Star Trek: Discovery

[Minerboh]

Such an inhumane thing to do to a character but the way Pike handled it was the most human, most brave thing anyone on this show has ever done. It genuinely moved me. What a difference a new season and new writers and new showrunners and new actors makes.

I absolutely agree with you. By taking the time crystal, Pike proved to be more man than Kirk ever was.
What do you think about the Borg theory?

[nx01a]

I think any of the captains would have made the same choice for the same reasons Pike put forward as well as from the same strength of character and determination to save lives. I'm just happy that Pike gets a spoilers:

happy ending after another decade of having to live with knowing what fate awaited him. The waiting must have been agony for him, much less actually having the accident happen.

end of spoilers I just want a Pike/#1/Spock series out of this!

As for the theory...
spoilers:

The Borg predate DIS by several centuries. If there's time travel that takes Control into the past coupled with spore drive travel to the delta quadrant, I will be genuinely annoyed. I don't think they'll go that route, though. These writers seem competent to connect to canon without wholly bastardizing it.

end of spoilers

[Beantownbrown]

“You’re a Starfleet captain. You believe in service, sacrifice, compassion… in love.”

Pike is the man; I would love to have a series on him.

[Cyke]

“You’re a Starfleet captain. You believe in service, sacrifice, compassion… in love.”

Pike is the man; I would love to have a series on him.

That whole scene gives so much more weight to The Menagerie. I love it.

[ChrisIII]

A Borg origin story could be interesting. Granted, it's something that's been tried in some of the Trek fiction....

-A lot of the stories seem to link up to V'ger and that seems to be sort of 'fanon' now. The Nero comics even had the Narada (Which uses Borg tech according to the Countdown comic) interacting with it, and I think the Shatner novels imply that the Borg might have created V'ger or vice-versa, or are at least connected in some fashion to the machine planet.


-The Destiny novels basically have Columbia-NX-01's sister ship captained by an ex of Archer's-hurled back in time and meeting a sort of biomechanical alien race. Things kind of go a bit wrong and they meld with some members of the crew, creating the Borg.

[Pinsir]

Well, I finished watching DS9 again and now I can catch up STD and...these are some very lack lustre episodes.

>> In general the twists for this season have been poorly foreshadowed. You could never have had guessed the Red Angel was Burnham's mother because no information was ever provided about her. She's never mentioned as a specific character, with the only foreshadowing being that the section 31 dude was responsible for killing her parents. Burnahm has never even monologued about her mother either. Its utterly out of the blue, the character had no presence whatsoever in the narrative before being revealed.

>> The evil A.I. vs time traveller trope is an offensively cliche and boring trope. Its been done much better before and for that reason it has an entire lack of identity. The Borg, the Dominion, the Romulans, the Klingons, heck, even the Xindi feel distinctly Trek. This feels like Terminator, Days of Futures Past, etc. The AI isn't even provided a proper motivation, its just assumed that it sees eradicating all life as a fulfillment of its mission statement because even the characters are seemingly aware of this cliche.

>> The emotional scenes have little resonance. I mean the last episode honestly feels like filler because I have little emotional connection to these characters.

>> the super genius princess is honestly the dumbest character in Star Trek. If this show was like, My Little Pony or She-Ra you could get away with this, but its honestly cringy and when the anti-SJWs froth at the mouth about bad SJW tropes, this character is a point in their favour.

In the previous series you can have a bad Star Trek episode, but then, the next week you can have a great one. But when the overarching season narrative is bad, it weighs down the good elements of the show. We barely had any screen time in the Klingon monastery because the grand narrative ate up the screen time and since that plot line is bad, it ruins the episode. I honestly now think the second season is worse than the first now.

[ZeroBG82]

>> the super genius princess is honestly the dumbest character in Star Trek.

Nope, Wesley Crusher still exists.

[Pinsir]

Nope, Wesley Crusher still exists.

