep those to use and it would be silly to delete the cards because I don't like the series. So why do some of you just automatically delete DSC characters? It can only harm you in terms of gameplay, and I can only suggest that whatever your motives, that act of deleting is therefore ......... illogical.
To your inquiry: Why does everyone hate on Enterprise? I'm old enough to see all of them, and found ENT the most refreshing and enjoyable. T'Pol, Archer, and Phlox are 3 of my fave characters in all Trek. Don't understand the hate.
I have to pay too. I'm in England and it's on Netflix here - we pay £15 per month for a family account. It's worth it for me but appreciate not everyone can/will pay money. For that money I have to say that I also have access to all the previous series and some (not all) of the movies.
How do pay £15 a month the highest plan on Neflix UK is £9.99 for 4 screens and UHD content and the cheapest £5.99 for 1 screen and just SD content if you are paying anymore you are being ripped off or you have two £7.99 accounts which seems pointless when the £9.99 account would be enough for any size family
3) Spore drive. Even in a universe chock full of miracle-particles-of-the-week and other technologies that are unrealistic even centuries in the future (see also: The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss), this is patently ridiculous. I get that the writers want to have some freedom to write their own stories with their own ideas for tech but they signed up to make Star Trek (and a prequel at that) which has a fairly well-developed canon for these sorts of things.
Not that I don’t agree with you, the spore-drive is a bit far-fetched, but if you’re going to make an argument about the technology of a show set 300-ish years in the future, you should do two things:
First, remember that this is a show where people can get knocked out by being pinched and time-travel can be achieved by flying around the sun.
Second, you can’t just say it’s, “Patently ridiculous,” if you want to criticize something, give some evidence as to why you’re correct.
I’m not against people having opinions (obviously I have my own opinions) but if you have an opinion about acting, makeup, story, etc. you can’t expect other people to agree with you. Voicing one’s opinion can be very useful, but it is unreasonable to expect everyone to agree with you. There are some problems with Discovery, as there are with every other show, and criticism is helpful and sometimes even educational, but they don’t have to be couched in a way which could be considered offensive by others (and I don’t mean this only to him, I mean it to all of you).
Just why I'll never understand why folks don't want to kill Bakula after watching more than 3 hours of Enterprise, lol.
Death by decontamination gel.
The frustrating thing is that we know Scott Bakula can act, and then he turned in such a stilted, wooden performance for 95% of the show...and tried to make up for that by overacting the other 5%. Enterprise’s mirror episodes are some of my favorites out of all the Trek series but Mirror Archer seemed over the top even for the Mirror Universe. I hear tell that he does a fine job on NCIS: New Orleans (and he had that excellent guest spot on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), so it’s not that he magically lost the ability to act over time.
3) Spore drive. Even in a universe chock full of miracle-particles-of-the-week and other technologies that are unrealistic even centuries in the future (see also: The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss), this is patently ridiculous. I get that the writers want to have some freedom to write their own stories with their own ideas for tech but they signed up to make Star Trek (and a prequel at that) which has a fairly well-developed canon for these sorts of things.
Not that I don’t agree with you, the spore-drive is a bit far-fetched, but if you’re going to make an argument about the technology of a show set 300-ish years in the future, you should do two things:
First, remember that this is a show where people can get knocked out by being pinched and time-travel can be achieved by flying around the sun.
Second, you can’t just say it’s, “Patently ridiculous,” if you want to criticize something, give some evidence as to why you’re correct.
I’m not against people having opinions (obviously I have my own opinions) but if you have an opinion about acting, makeup, story, etc. you can’t expect other people to agree with you. Voicing one’s opinion can be very useful, but it is unreasonable to expect everyone to agree with you. There are some problems with Discovery, as there are with every other show, and criticism is helpful and sometimes even educational, but they don’t have to be couched in a way which could be considered offensive by others (and I don’t mean this only to him, I mean it to all of you).
Peace and Long Life,
Fleet Admiral Jedrek A. Silv
If we were to take the entire Trek universe’s science as a whole and comment on the believability, yes, of course the spore drive is but one of many things that look odd. Between the neck pinches, the ten different methods of time travel (most of which are never referenced again after their debut), particles-of-the-week, and inertial dampening and structural integrity fields (among many others) I don’t think many people are claiming Trek is anything approaching hard SF. The Expanse, the BSG reboot series, and even Dark Matter and Firefly have a more believable take on future technology than Trek does.
That being said, an important function of any fictional universe is that it remain as internally consistent as possible over time. When that breaks down, the willing suspension of disbelief becomes harder to maintain. Some of that can be excused - the particle-of-the-week phenomenon, for example, could result from the advancements in particle physics over the next three centuries. I focused on the spore drive because it introduces a series of concepts that, taken individually, could fit into the universe but as a whole do not make sense (especially considering they are never mentioned again). A separate pocket of subspace hospitable to biological life? Okay, we’ve seen that with the solanogen-based life forms in TNG. Space fungus? Fungi live off of decomposing matter (as it is presented in the show) but living in a separate pocket of subspace suggests that its food supply would be quite limited. Fungal spores that somehow allow travel across vast distances, are attracted to dark matter, and allow easy travel to other quantum realities? It’s hard to accept all of that on top of the other items. The events that cause this to never be used again or even mentioned again in the future will likely also be pretty hard to accept...the loss of such a powerful and, frankly, near-magical technology isn’t something that can be explained away with some hand-waving, as happens with other facets of Trek science.
It’s something that could possibly be introduced in a sequel series but simply doesn’t work in a prequel. Great care must be taken in prequel series, something I think Enterprise did very well in both set design and plot development even during its rougher first two seasons. Discovery’s management seems more interested in shoehorning their own vision into the existing universe than fitting in between ENT and TOS...an approach that again would work much better in a post-Voyager sequel.
Briefly (I don't have a lot of time): I didn't DS9 because Brooks just overacted EVERY...SINGLE...WORD....HE...EVER...........(prepare to shout) ....*UTTERED* (shake head around for no reason at this point) but some of the writing was good. Horses for courses I guess but I don't agree with you on SMG - she can act just with her eyes and that's a real talent.
DSC is more cinematic, that's maybe what I like best.
SMG catches a lot of the heat. She is playing a Hooman raised as a Vulcan. A lot of her performance might just be her trying to convey the character.
"The truth is like a lion; you don't have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself."
Okay, so I have at long last gotten caught up on the show. I’m still working through all my thoughts and will dump them here:
Setting/Visuals
It’s obvious that the artists themselves are fantastically skilled and spare no expense to achieve the vision given to them. While some of the sets are a bit dark, I kind of like that. CG effects are movie-quality...from ships to astral phenomena to planets, everything looks magnificent. However, some of the choices for artistic elements aren’t so great - after watching the pilot I pointed out the pulse phasers, holograms, and more...these things still persist. Having Pike demand that holoprojectors get removed from the Enterprise just reinforced the hologram problem, rather than fixing it as intended.
Also, why would the saucer section on Discovery rotate during a spore drive jump? That screams of someone saying, “make jumps more exciting, I don’t care how.” I was also left with mixed feelings about that last battle - visually stunning, to a level rarely approached by even BSG’s annual battle episodes and only exceeded for me by the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith, but where did all those shuttles and pods come from? The scale of the ships seems off, given the size of the hangar bays in relation to the secondary bulls and the insane number of shuttles, worker bees, and what look like either combat drones or a radical new one-person travel pod (with phasers?!?) forming that cloud of smaller vessels surrounding Discovery and Enterprise.
And while the Klingons’ physical appearance was drastically improved in season 2, it’s still not right: if Trials and Tribble-ations, Affliction, and Divergence hadn’t directly interfaced with the makeup budget/design changes from 1969 to 1979, it wouldn’t have been a problem. We could have simply taken Roddenberry’s quip about Northern vs. Southern Klingons at face value and it wouldn’t be a problem. Discovery could *maybe* have gotten away with it by saying that one or more houses escaped the effects of the Augment Virus for some reason, and then talked about House Kor.