Wesley Crusher was in at least a few good episodes. I'm also not entirely opposed to the super genius youth trope, its just the fact that she's also a princess that bothers me. Its just too much.

[nx01a]

Michael is a princess?

>I NEED a Pike/Spock/#1/Hugh Culber show NOW!!!!
>The beauty of the Enterprise interiors was diluted by 20+ minutes of fawning over Michael, then the entire crew being willing to die for/with her.
>This episode was such painful filler. The goodbyes should have been kept to 5 minutes and provided more insight into the crew via their letters to their loved ones. Pity Joann Owosekun's loved ones will never read/hear her letter since they're Luddites. I genuinely laughed at that.
>Are Vulcans precognitive now? Do Vulcan ambassadorial shuttles have transwarp? How exactly did Sarek and Amanda know where to find Discovery much less get there faster than the Enterprise and ControLeland's fleet? Sarek and Amanda should never have magically shown up in the flesh to say goodbye to their adopted child while their real one is right there also in danger. A Katra projection might have worked better for me but the emotional resonance was just all wrong.
>I loved the weaponizing of every available space-capable craft. In fights like Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, and Nemesis, I always wondered why the Enterprise didn't literally offload everything they had with weapons and/or an engine core that could explode against the enemy ship.
>I avoided the Short Treks, only watching Calypso since it is set in the future. Having seen Tilly and Po, I have no desire to ever watch their Short Trek. The 21st Century Earth Girl mentality on an alien is... not a good look.
>Yes, Star Trek has a long history of undetonated torpedoes sticking out of ships. Starship Down, the aptly temporal Year of Hell, now Discovery.
>Season 2 has been a vast improvement over season 1 but episodes like this one show that Star Trek is best when it has a well developed ensemble cast to play with. Michael Burnham can't carrying this show by herself no matter how central she is made to the plot and its resolution. Pike and Saru and even guest stars like Jet Reno and Admiral Cornwell are far more entertaining. Making her the centerpiece was an interesting try but I think it was a mistake or, at the very least, wasn't realized as well as it could have been.
>I'm looking forward to the finale, a sweet space battle, and seeing Burnham be a time travel prodigy. Here's hoping the shock season finale ending is Michael saving her parents, thus removing her from Spock's life and erasing that highly incongruous Klingon war, paving the way for the adventures of the Enterprise in Discovery season 3. I know that's improbable but I can hope.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

So Discover stopped *&^%ing around with pointlessly giving us another prequel show and will finally start being about exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations 930 later.

The prequel nature of the show had long since outlived its welcome. I'm sure the Section 31 show will continue on in the Prequel era, but that's a very different animal. Exploring TOS era via the spy genre might work.

However, for Discover, they should have been moving forward from the get go. The characters feel like they are heading towards the future, not rolling around in an era defined by 1960s concerns. Create a new future about the concerns of the 2020s.

Michael Burnham is a full out superhero now with her own Iron Time Master suit with Saru as the Captain of Discovery, at long last.

They even managed to get Michelle Yoeh back for a cool stunt person gravity fight! She'll no doubt have fun with her in the future, but she'll likely be heading back to prequel land to join the still very boring Kingons.

[Cyke]

Finally, we're getting the post-Nemesis show everyone's been asking for.

But having the TOS Enterprise send her off was a nice touch to do it.

Speaking of which, my god, I got so many tingles just seeing the old girl do battle with a frankly pretty frightening threat. Once again, if you have a galaxy that needs saving, you get the goddamn ENTERPRISE. No bloody A, B, C, or D. Even hearing those modern day weapons sound effects juxtaposed against 1960s TOS bridge effects was great. And we finally get to see a full-fledged fleet battle with the Enterprise, complete with her battling fighters. Yes, please.

[Jokerz79]

Finally, we're getting the post-Nemesis show everyone's been asking for.

But having the TOS Enterprise send her off was a nice touch to do it.