Story/Characters
In a general sense, I liked the serialized plot. Syndicated stories worked well enough in TOS, TAS, TNG, the first two seasons of ENT, and to a lesser extent in DS9 and VOY but large, interconnected stories are more rewarding in terms of both plot development and character development. The twist of Lorca’s true origins was fascinating, and I can accept the inclusion of the Mirror universe as a whole the way it was done. Likewise, seeing Saru grow as a person, at first in spite of his nature and then by embracing it, was quite pleasing. Season 2 got too complicated for its own good and I think the writers really struggled with how to dig themselves out of the hole they created when it got to the last couple of episodes. Most shows are prone to plot holes and some towards the end of the season were big enough to pilot a Borg Cube through. And the end of Season 1 seemed abrupt - the Dominion War lasted many seasons, why not a similar treatment here?
Pike was well done, as was Admiral Therapist and most of the supporting cast. As I mentioned elsewhere a week or three back, Mudd was written to be a bit too psychopathic in his two main appearances (though The Escape Artist was much closer to the classic performance we know and love from Roger C. Carmel). And as endearing as Tilly’s spasticness can be, no sane person would have put her on a frontline starship or, really, any ship at all. I suspect the writers wanted someone completely opposite of Michael as a foil, without thinking about the character’s suitability to their circumstances.
Speaking of Michael...where to start? I’ll start by saying that I think SMG acted the part well but she got hamstrung by bad directing and worse writing. Having to take multiple minutes out of seemingly every scene for her to go through her two emotions (angry and sad) is something that most of her COs seem to tolerate, except for Georgiou (smart woman). Sometimes her reactions are entirely valid - the whole thing with Ash/Voq would mess anyone up - but she has these moments frequently and right in the middle of important events. I also think the whole mutineer/war criminal thing got pushed under the rug a little too quickly; I can understand how her conduct thereafter led to her exoneration and reinstatement, just not how the personal experience could have become a forgotten non-factor so quickly.
The other character-related issue I had was that more than in other series, Michael was the only real main character besides perhaps Saru. Even TOS and ENT had a trio of main characters and spent at least some effort to get us to know the supporting cast...Discovery had a chance to be better than that, to return to the great ensemble cast structure that made TNG and DS9 seem so rich, and ended up going in the other direction. We know pretty much Michael’s entire story as well as that of Saru, and have gotten only a few morsels of background for Tilly and Stamets/Culber beyond that. Given their travels to the future, it will be hard for development among the rest of the crew to occur now that family and professional connections have been severed. And that’s a shame, since the crew beyond those four or five should be more than appendages to be cast off when the plot no longer requires them.
Next Season and More Spinoffs
As was mentioned in one of the other threads here, going so far into the future really opens up some options for where to take the story. What does the Milky Way of 3187 look like? Once they have gotten recombobulated at Terralysium and gotten their bearings, will they work together with whatever the Federation has become? Will they stay or try to go home once they are sure Control is no longer a threat? Will we see the XRT-155D from Daniels’ database? Will we see Daniels himself or perhaps a successor to Daniels?
How will Mirror Georgiou get back to her time? Or does Section 31 still survive in the future? Without the one person in the universe she seems to genuinely care for (Michael) around anymore, will she continue to be sort of good or fall back into her Terran instincts?
Will we get a series or even just a miniseries covering Pike’s second five year mission? Where can the writers go that won’t risk treading on anything (else)? Maybe it could be a miniseries about the fall of Fleet Captain Garth of Izar...with heavy doses of flashbacks to the Battle of Axanar, which could easily have taken place during the Klingon-Federation War. PTSD combined with the accident and events mentioned on Antos IV, with a manhunt and eventual capture at the hands of Pike (leading to a promotion for Pike and his transfer to a training role) would make for a nice story arc across 8-12 episodes.
Final Impressions
I think that Discovery so far was neither as bad as it’s biggest detractors have claimed not as wonderful as its biggest proponents have claimed. It was engaging and exciting, with a good mix of humor, action, and loss all together. They tried hard to include references here and there that help connect the show to the rest of the Trek universe (Pike/Spock/#1/Enterprise aside) and mostly pulled it off. Had the same plot been presented in another existing canon or simply on its own, I doubt it would have produced anywhere near as much Internet outrage...then again, there will always be the fringe voices that need to manufacture reasons to dislike a show, reasons rooted in bigotry or overreactions to imagined bigotry, so maybe that wouldn’t have been the case after all.
Every Trek series except the original has had a rough first two seasons. Season 3 will tell us whether Discovery rises to the level we have come to expect from the other series or gets an early ax in favor of the other projects currently in the works.
It's been quite a number of months now so I want to say that I still think Discovery is a horrible botched abortion of a Star Trek series. If this was a similar, but separate IP to Star Trek then I think it would have been pretty ok. Nothing great, but it wasn't bad except for the fact that it's bad Star Trek.
Now, with that said I'll say that anytime you can say "The show was great if it wasn't actually [in some specific universe]" then it is simply a bad show. No qualifications. No excuses. Just bad. Discovery is no exception.
I'm not going into any detail because I don't care enough about. The show started off extraordinarily bad, got mediocre in the middle and ended nearly as bad as it started. Nothing but a train wreck from beginning to end. A couple of good concepts, but the overall execution and complete disregard for any established canon ruins any good concepts. The overarching themes were bad. The major plot points were bad. The main characters were badly written and a few badly acted. Some of the side stuff in the middle that didn't matter in the end was pretty ok and could have been turned into something good, but instead it was wasted here.
I will say that Discovery did do one thing that could be viewed as positive. It made Enterprise look simply "below average" by comparison. I mean, if you're ugly then I guess find uglier friends. That's what Enterprise did here.
Comments
In retrospect, most Star Trek series start very slowly, with the exception of TOS: both TNG, DS9 and VOY have... weak first seasons. ENT had to wait two seasons to get any good.
If anything, quality- and strength-wise, DIS has one of the stronger first seasons, and experiences a rise in quality much earlier than other Trek series.
We have Space on other carriers than Bell in Canada!
Discovery then is a show about... well, I can’t really tell. I enjoyed the first season as a good scifi action show, but in Star Trek regards, it’s hit or miss with DIS. Not only are the (well-produced) visuals a point of contention, with the displays looking more like the USS Relativity from the 29th century than a ship predating Kirk’s Enterprise, and the much-discussed Klingons, whose Klingon-ness has been dialled up to 11, minus the hair. I really wonder how, if ever, they will explain that.
Also, the show’s predictability is a problem for me. Some of the “surprises” could be seen very early, like the
I would have been okay with the overall story if the show was maybe set in the, say, 25th century. That’s far enough away from established events that the writers would have been able to take all the liberties they want, but with that prequel nonsense, it’s hard to suspend my disbelief enough to buy into it. Plus that method worked really well for Star Trek Online.
But on the main question, I was tempted at first to airlock every DIS crewmembers without blinking, but since I play the game to collect all characters I can get my hands on, with 201 currently immortalised, I thought, why the hell not.
Only thing that bugs me is that these new characters, who as of yet still have to leave their mark on the larger Trek canvas compared to all other crews (yes, even Archer’s) are so unbelievably powerful. Just why, for example, would Burnham be better at Science than, say, Jadzia, or Seven? Seven has the comprised knowledge of the Borg Collective, and she designed the Astrometrics lab with a little help from Harry. So I guess she could easily best Burnham in any scientific competition. Heck, she can open dimensional portals with Voyagers deflector! It certainly wasn’t designed for that stuff...
That's just standard new crew stats creep. New Scotty is pretty damn effective too. If they do another new 5* Jadzia or Seven before too long they will creep the power even higher.