Speaking of which, my god, I got so many tingles just seeing the old girl do battle with a frankly pretty frightening threat. Once again, if you have a galaxy that needs saving, you get the goddamn ENTERPRISE. No bloody A, B, C, or D. Even hearing those modern day weapons sound effects juxtaposed against 1960s TOS bridge effects was great. And we finally get to see a full-fledged fleet battle with the Enterprise, complete with her battling fighters. Yes, please.

While Discovery had a cool battle and this isn't the USS Enterprise this is a better representation of what the TOS Enterprise would look like in a modern battle.

[Cyke]

While Discovery had a cool battle and this isn't the USS Enterprise this is a better representation of what the TOS Enterprise would look like in a modern battle.

It's impressive, no doubt, and even Enterprise haters tuned in for In a Mirror, Darkly. But there the Defiant purposely and visually overpowers everyone there by design. It looks cool, but it's meant to be a curbstomp. As a visual exercise, it's cool but it's shooting fish in a barrel. The battle in Discovery is more of equal tech-levels, and so the tension for the ship itself is more palatable, and it shows how well the Constitution fares under heavy fire.

But even then, and uniquely for this situation, Enterprise is clearly superior to Discovery and it's built into the episode: even though Discovery is technically more advanced because she's a testbed for new tech, Enterprise was simply lasting longer and fighting harder -- her shields were in the 50s when Discovery's was nearly gone, Enterprise ran interference to tank for Discovery, Enterprise was laying down all the cover fire in a mini death-blossom. Even losing a gigantic chunk didn't stop her from maintaining phaser fire. Enterprise was superior in every other way, and it's consistent with how, in the first season, the Discovery crew kept name dropping the older Constitution class as *the* premiere posting in Starfleet.

[nx01a]

Brief thoughts on the finale...

>Fun space battle with movie quality production values.
>Admiral Cornwell is one of the baddest bitches EVER on Star Trek!
>Why not make the rest of the Enterprise out of whatever that blast door was made of?
>Why do the bad guys keep throwing around the good guys instead of holding onto them and snapping their necks?
>Congruous time travel.
>Some serious writing and logical incongruities. Why didn't Discovery get Po and her device then spore jump to Terralysium in the Beta Quadrant where Control could never reach them before working on charging the time crystal? Control was defeated so why time travel at all? How did Spock get beamed aboard the Enterprise when its shields were up? How did one photon torpedo do so much damage? Wasn't the time crystal supposed to burn out after a single jump, not the multiple ones Michael made? What about all 7 signals that appeared at once initially? Kelpians can fly the fighters of their former slave masters now? Have the Ba'ul been overthrown?
>How is Bondage Empress going from xenocidal cannibal to snarky horn dog? Don't people remember that she's evil?
>I could happily never see the Discovery and/or her crew again. I still feel nothing for them... except Saru since he lost a pair and grew a new pair.
>I LOVE the Enterprise, Spock, #1, and Pike! They NEED their own series!

Looking forward to season 3 even though I know it won't feature what helped make season 2 so much better than season 1: Pike. If it keeps the renewed feel of Trek the show suddenly manifested at the beginning of this season, I should enjoy it. The Short Trek 'Calypso' showed a human fighting against the future Federation. If they do some 'the Federation is evil in the future and we have to stop/save/show it the errors of its ways' as commentary on modern Western sociopolitics, I'll be both annoyed and intrigued.

[Cyke]

I'll give it a shot, though I definitely can't answer all of them...

>Why not make the rest of the Enterprise out of whatever that blast door was made of?

Same reason as to why planes aren't made of black box material? *shrug*

But what really made me go "huh" was that, while its explosion took out 1/3rd of the saucer, it barely rocked Pike, who was literally on the other side of that explosion. He looked at it like someone flashed a spotlight at his face, rather than a multi-gigaton anti-matter warhead.