Yeah I know... I just liked the idea of this being an immersive game that represents Trek as a sort of trading card game, and if that were the case Discovery characters couldn’t (yet) be as strong as others, mainly because others had more time to shine.
Recently I just finished watching the first two seasons of The Expanse. Another Sci-Fi show that takes place in the 23rd Century. The ships in the Expanse are very low-tech in comparison to any Star Trek ship yet many of the details are much more advanced looking than anything pre-Discovery.
Hell, the holographic displays for both Expanse and Discovery are almost eerily the same right down to the actors using similar hand gestures to shape information. Discovery might be a little too over the top but its sure nice seeing actual force fields plugging hull breaches instead of just saying it.
You mean like in Star Trek Generations?
Your point being? What does it matter how advanced technology looks like in other franchises? In Firefly or Star Wars the Tech looks vastly different from Trek, as it does in Gattaca or Battlestar Galactica or Blade Runner or or or. My point is that Discovery’s look is out of tune with the rest of the prime universe. Enterprise looked like a nice step up from NASA stuff and reasonably planted seeds for the direction things were going in Kirk’s ship. And the progression from TOS to TNG was well done in the TOS movies, especially Final Frontier and Undiscovered Country (I’m just talking about the visuals here, before anybody says FF is a bad film) did that well, and the Enterprise-B also did well in that regard.
Discovery evokes in me a feeling that, as mentioned, it is a successor to Captain Braxton’s Aeon and USS Relativity timeships, or that it really wants to be in Abrams’ alternate reality, but so far I haven’t seen anything that makes me think “so ten years later all these ships will look a lot lower-tech”.
Making a ship look hi-tech does not mean its out of continuity. They could've just wallowed in nostalgia and made everything look TOS to appease fan boys but I think that would've been a mistake.
Its been 50 years. That's a lot of time to develop TV production technology and its also 50 years of learned futurism. There are things in TOS they didn't think of and things they didn't have the ability to do. Hell, TAS is more futuristic than TOS simply because a presentation of high technology isn't impeded by low quality animation.
That's why I brought up The Expanse. The ships are low-tech, sometimes even patchwork but many details are far beyond pre-DSC Trek. DSC might be unnecessarily flashy at times but its a better presentation of a 23rd Century space ship because many of the things in it are something we can do today or in the near future. A better description would be the Prime Universe looks out of tune with Discovery.
That seems a little Wag the Dog in your concluding statement.. but really... we're talking in a way about doing a 'Period piece'. And the question is, should the period piece match what we know now about what might be in tech, or the period as presented previously. Because it's the future it gets muddy. This also could have been avoided by not doing a prequel.
I think it's a red herring in some respects as far as if you're gonna like it or not, but that's what it boils down to. Some folks want a, some folks want b.
Roddenberry and people, in the 60s, did not make sets out of cardboard and make costumes from pieces of cloth they had bought for $10 because they thought the far future would look like that. No one said "tricorders should be rectangles made of cheap plastics" because they thought technology would never move on past cheap plastics. No one said "Klingons should be basically like slightly tanned humans wearing ugly shirts" because they thought aliens should look like that.
The look of TOS isn't Roddenberry's vision. It's what his vision looks like within tremendous technical and economic constraints: everything in the show screams "let's pretend this is much more technological than it is... yes we know that it's cardboard but please play along".
And as a matter of fact, as soon as Roddenberry got the money (in TMP) his first thought wasn't "OK, now let's buy more cardboard". It was "god the show looked so cheap, let's redo everything from scratch, throw everything away. I want new sets, new uniforms, new effects, new Klingons, a new feel".
To me the show should match the vision. Roddenberry wanted his future to look and feel technological. He didn't want it to look like the future is made out of cardboard. He threw everything out of the window as soon as he could: there's no reason why a show in 2017 shouldn't do the same.
Maybe that's also why they should not have done a prequel
So, to summarize, the reason why they should not have done a sequel is: "as much as visuals are concerned, they ended up doing what Gene Roddenberry or Nicholas Meyer would have wanted to do in the same situation".
I can't say I agree with you. I don't hold the Discovery production up to standards that Roddenberry and Meyer clearly didn't have.
Note, I did not say sequel. I said prequel. There is a really big difference. One means it comes after something, one means it comes before from a storytelling chronology standpoint.
And there are numerous reasons not to do prequels, that have been some of the main reasons some fans have not been happy to date. Some would have been unhappy regardless, but there are numerous folks who would have been more satisfied if they had gone further into the future.
Go after Voyager, maybe after the time travel high points seen in early Enterprise with the Ent-J.
1) You don't have to mess with continuity as much as Discovery has.
2) You don't have to deal with the visual inconsistency aspect.
I'd probably still have given up on it due finding many of the characters actually less appealing than Enterprise for reasons I've mentioned enough times for even me to not care anymore.
Incidentally, I thought Axanar's preview showed some ways of making the visuals more up to date without throwing the baby out with the bathwater like Discovery did.
It's too bad Paramount and CBS decided that they feel threatened by fan productions now.
To your inquiry: Why does everyone hate on Enterprise? I'm old enough to see all of them, and found ENT the most refreshing and enjoyable. T'Pol, Archer, and Phlox are 3 of my fave characters in all Trek. Don't understand the hate.
Death by decontamination gel.
How do pay £15 a month the highest plan on Neflix UK is £9.99 for 4 screens and UHD content and the cheapest £5.99 for 1 screen and just SD content if you are paying anymore you are being ripped off or you have two £7.99 accounts which seems pointless when the £9.99 account would be enough for any size family
Not that I don’t agree with you, the spore-drive is a bit far-fetched, but if you’re going to make an argument about the technology of a show set 300-ish years in the future, you should do two things:
First, remember that this is a show where people can get knocked out by being pinched and time-travel can be achieved by flying around the sun.
Second, you can’t just say it’s, “Patently ridiculous,” if you want to criticize something, give some evidence as to why you’re correct.
I’m not against people having opinions (obviously I have my own opinions) but if you have an opinion about acting, makeup, story, etc. you can’t expect other people to agree with you. Voicing one’s opinion can be very useful, but it is unreasonable to expect everyone to agree with you. There are some problems with Discovery, as there are with every other show, and criticism is helpful and sometimes even educational, but they don’t have to be couched in a way which could be considered offensive by others (and I don’t mean this only to him, I mean it to all of you).
Peace and Long Life,
Fleet Admiral Jedrek A. Silv
The frustrating thing is that we know Scott Bakula can act, and then he turned in such a stilted, wooden performance for 95% of the show...and tried to make up for that by overacting the other 5%. Enterprise’s mirror episodes are some of my favorites out of all the Trek series but Mirror Archer seemed over the top even for the Mirror Universe. I hear tell that he does a fine job on NCIS: New Orleans (and he had that excellent guest spot on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), so it’s not that he magically lost the ability to act over time.
If we were to take the entire Trek universe’s science as a whole and comment on the believability, yes, of course the spore drive is but one of many things that look odd. Between the neck pinches, the ten different methods of time travel (most of which are never referenced again after their debut), particles-of-the-week, and inertial dampening and structural integrity fields (among many others) I don’t think many people are claiming Trek is anything approaching hard SF. The Expanse, the BSG reboot series, and even Dark Matter and Firefly have a more believable take on future technology than Trek does.
That being said, an important function of any fictional universe is that it remain as internally consistent as possible over time. When that breaks down, the willing suspension of disbelief becomes harder to maintain. Some of that can be excused - the particle-of-the-week phenomenon, for example, could result from the advancements in particle physics over the next three centuries. I focused on the spore drive because it introduces a series of concepts that, taken individually, could fit into the universe but as a whole do not make sense (especially considering they are never mentioned again). A separate pocket of subspace hospitable to biological life? Okay, we’ve seen that with the solanogen-based life forms in TNG. Space fungus? Fungi live off of decomposing matter (as it is presented in the show) but living in a separate pocket of subspace suggests that its food supply would be quite limited. Fungal spores that somehow allow travel across vast distances, are attracted to dark matter, and allow easy travel to other quantum realities? It’s hard to accept all of that on top of the other items. The events that cause this to never be used again or even mentioned again in the future will likely also be pretty hard to accept...the loss of such a powerful and, frankly, near-magical technology isn’t something that can be explained away with some hand-waving, as happens with other facets of Trek science.