(also, Quark is apparently better at disarming torpedoes, but that's for another day)

>Why do the bad guys keep throwing around the good guys instead of holding onto them and snapping their necks?

To gloat, of course!

>Some serious writing and logical incongruities. Why didn't Discovery get Po and her device then spore jump to Terralysium in the Beta Quadrant where Control could never reach them before working on charging the time crystal? Control was defeated so why time travel at all? How did Spock get beamed aboard the Enterprise when its shields were up? How did one photon torpedo do so much damage? Wasn't the time crystal supposed to burn out after a single jump, not the multiple ones Michael made? What about all 7 signals that appeared at once initially? Kelpians can fly the fighters of their former slave masters now? Have the Ba'ul been overthrown?

They couldn't/wouldn't jump to the other side of the galaxy because with Control in the ship, Control could always prevent the jump or jump them back -- this is why the self-destruct and the Enterprise's torpedoes wouldn't work (and if Entrprise fired again, Control would have reacted some way).

Spock beamed aboard the Enterprise while her shields were up the same way Scotty and LaForge beamed through the Jenolan's shields -- the writers forgot (whereas earlier in the episode they used the shields dropping as an actual plot point. C'mon, guys).

One torpedo can do that much damage presumably because the insides are fleshy (see in STVI when a torpedo penetrated the hull -- way more damage inside than out), but it was also huge compared to other torpedoes within Discovery herself, which could imply a heavier-than-normal yield. There's precedent, though: in Q Who, the Enterprise nearly fires a photon torpedo at point blank range in an act of defiance against the Borg, knowing full well that the explosion from that single torpedo would destroy the Enterprise as well.

For the time crystal, I imagine all those things that Reno and the Queen were working on for the suit's casing but, *shrug* technobabble.

The Kelpians flying fighters was, though, one of the most WTF moments for me, so I'm not even gonna try.

Also, on the same token, I think it's perfectly fine for two outnumbered vessels to use every resource at their disposal, hence fighters, fighter-bees, and shuttles (I'm reminded of DS9, where the station had Dukat's Bird of Prey, the Defiant, and the three itty bitty runabouts face down an entire Dominion fleet -- completely hopeless odds had there been actual fighting). But -- there were waaaaaayyyy too many fighters, fighter-bees, and shuttles coming from the both of them, almost as if their shuttlebays were hammerspace hangers.

>How is Bondage Empress going from xenocidal cannibal to snarky horn dog? Don't people remember that she's evil?

Evil yes, but the Mirror Universe has always been full of horn dogs, for good or for bad. Mirror Kirk's consort implied that they did it a lot. Mirror Kira was seductive, Mirror Dax got it on with Prime Sisko, and Mirror Hoshi slept her way to Empress.

>I could happily never see the Discovery and/or her crew again. I still feel nothing for them... except Saru since he lost a pair and grew a new pair.

Hey, Calypso implies that Discovery loses the entire crew, so there's that...

That brings me to another gripe of the show -- it expects us to really feel for the secondary cast, but offers them little to no development to actually bond with them. Nhan with her sassy, battle personality? That's fun but seems out of place here -- the show should have given her that personality episodes ago, rather than the stoic, duty-minded, near-mute Nhan since episode 1. All those goodbyes from the previous episode would have had more oomph had the show dwelled upon them more than "Hey-its-whatsherface-again." Those flash-forwards didn't help either -- why should we care about their deaths when we didn't care about them when they were alive?

The season started off well with building them up then lost interest in them. Pike's way of addressing the senior staff by name on his first day on the job was the perfect way to start it -- both his professionalism and Pike as the audience surrogate to get to know the senior staff. Nope, they dropped that until they needed to kill Airiam.

>I LOVE the Enterprise, Spock, #1, and Pike! They NEED their own series!

While we've had a season of Pike, I am so, so glad that we got to see Number One in action scenes finally, some 54 years after The Cage.