It’s something that could possibly be introduced in a sequel series but simply doesn’t work in a prequel. Great care must be taken in prequel series, something I think Enterprise did very well in both set design and plot development even during its rougher first two seasons. Discovery’s management seems more interested in shoehorning their own vision into the existing universe than fitting in between ENT and TOS...an approach that again would work much better in a post-Voyager sequel.
SMG catches a lot of the heat. She is playing a Hooman raised as a Vulcan. A lot of her performance might just be her trying to convey the character.
Setting/Visuals
It’s obvious that the artists themselves are fantastically skilled and spare no expense to achieve the vision given to them. While some of the sets are a bit dark, I kind of like that. CG effects are movie-quality...from ships to astral phenomena to planets, everything looks magnificent. However, some of the choices for artistic elements aren’t so great - after watching the pilot I pointed out the pulse phasers, holograms, and more...these things still persist. Having Pike demand that holoprojectors get removed from the Enterprise just reinforced the hologram problem, rather than fixing it as intended.
Also, why would the saucer section on Discovery rotate during a spore drive jump? That screams of someone saying, “make jumps more exciting, I don’t care how.” I was also left with mixed feelings about that last battle - visually stunning, to a level rarely approached by even BSG’s annual battle episodes and only exceeded for me by the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith, but where did all those shuttles and pods come from? The scale of the ships seems off, given the size of the hangar bays in relation to the secondary bulls and the insane number of shuttles, worker bees, and what look like either combat drones or a radical new one-person travel pod (with phasers?!?) forming that cloud of smaller vessels surrounding Discovery and Enterprise.
And while the Klingons’ physical appearance was drastically improved in season 2, it’s still not right: if Trials and Tribble-ations, Affliction, and Divergence hadn’t directly interfaced with the makeup budget/design changes from 1969 to 1979, it wouldn’t have been a problem. We could have simply taken Roddenberry’s quip about Northern vs. Southern Klingons at face value and it wouldn’t be a problem. Discovery could *maybe* have gotten away with it by saying that one or more houses escaped the effects of the Augment Virus for some reason, and then talked about House Kor.
Story/Characters
In a general sense, I liked the serialized plot. Syndicated stories worked well enough in TOS, TAS, TNG, the first two seasons of ENT, and to a lesser extent in DS9 and VOY but large, interconnected stories are more rewarding in terms of both plot development and character development. The twist of Lorca’s true origins was fascinating, and I can accept the inclusion of the Mirror universe as a whole the way it was done. Likewise, seeing Saru grow as a person, at first in spite of his nature and then by embracing it, was quite pleasing. Season 2 got too complicated for its own good and I think the writers really struggled with how to dig themselves out of the hole they created when it got to the last couple of episodes. Most shows are prone to plot holes and some towards the end of the season were big enough to pilot a Borg Cube through. And the end of Season 1 seemed abrupt - the Dominion War lasted many seasons, why not a similar treatment here?
Pike was well done, as was Admiral Therapist and most of the supporting cast. As I mentioned elsewhere a week or three back, Mudd was written to be a bit too psychopathic in his two main appearances (though The Escape Artist was much closer to the classic performance we know and love from Roger C. Carmel). And as endearing as Tilly’s spasticness can be, no sane person would have put her on a frontline starship or, really, any ship at all. I suspect the writers wanted someone completely opposite of Michael as a foil, without thinking about the character’s suitability to their circumstances.
Speaking of Michael...where to start? I’ll start by saying that I think SMG acted the part well but she got hamstrung by bad directing and worse writing. Having to take multiple minutes out of seemingly every scene for her to go through her two emotions (angry and sad) is something that most of her COs seem to tolerate, except for Georgiou (smart woman). Sometimes her reactions are entirely valid - the whole thing with Ash/Voq would mess anyone up - but she has these moments frequently and right in the middle of important events. I also think the whole mutineer/war criminal thing got pushed under the rug a little too quickly; I can understand how her conduct thereafter led to her exoneration and reinstatement, just not how the personal experience could have become a forgotten non-factor so quickly.
The other character-related issue I had was that more than in other series, Michael was the only real main character besides perhaps Saru. Even TOS and ENT had a trio of main characters and spent at least some effort to get us to know the supporting cast...Discovery had a chance to be better than that, to return to the great ensemble cast structure that made TNG and DS9 seem so rich, and ended up going in the other direction. We know pretty much Michael’s entire story as well as that of Saru, and have gotten only a few morsels of background for Tilly and Stamets/Culber beyond that. Given their travels to the future, it will be hard for development among the rest of the crew to occur now that family and professional connections have been severed. And that’s a shame, since the crew beyond those four or five should be more than appendages to be cast off when the plot no longer requires them.
Next Season and More Spinoffs
As was mentioned in one of the other threads here, going so far into the future really opens up some options for where to take the story. What does the Milky Way of 3187 look like? Once they have gotten recombobulated at Terralysium and gotten their bearings, will they work together with whatever the Federation has become? Will they stay or try to go home once they are sure Control is no longer a threat? Will we see the XRT-155D from Daniels’ database? Will we see Daniels himself or perhaps a successor to Daniels?
How will Mirror Georgiou get back to her time? Or does Section 31 still survive in the future? Without the one person in the universe she seems to genuinely care for (Michael) around anymore, will she continue to be sort of good or fall back into her Terran instincts?
Will we get a series or even just a miniseries covering Pike’s second five year mission? Where can the writers go that won’t risk treading on anything (else)? Maybe it could be a miniseries about the fall of Fleet Captain Garth of Izar...with heavy doses of flashbacks to the Battle of Axanar, which could easily have taken place during the Klingon-Federation War. PTSD combined with the accident and events mentioned on Antos IV, with a manhunt and eventual capture at the hands of Pike (leading to a promotion for Pike and his transfer to a training role) would make for a nice story arc across 8-12 episodes.
Final Impressions
I think that Discovery so far was neither as bad as it’s biggest detractors have claimed not as wonderful as its biggest proponents have claimed. It was engaging and exciting, with a good mix of humor, action, and loss all together. They tried hard to include references here and there that help connect the show to the rest of the Trek universe (Pike/Spock/#1/Enterprise aside) and mostly pulled it off. Had the same plot been presented in another existing canon or simply on its own, I doubt it would have produced anywhere near as much Internet outrage...then again, there will always be the fringe voices that need to manufacture reasons to dislike a show, reasons rooted in bigotry or overreactions to imagined bigotry, so maybe that wouldn’t have been the case after all.
Every Trek series except the original has had a rough first two seasons. Season 3 will tell us whether Discovery rises to the level we have come to expect from the other series or gets an early ax in favor of the other projects currently in the works.
Now, with that said I'll say that anytime you can say "The show was great if it wasn't actually [in some specific universe]" then it is simply a bad show. No qualifications. No excuses. Just bad. Discovery is no exception.
I'm not going into any detail because I don't care enough about. The show started off extraordinarily bad, got mediocre in the middle and ended nearly as bad as it started. Nothing but a train wreck from beginning to end. A couple of good concepts, but the overall execution and complete disregard for any established canon ruins any good concepts. The overarching themes were bad. The major plot points were bad. The main characters were badly written and a few badly acted. Some of the side stuff in the middle that didn't matter in the end was pretty ok and could have been turned into something good, but instead it was wasted here.
I will say that Discovery did do one thing that could be viewed as positive. It made Enterprise look simply "below average" by comparison. I mean, if you're ugly then I guess find uglier friends. That's what Enterprise did here.